Dirty muslim paedos

I thought I'd go with the most sensationalist thread topic I could to kick off this discussion. There's a breaking scandal in the UK that a convicted child rapist was paid £10k as a police informant into an "asian" child grooming gang. I guess this is a fairly interesting story, on the one hand no one wants to see a paedo being paid essentially because he's a paedo, on the other hand if you want an informant in a case like this (who has a chance of allowing the case to cracked sooner thereby curtailing more child sex offences) who else would you pay but a paedo? However, the informant angle of this story isn't particularly what I was interested in addressing.

What I'm curious about is do you feel like the men behind this ring, and other men who operated similar rings (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 other examples), should be labelled as muslim when they are muslim? Do you think it is beneficial to do so?

For whatever reason the press in the UK, even when doing their most damning exposé on the whole ring, seem to take great pains to not bring their religion into their articles. The ironic thing is, as the men have different nationalities in the other examples I've listed (often Pakistani, but at least one of them above is entirely Somalian - which is why is seems even more disingenuous to call them "asian") really the only common tie is that they're all muslim. At some point it's quite clear that there's a readily apparent pattern where men of a certain religion are committing a niche organised crime consistently and reproducibly, and it's an angle that the press are ignoring.

It's here where I'll throw in the all important disclaimer that the vast majority of the muslim population are decent dudes and the female equivalent of dudes, and that every creed, race and nationality in my eyes is blessed with equal propensity towards becoming a wanker (apart from the French), and it's a small proportion of bad apples (the child-rapey and suicidey-bomby ones) that give the other muslims a bad name. It's why I called the thread "Dirty muslim paedos" and not "Dirty paedo muslims", the latter implying all muslims should be tarred with the same brush.

I've been checking out the UK politics sub-reddit and what is weird on there is the main focus isn't on the rights-and-wrongs of paying that informant (which I assumed before going on there that's what all the talk would be about), it's more about the muslims being at it again (with more racist people, alarmingly quite up-voted in some instances, saying we should kick all muslims out of the country, etc.).

It's that level of anger directed at the press and the government, for their unwillingness to just call an orange an orange, that to me seems to be making people more divided on the issue rather than less (reddit is assuredly a white man bubble, but even so that bubble is not happy) - which is why I'm wondering if it wouldn't just be better to acknowledge that they're muslim. For some extra background, someone on the same sub-reddit posted a rather disturbing video of audience response to someone claiming these gangs are predominantly muslim on a televised BBC Three debate (essentially, young hip BBC) - here's the video.

I guess the bottomline is that there is a cultural divide here (one of the guys in the latest ring was reported to have said, "All white women are good for one thing, for men like me to fuck and use as trash, that is all women like you are worth"), do you think its useful to apportion that cultural divide to these people's religion? I guess you could argue that there's no real causality between their religion and cultural outlook, and so to draw that link is dangerous. It's not hard to find extremely toe-curling news about some groups of people in these countries that makes them seem like animals by western standards. Again I'm not trying to broad brush whole countries' populations and say they're are all the same, but there's certainly at least some pockets of people in these countries (the kind that can go on to form these child sex rings) that are culturally abhorrent.

I'm really not sure what to make of any of this, so I thought I would put it to the straight-talking TA forums for an opinion. Probably police directives on this are acknowledging and targeting these muslim sub-groups and knowingly referring to them as muslim, but I'm not sure how healthy it is for the rest of society that people are screamed at for saying these groups are muslim and media doesn't seem to want to mention it either for risk of being branded islamophobic. All the british public seems to do recently is become more and more divided.

As a final note, I would like to apologise for the slightly racist tone of the topic title. It was unfair of me to assume muslim paedophiles would have a poor level of personal hygiene by calling them dirty, when in all likelihood they have an average-to-good standard of personal hygiene. In fact, they may even be squeaky clean compared to you average slovenly white paedophile.

For this, I am sorry.

 

Fascinating stuff, it's one of those videos where you watch it and feel slightly more intelligent after doing so.

It links into what you said somewhere on here the other day, in that identity politics are a huge problem, and they're particularly a huge problem when tackling Islam and trying to approach it as just one thing because it's such a fractured religion to begin with that it doesn't have such a sense of identity.

I guess this is leading people down a path where the more the left cries that we can't just up and label hardline islamist muslims a problem on the grounds of white prejudice, the more centrists and people on the right get enraged by the state of affairs (pushing some towards straight islamophobia, where they say we should kick all muslims out of the country) because the problem isn't be tackled as a problem of the muslim community - which is quite clearly is.

There were actually several points in that video that the islamophobic right really could use to their advantage in the UK, for example the very large proportion of mosques funded by the Deobandi - which was a pretty damn high proportion (I think they said around half) pushing an islamist islam-is-the-best world view. A huge hang up I've noticed in our news is we're only talking about the mosques funded by the Saudis, which is actually pretty damn negligible and from what this video is saying and not near as much of an issue as the Deobandi funding (the irony is of course the Deobandi formed in India initially as a response to British Imperialism).

I guess the trouble is you only get ill-educated bellends on both sides of the debate smashing their opinions into one another, with the left saying we should socially accept all that the muslim minority is putting out there in its entirety because otherwise we're racist, and the right saying all muslims don't care about our western values and they can never integrate into society - all to just piss each other off more and damage both sides of the debate. Really it's much more complicated than that, as there are plenty of moderate muslims, and plenty of on-the-fence muslims who could swing moderate or extremist, and there's plenty that are just extremist.

To answer my own questions, the media should be labelling these child rapists as muslims, because them dodging it is just playing an awful version of identity politics - and it really is obfuscating the fact that some sects that fall under the umbrella of Islam are problematic. As they mentioned in the video, no one was afraid to label nonce priests as catholics and say it was a problem that arose out of the catholic faith, why should the muslim community be treated with kid gloves? It's not being multi-cultural to not admonish muslims when we would do white folk.

 

That seems like a rather insane situation, I don't know how reasonable thinking people can put the desires of one minority (muslims) above those of another (the LGBT crowd). I suppose political parties do anything to further their agenda, and it seems reminiscent of the Tories getting into bed with the DUP (controversial in similar ways as the DUP are hardline religious fundamentalists and so hate the fabulous gays too) though it's not quite the one-eighty that seems to be going on in Sweden as the DUP aren't asking for any changes to current laws - they're just quietly hating the gays.

As for Maajid Nawaz, I was going to fund that legal dispute he's got going on with the SPLC, because it seems like the case would throw a sharper focus onto the issues surrounding muslims in western society. However, when I got onto his page the minimum they ask for is a rolling £20 per month, and then a rolling £50 and £100 per month. If you select "one-off donation" as an option, the listed values are £1000, £2000 and £5000 or "other". Seems like the measly £10 I'd be prepared to offer isn't quite the amount he's looking for. He's based in London, and clearly some people will be making those rolling donations, so I don't think £10 would make a difference either way. I'll be keeping an eye on it, in any case.

EDIT:

So I took my revised opinion to reddit, and now I'm being called a racist (but getting slightly upvoted, hey hey). I can't imagine any other circumstance where there would be an instance of recurring organised crime, and potentially a factor that has some causality with crime, and people are encouraged to not address that causality.

I guess if there had been one or two instances of this, you could take it as a freaky outlier of the muslim community, but when it comes to 12 separate instances of muslim men organising to commit a specific niche crime - which I would say is enough that you could empirically call it an epidemic without hyperbole - there's at least parts of that community where weird shit is happening (again I'm not talking about all the community).

 

I think I finally figured it out, it's the Streisand Effect writ large. The more we choose to not acknowledge that in the UK (and elsewhere) that 12 separate instances of muslim paedophile rings aren't in some way a bit of a problem of some segments of the muslim community, the more the public talk about it and the more it gives license to racists who say ridiculous shite like, "Well let's kick them all out then."

It's troubling, because too many people say, "Well it's just how muslims operate. They hate the west, and their viewpoint is thoroughly incompatible from ours." Of course, that's mostly wrong, but not absolutely entirely - and that's Nawaz I felt was acknowledging above.

I think I would have always railed against that mindset before from a reactionary and liberal viewpoint, but when that's happened in 12 separate instances there's something wrong with clinging to the idea of mindlessly defending people and treating them as they're blameless victims all the time just because they're a minority population. And I'm not trying to say white people don't form paedophile rings, because of course they do, and as I've mentioned this is not by a long shot all muslims - but at what point does ignoring an obvious issue help societal cohesion?

To go down an even darker rabbit hole, I'm entirely sure what's worse - jihadis that will suicide bomb us because they think they're engaging us in war, or pervert islamists who would rather make twenty or so western 14 year olds swallow their cum because they think our liberal culture is heresy? Even when suicide bombers are killing children, I think they're being more honest and it's less of an insidious corruption. I know what I said there was vulgar, but it's actually happening, and sometimes describing things in the realistic terms in which they happened is unfortunately the only way to go about it.

Thanks to DE to being non-judgemental and providing some perspective. In an ideal world, 12 separate muslim gangs in the UK wouldn't have raped I'd say a minimum of around 5000 girls (one gang raped at least 1000, so there's my conservative estimate) and I also wouldn't need to try and get any sort of grasp on this unpleasant shit in the first place.

 

I've never really understood identity politics*, because I don't feel any affinity with any kind of tribe. It's not a factor that drives my decision-making to any great extent.

So for example, I have never understood why persecuted minorities insist on dressing like persecuted minorities. When a muslim man walks down a London street dressed like a muslim, and then complains that he gets a hard time as a result, I don't understand why he doesn't just wear jeans and a t-shirt instead. I mean, it's not difficult. If I went to live in a muslim majority country, and wore my jeans and t-shirt, and people started calling me a rapist and threatening to beat me up, I'm pretty sure I'd slap on a floor-length robe and headscarf in short order.

The thing is though, I've realised that this kind of thing is incredibly important to most people. Their tribal identity and tradition is a defining aspect of their existence, and for me to blithely say "Don't voluntarily dress like the thing that you are" is completely missing the point.

So, to the topic at hand. Yes, it might be true that there's a sudden swell in paedophile-rings-whose-members-are-all-muslim, but due to tribal identities and whatnot, the moment you start describing them as "muslim paedophile rings", all the non-paedophile muslims will go "Wait, I'M a muslim" and feel that they are being attacked by association, and all the non-muslims will see it as a muslim problem. None of that leads to anything good. There basically isn't any way to highlight the common muslim thread in these gangs without pissing off a whole load of non-criminal muslims, and exacerbating tension between groups of people.

In short, I disagree with the assertion that the press and the government are making it worse by NOT mentioning the muslimness of these people. I think the divisions would be worse if the mainstream media were going on about how this is a muslim problem, because then the view that all muslims should be kicked out would become far more acceptable as a response.

* I've never really understood identity politics, so here's a post explaining identity politics.

 

I think it's one of those things that's really hard to say whether they're not making it worse or they are, the writing is so much on the wall that many of these gangs are muslim now that to actively avoid calling them muslim seems a little like insanity, and many white males who see that for what is are getting more inflamed through this policy of wilful ignorance. To me, all that accomplishes is pushing white men into the arms of people who "tell it like it is", like UKIP and even more racist organisations like the BNP because of that palpable sense of avoiding the honest truth of the situation.

As I think I've already mentioned, the weirder and worse thing is the press and government are quite happy to call them "asian", which I thinking is a borderline racist insult to many asians in the first place and not even accurate in the second because, as I mentioned somewhere above, one of the muslim gangs was black Somalian, and it's not like Chinese people who fall under the umbrella of asian are going out and doing this. It seems like they're trading an accurate description of these groups (muslim) for an even more racist one (asian), and somehow that's better?

I don't know what I'm driving at here, because really the only way you improve these situations is by pouring money into educating the communities and running awareness campaigns, and you can hardly say, "There's a problem with some segments of the muslim minority that give them a greater than normal propensity to form child sex rings, so we're going to spend your taxpayer money stopping that," because people would just read that as favouring muslims again.

I think why I found the interview DE posted up on Maajid Nawaz refreshing because he is at least saying that there are too many muslims with an islamist Islam-is-the-best-fuck-the-rest mindset, and so to write off those guys as not real or normal muslims is producing more problems then it solves because they're no longer in the large minority compared to the total muslim population - whereas I think other more open-minded muslims may perhaps discount their islamist-leaning counterparts as not the norm so they can sleep easy at night. I guess I'm sort of treating what he is saying as gospel, but if someone goes out of their way to set up a think tank to expressly tackle these issues you would think he has a valid opinion.

Maybe we need to form a white male talking point checklist for this forum, now that we've already covered rape and a little bit of Islam.

The quote was a little unnecessary, I just didn't want to jump straight into identity politics without warning.

I think it's easy to think of identity politics as mostly just catering to minorities, when really I think it's about politicians approaching all demographics in society (young, old, rich, poor, white, black, gay, muslim, hindu, male, female, etc.) in the most reductive way possible just to earn votes, when really they should be focussing on shaping the whole society for the best. Again, people find it to be unfair deference and pandering to certain groups, and then they get sour grapes and resent those groups when it's the fault of the politicians for playing that game in the first place.

If you look at young people in the UK and ask them about the baby boomers, most of them are absolutely livid at the old for leading us down the Brexit path and see them as a truly despicable selfish generation who reaped all the rewards of the wartime generation and are now getting triple-locked pensions and fuel allowances. I think identity pandering is just turning us against each other, and will cause a lot of problems in the long run.

 

I suspect that Asian is okay as a label because it's a broad enough category. People are more likely to see themselves as "Japanese" or "Bangladeshi" in their identity space. You can argue that "muslim" is also quite broad, but evidently the muslims themselves don't see it that way, and I don't think a lot of non-muslims do either.

The argument that it's hard to say whether it's worse one way or another is, well, I would point out that historically we've done it the other way, and it's not exactly had great results. So let's at least give it a few more decades before writing off the approach of trying not to lump people together into categories that cause divisions and tension. Yes it's true that some people, particularly white men, get upset by this and may be driven to further extremes than they otherwise would. But it's also true that a lot of other people are consequently led in the other direction, towards tolerance and acceptance. What are the numbers? I'm not sure. I read recently that KKK membership in the US is at most 5,000 people. That's, like, tiny. I wouldn't worry too much about offending a few white guys if it means that 1 billion muslims are brought peacefully into mainstream society.

Also, I'm not sure what your final point is. Politicians gonna politic. If the young resent the old for voting for Brexit, do you think they would resent them more if the media hadn't constantly highlighted that Brexit is an old people problem?

 

You're probably correct. I guess I'm not entirely bothered if they're labelled or not, just so long as the government if tackling this with specificity on some level, even if they don't acknowledge that they're doing it publicly. When they choose to dodge associating it with muslims, it feels like the implication is that that's what they're also doing when they're trying to tackle it in our public services, but I appreciate it's not necessarily the case.

I think the leave campaign was in ways tailored to the older demographic by specifically appealing to issues relevant to them, disproportionately more so than other demographics, and what we're seeing now is the British government doesn't know its arse from its elbow when trying to negotiate these issues. For Brexit specifically, there was needless pandering by Boris Johnson to further his own career (who I sincerely think didn't expect the public to vote Leave) and it was on the basis of playing these identity politics games.

Of course the press have a hand in these things, but if the identity politics games hadn't been played they wouldn't have had quite so much to report on. What I mean is, while old people I'm sure would have still voted for Brexit more so than young people regardless of the campaign, the targeted Leave campaign encouraged even more to do so.

I guess I'm just tried of the highly focussed targeting of certain demographics as it leads to dogshit non-central politics, i.e. Labour promising the earth to young people last election, which they wouldn't have been able to deliver on. It's alienating to many different people.

 

Well it certainly was a cheery video ("Are we doomed?").

I get the idea that the faults of a small portion of a group should not be seen as emblematic of that group in the first place. I also understand as Smuel says that to talk about a specific unpleasant crime being linked to a certain group would more easily stir up tensions against that entire group.

I guess my remaining issue, while I acknowledge the points above, is that I appreciate honesty - from other people, the press and politically. The depressing fact of the matter above is almost all of the men mentioned in the instances are muslim. The nature of the crime itself is also something that requires co-operation between a large group of individuals, and is highly organised and premeditated - it's not the kind of thing that just happens. To under-report that fact, and to not acknowledge it politically, when at this stage with 12 separate instances it has become empirically correlative, is in a way dishonest.

I'd like to live in a world where you could attribute something consistently occurring with some people in a certain demographic, because it's true, and the rest of the population wouldn't get stirred up into irrationally hating everyone of that demographic as a whole - not because I have a desire to slap labels on people, but because tackling it as a specific issue would likely lead to more effective practical outcomes. However as Smuel says, unfortunately that isn't the case, and as soon as you say muslim men are committing these crimes idiots will just start to wrongly think all muslim men are paedos.

I guess, somewhat naively, I appreciate honesty as a virtue in and of itself - and you'd hope you could just tell people a thing that is happening and trust in their rationality to draw a reasonable conclusion. Practically, however, too many people are irrational and the conclusions they make often lead to mob mentalities and the grabbing of pitchforks - so a measure of dishonesty is the best way to go.

And if that makes me a racist, then by god I'm a racist!

Maybe I should end every post I make on this forum with that line.

 

I wouldn't think of it as being dishonest. I don't think you should ever flat out lie to people, because that's just asking to have your credibility ruined when the lie is uncovered. This is more of a lie by omission, which I prefer to think of as "not a lie at all".

As you've said, people are stupid. But they're also really smart, and able to pick up on the subtext of things. So a lot of the time when people say something that they think is helpful, it's actually counterproductive. For example, when Barack Obama is described as the first black president, the subtext is "A black president is really unusual and you shouldn't expect it very often". It would be far more powerful not to remark on his colour at all. Similarly, when a parent tells a little girl that she is "Just as good as a boy", the girl is likely to hear it as "There are mysterious factors that will hold you back in life, otherwise I wouldn't be telling you this". After all, she'll never hear anyone telling a boy that he's just as good as a girl. It would be better if the parent didn't mention the girl's girlness at all and just provided the same kind of encouragement to everyone.

So, the question is - does the muslimness of these paedophile rings actually have any relevance to anything? They'll be prosecuted just the same as if they weren't muslim, or at least that is the stated aim of the justice system. What would be gained by describing them as muslim? Yes, it's a common factor, but there are probably other common factors you could highlight if you wanted to, such as "bearded paedophile rings", or "men under 5'10 paedophile rings". Why do you think that the common muslim thread is a thing that ought to be highlighted?

I'd like to live in a world where people's ethnic origin and group affiliations were considered totally irrelevant. If someone blows up a building, they're a terrorist. They might say "I did it in the name of Allah!", but our reaction should be "What's that got to do with anything?" Describing them as a "muslim terrorist" should seem about as relevant as describing them as a "human terrorist", or a "Manchester United supporting terrorist", or a "goes cycling at the weekend terrorist".

Sadly, I don't think either of us will be living in our preferred worlds any time soon.

 

I think it's more that, at least on a policing and social services level, by acknowledging the common tie they may be more effective in future crime prevention occurring under these circumstances (I mentioned this a couple of posts ago, and was going to mention it in my last one, but couldn't get in there without tacking it on). I have no particular interest in any sort racial or religious discrimination, but I do have an interest in crime prevention, and if a more specific approach could be social services to prevent a crime before it happens or police services to catch a crime early - that seems like a better way to handle a situation. By contrast having a beard and being 5'10 don't seem occasionally tied to a certain criminal behaviour, at least not in any meaningful way.

I guess in all likelihood I'm just annoying myself over nothing, as government organisations must be profiling demographics of people to an extent under their Prevent campaign (not just as islamist muslims, but also people more pre-disposed to white supremacist extremism), and as mentioned personally I would connect the islamist line of thinking that Islam makes muslims superior to non-muslims to be responsible for both terrorism and for degradation of young non-muslim girls in equal measure.

I also guess if you are going to define and profile a demographic, it needs to be a refined and accurate demographic, so naturally people should never define "the muslim population of the UK" as a single demographic that should be handled as one entity.because it's too broad. However if you can accurately hone into the demographic inside the muslim population of the UK that has a problem with islamist thinking, then that would be a worthy demographic to target, which schemes like Prevent seem to be doing already - and there are certainly other factors at play other than religion that is putting them at risk in the first place.

I think another important point is, if you are targeting a certain at risk muslim demographic for greater police attention when it comes to crimes of this nature, you are also targeting them with other social services to educate against the root causes of what is predisposing this crime in the first place. I think all people see when they think of situations is completely prejudiced police profiling against as a blanket measure against a very broad group of people, when really it's about narrow demographics of people in a given group and it's as much about education as it is about policing.

Going back to original point of highlighting the common muslim thread, as I said this isn't an important thing to highlight publicly so long as it is being incorporated somewhere. However if you do highlight it publicly then at least everyone knows how the situation is being dealt with, and if people were more capable of objective and rational thinking the government could as clear as crystal set out it's methods without people becoming prejudiced as a consequence - but naturally aren't capable of detaching themselves from a situation like you say.

Well somewhere along the line empirically muslim men are committing these crimes. This doesn't indicate causality, but it can be used at a tool to help prevention by identifying the at risk segment of the muslim community.

My reaction is the same concerning a particular crime regardless of what race or creed commits it, I'm only interested in better policing and social outcomes that can arise from accurately identifying all particular demographics that have a great propensity to commit a crime in the first place.

And if that makes me a racist, then by god I'm a racist!

 

I agree that police investigations ought to be able to do profiling, since that will likely help in the effort to prevent crimes. And it's unfortunate that political correctness often interferes with the ability of the police to do their job effectively. But that's a different question.

We ought to be trying to move to a system where everyone is treated exactly the same, regardless of their tribal affiliations. The best way to do this is to ignore the tribal affiliations. Some people take it too far and start yelling at people who continue to highlight the tribal affiliations, but I don't think that's actually necessary.

So in summary, I support the mainstream media for not mentioning the dominant religion of a set of paedophile gangs, but I don't support the harassing of people who try to discuss the issue of whether their religion is relevant.

And if that makes you a racist, then by god you're a racist!

 

As I was reading through this thread, I was itching to write up a response which could be summed up as "Only relevant information should be reported", but then I get to the last post and Smuel beats me to it.

I guess that's my punishment for not checking the forums on a regular basis.

 

This is perhaps the most crucial point, as if it were any demographic of people that seemed to be committing a particular severe and specific crime more often than most, I would be advocating the same approach in dealing with that demographic (say if it were ginger Scottish people living in England were organising into to paedophile rings with greater than normal frequency, for example).

What I'm after is an approach that applies to everyone equally, but acknowledges for the disparities between people inherent because of tribalism, rather than overlooks them - because different groups of people have different problems. I think this was more or less my point all along, but you know how it is with me, I take 5 or 6 posts of rumination and waffly bullshit to get anywhere.

I'm at a loss to understand how ignoring that a problem is more prevalent in a certain group helps to tackle that recurring issue in that group, and it seems that this kind of approach to me is unwittingly more prejudiced than it is less, because unfortunately we live in a society that creates disparities between different groups of people. I think the onus should be on government to try and counterbalance that so we can move to a situation where everyone can be treated exactly the same regardless of tribal affiliations, rather than pretend everyone's equal in the first place. As I keep mentioning, in the video DE posted, Nawaz talks about the left being regressive in ignoring the problems of islamist thinking growing in the muslim community rather than doing something about them, mostly out of a misguided attempt to avoid so-called prejudice.

I guess this may again sound like pandering based on identity, but it's more about bringing small problem groups in line with conventional societal norms (bearing in mind that of course part of these norms is freedom of religious expression, etc.), and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the gang-banging of children isn't a societal norm.

 

I'm at a loss to understand how saying "Hey everyone, this is a Group X problem" helps to tackle that recurring issue in that group either, particularly when the problem is in no way specific to Group X.

We live in a society of free speech. If it's true that Islamist thinking is growing in the Muslim community, then that's a problem for the Muslim community to address. Obviously we will continue to prosecute child abusers and terrorists regardless of their tribal identity, but the best counter to extremist thinking is not extremism of the opposite flavour, it's open acceptance. So the best way to counter Muslim extremism is to say "Hey, you can fully participate in our society on equal terms with us if you want, and we don't care what your beliefs are, as long as you don't kill or abuse people." Sure, some Muslims will complain about this, but the vast majority of them will think it's great, and assimilate very well.

In other words, the way to bring a small problem group in line with conventional societal norms is to start treating them as though they were already in line with those norms. It's "The same rules apply to you and me", not "The same rules apply to you and me even though clearly your type doesn't like these rules, but don't forget who made them in the first place so you'd better shape up or else!"

 

I don't think I've said to say "paedophilia is a muslim problem", that's not exactly what I was driving for, but obviously the semantics of how people articulate these things can be problematic at points so I probably have fallen short somewhere. I'm saying some of an islamist portion of muslims has a paedophilia problem.

You're certainly making me think a lot.

I completely get what you're saying, and I've said in the past people should be allowed to think whatever they want in their heads and even admit that they're thinking it, so long as they don't commit crimes on that basis - which is essentially exactly what you're saying here too. In the past I was referring I think to general paedophilia, as if someone admits that they're a paedo they can get help, or even if they keep it under wraps so long as they are committing any criminal behaviour in the pursuit of that - who cares?

However, the islamist mindset seems more or less ideologically opposed to a western liberal one, with muslims subscribing to (a) think that Islam gives them moral and ideological superiority and (b) holding onto an extremely socially conservative that's common in a lot of Islam. Whereas a general all purpose paedo isn't aggressively opposed to society as we know it, islamist muslims certainly can be and so I don't think it's so easy as to win them over by leading with liberal example. While intellectual or academic islamists certainly exist who respect the rule of law, the ideological conflict of a lot of others I think puts them at odds with our legal system, because their religion already has its own version of rule of law.

I'm not exactly opposed to what you're saying, and again I guess I don't really know what I'm driving for here, just mulling things over. I suppose what I am wondering is do you think that government interference, through things like the Prevent campaign, is therefore wrong - and we should just let extremists, and the mindset that feeds extremism thrive? It's a loaded question, I know, but in some ways it seems like that's what is being enabled by not having such measures in place.

To move into an entirely weird(er) space, I think extremist muslims probably have a lot in common with young (non-islamic) spree killers in America. Both feel pushed out and marginalised by society, and I think both are motivated by a very "well then fuck society" mindset. With muslims, you have other muslims trying to radicalise them and tell them that Islam actually makes them better than the westerners that are making them feel marginalised in the first place (and also part of a community), and with American spree killers I guess they're more lone wolf orientated as they don't feel like there's anyone they can properly turn to, and as a consequence just have think by themselves "well I'll show them who's a buttface" and grab a gun.

Certainly a lot of Americans I would say want to deal with the problem of kids who think like this, so why should it be different with muslims tending towards extremism? Or do you think it's a bad comparison in the first place?

 

To your first point, one could argue that the Scottish Protestant mindset is ideologically opposed to a western liberal one, since they are also very socially conservative and think they have moral superiority over debauched liberals. And what's happened to extreme Scottish Protestantism? It's largely died out, because young people prefer the western way of life. Of course, however strident they may have been, Scottish Protestants never became terrorists, so we largely ignored them. However, this does show that ignoring groups can work effectively as an assimilation tactic.

It doesn't always work though. You could point to the Amish as being a religious community that has resisted assimilation, along with pockets of orthodox Jews and many other examples. But bear in mind that these groups are extremely unusual. Western society used to be 100% religious, and now it's basically 0% religious apart from a few hold-out subgroups. People worry that "extremism is taking over" but it just plain isn't. Young people can see the western lifestyle, with all its freedoms and benefits and liberal attitudes, being incredibly successful and also rather appealing, and then they hear the elders in their community railing against how terrible that all is, and it just doesn't make sense to them. As I said, people are smart enough to recognise subtext, and most aren't inclined towards fanaticism and would much rather live in a society whose only basic rule was "do what you like as long as you don't kill or abuse others". That's precisely why western liberalism has been so successful in the first place.

In terms of whether the government should actively do anything about extremism, it is a difficult question, because all that tribal identity stuff comes into play. I would say that we shouldn't treat any group of people differently from any other. Much of the stuff that would help to prevent radicalisation is also useful stuff in general that would help disaffected poor people and prevent criminal gang membership and your American spree killers and so on, so maybe do all those things, but in the name of providing opportunities for everyone rather than specifically for preventing radicalisation.

I guess fundamentally I just don't believe that you need to do anything specific to combat extremism, because "let's all be nice to each other and watch Avengers movies" is always going to win out over "let's live according to a thousand year old religious text", for the vast majority of people.