Jihadist attacks -- successful or unsuccessful -- should not determine attitudes toward Islam as peaceful or violent. The essence of something exists independently of its practitioners -- which is why the Crusades, etc. do not make Christianity a religion of violence. The violent nature of Islam is properly deduced from examination of its sources of inspiration, i.e., the Quran and the Sunnah. Still, one could be forgiven for hoping that multiple plots to kill hundreds of civilians might open some eyes. Evidently not.
From Islamonline.net via Just-International:
The majority of Britons and Scotts still retain a positive view of Islam as a religion of peace despite the damage done to its image by the recent terrorist plots in London and Glasgow, according to a new poll released Thursday, July 12."Despite the failed car bomb attacks, 60 percent of people believe that Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace," said Paul Woolley, director of Theos think tank which conducted the poll.
The Scotts are the most positive of all regions towards Islam, the poll found.
Nearly 69 percent of Scottish respondents believe Islam is a religion of peace against only 7 percent who don't.
"The swift condemnation of the attacks and the active stance taken by Muslim leaders against extremism has clearly helped to build confidence and national solidarity," said Woolley.
[...]
The Theos survey, however, found that the failed attacks have harmed the image of the Islamic faith.
More than seven in ten people (71%) believe that the attacks have given Islam a bad name.
Nearly 54 percent also said that the attacks have damaged the reputation of the faith in general.
The survey found that young people are the most group likely to see Islam as a violent religion.
Nearly 28 percent of 18-24 year olds believe Islam is fundamentally a religion of war which sits uneasily with modern Western culture compared with 17 percent of the overall population and only 13 percent of those aged 65.
Less than half of all 18-24 year olds (48%) see Islam as a religion of peace, compared with 60 percent or over for every other age group, the poll found.
"The trend that will alarm the Government and community groups most is that young people, who are generally more positive about spirituality, are so much more negative about Islam than the population as a whole," said Woolley.
The assumption here, as usual, is that people drawing the obvious conclusion about Islam is "alarming." Furthermore, that being "positive about spirituality" is somehow incongruous with skepticism toward a militarized ideology trying to kill one's countrymen. A giant step in the right direction would be to discard vague bromides such as "spirituality" and "religion" in favor of concrete terms that draw the necessary distinctions.
"The survey found that young people are the group most likely to see Islam as a violent religion."
Is this despite, or because of, the PC education forced onto the younger generation? Kids have pretty good BS detectors - and they can smell fear. Good news in any case.
"The survey found that young people are the most group likely to see Islam as a violent religion."
And that is all that matters.
'The survey found.........'
You cannot take a random sample of people and come up with these conclusions. Another group might have a different view altogether!
To be taken seriously, at least half of the country should be asked, and even then, the other half might come to a different conclusion.
This is not what the 'average Briton' believes, but are the views of a small number of people who might well not be representative of the whole.
I disregard these 'surveys' -- and how many of this random sample were Muslims?
After all, we must not discriminate, must we?
Britons are very ignorant of current events around this globe, and also of history. They forget even their own history of the muslims who kidnapped their peoples and brought them to Africa to become slaves. And now, have they been paying attention to what the muslims have been grumbling about? The Salmon Rushdie fatwas? The cartoon fatwas? The idea that even doctors (not this stupidity that it is the poor and disaffected) are willing to commit suicide just to kill them?
I keep wondering why people prefer the comfort of their behinds, I suppose it is easier to keep their heads up there. How many more attacks do they need? Does their country need to become a sty like Lebanon is and eventually have to bomb neighborhoods because of the muslim violence - like lebanon is doing?
I emailed Theos a few days ago and asked for all their survey details re: methodology, raw data etc. so I could check it out for myself.
If they were confident about it all I would have expected a positive response within 24 hours.
Nothing so far - not even an acknowlegement.
They are running a propaganda scam.
I know all about propaganda scams. :)
"Nearly 28 percent of 18-24 year olds believe Islam is fundamentally a religion of war..."
How interesting. In a recent survey wasn't it something like 27 percent of young Muslims in the U.S., in roughly the same age group, who thought it was okay to commit suicide bombings to protect Islam?
R_not
'Britons are very ignorant of current events around this globe, and also of history...'
That's a very sweeping statement, isn't it?
"Jihadist attacks -- successful or unsuccessful --should not determine attitudes toward Islam as peaceful or violent. The essence of something exists independently of its practitioners -- which is why the Crusades, etc. do not make Christianity a religion of violence. The violent nature of Islam is properly deduced from examination of its sources of inspiration, i.e., the Quran and the Sunnah."
-- from the comment in the piece above
Surely this overstates the case, and the need to pay attention only to the texts, not to behavior (that is, history). The texts of matter, but so too does how those texts are received, how they have been acted on over time and through space. It is not enough to have read, re-read, assimilated what is in the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. How have those texts been interpreted and used? When Muslims could not engage in full-scale warfare against non-Muslims outside Dar al-Islam, what did they do instead? ( And how did they treat non-Muslims under Muslim rule? That is why one needs to study the history of Islamic conquest and Islamic rule. Where there has been a milder regime, as in India under Akbar rather than his son Aurangzeb, is that attributable to "Islam" or to the syncretistic gentleness of a particular ruler? When, for about a century-and-a-half following on Napoleon's entry into the Middle East in 1798, Islam appears quiescent, does this bespeak an "end to Jihad"? Is there, can there be, a permanent state of "After Jihad" - to use the absurd phrase of Noah Feldman -- without transforming Islam? During that period, weren't there local Jihads continuing wherever they could be fought -- from Dan Fodio Usuman in Sokoto (beginning in 1804) to Abd el-Kader in Algeria, to the Jihads conducted against the British in India by local Muslims and against Hindus (the Mophlah Rebellion in 1920), and the Jihad against the Jews in present-day Israel that began long before the State of Israel was declared, or the Jihad declared against Chinese authorities, by Uighurs on the edge of the Gobi in 1930, and so many more that we simply ignore or overlook?
Surely study of the history of the permanant impulse of Jihad, and of how non-Muslims has fared, the study that one finds in "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam" and "Islam and Dhimmitude" and "The Dhimmi" (all by Bat Ye'or) is important. If the same passages existed in the texts, but if, over 1350 years, Muslims had managed mostly to show no signs of being inspired by those texts, of having their attitudes and their behavior prompted by what those texts contain, then one might be able to view Islam differently. But the history of Islam, alas, shows that that history depends on those texts, those texts taken to heart.
The Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya, for example, offers an Islamic variant on the Western "pacta sunt servanda" (treaties are to be obeyed). Well, where does the treaty come from? From the life of Muhammad, from what he agreed to, with the Meccans, and then what he did after 18 months. How has Muhammad been taken as a model, uswa hasana, the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil? Have his dealings with the Meccans been emulated, or rejected? How can we know, unless we look at the behavior of Muslim states in their treaty-making with Infidels? So let's examine the most obvious modern case -- that of Israel, and the various agreements it has made -- the Armistice Agreements of 1949 (which Israel hoped would become permanent, but were violated in their letter and spirit by all of its neighbors save Lebanon), and then the assurances given, by Nasser's Egypt indirectly to Israel through the Great Powers, assurances that if Israel withdrew from the Sinai, Egypt would not remilitarize the Sinai, not blockade the Straits of Tiran, not keep Israeli shipping from the Suez Canal. And then there are the assorted agreements, interim affairs, obtained by various American negotiators, right up to the disastrously-negotiated (by the Israelis) Camp David Accords, and then, what became a farcical agreement from the first week, the Oslo Accords.
Surely this history matters. Surely it is not only the texts of Islam that matter, but that in southern Thailand Muslims are killing Buddhist monks and schoolteachers and farmers, that Pakistani Muslims and Bangladeshi Muslims have for decades been discriminating against, persecuting, harrying, even murdering, Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, so consistently that millions have fled to India. Surely the texts about "striking terror" into the hearts of the Unbelievers, and the example of Muhammad in doing so, are important, but so too are the mass terror in New York and Washington, in London and Madrid and Moscow, the murders of individual leaders in Amsterdam, the seizing of schools in Beslan and Ma'alot, the blowing up or seizure of airliners, and all the rest of it -- never meaningfully denounced by the world's Muslims, but rather, the perpetrators either defended, or made heroes, their pictures plastered everywhere, their "deeds" memorialized in song and story, as in the territories called, quite inaccurately, the "Palestinian territories."
The behavior, over time and space, demonstrates the seriousness of those texts. Let's be academically modish, or just slightly demode. Let's call the study of Islam's history the study of reader-reception, or possibly listener-reception. What affect on the minds, the primitive minds, of primitive men, unused to think, and discouraged from, even punished for, thinking.
Yes, reader-reception studies. That's it.
Yeah kids have an amazing ability to see right through a person. They are good lie-detectors.
Hopefully all those middle class parents in positions of influence and power will listen to there children's concerns.
R_not
'Britons are very ignorant of current events around this globe, and also of history...'
That's a very sweeping statement, isn't it?
Posted by: Sencit [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 15, 2007 6:58 AM
It applies to the West, not just Briton. If it wasnt true, we wouldnt have this Dhimmi attitude that we have.
"Yeah kids have an amazing ability to see right through a person. They are good lie-detectors.
Hopefully all those middle class parents in positions of influence and power will listen to there children's concerns."
And these 18-24-year-olds will soon be in positions of power and influence themselves. I wonder whether middle-aged complacency will overtake them, too, though?
"Britons and Scotts"
The JUST article just did not get off to a good start - English, Cornish, Scots, and Welsh are all Britons. Last I heard, many people in Northern Ireland also still think of themselves as British.
And these survery 'results' are strangely at varience with other recent surveys, see
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=4H2SJLIK03I33QFIQMGCFGGAVCBQUIV0?
xml=/news/2006/08/25/nislam25.xml
which includes this:
"The number who believe that "practically all British Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding
citizens who deplore terrorist acts as much as anyone else" has fallen from 23 per cent in
July last year to 16 per cent".
It will be interesting to see if Theos respond to Sir Henry, and to know how they selected those they surveyed. Mostly from worshippers at the Church of Wishful Thinking would be my guess.
Nearly 28 percent of 18-24 year olds believe Islam is fundamentally a religion of war which sits uneasily with modern Western culture compared with 17 percent of the overall population and only 13 percent of those aged 65.
This shouldn't be surprising. This age group is fresh out of years of schooling alongside moslem students, where they had daily experience with their belligerent and antagonistic behavior and demands for special privileges.
sorry bad link, try:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/25/nislam125.xml&page=3
ebonystone - I agree about the exposure to Muslims in school. Another possible factor could be higher exposure to information on the internet in this younger age group.
Title of this piece: "Despite Plots, Britons See Peaceful Islam"
Written in cahoots with Islam online. That little tidbit clarifies which Britons see Islam as peaceful, eh Achmed?
Considering the source of this piece,
"Britons are very ignorant of current events around this globe, and also of history."
You know you could say the same about a lot of Americans. Our schools do the absolute worst job of teaching history. The very little history that they actually teach is so politically corrected up that it's useless.
I imagine the situation isn't much better in Canada, Australia, or any other part of the civilized world.
"Nearly 28 percent of 18-24 year olds believe Islam is fundamentally a religion of war..."
Hey I'm in that age group and I have a very negative view of islam. So do a lot of my friends, with a view exceptions.
Got to remember that the younger people know that the people most likely to have been killed in the attacks on both 9/11/01 and 7/7/05 have been folks in their 20's, 30's, and 40's who were simply were going to their places of employment on those two days. Hense the more negitive viewpoint towards Islam.
AARGH. The problem with all of this is that, somehow, people still equate Islam with a religion when it is just a goofy political system with a vestigial religious component.
Hugh, bravo for your work and keep emphasizing that Islam is just a political system with no real remaining spiritual core.
Greg, this statement is irrelevant. An essence that no one practices is harmless and moreover pointless.
The problem with Islam isn't about its "essence" or even its "inherent" nature. Arguing what is or isn't inherent to Islam is a red herring.
The problem is that mainstream and respected Islamic authorities have, since Islam's beginning and continuing today, ratified interpretations that confirm subjugation or warfare against non-believers and treat women like property. And thus, unsurprisingly, a significant, not-always-identifiable subset of Muslims worldwide are at the very least sympathetic to those interpretations if not willing actors implementing their dictates.
Greetings:
Hopefully, the 18-24 year olds will maintain and/or expand their view of Islam and Muslims.
They have the long row to hoe.
Maybe Mr. Smeaton of Glasgow Airport fame can open an academy.
To 11840 - 'they have the long row to hoe'.
Yes. And they have been, subliminally, primed for it. This is the cohort that were 11 or 12 or 13 when the first Harry Potter book came out.
Please, everybody, go see the latest HP movie - 'Order of the Phoenix'. The resonances/ parallels with our current predicament are unmistakable. It's a call to arms, clear as daylight. And it's a great antidote to self-hate - just watch for the context of a phrase someone uses toward the end - "we've got something worth fighting for".
Life, love, friendship, freedom, intellect, beauty, the 'open' society - all are threatened by the real-life 'death eaters', the preachers and the warriors of the Third Jihad.
All that is needed is for some of us older folks to explain to the teenagers and young adults of the West, indeed of the entire non-Muslim world, that it is THEY who are the Order of the Phoenix, they who are 'Dumbledore's Army', going up against Mohammed's murderous Death Eaters.
I'd love to have been in a cinema in Glasgow, or London, or Madrid - or Jerusalem - to watch how people reacted when Harry stands up and declares "I want to fight!"
what do they think about Judiasm?
ploome - "what do they think of Judiasm"
This documentary was shelved by BBC2 but picked up by Channel 4.
Documentary: The War on Britain's Jews? (6 parts)Last year, an All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism found that violence, desecration of property and intimidation directed against Jews are all on the increase. Richard Littlejohn talks to victims and analysts and argues that antisemitism, once the preserve of the extreme right, now has a foothold among some Muslims and says even elements of the Left are fuelling the fire.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nkCTH7LK7OU
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=H7jbZ8HhK1Y
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=hgfMmsaed64
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F50Fji0Jbbg
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ysY8YnhMj3Y
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=aUyVbE8XW4M
"The survey found that young people are the group most likely to see Islam as a violent religion."
Good news indeed.. here in New York City there's a lot of complacency, even though we were the target on 9/11.
I think the fact younger people are exposed to moslems in shcool and elsewhere has indeed a huge influence on their opinions.
Good for them to cast off the pink multihulti glasses of the 68 generation before.
R_not:
"Britons are very ignorant of current events around this globe, and also of history"
Utter cobblers. You don't know what you're talking about, my ignorant friend.
When you say "Britons" do you mean all residents of the UK - including those of us who post on JW/DW and those journalists who are fully aware of the Islamist threat - e.g. Melanie Phillips - and members of the BNP?
We don't all get our news from Al-BBC, you know! Some of us are actually capable of independent thought and reasoned analysis.
Do you think the nation that established the largest empire the world has ever seen would have managed it by being ignorant?
From which nation of intellectuals and historians do you hail? Or perhaps you R_not going to tell us?
From your spelling of "neighborhoods" I deduce you are from the USA - the nation that calls a tournament "World Series Baseball" but only Canadian and American teams participate.
""Despite the failed car bomb attacks, 60 percent of people believe that Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace,"
....almost exactly the same percentage of people in PRE WWII UK, that felt Chamberlains concessions to Hitler were "appropriate."
"Nearly 28 percent of 18-24 year olds believe Islam is fundamentally a religion of war..."
How interesting. In a recent survey wasn't it something like 27 percent of young Muslims in the U.S., in roughly the same age group, who thought it was okay to commit suicide bombings to protect Islam?
I have found that younger people, below 30, tend to be more conservative than their parents, while still dis-trustful of institutionalized religion, they are more open to the spiritual aspects of things; they also happen to be more pragmatic.
I was one of those people that, a decade ago, would have stated that Islam was a religion of peace. 9/11 was a major changing point, and after reading Islamic works and doing some research, I had long ago stopped watching network news, and using a bit of common sense I came to the conclusion that Islam is not a religion of peace. That, even as Catholic, I could point to certain elements of Islamic theology that might coincide with Christian thought, and even some peaceful elements (feeding the poor / caring for orphans and so forth) neither could one deny that there are violent elements and a core theology that is directly at odds not only with Christianity but with human rights as whole. Islam, and the Qu'ran, can easily be used to motivate and justify a jihadist terrorist, it is currently being done so. All the wishing of the liberals of Islam being a "religion of peace" is not going to change the current, and historical fact, that is hasn't been... ever... a "religion of peace." Rather, it's been 1400 some years of violence, oppression, and killing in the name of God.
The sooner the West at large faces up to that fact the better.
watling
Our regret to say there is some truth in what R_not says.
Four years ago I talked to a young student who lived just five miles from the centre of serious rioting in the North of England. Much of it was not reported in the MSM but he told me the college he attended had been closed down for two weeks for the safety of the students. Nevertheless he entirely accepted the media line that the rioting was due to “extreme right wing elements” and could not understand why people would not accept that we now lived in a multi-racial society.
Unless you use the web there is pretty much a total block on negative reporting. I have more than once posted the case of a local paper threatened with closure by the Race Relations Board for printing a perfectly factual negative story about “Asians”.
Fred:
Nevertheless he entirely accepted the media line that the rioting was due to “extreme right wing elements”
Those of us who live in the UK know which media sources can and cannot be trusted. The following high profile organisations habitually twist the truth to suit their leftist, multicultural, politically correct ideologies:
- Al-BBC (no surprise there)
- The Guardian
- The Daily Mirror
- The Independent
- Anyone representing the "mainstream" political parties - i.e. the LibLabCon trick (yes - even the Tories believe that adopting a monoculturalist policy would cost them too many votes, hence their desire to out-Blair Blair)
- Any Muslim organisations
The newspaper I trust the most is The Telegraph.
"They forget even their own history of the muslims who kidnapped their peoples and brought them to Africa to become slaves. "
actually this guy does have some basis for his sweeping statement. north african muslims would regularly raid cornish towns to steal british for slaves. a few hundred thousand were taken over a period of time from europe. is this taught in schools? no!
most british are pretty ignorant (just teasing) with concern to islamic history, the crusades and the islamic invasion of europe leading to charles martel saving europe. ask any brit who charles martel is and they will stare at you blankly, unless they studied world history at oxford.
http://globalpolitician.com/articledes.asp?ID=2606&cid=2&sid=2
a great link explaining muslim raiders into europe.