Not just knee deep

At Mia's birthday party on Friday night, there was a discussion about the aftermath of the London bombings, and repurcussions on the Muslim community. I am not going to extol at length about this with an in-depth treatise, but there are a few points I would like to get off my chest, if only to clarify a few things. In no particular order, they are:

• The 'Muslim Community' is as much a community as Anglicans, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Sikhs and Hindus. That means that we have our different groups, beliefs and disagreements - some violent.
• The Islamic faith does not have one overall leader. It is a widely dispersed faith. This is both a boon (no one leader can dominate the faith) and a hindrance (it is hard to come up with a collective response).
• The Koran, like any other holy book, is by turns vague and desparately out of touch with the way we live today. For those who criticise the Koran, I would ask them if they would be willing to criticise the Old Testament for much the same reasons. Not everything from several hundred years ago was supposed to be taken literally.
• Much of what are taken to be 'Islamic customs' are in fact not so - they are more often cultural issues, which vary from the Middle East to South Asia to South-East Asia.
• The Pakistani community in the UK is overwhelmingly Muslim. Many of those who hailed from villages settled in mini-communities, and those from cities, settled in town and cities and chose to live outside the security of their own mini-community, opting to mix more widely (with both good and bad results). These groups are very different to one another, in terms of their outlook on life and religion, and have little to do with one another. But they are all more or less like the rest of us.
• Yes, the London bombers were UK-born and from the mini-community in the Leeds area. It is an area whose local economy was based on a manufacturing and textile industry that collapsed twenty years ago, and has not sufficiently recovered, so it is a bit dismal on the employment and urban renewal fronts. Whether it's these guys or the Brixton nail bomber David Copeland (1999), if you can get guys from a gritty area, reinforce the view that they are at a dead end, make them feel worthless, you can pretty much get them to believe & do anything. It's grooming, just as it is in paedophilia.
• What of the groomers? Whether it's Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Al Qaeda or the BNP, they are all out of their tiny fucking minds. Each of these people believe that there is going to be a great struggle - a huge battle with massive armies - between Islam and Christianity. It could have been a David Lean epic, for it is just a movie clip that plays in the pathetic minds of empty souls. The world doesn't have battles like that anymore, partly because people have much more to unite them - now that we know more about eachother through immigration, travel, etc - and people can be successful through helping others be successful, rather than killing them (trade economics).
• The Muslim community is just stunned. They had no idea that members of the community felt like this. It is not those that immigrated here from India/Pakistan/Bangladesh that are disaffected, but their UK-born offspring. Interestingly (anecdotally), the 'groomers' all come from outside the UK and have different agendas to the UK 'patsys' they used.
• The BNP and others could say that immigration is to blame for all this. Patently absurd. A groomer doesn't have to immigrate here. He can just visit for a week or two.
• Of course, while there will be no big battle, there will always be attacks on society - think back to the 70s, and the Red Brigade, ETA, the IRA, the PLO and the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Think of anti-abortionists blowing up abortion clincs and killing doctors.
• Every 20-25 years some poor community goes through a lot of turmoil.

But why is there turmoil now? There are lots of ingredients.

If you take the Middle East as one, people will talk about oil. That's a minor one. The big issue with the Middle East is water. Water is life, it's growth - both agriculturally and economically.

It's politics. An unfortunate situation with Islam is that in many Islamic Republics, interpretation of the Koran is left to a 'learned academic' - always male, and usually from a not so cosmopolitan or urbane background. Remember, in small, sparsely populated villages, you have to double up on the roles you play, so the local cleric is often the village idiot. Many clerics harbour political ambitions.

It's economics. Lots of disaffected youth who feel worthless. For a parallel, think back to the UK race riots in the early 80s - lots of young folk felt disaffected, detached from Thatcher's Britain.

It's also personal. In the case of Al Qaeda, it's Osama Bin Laden's revenge against the House of Saud. In the case of Hizb-ut-Tahrir or the BNP, race is used to recruit disaffected youngsters to be used as footsoldiers to terrorise and coerce their way to political legitimacy - think back to Oswald Mosely and the black shirts. Think also of Umberto Bossi of Italy's Northern League, Jorge Haider in Austria or the Nazi-like Christian Nationalists in Peru who blame the country's woes on it's Jews (there's less than 100 Jews living there).

What to do? Give disaffected youths self-worth. We all have a part to play in that. We can never stop 'groomers' or fanatics, but we can give their would-be footsoldier victims an alternative, making them deaf to the rants of bigoted imbeciles.

What will you do about it?

Love, peace and respect,

Fearless