Storm Track Disinformation: The Islamic Fantasy and the Reality

Three recent articles caught my attention today on Muslims and Islam which shows the disconnect between reality and those that live in a fantasy land.

First, from Todd’s Hammer.

Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-Egyptian muslim, recently denied a visa to live in the United States while he was a visiting professor, wrote a piece for the Guardian last week in which he argued that Britons should stop looking at British Muslims for the answers to violence and start examining their own liberal values. He argues that integration is not the answer and that Muslim violence is the fault of the actions of the majority in Britain and elsewhere in Europe and America.

I guess he means the liberal values of personal freedom and the rights of the individual? Or the right to live the life you seem fit as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else? But he may be referring the values of sex, greed and violence that our splendid comrades in 'Follywood' trot acroos movie screens and TV to the world as our basic human values. But just because perdsonal freedom leads too many time license doesn't mean personal freedoms should be scapped becasue it offends someone's sensibilities.

In response, David Goodhart, editor of Prospect and longtime defender of Ramadan against his alarmist critics, takes the European-Muslim intellectual to task for falling into simplistic clichés, victimhood, and misplaced identification. Goodhart acknowledges the difficulties faced by strangers (i.e., minorities) in any culture, as humans tend to distrust the unknown, but argues that British Muslims enjoy a degree of freedom and prosperity unknown to them virtually anywhere else in the world, including in Islamic states. He further argues that Ramadan falls into tired habits of mind that see muslims as perpetual victims and refuses to take responsibility for its own actions.

That’s calling a spade a spade.

In all, it’s a great pair of readings and raises some of the most important questions of our time about multiculturalism, religious pluralism, and democracy.

Next, the fantasy from the New Culture Forum.

Alisdair Palmer has an excellent piece in the Sunday Telegraph on the report by the Commission on Integration and Cohesion into 'the dissemination of extremist ideologies' in Britain:

You search in vain for insights into the nature and dissemination of extremist ideologies, let alone for any form of practical solution to the dangers those ideologies present. There is just a lot of blather about the definitions of integration and cohesion, the difficulty of achieving either of them in practice, and the complexity of the various government agencies supposed to be involved in promoting them.

La-la-la is about the sum of it. Some of the commissions' recommendations are almost touching in their naivete. For example, they suggest that newly arrived immigrants be given "Welcome Packs" that explain the limits of acceptable behaviour in Britain. A spokesman for the commission suggested that "the packs may say that we like to queue at the post office and we don't really like spitting in the street". There is nothing about how, in Britain, one of our "core values" is that we're not too keen on a father who, in order to protect what he believes is his family's "honour", garottes, smothers or stabs his daughter 23 times because she wants to choose her own husband; that we do not believe that a son who is homosexual should be murdered; or that Jews are pigs, Christians are cross-worshippers, and Hindus deserve death.

The commissioners decided to create a fantasy Britain, one in which there aren't any significant differences in the ways different groups believe it is acceptable to behave. Its vision of happily co-existing cultures whose problems mostly stem from the fact that they are not given the right help by Government officials, has about as much in common with the reality of community conflict in Britain as the films the Soviet Union used to make about the paradise of plenty created by communism.

In one way, you can't blame the commission for that: the fantasy has been the basis of our collective response to mass immigration for at least the past 30 years, and probably longer. So, for example, the police have expended a great deal of effort to ensure that they did not recognise "honour killings" when they came across them. Dead women murdered for daring to have a relationship not approved by their family have been categorised as "suicides" or "stranger murders", but not as what they are, which is victims of the patriarchal culture in which they were raised. La la la.

Now here’s the reality.

A new study by the US Institute for Peace (USIP) of polling data from fourteen different Muslim countries finds that support for a role for Islam in politics strongly correlates with more likely support for terrorism. This statistical analysis is certain to draw protests from the usual propagandists of radical Islam in the US, even though the USIP can hardly be considered a neo-conservative institution.

Ever since recent release last month of the Pew poll on American Muslim attitudes, the Islamist propagandists and their media establishment allies have been working feverishly to avoid the implications of those findings by citing another study purportedly showing Americans more in favor of attacks on civilians than Muslims in the US and around the world, claims rebutted in my American Thinker article last week, "Lies, Damned Lies, and CAIR's Statistics".

But now the USIP poll reveals the true nature of the connection between Political Islam (the attempt at imposing Sharia law on a society) and the tactics of the militant jihadists.

The current report in question, "Correlates of Public Support for Terrorism in the Muslim World" by Ethan Bueno de Mesquita of Washington University in St. Louis, also examines data gathered by the Pew Research Center and finds a broad range of opinions and attitudes in the Muslim world.

The standout finding of the USIP study is that support for an increased role for Islam in politics is correlated with greater support for the use of terrorism, even in countries that already adhere to political Islam. The USIP study also busts the bubble of radical Islamic apologists who claim that support for terrorism is driven by people living under Islamic dictatorships. What the data shows is that dissatisfaction with Islam's role in internal politics has very little correlation to attitudes on terror.

Perhaps even more important, the data shows that in these countries the perceived threat to Islam posed by the government plays virtually no role at all in support for terrorism.

This new study also shatters the myth of the supposedly peaceful Muslim world advanced recently by CAIR, ISNA and the Orwellian-named Terror Free America. If these organizations are really concerned about combating terror and improving American-Islamic relations, this study clearly demonstrates that they had better start working on the Islamic side of the equation.

Poverty, lack of employment opportunities, social injustice, Israel, Iraq – none of these drive terrorism. It’s the ideology of Islamism that is the threat and it should be sought out and destroyed wherever and whenever it is found.

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