March 20, 2002

8:16 AM

Islamic Republic of Great Britain?The heartland of violent Islamic extremism is now none of the official fronts of the war on terror. Its center is Western Europe -- mainly, but not exclusively, in Britain. "Al-Muhajiroun has one goal," Anjam Choudry, its U.K. chairman, told the Observer newspaper. "We would like to see the implementation of the sharia law in the U.K. Under our rule this country would be known as the Islamic Republic of Great Britain."
posted by semmi (24 comments total)

Semmi, you have a tendency to find the nutcases in the Muslim community and presenting them as if they are the majority. These people are marginalized within the overall Muslim population, and I wouldn't be surprised if you knew that already. In case you want to read about other Muslims in the UK besides the crazies, here's a link.
posted by laz-e-boy at 8:33 AM on March 20, 2002

Herein lies the reason why blair is so gung-ho on committing GB troops to the war effort...
posted by BentPenguin at 8:41 AM on March 20, 2002

No, this isn't the reason at all. The reasons are multiple and complex, and don't have to do with fringe groups.
posted by cell divide at 8:58 AM on March 20, 2002

In case any one doesn't click through and read la-z-boy's link above, it is a squishy-wishy warm hug of a piece about blond haired blue-eyed Englishwomen who have converted to Islam -- A completely uncritical acount which would have had everybody throwing up if it had been about young Islamic women converting to Christianity. In one hilarious line, a convert declares: "Islamic teaching made perfect, logical sense. You can approach it intellectually and there are no gaps, no great leaps of faith that you have to make." No "great leaps of faith?" Clearly, she doesn't know bupkis about her new religion, or any religion.
posted by Faze at 9:02 AM on March 20, 2002

Further proof that religious orthodoxy of any sort is dangerous.
posted by evanizer at 9:12 AM on March 20, 2002

One London mosque leader says extremist mosques are attracting hundreds of disaffected youth, in the wake of Richard Reid's arrest; but even last fall, London had secured a reputation as a hub for extremists and dissidents from all sorts of countries, in part because of its political freedoms.
posted by dhartung at 9:16 AM on March 20, 2002

laz-e-boy, hit the lever on your chair, sit up, get closer to the screen, and read Semmi's phrase the heartland of violent Islamic extremism. Where does that phrase confuse you?
posted by dhartung at 9:20 AM on March 20, 2002

"We would like to see the implementation of the sharia law in the U.K. Under our rule this country would be known as the Islamic Republic of Great Britain."

Yeah, yeah, yeah... And I want pancakes. Difference is, I'm getting my pancakes.
posted by phalkin at 9:29 AM on March 20, 2002

That BBC poll in which "one-quarter said they supported British Muslims who had gone to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban" was interesting. For more on conversion, Converting from Buddhism to Islam has comparisons of Islam with atheism, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. If you're pondering the question of suicidal extremists vs. regular law-abiding individuals, I've just started a book by a former congressman called "Silent No More -- Confronting America's False Images of Islam" that's informative and not too tough to read.
posted by sheauga at 9:33 AM on March 20, 2002

Pancakes are excellent. My choice for breakfast over all others, and I have been known to eat them for dinner too.
posted by a3matrix at 9:41 AM on March 20, 2002

I found the post from the poster much more compelling than I did from the Lazyboy man would refute him (and call names) because those young recent converts are muchless representative that say Arab muslims who have moved to England.
Further, the initial post is not about a fews people but rather from what is going on, or so we are to believe, in a number of mosques.
posted by Postroad at 10:39 AM on March 20, 2002

From the tone of the original post, you would think that there are 2 million potential Muslim terrorists in England, but the numbers from the article tell a different story (200 Al-Qaida members, 200 people protesting the war, a handful celebrating 9/11). This is out of a Muslim population that is nearly 2 million. I know extremism is a problem, more so in the UK than the US, but fanning the flames like this is not going to help things.

The point I was trying to make about the article that I posted is that normal Muslims - the kind everyone supposedly wants to hear from/about - are not newsworthy or are dismissed as being fluffy. Violent Muslims get all the attention and somehow become representative of all Muslims.
posted by laz-e-boy at 11:34 AM on March 20, 2002

I do see laz-e-boy's point. It's almost as if we need to constantly and actively marginalize the noisemakers in order to emphasize and even propigate the fact that they are a fringe element. The problem with focusing only on bad Muslims in the media is that it starts to give impressionable minds a negative image to identify with. I know this sounds terribly Pollyanna, but I think it's true. We live in brittle times. The best weapon in the world is psychology. It's also the most difficult to deploy effectively when you're the "good" guys.
posted by donkeyschlong at 2:38 PM on March 20, 2002

A mere 200. My, with a force like that you could only wipe out ten World Trade Centers. </dry>

laz-e-boy, even Jesse Jackson Sr. says he feels like crossing the street when he sees a couple of young toughs of his own race approaching him on the sidewalk. It's a problem. Do we stop reporting all murders in the city, because so many are done by black men, lest people get the wrong idea about law-abiding black men? I don't know an easy way to report the crimes without people gradually building up this image. The media can do all it can to avoid making the men's race an issue, but then you get to the part where you show their picture.

Even so, it's been years since the first time CAIR or whomever complained about the term "Islamic fundamentalist" or "Muslim terrorist", because over time, they say, the public begins to associate the one word with the other. Even if you're careful to say who you're talking about, naming the group for instance, at some point their religio-political philosophy comes into play. Without irony, surely, this became known as Islamism, which is actually a better term, one known throughout most of the Islamic world, and considered more accurate by scholars -- but it's a dilemma. If you rename it to pretend to protect the original term from contamination, you decontextualize the derivative term, in fact approaching euphemism and obfuscation.
posted by dhartung at 2:48 PM on March 20, 2002

laz-e-boy, even Jesse Jackson Sr. says he feels like crossing the street when he sees a couple of young toughs of his own race approaching him on the sidewalk.

The focus should be on "toughs" not on of his own race. It is racist to avoid all Blacks because of the actions of 'toughs' just as it is a kind of racism to feel bad about avoiding toughs just because they happen to be Black. Racism is when one assumes a group's worst are representative. As long as news reports are accurate, only racists and reverse-racists will find fodder for stereotyping/whinging.
posted by cell divide at 2:57 PM on March 20, 2002

A mere 200. My, with a force like that you could only wipe out ten World Trade Centers.
My, only x million white guys with crew cuts and only tens of thousands of rental vans, with a force like that you could only wipe out every federal building in this country.
posted by ajayb at 3:02 PM on March 20, 2002

oh and its not a question of not reporting, but a question of giving them the value that they actually have. Should every thing that emanates from the mouths of every Christian fundamentalist wackjob or every KKK member or every fool who leads a militia be given weight? No, we tend to marginalize the Robertsons and the Falwells. There are likely millions of fools in this country who would argue that America is a Christian country and that we should fight the nonreligious enemy within and convert or kill all pagans. Typically we just leave them to their own little patch of insanity and glance over once in a while to make sure they aren't planning on doing anything to us. We don't shrilly write article after article after paranoid article about them and assume that they are representative of all of Christianity.
posted by ajayb at 3:15 PM on March 20, 2002

Do we stop reporting all murders in the city, because so many are done by black men, lest people get the wrong idea about law-abiding black men? I don't know an easy way to report the crimes without people gradually building up this image. The media can do all it can to avoid making the men's race an issue, but then you get to the part where you show their picture.

That's the thing. We should absolutely be reporting crimes, complete with references to race, religion, and motivation - CAIR's whining be damned. But when we start raising flags about potential criminals, for no other purpose than to sell a few newspapers, then we do more harm than good.

If there are terrorist networks out there, by all means the authorities (hopefully assisted by the majority law-abiding Muslim communities) should root them out. (BTW, many of the major US Muslim orgs have already met with the FBI and others offering to help in any way they can to find terrorist networks). But news stories like the one posted serve only to fan hysteria among the general populace and make life difficult for the innocent.
posted by laz-e-boy at 3:35 PM on March 20, 2002

I don't recall too many other religiously affiliated people other than muslims, that actively go out and commit acts of terrorism.

When is the last time you heard of an act of terrorism commited by a Christian or Catholic or Buddhist or any other religion outside of Muslims in the name of [Insert Favourite Cause Here].

That is my problem with muslims. Then again i'm an atheist, so as far as i'm concerned anybody with a religious affiliation needs to get a grip. The sooner we deal with our problems and fix them, instead of praying to some non-existent entity to save us all, the better the world will be.
posted by Zool at 8:07 PM on March 20, 2002

Well Zool you could start with the pro-life terrorists, and their relations such as the Atlanta olympics bomber. There was also the Jewish terrorists who had the bomb plot that was discovered after Sept. 11th.

The difference seems to be in the level of support, planning, and $$$. Without the green I don't think Osama would be a big threat to the US. Admittedly it doesn't take much to pack a Ryder truck with chemicals, but still...
posted by chaz at 9:26 PM on March 20, 2002

Most acts of terrorism i hear about, day in, day out for the past who knows how many years, are the result of a person with the muslim religion as their faith.

This war Osama Bin Laden was trying to start, Muslims against the infidels, has been brewing for many years now and i don't doubt with the current Israel/Palestine situation, that this might actually happen one day. Any excuse to kill the infidels will do.
posted by Zool at 10:01 PM on March 20, 2002

Zool, then I guess you haven't been paying attention to South and Central America in the past 20 years. Maybe you missed N. Ireland and Spain as well. How many thousands have died from terror in those places? And not a Muslim to be found. Weird.

Most terrorists in the world have a specific political goal, not just someone looking for an excuse to kill someone. The danger is in the combination of the two, which has been replicated all over the world.
posted by chaz at 11:21 PM on March 20, 2002

Some terrorists have a political goal and stick religion in front of it to try and attract more people to help them.. Properly (or should I say improperly?) used, the clever can manipulate the not so clever using faith - look at all those cults that popup around the place. People need something to believe in, no matter who they are - even if you're an atheist, you'll believe things will get better if things are going craply for you (unless you're an extreme pessimist of course..).

Money isn't that big a thing to get hold of - hell, if it was bin Laden who fiddled the put options on the market after sept 11, he would have got his money back easy peasy.

The main reason these stick out more is due to the innate differences in the way the billion or so muslims live and the way the western world lives, with their respective values, morals etc - Islam is viewed as a strange thing by most people, mainly due to the fact that if you call yourself a muslim, you tend to stick to the whole religion as a way of life thing as opposed to something to do on sunday afternoons view (there are of course, many, many good christians/jews/buddhists, but on the whole in say Britain?). This means that attacks carried out by 'muslim terrorists/fundamentalists etc' seem more threatening than an attack carried out by someone you can relate to more (does that make sense?).

Also, most muslims are happy just to live their lives rather than thrust themselves to the fore - this is why you here loudmouths like AM rather than the majority (the lack of a central authority/structure also makes this kinda hard..). This appears to be getting slightly better, but we (non-fanatical-kill-all-the-infidel-muslims) probably need to do more to give our religion the good rep it deserves.
posted by Mossy at 3:38 AM on March 21, 2002

Chaz, i did not miss N.Ireland and Spain, those two are more to do with land than religion and only in N.Ireland, have they used religion as an excuse to kill each other. In Central and South America it's more to do with drugs, and the control of those drugs by very rich people who will do anything not to lose out on their wealth.

The Israeli/Palestine situation is also more to do about land than religion, but, Muslims are the only one's trying to turn any battle into a religious affair.

I am a very angry person, but never violent unless it's in self defence, i am getting very angry with the current state of this planet, maybe i care to much, maybe my intelligence is on higher plane compared to the rest of the world. I can see problems and have solutions to them, maybe i am ahead of my time, maybe i'm just venting anger.
posted by Zool at 3:33 PM on March 21, 2002