The actions of radical Islamophobes should not be used to condemn the peaceful Islamophobe majority
– Allum Bokhari, tweeting the situation with great panache 😀
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Samizdata quote of the dayJune 19th, 2017 |
 40 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Exactly – quite correct.
And the government should arrange meetings with “Islamophobes” such as Robert Spencer and David Wood to show that the government is not bigoted against the Islamophobe community.
More seriously – the point needs to be made (over and over again) that the problem is NOT with Muslims as people – but rather with Islam, the teachings and personal example of Mohammed.
As for person who drove a van into a group of Muslims – he is a murderer and should be punished as such.
We may never know his true motivation.
Brilliant.
I love his quote. Sauce for the goose and all that jazz.
Free speech is supressed in this country.
Episodes like Rotherham and Rochdale show this. Even council child care staff and the police kept quiet about certain things for fear of losing their jobs for racism.
In a country where people cannot speak freely I find it unsurprising that we see explosions of criminal rage from time to time.
My super power is that I can identify the one Muslim terrorist hiding in a crowd of normal Muslims.
Most of us anti-Islamicists are good, moderate anti-Islamicists, who deplore the violence shown tonight by those who have hijacked our peaceful and loving anti-Islamicism.
I fear the coming backlash, and hope that the world can understand that this is not true anti-Islamicism, but simply a hateful bastardization.
Excellent observation.
Yes, a thousand times yes, and if the gent leans to le Sinistre and anti-sensible-folk [Snark!] as the linked site seems to suggest, then I say doubly, Good for him! in this quote.
“My super power is that I can identify the one Muslim terrorist hiding in a crowd of normal Muslims.”
This is the point however unintentionally you made it. We don’t have mind reading devices, hence we should stop all Muslim immigration immediately.
Pete comments that “Free speech is suppressed in this country”, and I have no reason to doubt him. But I would like to call attention to a spot of good news on that front in the US, where our Supreme Court has just ruled (unanimously!) that the government cannot deny a trademark merely because some might consider it to be “offensive”. Justice Alito (no conservative) wrote “It offends a bedrock First Amendment principle: Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend.” That’s a very broad statement, applicable not merely to trademarks, and should help shut down those who would claim that there is no First Amendment protection for “offensive speech”. You in the UK could take a leaf from our book on that.
Just wanted to point out that the Norwegians got the message:
The actions of the radical Breivik were not interpret as damning for the peaceful majority of supporters of the Progress Party.
(Much the same could be said for Denmark and Finland.)
This is true – “Muslims as people” certainly is not a problem. Some people may claim something to the effect of “people as Muslims” is a problem – and perhaps that is what Paul Marks means to refer to.
But in any case, there are very, very, very few (if any) historical precedents of a society ridding itself of a perceived enemy ideology by pointing out that the enemy ideology – and not the people who practice it – is the enemy.
How did 15th century Spain rid itself of Judaism?
How did 16th and 17th century France largely eliminate the threat of the Huguenots?
How did the Ottomans neutralize Shia uprisings?
How did the Catholic Church and Orthodox Church largely prevent Bogomilism from spreading in the 12th and 13th centuries?
How did Communists & their supporters deal with supporters of the hereditary monarchy during and after the Russian Revolution in the early 20th century?
Now, I’m not saying that these efforts against internal ideological dissent were successful because they refrained from saying that “Jews/Huguenots/Shia/Bogomilism/monarchists as people is not a problem”. But where are the examples from history of people saying this about an enemy practicing/supporting an enemy ideology within their society and also successfully eradicating the power of said enemy ideology in their society?
The West is going to lose to Islam. The West is not necessarily going to lose only because it says stupid shit like that. The West is going to lose to Islam because too many Westerners (like Paul Marks and many others more tolerant than him) have mindsets, approaches to addressing the Islam issue within the West that causes them to think it is a good idea to say something like “Muslims as people are not the problem” as often as possible when doing so will not be effective in eradicating the power of the enemy ideology within the West.
Virtue signaling does not win wars.
SCOTUS taking cases about a matter that SCOTUS would previously not need to hear about in the first place is the first step to changing the precedent on that matter. Not that SCOTUS always reverses precedent – usually SCOTUS obviously does not. But hearing a case is an implicit recognition that in the belief of some Supreme Court Judges either: the lower court may have ruled incorrectly and/or that it is a matter that merits the attention of SCOTUS. Either scenario does not bode well.
It’s nice that SCOTUS has defended free speech but generally speaking rights that are not threatened in a society do not need to be defended. Well established and well protected rights do not really need to be defended at all – or at least not as much as less established and less protected rights need to be defended.
Are younger and immigrant Americans more or less accepting of free speech than are older and native-born Americans? Visited Evergreen State College recently?
“More seriously – the point needs to be made (over and over again) that the problem is NOT with Muslims as people – but rather with Islam, the teachings and personal example of Mohammed.”
I have to disagree. Yes, the teachings and personal example of Mohammed are the core of the problem, but the people are its transmitters. And I’m not talking about radical Islamists and overt terrorists; I’m talking about the ordinary, peaceable (at least outwardly) Muslim-on-the-street. Those aren’t the ones blowing things up, driving trucks into crowds, etc., but they are enablers of such people. Even if they never donate to radical causes, their support of mosques and spread of this foul “religion” helps provide the foundation for the terrorists (wittingly or otherwise).
It is sometimes claimed that the radicals and terrorists constitute only a minority of the Muslim population, and that might be true (although surveys in majority-Muslim countries consistently show that substantial majorities there support terrorism). But even if it is only a minority, with 1.6 billion (Pew’s figure) Muslims in the world that’s still a huge number of very dangerous people. Even the ostensibly “peaceful” one are a serious problem.
Instead of the examples of Shlomo Maistre (June 19, 2017 at 8:57 pm) above, I recommend considering allied attitudes to Germany and Japan in WWII. The war started with “the German people are not the problem, just the nazi leaders” being the verbal and strategic line. RAF bombers flew over Germany and dropped not bombs but leaflets saying “The War that Hitler started will last as long as he does”, then we waited for the German masses to rise up or the German generals to arrange a coup. Instead, various General von Xs planned and led invasion after invasion with dedication and skill, while sundry Hans Schmidts fought obediently, bravely and effectively.
By the middle of the war, these events had changed many minds. From the political establishment to the left-wingers, some of them ex-communists, who pushed a “let’s fight a people’s war – the kind Hitler can’t win” argument, a range of rigid-minded British intellectuals can be seen slowly giving up their notions under the brutal repeated impact of these facts.
Unlike Shlomo’s examples, we never gave up belief in the redeemability of the German people but we abandoned the idea they could be persuaded to change by anything other than sustained unalloyed failure, unconditional surrender and prolonged explicit submission to western power. Acceptable methods included fire-storming Hamburg.
The same change can be traced in the very rigid-minded communists. For quite a while after Hitler’s attack on the USSR, party dogma instated that oppressed German workers could be stirred up against their ‘true oppressors’. Eventually, communists can be seen accepting that the minds of the German workers simply refused to obey communist theory.
This comment is long enough on Germany; I’ll let whoever wishes discuss Japan. Those who do not learn from past defeats are condemned to repeat them. Those who do not learn from past victories of history risk losing. I think my examples more worthy to take positive lessons from than Shlomo’s
There can be no triumph over bearded murder without triumph over the left.
I almost mock myself.
We–and when I say we I mean you–out there–have allowed your offspring to be indoctrinated with Marxist shite. Hell the greenfreak shite starts the day they walk thro’ the door of infants school. The Unis just complete the job.
That is the problem,
Without that the other problem would be far away overseas.
“But even if it is only a minority, with 1.6 billion (Pew’s figure) Muslims in the world that’s still a huge number of very dangerous people. ”
Ok. So what do you do? Kill the Muslims? Deport them (as Spain did in 1492)? Both of the above? Re-educate them? What?
The problem has no solution. Many people in the world (most) are idiots, and behave irrationally (Muslim or not). Man is not perfect, and probably not perfectible.
Jacob: Far away overseas is the solution you are looking for.
Years ago I read an interview of (I think) one of Bush’s election lawyers (I forget at what website and I forget the exact details as to why this was and I’m too lazy to look it up now) that when the FL voting controversy & recount arose in the 2000 Presidential election GOP nominee George W Bush had to choose one of the following: instruct his lawyers to act in legal proceedings according to his strict constructionist beliefs or win the election. He chose to win the election.
Sarah Hoyt has some thoughts on a possible solution and the need for it, in three parts.
“and the need for it”
This part is not disputed.
“He chose to win the election.” – and…? did he solve any problems?
By the way – here is a story from Muslim land – a routine story.
I agree completely. Islam itself is not strong, it is only in combination with a very different enemy that is poses a significant threat.
“Islam itself is not strong”
Correct. Islam is not a threat, just a nuisance.
The real threat is the ideology that was responsible for at least 100 million deaths in the 20thC.
Jacob (June 19, 2017 at 9:55 pm): “The problem has no solution.”
Unlike the left, we tend to think that problems have no ‘solutions’ (that is, not final ones reachable in politically-relevant timescales without side-effects that risk being worse than the original problem). But they can be encouraged to diminish instead of growing. A culture can offer incentives to its citizens to defend it and to its visitors not to attack it. Or it can do the reverse.
PC is to western polities what HIV is to individuals. As far as hate speech laws let us do so without risk of arrest (further if we can find the courage – and the tactical sense that at a particular moment it would be a win), let’s purge ourselves (and our rhetoric) of it.
I would include the prohibition to possess weapons and use them in self-defense in the PC doctrine, at least in this context. Or maybe even in a wider sense too, as free speech is the first line of defense against hostile cultures and ideologies.
“Unlike the left, we tend to think that problems have no ‘solutions’”
Sure. What I mean: you can’t impose your utopia dreams on other people by force, claiming it is “the solution”.
The same goes for Islam – it is what it is, far from perfect. It is not the most crazy or damaging ideology or religion (taken in historical perspective). So… leave it alone.
Stop importing more maybe? Deport the ones that are dangerous.
Start putting restrictions on Islam within our countries on the basis that any religion that wishes to benefit from freedom of religion must also practice tolerance of other beliefs, not just in word but in deed. What sort of restrictions? How about any mosque that produces jihadists is automatically shut down and anyone associated with running that mosque is banned from being involved in running another one in perpetuity. Any mosque that allows ‘extreme’ Imams or Mullahs to teach (with the home secretary responsible for defining what we mean by extreme) is given one warning before they are treated similarly. Deport Muslims who preach extremism but don’t break the law themselves. Treat wearing the Burka in the same way as someone wearing extreme bondage gear in public.
“Ok. So what do you do? Kill the Muslims? Deport them (as Spain did in 1492)? Both of the above? Re-educate them? What?
The problem has no solution.”
The problem has no single solution, no perfect solution, but there certainly are at least partial solutions.
First, stop the bleeding: Eliminate all Muslim immigration, including refugees. Then embark upon an aggressive program of expedited deportations, not targeted toward ordinary, ostensibly peaceable Muslims but those (notably Imams) who advocate for terrorism, recruit terrorists, support terrorism in any way (financial or otherwise, including through allegedly “humanitarian” Muslim front groups), or who advocate for the application of Sharia Law. Closely track and enforce time limits on visas issued to visitors from Muslim-dominated countries (this should already be being done anyway). Eliminate government-mandated extraordinary accommodations for Muslim cultural or religious practices. And make it absolutely clear, through statute and the courts, that criticism or ridicule of Mohammad, the Koran, Islam, and any of its tenets or practices, is as acceptable and legally protected as is criticism of any other religion.
Implement all that, and give it time to take effect, and then re-examine the situation to see if anything more is needed (or, conceivably, if some of them can be relaxed). However, I suspect that these should be sufficient to minimize the threat.
This has absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about.
I was talking about internal ideological enemies within a society and not external enemies a society is fighting a hot war against with overt, explicit, state-sponsored military units. When you are firebombing the enemy’s cities, invading their lands, and slaughtering their armies you can perhaps afford to say nice things about them and still prevail.
So where are the examples from history of people saying this about an enemy practicing/supporting an enemy ideology within their society and also successfully eradicating the power of said enemy ideology in their society?
If Niall were proposing to treat Muslims who are citizens of the UK as the RAF treated Dresden in February of 1945 then that would be one thing, but he’s not.
How did 15th century Spain rid itself of Judaism?
How did 16th and 17th century France largely eliminate the threat of the Huguenots?
How did the Ottomans neutralize Shia uprisings?
How did the Catholic Church and Orthodox Church largely prevent Bogomilism from spreading in the 12th and 13th centuries?
How did Communists & their supporters deal with supporters of the hereditary monarchy during and after the Russian Revolution in the early 20th century?
Think about it.
The threat from the ‘peaceful Muslim majority’ is not that they will turn violent. It’s that when there are enough Muslims in the country they will start voting for Muslim policies, and then Muslim parties, and gradually the country will become semi, or wholly, Islamified. That’s why I fear the peaceful Muslim majority *far more* than I fear the obviously violent Muslim nutters.
Islamic immigration must be stopped as soon as possible.
The British government should initiate outreach efforts to moderate ‘phobes.
Shlomo Maistre (June 21, 2017 at 2:23 am), at the start of WWII, many refugees were locked up and slowly screened (unlike now, most of them were genuine refugees, not immigrants). The left complained a lot about this. Oswald Mosely and many friends were also locked up – whereupon half the British upper class told the government “Are you insane not locking up his wife; she’s ten times more dangerous than he is!”, after which Diana Mosely nee Mitford was also locked up. The left complained not at all about this; when Churchill decided the danger was past and let them out, the left complained – as did Diana’s sister Jessica who told Churchill to shoot her own sister and brother-in-law when she met Churchill at an event during one of his wartime US visits.
The treacherous Stalin-obeying part of the left was left to expose itself and otherwise tolerated in the war’s first two years. The “People’s convention for a people’s peace” was allowed to go ahead in early 1941. Allowing their visible political failure, and embarrassingly abrupt U-tern when Hitler attacked Russia, was perhaps the best political strategy in retrospect, but was may have been the result of less clever – and much less admirable – causes.
In the US and Canada, Japanese were rounded up and interred for a couple of years. It has correctly been pointed out that this was unconstitutional as regards those Japanese who were U.S. citizens, though the Japanese affected were rather forgiving at the time – they knew how Japan would have behaved if the case were reversed.
In short, free speech of citizens was very tolerated. Non-citizens were locked up to whatever degree was thought prudent. Some citizens were interned without trial, a thing which bothered Churchill a lot and Roosevelt a lot less.
I believe the widest possible restoration and use of our violated free speech rights will be needed to find solutions to current problem. I expect those solutions, when they are finally pursued, to come from our culture rather than others. When we’re finally allowed to talk about it, the scale of the problem will show the scale of the solution.
I’m well aware that Turkey is Islamic today because a thousand years ago this densely-populated Christian region was turned into a mass grave by the Seljuks. Laws permitting the enslavement of Christian children persuaded the few survivors, and the Christians of regions conquered later and less brutally, to consider converting. We need much greater freedom of speech about such things (under Labour, a man was arrested for quoting Churchill about Islam on the street in the UK, and I’d be very cautious about my chances on a Hyde Park soapbox today). But I’m not convinced there will be any need to imitate their methods rather than talk about them. All the regimes in your examples suffered very serious side-effects of their solutions. From the Bishop of Toledo’s plaintiff query “Who will make our shoes now?” after he had organised expulsion of Spain’s Jews, through the communist state’s dying when it could no longer endure the terror that alone could make it ‘function’, both the harsher and the (relatively) gentler of your examples look a lot like failures.
Um what? I literally have no idea how you have even attempted to contradict any of my points with this. This indicates to me that you simply don’t understand my point.
You keep bringing up WWII. There are multiple differences between WWII and what I’m talking about – the threat of internal ideological enemies. Being Japanese is not a religion or a political ideology, unlike practicing/believing Muslims. Engaging in a hot war with external enemies (especially prior to advent of nuclear weapons) where the allies could have actually lost to the Axis powers has nothing to do with whatever the fuck we (UK/USA/much of the West generally) are doing now if we can even call it a war (nation building/winning hearts and minds/war on terror/combating asymmetrical warfare).
Let me repeat my point:
The West is going to lose to Islam. The West is not necessarily going to lose only because it says stupid shit like that (“More seriously – the point needs to be made (over and over again) that the problem is NOT with Muslims as people – but rather with Islam, the teachings and personal example of Mohammed.” – as Paul Marks claimed we should say a lot lol). The West is going to lose to Islam because too many Westerners (like Paul Marks and many others more tolerant than him) have mindsets, approaches to addressing the Islam issue within the West that causes them to think it is a good idea to say something like “Muslims as people are not the problem” as often as possible when doing so will not be effective in eradicating the power of the enemy ideology within the West.
Virtue signaling does not win wars.
So where are the examples from history of people saying this (the believers of the enemy ideology are not the problem”) about an enemy practicing/supporting an enemy ideology within their society and also successfully eradicating the power of said enemy ideology in their society – in an example that is generally similar to our current situation vis-a-vis peaceful Muslim citizens of Western nations who are from countries we are not at war with of which there are many millions?
WWII, unlike the examples I cited, does not address or contradict my point at all because it’s a false comparison since there are so many obvious, blatant differences between WWII and what I’m talking about and furthermore your others points (such as about immigrants vs refugees and alleged “side effects” of solutions to problems) don’t really address or contradict my point either.
Correct.
In fact, the usual purpose of many of those who recruit, train, arm, support, and direct those who carry out Islamic terror in Western nations is for the terror attacks to cause moderate Muslims to be alienated from their wider non-Muslim communities.
This hardens their spirit, constrains their social circles, dampens their potential exposure to Western culture/secular values, and further isolates them from non-Muslim people. The consequences of this are are varied (fortifying the faith of moderate Muslims in Islam, hardening their spirit, enhancing the reliance of moderate Muslims on radicals for finding jobs, finding mates and forming families) and these consequences taken together generally empower the radical Islamists even more by increasing their power and stature within the Islamic community.
The moderate Muslims DO NOT see the Islamic terror attacks in Brussels, London, Paris, NYC etc and want to engage with, be friends with, socialize with whites/Christians/Jews/Buddhists/atheists less as a result…. BUT their ability to do so with those groups does decline as a result of the attacks, so it happens less.
The end game of the Islamist radicals is to use the moderates to seize political control through peaceful demographic takeover of Western nations like UK, France, Germany etc.
This isn’t exactly rocket science. But the mindset that produces comments like “we have to repeat over and over that Muslims as people are not the problem as often as possible” is precisely the sort of mindset that will prevent the West from doing what needs to be done to survive demographically.
Just as an extension:
Niall said:
This proves my point.
WWII had a definite series of objectives. On European front these objectives were crudely:
1. Defeat the Nazi war machine
2. Invade and hold territory in Europe (eventually retake France, Italy, Eastern Europe, etc)
3. Remove Hitler’s head from his neck
Doing those things would break the will of the German people to fight.
What can we do to break the will of the fundamentalist Muslims to fight us?
1. There is no war machine that threatens us (UK, USA) as the Nazis did. Even the most potent enemy Iran we could eliminate in a week without even using nuclear weapons.
2. We tried invading and holding territory (Iraq and Afghanistan) and it only made things worse. Doing so again would probably only increase the flow of Muslim immigrants to western nations
3. Kill one leader, another pops up. It doesn’t dampen the radical Islamists’ fervor to fight because they are sufficiently inspired by religious ideas that are centuries old (not a man who gives charismatic speeches like the Nazis were). For example, we killed Osama bin Laden. Things have gotten better for radical Islamists since then. See: ISIS.
The comparison with WWII is just blatantly absurd.
Cal Ford and others- they don’t even need to be a majority! Here in Sydney, they are accummulating in enough numbers to form lobby groups on behalf of Palestine. One ex-Premier, Bob Carr, even boasted about it on a TV show, once. Probably as proof of his responsiveness to electoral matters and constituents. And we have people who are trying to live by sharia laws, not Australian laws (Child brides, etc.)
I presume walls of text are more excusable when they are deep in an old thread and won’t clog up too many running conversations?
If we’re doing the WWII thing, I think it’s worth considering the postwar instructions for the occupation of Germany, for an idea of what might be considered normal when you are in a nominal state of peace but see a potential threat in the area you govern, as opposed to a hot war.
Bold mine.
Erik (June 22, 2017 at 11:19 am), your information above is a useful reminder of what we have thought it fair to do in the recent past. Another is the notice Natalie has on her fridge, which is of WWII-vintage (salvaged from the wall zone IIRC) and was put up under those same regulations. It says “Looters will be shot” in German, French and English.
In the UK today, we have asylum seekers (some genuine, many fake), failed asylum seekers (still here, so the ‘failed’ is a PC usage) and other non-citizen residents of the relevant group. We also have nominal citizens admitted under Tony Blair’s “break my own laws to rub your noses in diversity” manipulations and similar fraudulent circumstances.
However we also have citizens from the relevant group who became so by methods not fraudulent.
The evolution of intellectualised British thought from ‘it’s not the Germans, it’s just the Nazis’ at the start of WWII to “it’s a lot to do with the Germans” by half-way through the war is useful for understanding how British thought on today’s problem could (I do not say ‘will’) evolve, and your end-WWII-occupation rules speak to that. However UK precedents for addressing citizens of challenged loyalty are to be sought on this side of the channel and in the war’s earlier days. Hence my comment at June 21, 2017 at 1:30 pm. Shlomo has listed some other countries’ approaches, but if we ever reached them – I am not holding my breath in a number of senses – it could only be by going through our own past first.