Re: Perhaps this is why the "Islamophobes" fear Muslims?
How low is the bar of expectation for Islam when the most barbaric atrocities in the name of Allah surprise no one.
(Raymond Ibrahim)
Startlingly well put.
On radicalisation of Muslim yuf:
After terror attacks, Western leaders routinely call on Muslim clerics and community representatives to condemn the acts as a message to would-be radicals in their flock. But for Muslim radicals, wrote University of South Australia academic Yassir Morsi in The Guardian in August, being condemned "is itself an affirmation". According to this school of thought, supine community leaders provoke contempt among young Muslims, further entrenching their rad... I know, it's getting tedious.
On the shopping list of factors that are/might/could encourage radicalisation are proposals to cut welfare payments to people engaged in extremist conduct and not having Islamic chaplains in schools. Add to all this the bewildering and varied individual vulnerabilities to radicalisation, the needles in the haystack: single parent households, drug use, criminal activity, religious conversion, mental illness.
The point of this exercise is not to weigh the merits of these theories. Suffice to say, some seem sensible enough, others less so. (The one that made me laugh out loud came from American commentator Lee Smith who asserted teenage girls in Europe are joining ISIL because the West can't offer them "meaning and purpose", all but laying the blame at the feet of One Direction.)
The problem with this loose talk about radicalisation is probably twofold. In the racism of low expectations it verges on casting Muslims as tinderbox volatile, at risk of exploding if the wrong thing is broadcast or said or done. On the flip side, there's a subtle intimidation at work.
Everything we do is fatally wrong. We're damned if we move against extremism, we're damned if we don't - and should a catastrophic attack occur then sure as night follows day it'll be our fault.
http://www.watoday.com.au/comment/radicalisation-every-answer-is-always-wrong-20...