Islam
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A fine point
I forget how I got to this examination of the French riots, but this is a pretty good explanation
What you’re seeing in the riots now is really just the same thing that happens when the government tries to privatise some public company, and the unions go on strike.
This is the French banlieu criminal union going on strike.
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Long time no blog
The riots in France continue. Is it me, or is it very strange that there is a national strategy on what is essentially a local law enforcement problem, albeit a common one.
I still think some of the French politicians are playing a “the worse, the better” game with the rioters, to wit, the worse the riots, the more the anti-immigration sentiment, which bodes well for le Pen’s party. Or it could be that the French government simply lacks the ability to end the riots.
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And on the 13th day
The riots continue, and seem to escalate a tad.. I am a believer that this underclass was created by perverse incentives of the French welfare system, who have nothing to lose by indulging in Jane Galt “breaking stuff is fun” meme.
That being said though, are the French actually trying to stop the rioting? Their efforts have been somewhat subtle. It seems like there’s something larger afoot here.
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Are the French even trying?
We enter day 11 of the European intifada.
So now the French cops found a Molotov Cocktail factory and rioters are shooting at cops and attacking firemen. They seem to be doing a successful job of ghettoizing (or creating their own autonomous areas) themselves. I suppose the French will eventually call in the military once this whole thing starts to lose steam and then call it a triumph of civilization.
One of the commenters over at the Belmont Club observed:
But are letting the burnings and insurrection go on so as to give the Muslims plenty of rope to hang themselves. Perhaps a decision exists within the French government that Muslim labor is not needed when less criminally-inclined, less subversive alternatives exist in Latin America, India, Asia……and that they have decided Islam cannot assimilate and the riots are a good way of convincing the public of that fact..
Which is an interesting thought. Not practical, and a bit too clever. It also ignores the (I think) obvious observation that when you pay people to stay out of the economy you create an underclass and breed resentment. I would imagine that would happen with most immigrant groups.
Also from Belmont
Car burning is spectacular, serious enough to get attention yet — and this is the vital point — not serious enough to provoke lethal force
which is probably true. That means these things can go on forever and probably continue for another week or two. All of this points to large gains for le Pen’s far right party whenever their next election happens.
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Two things
- Bali protesters: Kill the bombers – an example of history moving in the right direction abroad. Evidently Bali is one of the few countries where radical Islam exists, but is actively not tolerated
- A major clash between the Russians and the fellow travelers of radical Islam, Chechen separatists, is not major news. Chewbacca becoming an American citizen does make it above the fold on CNN.com.
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Fascinating and horrifying
I recently read this interview with a terrorist recruiter in the UK Prospect. It’s quite long but worth reading. The recruiter is some unassimilated Pakistani Brit who seems quite terrifying in his certainty. It brought to mind two things.
- It is uncanny how accurate Eric Hoffer was in describing this sort of person in The True Believer as rootless, no strong family, no national identity, no sense of self etc.
- The current situation seems to be similar to the international(ist) unrest Trotsky had in mind before he was forced out by Stalin. That is to say; having active agents throughout the world with no strong connections to the center of the movement. The Global Guerillas blog calls this Open Source Warfare.
And now I see this article on the French deporting radical Muslim clerics. Hmm.
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Yet more London
I came across an interesting column in the Times of London, specifically The act of small-time losers by Anatole Kaletsky. Similar in some ways to my earlier thoughts on the matter, different in others. Specifically
In this sense, the most useful analogue for last weekÂs outrage in London may not be September 11 or even the bombing of Madrid last year, but the worst act of terrorism in postwar Western history before September 11: the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995. Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator, was, like the London bombers, a small-time loser who felt he was acting out of intense ideological and religious motives. He was a fervent white supremacist and belonged to an extensive network of neo-Nazi fanatics who are generally believed to number many thousands across the US. His commitment to an essentially religious doctrine  that a global Jewish conspiracy, using African-Americans as their subhuman foot-soldiers, was taking over the world and preparing to exterminate or enslave all white Christians  was every bit as sincere as the faith and Âpiety of many jihadist terrorists.
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It certainly did not occur to anyone after the Oklahoma bombing to apologise for the racial desegregation which had provoked the American neo-Nazis and their ideological antecedents, the Ku Klux Klan. Nobody suggested abolishing affirmative action or banning Jews from public office on the grounds that racial mixing and the prominence of Jews was angering white supremacists and acting as Âa recruiting sergeant for more neo-Nazi terrorists who might copy McVeigh.
Should the political sensitivities and religious aspirations of jihadist killers be treated with any greater respect? The answer is clearly, no.
and
Just as conservative America totally isolated the white supremacists and neo-Nazis after the bombings in Oklahoma, the rational Muslim community in Britain must be forced to reject completely the small minority of Wahhabi fanatics who boast that they Âlove deathÂ. Only then can there be any hope of restoring respect for human life in the Islamic community and reducing the concept of martyrdom to what it really amounts to: a sad, lonely and utterly futile suicide.
While the entire column is well worth reading I do object to a few points. The final paragraph can easily be taken to mean that white supemacists and neo-Nazis were an integral part of conservatism in America, which hasn’t been true in my lifetime (outside of Mississippi I suppose). The second point is that it ignores the proportions and locations.
The Wahhabi fanatics are part of the Muslim community in Britain, probably a very small percentage. For a round number, call it one percent. Compare that to the percentage of neo-nazis in the white community, where I would imagine it is less than one percent of one percent. Also, from what I’ve read British Muslims are concentrated in cities where the intimidation power of a commited minority is likely to be greater. The likely “conservative white” (to follow Kaletsky’s logic) supporters were more suburban and rural where I would imagine the power of a commited minority is lessened by distance.
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Repeating News
This is now the third appearance of the Muslim vs. teh Unclean meme, this time taking the form “Calif. Nat’l Guard Sorry About Pig-Blood Flier“. Oddly enough I’ve seen it about the same time every year.
The gist of the story is that mixing suicide bombers blood with an “unclean” animal would discourage the suicide bomber from killing people. For example, a bus in Israel could have a bucket of pig’s blood on board. Were the bus to explode the unclean blood would forever taint the suicide bomber’s final remains, and therefore, no paradise and 72 virgins for him.
Naturally, Snopes has an article on this. Short summary, it’s a very improbable solution.
The desire for simplistic solutions to complex problems has spawned several widely-circulated messages of late which seek to transform a fight against terrorism to the easily-manageable level of a horror film or a comic strip. Today’s popular notion is the concept that a pig is to a Muslim as a crucifix is to a vampire × simply arm yourself with a porker, and you can use it to render even the most fanatical terrorist helpless, sending him cowering in fear lest he come into contact with anything porcine.
Such notions reduce an extremely widespread and diverse religion × and the people who follow it × to a monolithic entity with a single set of beliefs and rules to which everyone adheres. Islam has a variety of sects and sub-sects just as Christianity has a multiplicity of denominations; assuming that all “Muslims” believe and behave identically is like assuming that all Catholics and Baptists believe and behave identically because both of the latter groups are “Christians.” In one sense, messages such as the ones quoted above could be considered as silly as Muslims’ proclaiming that a good way to throw the USA into disarray would be to “bomb” America with juicy steaks on Fridays, because “Americans are Christians,” and “everyone knows Christians who eat meat on Fridays go to Hell.” Never mind that not all Americans are Christians, that not all Christians are Catholics, that not all Catholics believe in exactly the same things, that not all Catholics are equally religious or faithful, and that even the “rules” of Catholicism have changed over time.
I would quibble over the user of the term “simplistic” when what is actually meant is “simple”. Of course people would want simple solutions over complicated ones.
Then again, as I prowl the Snopes site, I see this legend, marked true: “An article from The Jewish Journal describes Israeli doctors’ providing blood to Palestinians who were injured at Jenin but refused to be given “Jewish blood.”“
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More thoughts on London
Instapundit pretty well sums up my view of the matter, but the whole business has led a few things to come to mind:
One thing absent from most analysis of the current world situation is the far reach of the community aspect (Ummah I believe) of Islam:
It is correctly used to mean the nation of the believers (Ummah Al-Muhmini) in Islam, thus the whole Muslim world.
In practical terms it takes the form of a meta-loyalty that competes with national loyalties (probably the reason the wretched term “Muslim-American” is used instead of “American Muslim”). I suppose the nearest comparison is the affinity of many American Jews for Israel, as well as the clamor for leniency for Jonathan Pollard. It also explains the attention given to Israeli treatment of Palestinians compared to the relatively scant attention given to all of the problems in Kyrgistan, Egypt, Sudan et al (in-team vs out-team)
For the most part though there is simply no matching comparison for Americans. Islam gives many Muslims a competing loyalty which Westerners have problems understanding but seems very natural to Muslims. This “team” aspect to the religion (a horizontal and not vertical faith, I’ll elaborate on that later) gives overlap to loyalties and goes far to explain the wholly inadequate Muslim response to terrorism.
In looking over this I see I shouldn’t post at 4:00 in the morning if I want to impress people with clarity.
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The winner for weirdness
From an interview with female Palestinian suicide bomber
According to the Koran, male martyrs are welcomed to Paradise by 72 beautiful virgins. Ayat, as with many of the women she is incarcerated with, believes that a woman martyr “will be the chief of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair”.
From the Telegraph UK.
Second class even in the afterlife.