Even Human Rights Watch noticed. But this report is suffused with denial that anything in the substance of Islamic beliefs could have a role here. Islamic jihad is almost always portrayed as a reaction to something; the assumption is that there has to be something to blame, and if it hadn't happened, maybe the jihad would not have happened. It's just a matter of not engaging in any of those objectionable practices -- above all, not self-defense.
Indeed, it is an article of faith within the mainstream media that "radical" Islam is invariably caused by anything other than Islamic texts and teachings. "Four Die in Shoot-Out as Russia Faces Jihadist Threat (Update1)," by Lucian Kim for Bloomberg, September 25:
Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Three insurgents and one policeman were killed in a gun battle in the southern Russian region of Dagestan, the latest in a wave of attacks rocking the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region.
The shoot-out took place after police stopped a car for a document check in Dagestan's capital Makhachkala last night, state television reported today. The number of violent deaths almost tripled this summer as the fight between the authorities and Islamic militants in the North Caucasus also cost the lives of civilian bystanders and human rights activists.
The explosion of violence is the result of poverty, corruption and government neglect, according to both officials and their critics. Those factors combined with a militant brand of Islam that has replaced communism as an ideology means Prime Minister Vladimir Putin faces the worst instability in the region since he sent troops to subdue a rebellion in Chechnya a decade ago.
"One of the most dramatic results of that war is a joint insurgency operating under central command," said Tanya Lokshina, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Russia office. "It's not separatism anymore, it's a jihadist insurgency."
Violent Deaths
By the middle of September, 424 people had been killed in attacks in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan this summer, almost three times the number of violent deaths in the same period last year, according to state-run news agency RIA Novosti. Those killings include an August suicide truck bombing at an Ingush police station that killed 25 and the July murder of Chechen human rights activist Natalya Estemirova. [...]
Even as young people in most of Russia embraced western lifestyles and culture after the fall of communism, their peers in the North Caucasus gravitated toward the "active, militant" Islam of the Middle East and Persian Gulf region, Malashenko said. Protest against social ills, poverty and bad governance inevitably took on a religious character.
That raises an interesting question: why didn't the other "young people in most of Russia" embrace a comparable ideology? They also dealt with economic and social upheaval in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. For that matter, protests against social problems have taken on a religious character for millennia: What matters is how the religion in question suggests one handle them.
"The radicalization was a gradual process. Now it's matured and become critical," said Adam Gazdiyev, the spokesman for Ingushetia's representative office in Moscow. "It's a law of physics: there was an ethical-moral vacuum, and the radicals began to fill it."...
For purposes of comparison, here is the sort of thing the Christians have been doing in Russia.
Nota bene, at the instigation of a Russian citizen and academic:
"The Russian Government, through its State Education Department has undergone a massive transformation in the last decade. It has recognised a moral vacuum in its society, over nearly a century of Communist rule, and wants to educate its young people in moral education.
"For this purpose it appointed a Professor of History, Dr Olga Lutsenko, to design and implement a program of moral education for the entire Russian education system.
"At the time, Dr Lutsenko was not a Christian, but she became a Christian after she was given a Russian Bible, by some American visitors.
" Even before she became a Christian, she had recommended to the Government that the best program would be one, which taught the moral values of Christianity. This program was accepted."
While the Muslims have been busy recruiting young nominal Muslims in Russia for Jihad, and teaching them to hate and kill non-Muslims and overthrow the Russian social and legal and political order, the Christians have been handing out Bibles and doing their best to encourage young Russians to become responsible, peaceful, loving, productive human beings. Bible Camp + informal good citizenship teaching.
The following link describes what young Christians from USA, Canada and Australia have been doing one-on-one with Russian kids, over the past few years.
http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:1dq0nr5BLdgJ:www.northside.qld.edu.au/college/documents/college-life/missions/Students_Mission_Information.doc+Bible+Society+Dr+Olga+Lutsenko&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au
Here's some more about Dr Lutsenko (from 2000)
http://www.canadianchristianity.com/cgi-bin/bc.cgi?bc/bccn/0700/sirussia
And from this year:
http://www.allbusiness.com/education-training/education-systems-institutions/12180409-1.html
That's a really heartening story, DDA, I hadn't known of anything like that going on!
I visited Russia at the start of the summer (Moscow, so I suppose I didn't get to see the 'real' Russia), and was surprised at just how many Churches there were. Sadly there didn't seem to be many people, especially young people, in them, but if Christianity is growing throughout Russia then that's a good thing.
I hate how the media always looks for spurious factors like 'poverty' to justify jihadism, when there are millions - BILLIONS - of people in the world who survive on less than they need, and don't turn to terrorism. It's simply a case of promoting morals at a young age, and in my humble opinion Christianity is a great mix of the spiritual and physical, because it teaches the inextricable link between love of God and love of our neighbour.
/end sermon.
Well, gee, there are a lot of single things that if they'd not happened we'd not have Islamic terrorism today. One of them is had Mohammed never been born. Another would have been his early death before he met Kadija. Had Kadija never existed .... It goes on and on. But they all have in common the non-existence of Mohammedanism, today.
There is nothing WE have done other than build a free and tolerant society that surpasses anything the Muslims ever generated, ever could have generated, or ever will generate.
{^_^}
alleycat: I was there too, Moscow, in June, and then went through other ex-communist countries. One touching moment was when a young, hip boy in Budapest asked me to write him out The Lord's Prayer, the old one, in English, saying it sounded so nice in English. The churches there were glorious, too...I was somewhat surprised the communists seemed to have maintained them, or at least not destroyed them.
I feel that destruction of European cathedrals (see next report of today} would not make the destroyers popular with their fellow Muslims. They could tolerate them being turned into mosques but destruction would be seen as going too far. I would hope so, anyway. Most of the Muslims I saw in Europe seemed to be enjoying their surroundings - maybe they thought they owned them already and were viewing this time as a "new golden age" for Islam, which will go down in their history as a time THEY invented...whatever the West is inventing now!
An "ethical-moral vacuum" which the radicals began to fill. A moral vacuum? Why, lets fill it - with violence!...?
have you noticed that wherever Muslims are actively doing their jihad thing "civilians" die.?
Excellent, it's a really interesting place, isn't it? The thing that struck me most was the clash between how forbidding all the big official buildings and gaggles of police / soldiers or whoever they were wandering around the streets seemed to be, and just how friendly the average person is. I got chatting to a barman in Club Che (yep, it really is that cheesy lol), and he was treating me like an old friend. People just seem to randomly stop and talk to each other, which just doesn't seem to happen in England. I felt totally safe there at night, which had been a worry beforehand as I was alone, but it was fine. Much less scary than London lol. Is that how you found it or did you have a different experience?
From my guide-book (historical expertise ftw) I read that there were major purges of churches in Moscow, so there should in fact be even more today than there actually are. There's one (I can't remember its name now) that is covered from floor to ceiling inside in beautiful silver and gold icons because the priests managed to rescue them from several churches that were being destroyed by Stalin's goons, so they're kept all together in one church as a kind of memorial.
As for muslims preserving European cathedrals, I really hope you're right. Maybe they wouldn't destroy the cathedrals because they know that they just wouldn't have the ability to build something as magnificent in their place, but I wouldn't put it past them to pass the cathedrals off as mosques of their own. Which in itself is enough to make my blood boil...
Oh,Ohoo, Those people have been living with poverty, corruption and government neglect. They are most probably living in an Islamic society.
Poverty (corruption and government neglect too) actually has little to do with causing crime. Most poor people are law-abiding. The chief culprit in criminal activity is a lack of proper morals and here the Judeo-Christian ethical code is an almost infinitely superior one to that promulgated by Islam. Just at it was almost inevitable that the world would get a religion that was fundamentally flawed, including its morality system, so it could be argued that it was almost inevitable as well that a major religion or two would come along with a superior code of ethics. Well, the world got both. It got the Mohammedan code, which is replete with notions of superiority thinking that justify most any action to advance the religion, and it got the Judeo-Christian code which is suffused with the Golden Rule for all and the cherishing of one's fellow man even when he has fallen a great deal downwards. Theology and ultimate truth aside, most anyone of sense, including an agnostic like me, should rather easily be able to discern the vast differences here between these two codes that have been in existence now for quite a long time. The distinction between the two is as stark as night and day, one encapsulated in darkness and the other in light.
Russia is the last bastion of Byzantium, what is left of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Russian Orthodox Church. The Islamic Jihad will not rest until it dashes itself against those walls they think are theirs by right. It has little to do with poverty and discontent, this is all about Jihad. This fight goes way back to the Byzantine-Arab Wars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine–Arab_Wars
Unfortunately, the graft and corruption that brought down Constantinople is alive in today's oligarchic Russia, which does not bode well for them. It will be a tough fight once again, Cossacks against the Mohammedan hordes. The map of Arab conquests far exceeds the borders of Byzantine empire, but they want still more of it for Allah, from Spain to Russia, all of Europe. The Jihad will kill many in the effort to enslave all mankind to their Saracen evil creed. It has been a long fight, we must finish it.
"Russia is the last bastion of Byzantium"
I don't think Muslims need to mince symbolisms here: by the translatio imperii, Russia may be the "Third Rome", but Europe, with America at its vanguard, remains the First Rome (while the Second Rome, Byzantium, won by Muslims finally in 1453, has become a humiliating stump of a once glorious victory for Muslims).
First Rome, Second Rome, Third Rome: to Muslims it's all subdivisions of their perennial enemy that has from the beginning to now continually frustrated their divine right of Lebensraum.
Wellington: Princess Anne, decades ago in an interview, expressed anger, fury even, at the idea that poverty causes crime. She said such an idea was a slur on poor people, that they were considered to be less capable of being moral - or something like that. I admired her for her stance, which was more "egalitarian" than the leftist ideas which were beginning to dominate at the time ( and now DO dominate.) I wonder what she thinks about all this Islamization of Britain; she has probably given up on the British by now.
Alleycat: Yes, I too found it safe. I have never ben to London but my daughter is there and she doesn't feel safe at all. And yes, the people were very polite and friendly. It was a nice change from multiculturalism, too, if I may be so bold to say it. We in the West have been bullied into agreeing to lose our culture and pay for the replacement culture even though we don't know the end result and have no say in what it is. Other places such as China, India, worry about the effects of global culture but they still have their land! We are losing that to strangers who we are supposed to just hope will be nice to us when they take control.
In reply to PG and alleycat:
Yes, the victorious Moslems might preserve the churches of Europe to use as mosques. I remember seeing one in Hungary that had been, in turn, a Catholic church, a mosque, an Orthodox church, and a Protestant church.
But they'll destroy much of the contents and decoration: the statuary, inside and out, most of the stained glass, and of course the bells. Any frescoes or mosaics might escape by merely being whitewashed over, like those of Hagia Sophia.