Brian Micklethwait thinks that there are plenty of places in the world which don’t have welfare states but do have problems of relations between Moslems and non-Moslems. Well, funny he should say that…
I’m a fan of Charles Murray’s writings on the “underclass” which I mean to refer to a class of mostly young males who drift in and out of the labour market and depend on welfare ebenfits or crime for their livelyhoods. The unsocialized males fail to adopt the role of economic producer or father. Young women produce children as if they were paid to do so. One of Brian’s neat expressions is to say that a welfare state may not be intended to pay people to be poor, but the outcome looks a lot like it.
Looking at the Palestinian camps one might think these are devoid of welfare statism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Palestinian refugee camps are run by international government agencies, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (U.N.R.W.A.) in Gaza, the Gaza Strip and Amman, Jordan. The Palestinian territories are arguably the most heavily “cared for” places on Earth (the former Yugoslavia is another candidate). Oldham, Bradford and other trouble spots in the U.K. display similar characteristics: high levels of state intervention to “help” immigrant communities.
As someone who has signed-on the dole more than once and stood in hospital queues for many hours for emergency treatment, I’ve often found myself daydreaming about blowing the whole thing away with a nice heavy-calibre machine gun (bombs haven’t been the same since remote controls and timers). This had nothing to do with other people in the queue, they’re fellow sufferers, nor the people behind the bullet-proof counters (well not often), they’re mostly reasonable people asked to turn shit into gold by their superiors and their victims alike.
When there’s a riot in a town “by Moslems” it would be interesting to check exactly who is rioting, what their parents really think of it (not what a TV crew “finds”), what their source of income was before the riot, and exactly what the target was.
I’m guessing that most Moslems over 35 years old regard rioting in Britain as stupid and dangrous to all Moslems: actually it reminds me of “Rebel Without A Cause”, except these youngsters have a cause to justify themselves. Crime, especially 1) crime by those whites who see themselves at the back of the welfare queue and, 2) street drug trafficking, is main cause of Asian militancy in Britian. In the Palestinian camps, what more glamorous thing is there for an energetic young man to do?
None of this, I may be told, explains flying aeroplanes into skyscrapers. That however is so similar to the adolescent antics of the Leftist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe. Note that two adolescents who weren’t Moslems tried to copy the terrorists (one in Italy, one in Florida).
The solution to that problem is to make it clear that anyone who crosses the line between wishing to “blow it all away” and actually buying a heavy-calibre machine gun for the purpose is going to fail, and die, and their names will either be forgotten or misspelt. I can’t remember the names of minor players in the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades: will anyone remember what-his-name the guy who organised the hijaking in twenty years time? Not Bin Laden, the one who arranged the pilot training.
The most upsetting thing for a young fundamentalist terrorist is not being taken seriously. Conversely, talking up a gang of teenage virgin boys with small willies whose parents don’t understand them into the heroic vanguard of a billion fanatics on the march is fulfilling their wildest dreams. I won’t be popular in the US for thinking this but 9-11 was basically a bigger version of a crazy joyride, albeit deliberately stirred up by some truly evil people. Rather than execute these kids it might actually be a better deterrent to set them loose, but never to allow them to wear trousers or underwear again.
The people who point these kids in the direction where they do the most damage are people we should be worrying about. Frankly their motives are no different whether ecologist, socialist or racial supremacist: hatred of global markets and capitalism. I don’t believe the leading fundamentalists believe in it any more than Stalin believed in withering away the state.
So the two reasons for not getting excited about a Moslem threat are: 1) most Moslems feel threatened by the same thing Brian does, for example Southall is very near Heathrow airport, 2) it encourages those who want to create a war between Islam and the West. I rather like the approach taken by the British courts when I.R.A. terrorists used to stand trial (before the politicians decided to take them seriously). The judge would simply consider the crime and the appropriate sentence. The convicted murderer would be refused any legal recognition for the political motivation of his actions. I could write at length on this subject, but it would monopolize this blog. Perhaps Brian and I should discuss this offline and come back with an understanting on where we disagree.
