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A 17 year old Kurdish girl was stoned to death, in north Iraq in April 2007, in an ‘honour killing’ by the men of her family for her relationship with a Sunni Muslim. A ‘Westernized’ Sikh woman living in West London was murdered by her family for ‘besmirching the family honour’ by having an affair as her arranged marriage unravelled. A Muslim woman made repeated claims to police in South London that her family was planning to kill her because she had ‘brought shame on them’. Nearly four months later her body was found buried in a garden 100 miles from her home.

	The UN Partition of Palestine gave birth to Israel and it was attacked by its (Arab) neighbours in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. Its triumphs (survival) resulted in large numbers of displaced Palestinian Arabs. Their cause was championed by Arab states but few willingly offered (the refugees) new homes in their own territories. Thus fundamentalist-oriented groups arose.

	I have always suspected that a few bags of gold, to some Pashtun or Tajik warlord in 2001 would have done for Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda long ago. (columnist, UK Sunday national newspaper, April 2007)

	While Muslims in the early centuries amassed Jesus traditions, Christian scholars in Europe denounced Mohammad in negative terms. Today’s scholars both are guilty of seeing the worst in each, in crusade-Christianity and warrior-Muhammad.

FAMILY DISHONOUR AND BLACKMAIL
Cases of ‘groomed conversions’ to Islam by radical Muslims of young Hindu and Sikh university women students are coming to light at UK campuses. Use of Hindu and Sikh ‘fear of being dishonoured’ by blackmailing threat techniques are alleged. Numbers of young women affected are estimated from 100-120 nationwide. The men are alleged to aggressively target the vulnerable; befriend them; then intimidate them; sometimes drugs are used; apparently-compromising photos taken; then there is pressure to convert them to Islam. The extremists were said to exploit family tendency (among Hindu and Sikh) to treat conversion as a grave dishonour, a stigma, a shaming of parents, worse than bankruptcy or losing a job.
(report précis, UK national newspaper, March 2007)

	Islamists cannot control information in the West as in Islam-dominated countries. In many nations young men learn nothing but the Koran, no world history, science or current world events (though TV and Internet is inexorably changing this). Muslims in the West claim Islam is an open religion, but actions speak louder, truer than words.

	Multiculturalism, in the UK, does not promote equal treatment for all cultures. One culture is not treated equally – the indigenous British culture, centred for hundreds of years on a set of traditions, laws and customs arising out of its Christian heritage.

Muslims, according to classical Islam, were required to set up a viable Muslim community – mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. Over 40 years in the UK, this has not happened classically; but today (with the majority of Muslims living in virtual segregation, in ‘community ghettoes’) 61 per cent say they want Shari’ah law.

	Political Islam is under challenge from its own rhetoric. The need is to be self-critical, share responsibility for the failure of Muslim societies, do not simply blame the (materialist) West for all the problems.

	The Muslim (convert) preacher told UK worshippers that women are deficient even if they have a PhD. ‘Her intellect is incomplete, she may be suffering from hormones that will make her emotional. Two women witnesses equal one witness of a man’.

	Ethnic communities comprise less than ten per cent of the British population. Multi-culturalism believes Britain is made up of many cultures that are all equal. The previous tradition was assimilation of immigrants and their following generations.

IF THEY CAN’T HEAR YOU SPEAK?
A Muslim teaching assistant sacked for refusing to remove her nijab veil at school would have been dealt with in the same way if she has gone to work (determinedly) wearing a balaclava, an employment appeal tribunal was told. Her ‘religious beliefs’ had nothing to do with her being sacked, she was not discriminated against, the tribunal decided. Staff said pupils at the mainly Muslim school found it hard to understand what she was saying. The teaching assistant said she was willing to remove the veil before children in class but not when male colleagues were present. She alleged her human rights had been breached and wished to take her case all the way to the European Court
(précis, report, UK national newspaper, March 2007)

	The exclusive religious nature of Islam only lasted for a few years after its emergence. Islam fused religion and politics, giving birth to political Islam, still in effect in our times. Political Islam is an old phenomenon, as ancient as Islam itself, only the labels have changed throughout history.

	What we know from the past is that when fundamentalists are attacked, whether they're Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, they become more extreme. Religion speaks (tough) directions, even solutions, to contemporary conditions, or it now dies.

	Around 1900 Muslims were 12 per cent of the world’s population. The population has increased so has Islam, now 24 per cent. The intactness of our basic doctrines and practices is our greatest achievement.

Faced by multiculturalism and the racism inherent in political correctness in Britain, who challenged the moral relativism that insisted the culture of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Heat’s poetry, Turner’s paintings and Elgar’s music was no more important than the cultures of other imported minorities? Cries of racism drowned out rational argument.

TOLERANT SOCIETY, FLOURISHING EXTREMISTS
Multiculturism, it was believed, with its emphasis on the celebration of diversity, would build a vibrant and tolerant society (in Britain). Instead it allowed extremists to flourish. Aggressive implementation of this ideology has been deeply flawed, helping to stir up bigotry and division. It failed to generate any feelings of national allegiance among ethnic minorities.
(Manzoor Moghal, UK, 2001)

	Although most Muslims (in Britain) – even devout ones – will not become active Islamists or fundamentalists who seek to reform the state along religious lines, a type of thinking is becoming noticeable – multicultural policies have encouraged ethnic-minorities to believe they are in need of ‘special recognition’.

	We keep our past alive. Is it good to say this? Remember and learn from the past, yes. But how can you live with one foot in past, one in present?

	Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, traditional morality undermined, an ‘anything goes’ culture in place, selfish codes of behaviour now taken as unchallengeable ‘rights’. There has been creation of a debauched, disorderly culture.

	The rejectors say that there is more chance of hell freezing over than there is ever of integrating any Muslim into any type of civilisation. Muslims are unable to join the human race until they leave Islam.

	Where ideas do not move, replaced instead by rules learnt by rote, you have populations incapable of true, original thinking.

A BARRIER TO INTEGRATION ?
I find it (the article) convincing on the whole. But I would like to question one point. The author asserts that Islam is not a barrier to integration. Surely this needs more than a mere assertion? The Qur’an tells Muslims not to make friends of Christians and Jews, and that if they do they will be ‘no better than them’. I could produce many more instances of religious barriers, as I am sure the author is acquainted with. This Muslim-West religious culture problem needs far more open and honest discussion.
(email comment on article in UK national newspaper, February 2007)

	Our’s is a time when to be rooted in the past, an organic entity (such as Islam) that goes back centuries has become the strangest and most unusual thing. The norm today is to be disconnected, rootless. The great gift of Islam is that it is nourished by roots sunk deep in the revelation of God, from an age great in faith.

	The deafening silence of the Arab/Muslim world towards mass slaughters, Muslim on Muslim, indicates one thing, this (Middle East) region will stay in the abyss of darkness, ignorance and backwardness until it looks in the mirror, and sees the ugly reflection.

	Muslims (in the UK) are promoting a kind of voluntary apartheid, shutting themselves away in closed societies and demanding immunity from criticism, corroding the foundations of British culture.

There has been a profound loss of national and cultural and religious nerve in Britain. The Christian values that once defined our national identity have simply collapsed. Britain’s Christian anchor has been pulled up leaving our moral compass spinning.

	Many elements in Islam can benefit the modern West. Family networks, a strong framework for morals and social responsibility. But the need is to break with traditional and literal interpretations of the Koran.

	Muslims quote George Bernard Shaw as saying the Bible is the most dangerous book in the world, keep it under lock and key. What value is there for Islam to quote an atheist like Shaw who also said there is not one single established religion that an intelligent, educated man can believe in.

HISTORIC CULTURE BEING LOST ?
The alienation of many Europeans from their civilisation arises from a sense that their historic culture is not worth fighting for or even saving. Britain is the most alienated country (in Europe). If you denigrate your own culture, newer arrivals may look for one elsewhere (for a sense of identity). The world-view of radical Islam became one available identity to second generation Pakistanis in Britain.
(website Dr Daniel Pipes, March 2007)

	Emotive controversial history, on 11th century Crusades and WW II Holocaust, is being skirted at UK schools to avoid offending Muslim pupils. The first reason (allegedly) is because the history contradicts local mosques’ teachings, the second (in true PC terms) so as not to spark anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions by Muslim pupils.

	Tolerance digs its own grave if it does not defend itself against intolerance.

	The West has evolved toward the religious and cultural order we now inhabit, artificially imposed in developing parts of the world. It has been too quick for the developing world. They've got to modernize yesterday, but globalisation is not going to stop for them.

	If Western civilisation is doomed, then God help us all. For Islam can only offer medieval superstition and the worst of Man.

HELPING HAND REFUSED
Muslim mosques in Britain (1,600 and mostly small) are jealous of their independence and financial autonomy, and would be extremely suspicious of any government-backed attempt to introduce ‘properly trained Imams’ from abroad. They feared a secret agenda and warned the move might provoke a backlash, said a spokesman for the mosques. Hostility arose from a proposal, by the King of Jordan, to ‘send trained Imams and Islamic experts’ to help bolster moderate Muslims in their fight against extremism in Britain. ‘Many of the extremist teachings of Pakistani-born imams in the UK derived from their poor understanding of the Koran in its original Arabic’.
(précis, leader column, UK national newspaper, reporting the incident, May 2007)

	Within the framework of Islam, Muslims cannot experience innumerable ways of being in the world. Instead they are moulded into one large and lumpy, mentally challenged cliché.

	History is witness that ‘barbarians’ have always triumphed over the mighty civilisations because of the intrinsic civility of such civilisations.

	Managers, at a UK Muslim-run children’s centre, believed the conversion to Islam, of a registered sex offender on the staff, “had wiped clean” his previous misdemeanours. The concerned person who reported the sex offender’s records was “accused of being a bad Muslim in failing to accept the teachings of the Koran.” (complainant, employment tribunal, UK)

	It is eye-opening to find the amount of independent thought and diversity of interpretation that existed in the early centuries of Islam. Only in our more recent centuries has grown the ‘need’ to limit interpretation.

Anti-Westernism among fundamentalist Muslim ‘puritans’ encompasses idealizing a small part of Islamic history (the golden age) and ‘setting their development compass’ toward the past. Intellectually they are not rooted in this past – too angry, too impatient, too absolutist – and their identity is formed and solidified as a reaction to the West.

	Unlike fundamentalist activists, moderate Muslims do not believe that Israel is responsible for the failure of various Middle Eastern states to develop, modernize or democratize.

MODESTY YES, EXTRA PIETY NOT NEEDED?
Muslims believe that the Qur’an, and Hadith (the collected interpretive traditions by scholars) and Sunnah (connect with the way of the Prophet, religious actions by Muhammad (pbuh) during 23 years of his ministry) require a woman to dress and behave modestly, particularly in public. The burqa (burkha, burka, burqua) is an all-enveloping outer garment (like a total robe) worn by many Muslim women in many countries. It is all-encompassing, and a net/grille allows seeing. The face-veil, or niqab, is a common departure, the face veiled except for the eyes. Some Islam scholars see it as a “fitting-in into society”, as an act of extra piety. A majority of scholars say it (niqab) is not necessary
(several sources conflated)

	(Comment on ‘fellow-traveller’ apologists for Islam fundamentalism) It was in just that spirit and even that vocabulary that the fellow-travelling Beatrice Webb advanced the transcendent virtues of the Soviet social model. Gullible, false and dangerous statements of this kind are now as common as rain in the West.

	(Turning to jihadist radicalisation) the Muslim individual begins to let the beard grow long, shaving the moustache. This is considered a way of imitating the Prophet and salaf (ancestors), returning thus to the original epoche of Islam. Three fingers length (of beard) is the maximum permitted and mostly obeyed

	The belief that Islam (and Shari’a) alone can serve as the basis for government today is so flawed. People are relying on Islam to ‘save them’ from the West and (alleged economic and cultural) imperialism. They have to recognise that imposing Islam and its strictures on society carries far too many risks (of backlash).

	Instead of getting wound up by this puritanical stupidity, let us see the vast realisation dawning of what the ‘civilised world’ is dealing with here. It is time to start laughing at these fools. I see the death rattles of a mindset that does not belong in a civilised world. Why do Muslims harbour this feeling of superiority when all evidence makes mockery of such delusions.

WHEN THE SCIENTIFIC CEASED IN ISLAM
Muslim scholars argue that Qur’an urges a quest for knowledge of nature by observation, and this inspired the development of scientific method by Muslims. However in the 12th century when Muslim philosophers began to suggest that truth itself may be revealed by empirical observation as well as from the Qur’an, there was a religious crackdown, the gate of ijtihad (independent reasoning, seeking and union with true understanding) was closed and scientific research largely ceased in the Muslim world. It was eventually pursued in Europe, but not without resistance from religious authorities there. The start or the 13th century saw the beginning of the relative decline of Islamic civilization. This decline was not caused by outside forces. It was not caused by a lack of dedication to Islam. It was caused by Islam itself. It rejected science and scientific method which later became the main driving force in industrial prosperity in the West.
(précis, from website, John L Perkins 2003)

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