Islamophia

[miasmum]

Suff most of our Bangladeshi families were Sylheti which tends to be the poorer families, don't know if that makes a difference

[cromwell]

Experts calling us all out as *Islamophobes*, as though we are the evil ones, will not work any more.

Whether it works or no, I am convinced that they are going to try. The accusation of Islamophobia is going to be used in exactly the same way as the accusation of racism was used. To intimidate, to suppress inconvenient facts and to set very rigid limits on debate.

We are already getting this argument that the far right are just as dangerous as Muslim terrorists, when the amount of terrorist incidents and fatalities say that it really is not.

But the Islamophobic line is going to be used to shut people up. You could go on a TV debate show and very calmly and without heat start to list Islamic terrorist incidents in Europe over the last couple of years. You wouldn't get half way down it before another guest or audience members started screaming and shouting you down as using "hate speech".

So a simple calm recitation of facts* would be hate speech; Islamophobia. This is where we are going. It's the same path that led to the mass grooming of vulnerable young girls in Rochdale, Rotherham, Dewsbury, Oxford, Halifax and more.

Intimidate, deny and suppress and keep doing it until you can't do it any more. We're just kicking the can down the road here.

*Maybe we need a new category - hate facts.

[Suff]

So, if it is representative of the whole of the UK people do know what Islam is all about.

In my experience, yes.

If you want to know a culture, you have to get close to it, live with it, be invited to share, en famille, with it. Even, perhaps, marry into it.

More than 95% of the 85% of the UK, who are not Christian, have never done so and so have a view, of the way the religion permeates the life, from the position of an outsider.

This is not a country v city attitude. This is the fact that Moslem communities do not tend to open themselves to outsiders, so outsiders need to go to some lengths to discover what life is really like within Islam.

[Suff]

Suff most of our Bangladeshi families were Sylheti which tends to be the poorer families, don't know if that makes a difference

All the difference in the world mm. Just as it did in Christianity in centuries past and in the French and Russian revolutions. Even the sectarian violence in NI was strongest in the less well off (and usually educated), areas. My cousin's wife and her 3 sisters have extended University educations and my cousins wife holds a high level ministerial office in an Islamic country. Their mother has pictures of herself in Mini Skirts when she was at University in Tehran.

Go to the Islamic farming villages of the country in which my cousin's wife holds that ministerial position and you will be lucky to see a face or an ankle of a woman.

It is the mandatory education of all children, controlled by governments, separate of religion, which separates the 1st world from most of the rest of the world. Not their power, economies or sheer money. The education acts of 1870 (England) and 1872 (Scotland), were the foundation of the society we have today. The problem, from our perspective, is we keep sucking in adults from places where education is not mandatory.

[Workingman]

If you want to know a culture, you have to get close to it, live with it, be invited to share, en famille, with it. Even, perhaps, marry into it.

More easily said than done when such a sub-culture closes itself off and refuses to integrate. When it wishes to impose its religious laws above the civil and criminal laws of its host nation, and good luck with marrying in if you are a non-Moslem and will not convert. All of which begs the question of who is to blame for the *outsider's* view: the outsider or the insider?

Suff, I never said it was a city v country thing. I simply used the rural/urban metaphor to point out that most British people DO know about the Islamic thinking you mentioned because they see and hear it every day in their own lives. These things are inescapable for the vast majority of us.

[Suff]

WM I believe it is one thing to hear what is said from the outside. It is entirely another to know and understand the thinking processes behind what is said.

It's not so long back that you couldn't marry a Catholic without converting. I think we have moved on and now we are getting our past revisited on us in a more extreme form. If we still had those same values, there would be very little cross culture marriage or even relationships.

On that note, it's useful to take a look around at those cross culture marriages and see how many are from indigenous women and how many form indigenous men.

[cromwell]

good luck with marrying in if you are a non-Moslem and will not convert.

Marrying? I think we both know what would happen if a white male teenager asked a Pakistani girl out on a date.

[AliasAggers]

What a frightful subject this is.

There doesn't seem to be an answer to it. I hate to think of what the future holds for today's young people,
and it greaves me to think of what past politicians have done to allow this country of ours to be invaded by
people with such an alien culture.

One thing though - I won't be sorry to leave it.

[Workingman]

There doesn't seem to be an answer to it. I hate to think of what the future holds for today's young people, and it greaves me to think of what past politicians have done to allow this country of ours to be invaded by people with such an alien culture.

The future will be what they make it. It might not be what some of us would like, but they are the ones who will have to live and deal with it.

Christianity went through the Spanish Inquisition and Reformation and Islam looks to be going through the same. Western cultures, the youth especially, will not want to revert to C7th values. They might currently be accepting of other cultures because it is the thing to do, but once they realise that their own freedoms are being curtailed by these other cultures their *acceptance* will change.

[Suff]

They might currently be accepting of other cultures because it is the thing to do, but once they realise that their own freedoms are being curtailed by these other cultures their *acceptance* will change.

On that I'm not so sure. The very same people pushing LGBT and other lobbies and rights are hammering home those restrictions on their lives.

A conflict I see no resolution too short of drastic change.