I would like to offer two opinions that I suspect will be unpopular around here.
Islam is a religion, not a race. It is a set of beliefs. It is quite possible to dislike any set of beliefs, whether it be Islam, Christianity, creationism or Scientology, without being racist. Calling people “racists” is unhelpful when discussing opinions on beliefs and ideas. It’s important to be able to criticize religions based on their content and teachings. I don’t disagree that many people who criticize Islam are bigots, but it is perfectly legitimate to criticize and question these ideas and perhaps it’s better to assume the best, rather than the worst, of people who say such things. Until they say “I hate Muslims” (or any other group) you’re just bringing out the straw men.
Secondly, I think it’s unhelpful to ignore the existence of millions of Muslims who genuinely do believe that Islam teaches things that are completely incompatible with what we consider to be a just society. To say “that’s not the real Islam” or similar is to completely ignore their own justifications for their beliefs. Millions of Muslims believe Islam teaches them to treat women (and various others) as, essentially, subhuman. I don’t think problems like that will go away until there is some acceptance of that fact.
And to answer the original question, it’s a great idea. Hopefully it will show another way to the violent minorities on both sides.
Doesn’t a religion “teach” whatever each individual adherent says it teaches to him or her? Why does your definition of the “real” Islam trump any other individual’s definition of the “real” Islam?
Furthermore what do we gain by assigning a characteristic to Islam and then tarring all Muslims with that label rather than keeping it on the individual level in the first place?
I wouldn’t call around 60 known gangs, and 2,400 confirmed victims in the space of just over a year, a “fairly small group of Pakistanis”.
Your reliance on the reporting of a single article, namely the one in the Independent, rather than the information in a whole range of diverse articles, indicates your preconceived bias. It is supremely ironic, therefore, that you accused me of making up my mind beforehand and “cherry-picking”.
You have not provided a “whole range of diverse articles.” You have provided three or four articles from the same biased sources, repeated over and over again. You said to use Google and when I did, I found a lot of repetition from biased sites. The first actual news article I discovered was that of The Independent. Now you have brought forth a second news article, this time from the BBC. You quoted Lord Taylor presenting the numbers, (in which he makes no claim regarding ethnicity or religion), but chose to ignore this statement from the same article.
That’s partly my point. Often those who mean well will say doing x or y is not the “real” Islam. Those who kill in the name of the religion, for one reason or another, are not following the religion “properly”, supposedly. If that is how millions of people see the religion, that is a real aspect of the religion whether we like it or not. You can quote Islamic scripture to justify either peace or violence, and saying only the parts we like represent the “true” version of Islam is unhelpful when so many people disagree - and act accordingly.
If you’ve only found two articles that you consider from reliable sources, then you obviously haven’t looked very hard, but then, no one likes their prejudices to be disturbed. The above quote from the Independent ignores the proportions. To simply state, as that spokeswoman did, that perpetrators come from all backgrounds, without stating any figures, is an obvious whitewash. So let’s have a look at what an actual, honest Muslim said about the figures:
+++Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, accused elders of the Pakistani community of “burying their heads in the sand” on the matter of sexual grooming. He said that of 68 recent convictions involving child sexual exploitation, 59 were of British Pakistani men and it was a significant problem for that community. He said the actions of criminals who thought “white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused” were “bringing shame on our community.”+++
Muslims make up 7% of the population of the UK, but, up to the time this individual was speaking, had been responsible for 87% of child sexual exploitation cases.
I have noticed among your posts a resistance to having one’s prejudices disturbed.
I said that after you claimed that Google would show a lot more information, I went to Google, using your search argument, and in the first four or five pages, petty much all the reports were the same three or four reports repeated by the same anti-Muslim hate sites. There were NO genuine news sources in those first few pages. Eventually I did find some news reports and linked to the one that presented the most comprehensive information.
It was not a whitewash. The Upper Chamber was looking to address a serious problem. As was noted in The Independent and The Times stories, pretending that the problem is limited to one group of people runs the risk of not paying enough attention and letting others continue.
However, I am already aware that the problem is more prevalent among one group. It even appears in my earlier post. Of course, rather than discovering that “Muslims” are running about Britain raping every “white” woman they find, (interesting way that the EDL and others portray the situation), there is a specific problem among a specific ethnic group from a fairly small section of one country.
I agree that it should be addressed among the Pakistani/Kashmiris–and among the various other groups who are engaged in that conduct.
Interesting that you have to make a claim that Shafiq is an “honest” Muslim, implying that most are not. In fact, if one reads the various news articles, even the ones from your hate sites, one will find a number of Muslims condemning the behavior. I also note that he addressed the more accurate description of the criminals as being from the “Pakistani community” rather than pretending that it is a general problem among “Muslims.”
By which you actually mean 87% of cases involving teen girls being “groomed” for sex by (predominantly) older teens and twenty-somethings–still a fairly small number–even though you used language that implied all sexual abuse–a much larger number throughout Britain that has no such “Muslim” association.
I am not denying the problem that exists. I simply note that you came into a discussion and posted wild claims about “Islam” and “Muslims” that has nothing to do with the religion, per se, but is a specific problem to a specific group of men with a common origin in one smaller region of the world.
No, America did not “withdraw because of a lack of public support.”
America invaded Vietnam* tried to impose it’s will and protect it’s puppet government and withdrew because it’s army wound up getting beaten, spanked and sent home with it’s tail between it’s legs.
The US lost because they knew nothing of Vietnam, it’s culture, or it’s history and they ignored Giap’s advice to the French they would lose even if they killed ten of his men for every one of his they killed because eventually the French would give up.
Eventually, the US got tired of seeing 350 American boys coming home in boxes every week.
And please, let’s not restart some silly argument that the US didn’t invade Vietnam unless one also wants to argue the Soviets didn’t invade Afghanistan or Hungary. When you send an army into a country to prop up your puppet government that’s called an invasion which is why we refer to the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Afghanistan and should refer to the American invasion of Vietnam.
Yes, by all means, start a thread on how Vietnam beat the United States. In the mean time, you managed to ignore what I said relating to this thread and it’s a rehash of a point I’ve made many times. When you peel away all the layers of Islam the core is a warlord who slaughtered and enslaved people. The religion he established is extremely intolerant to any challenge of it. And while you can say that was the case for various religions in the past there was no basis for it linked to the teachings of their progenitors. Not the case with Islam. Mohammed himself took his teachings to a very violent level. To this day apostasy is a crime that carries with it severe penalties.
At the end of the day, when all the Islamopologists have whitewashed the bloody fence that divides the world, Islam is a religion where it’s religious leaders openly form armies in many places around the world. This is the 21st century and yet we have to put up with “scholars” declaring Jihad based on the teachings and (more importantly) the actions of their prophet. And that, not culture, explains why people will go apeshit 6000 miles away at the mere suggestion a book might be burned or someone wrote a book or painted a picture that they deem worthy of a death sentence.
It’s not a handful of secluded people that can be hand waved away. It’s the religion that drives this and the acts of terrorism that result are found around the world.
If you found it so hard to find good articles, maybe you should have tried slightly different variations on the search criteria. Even Wiki has links to articles.
You seem to make a big thing about the fact that the vast majority of these Muslim perpetrators were Pakistanis. This is no real surprise, given that the vast majority of Muslims in the UK are Pakistanis.
You then go on to assert, with no evidence at all, that this problem has nothing to do with Islam per se. Unfortunately, the evidence points very strongly the other way. The Muslim school that the rapist I referenced earlier attended taught him that women were worthless, and the Muslims interviewed in the Dispatches documentary implied that it was the girls’ own fault for dressing the way they did. Many Muslim leaders, and yes, there are certainly honest ones (I never said otherwise), have accepted that it’s a cultural problem within their own communities.
Nor is it true that the EDL claim all Muslims do this. Again, that’s prejudice on your part. From their own website:
+++Whilst we must always protect against the unjust assumption that all Muslims are complicit in or somehow responsible for these crimes, we must not be afraid to speak freely about these issues.+++
Ah. The same tired appeal that ignores several centuries of actual history.
Muslims have not been any more violent than any other large group throughout history–and have been rather less violent than Christians in a large number of cases.
The current violence associated with Islam is pretty much a direct response to the oppression of various Muslim groups for most of the last couple of hundred years. It is nearly all political in nature and it begins to fade away as soon as Muslims move out of the lands where the suppression took place.
There very likely is a certain amount of internal strife as Islam goes through a period that roughly corresponds to the Christian Reformation, but that does not translate into a serious world wide plan of conquest.
The “violence” of the Prophet may very likely provoke some converts to follow that path. (As noted elsewhere, a large number of “local” terrorists have been recent converts with no serious grasp of the religion, e.g., Richard Reid, the “Shoe bomber,” Jose Padilla, Michael Adebolajo in London last month.) However, these guys are nutcases who happened to latch onto Islam and could have just as easily latched onto other ideologies.
This is nothing but a complete whitewash of what has transpired. Complete. No other religion today sparks the intense and violent reaction to apostasy or other challenges except Islam. Imagine if this pictureincluded the Prophet Mohammed. Bodies would be stacked up like cord-wood around the world. You completely ignore the whole concept of religious leaders in Islam actively calling for the death of people who insult “he who must not be painted” or his teachings.
It was changing the search criteria that finally provided links to legitimate news sources. ::: shrug :::
And you are studiously avoiding the point raised by both a British investigator and a Pakistani immigrant community leader that the majority of these thugs were not just Pakistani, but Pakistanis from the same region of the country–strongly implying some cultural connection to their actions.
You are ignoring the actual statements, again. (Both mine and those of the people interviewed in the reports.) If this is a “Muslim” problem, why do we not see the same sort of crimes being committed by Muslims from all over the world? Why did these crimes just start in the last decade or so when there have been hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Britain for decades? Why are so many of these crimes being committed by rural Kashmiri Pakistanis and not Pakistanis from Hyderabad, Karachi, or any of the large cities or the regions further from Kashmir? Where are the gangs from Malaysia? India? Egypt? (The Afghans who have shown up at trial tend to have been friends with the Kashmiris and no one has mentioned an Afghan gang.) Why have there been non-Muslims among those accused of the crimes?
My guess would be that this is an issue rising from the cultural conflict between men from a specific location that, once it was publicized, was seized upon by guys outside those groups as a “fun” thing to do. However, since it arose in one country from one localized group and is not happening in other countries and is not even happening widely among people of both the same religion and nation outside the enclaves of the Kashmiri immigrants, there is no evidence that this is the result of the religion, per se.
It is true that you have not said there were no honest Muslims, but emphasizing that one happens to be honest clearly implies that most are not, otherwise there would be no need to make the claim.
No. That is a straw man from you, since I have never made that accusation.
Nah. It is just you cherry picking things about which you have a need to feel fear.
I actually noted the comparison to the Reformation and its violence.
You, however, like to pretend that the behavior of people in third world countries is dictated by their religion even when there are not similar actions by Muslims in Europe and North America or even Muslims in other non-Western societies. (While also ignoring Christian-on-Muslim violence in parts of Africa.)
Are there Muslims and Muslim leaders who are still invested in violence? Sure. They are not a majority of any nation and they are generally located in societies where violence is already still the norm, using religion as an excuse for their cultural tendencies. When Dearborn breaks out in violent riots over insults to Mohammed, I will consider your claims to have something more than xenophobia behind them.
Are you saying the problem is an ethnic one, rather than religious?
As you point out yourself, there have been Afghans involved, and others too (the reasons you gave are just assumptions on your part). Some gangs have had North Africans in, I believe, and the one in Derby had 1 or 2 white Muslim converts in it, if I remember correctly. But it is not so surprising these are few non-Pakistanis, for the reason I stated earlier. Pakistanis make up the vast bulk of Muslims in the UK.
But even if you are right, and this is a specifically Pakistani/Kashmiri problem, it still doesn’t solve the issue, or make our girls any safer, for the very same reason, namely, that the vast majority of Muslims in the UK are Pakistani/Kashmiri.
Your assumption that this hasn’t been going on for decades is just that, an assumption. The reports make it clear that until recently police have refused to investigate or prosecute, for fear of being labelled racist.
Probably more narrowly focused than just ethnic. More likely specific to a very small location.
Nope. You are ignoring the evidence, again. The first several gangs that were involved with this were not just Muslim, not just Pakistani, but Pakistani from a very specific region in the Kashmir.
As I already noted, it probably got started with gangs from that region and, as other gangs heard about it, thought it would be fun and decided to engage in the same behavior.
Wrong. Kashmiri do not make up the majority of Pakistani immigrants to Britain. However, one thing that recognizing that Kashmiri connection would do would be to allow law enforcement and social services organizations to focus on identifying and stopping the probable perpetrators without diffusing their efforts, wastefully, on anyone who was Muslim as you would seem to choose to do.
No, again. The reports make it clear that the authorities did not treat the victims’ statements seriously and so did not follow up to nip it in the bud. However, the statements were documented and can now been identified. We see the same problem in the States where the cops tend to ignore complaints by (young) women whom they presume to be prostitutes and/or addicts, allowing repeated crimes to continue for several years. It is notable, however, that with the publicity that this “grooming” has garnered in Britain that we do have specific dates and no woman (much less multiple women) have come forward claiming, “Hey! That happened to me years ago.” No social workers have been found muttering under their breaths that the cops are finally going to do something about this issue. That is the standard way such events are discovered and reported. Once the initial silence is broken, any number of earlier events turn up. Given that this has been in the news for several years, barring evidence of earlier attacks, I see no reason to presume that they have been going on for “decades.”
If by “a certain amount” you mean we’re certain of the amount of thousands of Muslims who have been killed in Iraq in the last few years by terrorism committed by other Muslims, I think you’re probably right.