Radicalisation or Rubbish?

[Super Nova]

He is the Hugh Hefner of the chook pen.



They are on to him though.

[Rorschach]

Islamist extremism is the ideology that must be defeated
The Australian
November 21, 2015 12:00AM

Unsurprisingly, young Muslim men who are raised in Syria’s Raqqa, Iraq’s Mosul or Saudi Arabia’s Medina are typically not alienated or ostracised for their Islamic faith or Arabic ethnicity. Yet thousands have become Islamist extremists, intent on killing Shiite Muslims, non-Muslims or random crowds in an effort to promote their absolutist, almost nihilist, creed of death and destruction. No one analysing the spread of this extremist Wahhabiism — this rising tide of Islamist terrorism — across North Africa, the Middle East, the sub-Continent or South East Asia could seriously suggest social rejection or anti-Muslim sentiment in the suburbs of Western nations could possibly be a causative factor. This is why the words of Australia’s Grand Mufti, Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, citing Islamophobia and counter-terrorism measures as causes of terrorism are not only dangerous and insensitive but clearly ridiculous. Greens leader Richard Di Natale talks of “building social cohesion” as one way to prevent terrorism. Yet it is that very cohesion that already exists here and, for the most part, in other western nations which the terrorists seek to destroy.

While it stands to reason we should always work to prevent any level of alienation in our communities (all the more so if it is based on race or religion) we would be engaging in an exercise of deliberate delusion if we attempted to argue such social ills are the root cause of Islamist extremism. Disillusionment, especially among youth, is hardly new and is certainly not restricted to young Muslims in our society. Young men, whether or not they were born here and whether or not they belong to a range of other immigrant or religious cohorts, have not turned to murderous and suicidal terrorism as a way to express their angst. This is an ideological carcinoma endemic only to people in Muslim communities or converts to their religion. We can skirt around this unpalatable fact all we like — seek to ignore or deny it — but it will not change the reality.

It seems absurd that we need to be saying all this, yet again, 14 years after 9/11, 13 years after the first Bali bombings and almost a year since an Islamist extremist took hostages at gunpoint in Martin Place. But there seems to be a persistent sheepishness among world leaders, from Barack Obama down, to address the Islamist motivation at the core of the current global threat. Just because Mr Obama goes out of his way to avoid mentioning Islam or Muslims, and just because our own political leaders do the same (even Tony Abbott used “death cult” to avoid saying Islamic State), it doesn’t stop the terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they kill innocents anywhere from Beirut to Boston, Mosul to Melbourne or Paris to Parramatta.

To recognise the nature of our current terrorist challenge is not to demonise a religion or its followers. Muslim communities are terrorised and murdered by these same extremists and, obviously, are crucial partners in combating the threat. It is their religion’s name that is used by the barbarians and they have a stake in eradicating the cancer. The extremist interpretation of Wahhabist Sunni Islam is the central ideological thread that must be countered. It dates back 300 years but has been on the rise in the Middle East since the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood more than 80 years ago. To this extent Islamic State — while powerful through the land and cities it holds and the inspiration its self-declared caliphate provides — is just one of many Islamist organisations that must be countered. Whether it is Jemaah Islamiah persisting in South East Asia, Boko Haram fostering chaos in Nigeria or the Taliban reasserting their terror in Afghanistan, the challenges are diverse and global. The terrorists are adherents to medieval practices whose paradoxical grasp of digital media allows them to spread their propaganda like never before. We cannot combat their bloodlust nor counter their message if we do not even recognise the ideology they spread.

Revelations that a tiny fraction of the money spent on “countering violent extremism” actually deals with those who have been radicalised and that 199 passengers have been banned from Australian planes for security reasons in the past five months only emphasise the need for increased vigilance at home. More than 100 Australians are currently fighting for Islamic State in Iraq or Syria and 40 have already been killed, some as suicide bombers. We’ve had three domestic terror attacks that have killed three innocent people and three terrorists. And with 140 passports cancelled and ASIO running 400 high priority cases, we know the domestic threat persists. The motivating factor is not terrorism nor violent extremism, nor is it alienation, Islamophobia nor Western foreign policy. These are grievances used for propaganda and recruitment purposes. The core of the motivation is an Islamist extremist distortion of one of the world’s great faiths. This brutally intolerant ideology needs to be called out and defeated.

[Rorschach]

Paris attacks: Worriers about Islamophobia a bigger problem than Islamophobia itself
Brendan O’Neill
The Australian
November 21, 2015 12:00AM

Is Islamophobia the driver of ­Islamic terrorism? Some observers think so.

They argue that if only we in the West were nicer to Muslims, if only we didn’t diss their prophet, then angry terrorists wouldn’t shoot us, bomb us, execute ­cartoonists.

Everything from the 7/7 bombings in London to the Paris atrocities last week has been linked to our alleged mistreatment of ­Muslims.

The Guardian newspaper in Britain wonders if French “discrimination against Arabs” may have been a big factor in pushing French youth towards Islamic State.

A writer for The New York Times says feelings of “exclusion and disrespect” among French Muslims is what motored the bloodshed. He says Islamophobia provides “fertile soil” in which “anger (can) grow”. After Paris, he says, France must “openly ­embrace Muslims”.

The Grand Mufti of Australia caused a stink with his claim that there were “causative factors” to the Paris assaults, including the “racism (and) Islamophobia” faced by French Muslims.

In short, we’re nasty to them, that’s why they kill us.

These worriers about Islamophobia always insist they aren’t ­offering a justification for terrorism. But they are.

They imply that murderous ­assaults are at least an understandable response to being disrespected. They provide the Paris nihilists with a posthumous explanation for their barbaric behaviour: “I was treated badly, therefore I killed people.”

The sly justifiers of barbarism have no explanation for why earlier generations that faced far worse discrimination — the blacks of the American south, for example — did not blow up concert halls packed with youths.

But leaving to one side the utter nonsense of linking mass murder with societal disrespect, there’s an bigger problem here. Which is that these observers get things entirely the wrong way around.

It isn’t Islamophobia that alienates Muslim youth and incites in them such a powerful sense of grievance that some of them ­develop violent urges.

No, if anything, it’s the ­obsession with Islamophobia that does this.

Look — the only people responsible for terrorist attacks are the terrorists themselves, not any people or ideas that once may have offended them. These people have free will, and they use it to murder and maim.

But if we’re determined to find a context in which their fury may have festered, then we will do better to look not at Islamophobia but at the Islamophobia industry — that well-funded multicultural machine that trawls endlessly for evidence of anti-Muslim hatred and seeks to convince Muslims that Europeans, Americans and ­Australians hate them.

This chattering-class sport of exposing mob prejudice against Muslims has surely done the most to convince some Muslims that society hates them, so maybe they should hate society back.

The elitist panickers about Islamophobia have been out in force post-Paris.

The bodies were barely cold before these fearers of the masses were predicting a bovine pogrom.

It’s the great irony of the fashionable concern with Islamophobia: it presents itself as a stand against prejudice, yet it’s fuelled by prejudices of its own. It is built on a view of ordinary people as ­irrational, easily switched to ­violence, itching to burn down a mosque.

And like all prejudice, it is largely fact-free: no terror attack has been followed by widespread anti-Muslim violence. Isolated attacks on mosques, yes. A pogrom? No.

In terms of social cohesion, and social peace, the fear of Islamophobia — what we may call Islamophobiaphobia — is a bigger problem than Islamophobia itself.

The Islamophobia industry, funded by officials, uncritically fawned over by much of the media, does two really bad things.

First, it gives Muslims the impression that criticism of their religion is wicked.

Indeed, when the idea of Islamophobia was invented in the 1990s, primarily by aloof think tanks such as the Britain-based Runnymede Trust, the concern was entirely with policing criticism of Islam and shooting down the idea that Western values are ­superior.

Runnymede, whose 20-year-old definition of Islamophobia informs the global debate, said Islamophobic speech included claims that Islam was “inferior to the West”.

It implored the political classes to present Islam as “distinctively different but not deficient”, as being as “equally worthy of respect (as Western values)”.

So from the get-go, the Islamophobia industry was about reprimanding opinion, punishing moral judgment, so that even the belief that Western democratic values trumped Islamic ones came to be pathologised as a phobia.

It was about imposing relativism, not challenging racism.

And we wonder why some radical Western Islamists hate and threaten those who mock their faith.

They’ve grown up in nations in which criticism of Islam and a preference for Western values have been demonised. They’re kind of the armed wing of the Islamophobia industry.

The second bad thing this industry does is convince Muslims that the world hates them.

With their bumped-up stats and often shrill claims, it’s surely the Islamophobia-obsessed think tanks and journalists, not isolated Islamophobes, who have made some Muslims feel like aliens.

The consequences of the elite project of cultivating Muslim fear are dire.

The Islamophobia industry censors and divides, making whites feel they can’t express moral concerns about Islam and making Muslims feel like an ­utterly removed group.

It may not cause but it certainly contributes to a feeling of injury among some Muslims, especially younger ones.

I’ve seen this on campuses in Britain, where radical Islam is growing. When I speak for Islamic societies at universities, I’m often shocked by people’s attitudes.

Their capacity for self-pity is ­profound; their suspicion of Western society is palpable.

Did they learn these attitudes from a finger-wagging imam on the internet? Perhaps.

Or maybe they picked it up from the messages they receive every day from mainstream media and public life, from progressive hand-wringers, all desperate to convince them that society and its vulgar inhabitants despise them.

The Islamophobia industry, and more importantly the late 20th-century creed of relativistic non-judgmentalism that fuels it, makes it harder to do the very thing we must do post-Paris: argue unapologetically for the values of liberty and democracy, for all the good, amazing stuff about Western society, and assert that these things are better than Islamism.

The rise of terror that is justified as a punishment of those who ­criticise Islam (the Charlie Hebdo massacre) or as an assault on the everyday values of the West (the Paris massacre) shows that ­­ultra-violence can spring from relativism.

Many make the mistake of viewing relativism as an “anything goes” creed, in which you can do whatever you like.

Not so. The cult of relativism punishes one thing extremely harshly: moral judgment, moral discrimination, the idea that some ways of life are ­better than others.

That the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were executed for valuing liberal values over Islamic ones, and if the good citizens of Paris really were attacked for their ­nation’s alleged Islamophobia, then this should remind us, ­brutally, that barbarism is a close cousin of relativism.

[mantra]

Young men, whether or not they were born here and whether or not they belong to a range of other immigrant or religious cohorts, have not turned to murderous and suicidal terrorism as a way to express their angst. This is an ideological carcinoma endemic only to people in Muslim communities or converts to their religion. We can skirt around this unpalatable fact all we like — seek to ignore or deny it — but it will not change the reality.

Islamist extremism is the ideology that must be defeated
The Australian
November 21, 2015 12:00AM

The ISIS ideology obviously appeals to enough young people to continually expand their foot soldiers. We don't even know what countries they're working in, but have to assume they have a good number of members in most developed nations who are just waiting for the right moment to commit an act of terrorism.

Thanks to so many social media outlets, many of which appeal to the young and confused - the ISIS army will keep growing. It is going to be very difficult to stop them now. We don't know who they are until it's too late.

[mantra]

At a small cost they can start recruiting children for their future. It's a nice story.

When seven-year-old Texas boy Jack Swanson donated his savings to assist in the clean-up of a local mosque that had been vandalised, he did not expect anything in return.

But he has now received a generous gift of thanks from the American Muslim Community.

Following his $US20 donation — which he had earned helping out at home, and was saving for an Apple iPad — Jack received a surprise iPad in the post and a letter reading:

"Dear Jack, you had saved $20 in your piggybank for an Apple iPad.
But then a local Islamic mosque was vandalised.
So you donated your $20 to this local Texas mosque because of your amazing generosity and kind heart.
Please enjoy this Apple iPad with our sincere thanks.
Love the American Muslim Community."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-21/y ... ue/6961094

[Rorschach]

Islamic State is ISLAMIC... no amount of denial will alter that FACT.
Radicalisation is a word used to excuse those who are already indoctrinated from birth within their families and societies to believe in the formation of a Caliphate, the return of theMahdi and the formation of an Islamic world. ISLAM means submission... total submission... anyone who would do less is not Islamic and they will kill you. Mind you, you have to be a specific type of Muslim to fit their criteria for acceptance and life.