You’re missing the significant distinction between public and private communication. Making a Nazi salute at a concert might get you arrested. Making a Nazi salute at home when a few friends are visiting won’t.
It’s pretty much the same in any country. Here in America, if a band of criminals want to get together and plan a bank robbery, they’re not going to do it in a public place. They’ll meet at somebody’s house where the conversation will be private and they can discuss plans to break the law without fear of being overheard.
If you’re looking for recruits to join your terrorist organization, you’re not going to announce it at a public meeting. Instead you’ll invite potential recruits to some private function where you can sound them out about their beliefs and gauge their interest.
I was refuting a clearly erroneous statement: that ISIS recruits have nothing in common with the average Muslim, other than a label. Surely you can admit that these differences and commonalities play a part in Muslims’ resistance or susceptibility to recruitment by ISIS. That ISIS shares with the average Muslim antisemitism, hatred of Israel, homophobia, and distrust of liberal secular traditions means that these are things they do not have to convince their average recruit. Instead of the hatred being an obstacle, it is an asset in recruiting those who share these views.
People’s beliefs ebb and flow over time. Many devout Muslims I have met have told me about periods of their life when they, as they phrased it, “were not religious”. It is troubling that one of the ways that people are reconnecting with the religion of their youth, or with their newly joined faith, is by joining a band of murderous psychopaths. And it is a fact that a major factor in this trend is the partial commonality of belief between ISIS and the average Muslim, including the common source texts and the shared belief in their infallibility and authenticity.
They don’t. Muslims are, in fact, the main victims of ISIS’ violence, precisely because they don’t share anything in common with ISIS’ members.
Except that, as has already been pointed out to you before, Muslims who are more religious are in fact the most resistant to ISIS’ recruitment appeals, which is exactly the opposite of the way it would be if your assertion that joining up with ISIS correlated with going from “not religious” to “religious”.
I have shown directly that they do indeed share anti-Semetism and homophobia with ISIS. That is not something ISIS has to teach, in fact it is one way Muslim communities prep Muslims for recruitment, as do a shared set of religious texts, and an often shared view on their infallibility, in the case of the Koran, and authenticity, in the case of hadith.
They are becoming more religious by the framework they have come to understand, in which action on the battlefield shows ultimate devotion to their religion.
Except ISIS isn’t targeting gays and Jews. They’re targeting other Muslims (you know, the very same people who, according to you, are just as homophobic and anti-Semitic) and “Crusaders”.
You’re really stuck on that whole “ISIS are just following Islam as it’s taught in the Islamic scriptures” thing, in spite of being repeatedly shown to be wrong about that, aren’t you?
The perverted version that ISIS teaches, perhaps. And you can tell it’s perverted from the way even other devout Muslims practice it by the fact that ISIS has little success recruiting from the already-religious. Those who are already familiar with Islam and live according to its teachings are the ones most likely to reject ISIS recruitment. It’s only among those who are uneducated and unpracticed in Islam that ISIS has the most success.
In fact, in countries where Muslims are a significant portion of the population, the overwhelming majority have a negative view of ISIS. Even in Pakistan, the majority view is “Don’t know” rather than “Favorable,” and Pakistan is the exception. Even when you look at the percentages for Muslims only, the vast majority have an unfavorable view of ISIS.
ISIS is certainly targeting both gays and Jews. Do I really need to give you cites for this? And they often declare the Muslims they target to be apostates, as is takfiri tradition.
Now you are both dodging the discussion and falsely declaring to have already won the debate. Here it is again, so you can have another shot at responding to what I actually have written:
[QUOTE=Hank Beecher ]
That (anti-Semitism and Homophobia) is not something ISIS has to teach, in fact it is one way Muslim communities prep Muslims for recruitment, as do a shared set of religious texts, and an often shared view on their infallibility, in the case of the Koran, and authenticity, in the case of hadith.
[/QUOTE]
You repeatedly accuse me referring to the one correct Islam, when I have done no such thing. And now it is you that declares ISIS’s Islam to be ‘perverted’, implying that there is one true Islam, namely your’s, that it the correct one. In a viscous bout of irony, you are proclaimingtakfir on the takfiris, using the same rhetorical trick on them that they use on their victims before they execute them.
Tell me then, if Muslim communities do not, as I claim, prepare the ground that ISIS plants it’s seed in, why does ISIS recruit among Muslims at all? If the homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-liberal, and anti-Western beliefs that are rampant among Muslims does not pave the way for them, and familiarity with Islam is purely an inoculation against them, wouldn’t ISIS choose non-Muslims over Muslims to recruit?
So, not to take away from yet *another *another go at “because Islam bad !!”, but I felt like actually providing my answer to the OP :
freedom of expression is **really **not “severely limited” in France. True, you can technically get fined for Holocaust denial and “inciting racial hatred” and “terrorism apologia”, but in practice these laws are only applied if you’re a high profile personality, do it on live television, publish a whole book about it or something like that.
Ordinary people are, by and large, perfectly free to be racist, anti-semitic, homophobic etc… cunts every blessed day of their lives.
the kids targeted by extremists are *already *radicalized to a profound extent. They’re angry at all the unofficial (and official) limitations and oppressions that their host countries impose on them. They’re angry because they’re stuck in the shitty neighbourhoods, because they feel condemned to living beneath a glass ceiling (even, hell *especially *after pursuing higher education - which BTW is exactly how Gandhi felt in England way back when), because they feel routinely ostracized and marginalized…
In the US, kids like that are approached by Bloods and MS 13, or white supremacist groups, or Scientologists etc…, all of which provide them with a sense of pride, of belonging, of being able to do something. You know, like torching black churches and shit. And sometimes they just shoot up a school or something.
In Europe, it’s religious extremism that seizes that opportunity with young “Arabs”.
It’s really that simple. There’s nothing particular about Islam in this regard, save perhaps the modus operandi of the violence and stupidity they’re goaded into. And it’s not gonna get solved by punishment, or putting every Muslim on file and visiting them in the middle of the night or anything like that. You want to solve “the Islamic problem” ? Give Muslims/immigrants an actually equal part in society and its economic/social/cultural/political life instead of “let’s not, say we did and scold them for acting like we haven’t”.
Finally :
Because we don’t have a Gestapo, and we don’t arrest people for thoughtcrimes (although policies of the last few days, as well as last January, are making me something of a liar there…).
The Kouachi brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo were on a police watchlist and under increased scrutiny already. From what I understand, so were some of the attackers of Saturday.
And that’s the extent of what we can reasonably do, barring further data or lawful proof of mischief. *We *don’t have a Guantanamo to hold them incommunicado without even a hint of due process, nor any global phone & internet wire tapping initiative (cheap shot, I know. Still, yanno.).
What is patently false is wandering into a thread that specifies a discussion of Europe and trying to twist it into an general attack on Islam.
Have you any evidence, (other than claims by European Islamophobes), to support the idea that Muslims in Europe* are generally supporting punishments for apostasy, homosexuality, or other violations of the Qur’an or the Hadiths? Or are you simply attempting to hijack one more thread to promote hatred of Muslims?
Go look at the OP. The question–the actual question in the title–is “How Do Muslims ‘Radicalize’ Other Muslims In Western Europe?” if you have to drag Pakistan or Syria into the discussion, then you are deliberately hijacking the thread.
They are hardly going to target Christians, (who are not being subjected to xenophobic discrimination in Europe)–although they have, actually, gotten a number of Christian-to-Muslim converts to join them.
As noted above, the vast majority of the recruits are uneducated in Islam. Daesh approaches them with a version of Islam that appeals to them based on its supposed inclusive nature. Claiming the Islam in Europe is “preparing the ground” for recruits is nonsense, otherwise, Daesh would find its best recruiting from mosques, rather than the disaffected and uneducated.
You are the one hijacking the thread with your implication that I am trying to promote hatred of Muslims. That is not called for.
I provided evidence for what I claimed, so I do not know why I should provide evidence for something else, simply because you demand it for whatever diversionary reason.
Why don’t you try responding to post #9, in which I directly refuted your claim that “Most practicing Muslims do not share anything with the Daesh recruits beyond a label of"Muslim.”, provided evidence, and did not mention Pakistan or Syria.
My mention of the Pew survey was in response to this: " I strongly contest the idea that the average Muslim is more scrupulous in following his/her religion’s teachings than the average Christian." and since most Muslims live outside of Europe their views are relevant to the question how the average Muslim follows teaching.
I note that you have no comment about others bringing into the thread such highly on topic subjects as former governors of Arkansas and African Christian preachers. Yet you loudly object to the mention of* Syria*, in a thread about ISIS…go figure.
Indeed, I’m always surprised by the non insignificant number of new converts (of French ancestry, with catholic/non-believer parents, with no crime history, etc…) amongst the people who leave to fight for ISIS/DAESH. It’s quite mystifying that a young man who had no link with Islam, raised in a rather irreligious culture ends up some years later as a bloodthirsty muslim extremist.
clairobscur, I think it is not very different from the sort of romanticism of action and magical change of the world that attracted youth of such backgrounds to the Left terror groups in the 1970s. but we are being silly talking about the topic of the OP…
Indeed. This debate is detracting from the issue discussed. Not liking gays and Jews has few to do with deciding to put your life on the line in Iraq under the orders of people who are widely considered as butchers, so it doesn’t really matter whether or not young Muslims in western Europe are more or less homophobic than old politicians in the USA.
Except that the common source and the belief in its infallibility is shared by all the other sincere Muslims who don’t leave their country to fight for DAESH. So, it explains nothing.
You don’t think that preexisting homophobia and antisemitism would be qualities that would make an impressionable youth predisposed to join a group that murders homosexuals and Jews? What next, being racist against blacks doesn’t make someone a more likely recruit of the Klan?
This is faulty logic. You have simply shown that the shared belief in question does not always contribute to a Muslim being recruited, not that it never does. There is a lot of white supremacist propaganda around in the US, and it is widely consumed. (At one point David Duke got the majority of votes from white voters, when he ran for governor of Louisiana, IIRC.) Yet the vast majority of those people have never physically attacked a member of a minority. It doesn’t follow that white supremacist ideology is blameless in the rare occasions when they do, simply because of all the times it was digested without leading to violence.
In Europe, Muslims live in segregated neighborhoods in major cities. They’re poor, have no opportunities, and get angry and violent. This is exactly the reason for getting them out of refugee camps and into prosperous countries. America Muslims do great. They are better educated and wealthier than the average American.
(cheap shot, I know. Still, yanno.).