And counter-terror measures will just make more Muslims join the Islamic State, doncha know. How many times have we heard this song and dance? And yet no one, especially in Britain, seems to have caught on to the game that is being played.
One of the Muslims interviewed in this story says that the Muslims who join the Islamic State aren’t learning their understanding of Islam in the mosques. Reuters accepts this without objection or invocation of a dissenting voice. So we are to believe that the Muslims in the UK who are — by their own account — most fervent and devout are adhering to an Islam that is completely foreign to the Islam taught in the local mosques. What a strange phenomenon! Yet no one seems in the least curious about how it came to be.
“English city stunned by family’s flight to join Islamic State,” by Michael Holden, Reuters, June 19, 2015:
BRADFORD, England (Reuters) – Zahoor Ahmed shakes his head in disbelief as he surveys the back of a terraced house belonging to the family of the three Dawood sisters, believed to have traveled to Syria to join Islamic State militants and brought their nine children with them.
“Why would you go to Syria? I don’t understand it,” said Ahmed, 52, wearing traditional Muslim attire as he surveyed the unremarkable street in the northern English city of Bradford, where he said he had never encountered extremism.
He is far from the only person in Bradford bewildered by the apparent decision of Sugra, Zohra and Khadija Dawood to journey to Syria with their children, the youngest aged just three, and leave their husbands behind.
The case came to light just two days after reports that Talha Asmal, a 17-year-old from Dewsbury just a few miles from Bradford, had carried out an Islamic State attack in Iraq, becoming what is believed to be Britain’s youngest suicide bomber.
Both incidents have provoked soul searching among British Muslims at a time when the government is proposing new laws to give the authorities greater powers to fight radicalization and potentially shut down mosques linked to extremists.
There is actually no evidence of soul-searching in this article. Instead, it is filled with the finger-pointing we usually see.
The authorities say more than 700 Britons – men and women, some teenagers, some well-educated – have been lured to fight in Syria and Iraq, most to join the group Islamic State….
He plans new laws to ramp up powers to ban “extremist” groups, close mosques where radicals thrive and censor media to restrict broadcasts that encourage extremism.
But some British Muslims say such measures are counter-productive, increasing the feeling of isolation that fuels radicalism. The state needs to work with Muslims, not demonize them, said Bana Gora, founding member of Bradford’s Muslim Women’s Council.
“This onslaught of counter terrorism legislation that’s coming through is not going to help matters,” she said.
In other words, fighting against jihad terrorism only leads to…jihad terrorism. Better to surrender outright.
If the government takes on “powers to shut down mosques at their pleasure, how is that going to help build relationships between the Muslim community and the state?” she said.
Why aren’t Muslims in Britain expelling jihadis from those mosques on their own initiative?
Stories of recruits traveling to Iraq and Syria open politically sensitive questions about whether Britain is doing enough to integrate minorities, especially in poor northern cities with a history of racial strife.
Nearly a quarter of Bradford’s estimated 526,400 population are Muslim and the area has England’s largest proportion of people of Pakistani heritage. Like many northern towns and cities it has struggled economically in recent years with the unemployment rate above the regional and national average.
Parts of Bradford were torched in race riots between whites and people of Asian descent in 2001, although today most people who live there say it is a friendly city and communities get along well.
The Dawoods’ neighborhood is typical: working class and ethnically-mixed, where women in veils are as common as white men in England soccer shirts, and churches and mosques operate cheek by jowl.
Unlike officially secular France, Britain has no policies against religious dress in public places. The government pays for pupils to study full-time at Muslim faith-run schools, just as Catholic and Protestant schools receive state funding.
Secularist critics say such “multi-cultural” policies can encourage segregation, isolating minorities while provoking resentment and political backlash among some whites.
“Whites”? What race is Islam? And anyway, usually Reuters is against France’s efforts to preserve its own culture, but here it seems critical of Britain’s willingness to destroy its culture. In both cases, this allows them to portray Muslims are victims, and that explains the inconsistency.
After Asmal’s reported suicide attack, the stridently right-wing Daily Mail tabloid labeled his home town Dewsbury “The breeding ground for jihadis where even the ice cream lady wears a burqa”. It printed a photo of a woman hidden behind a black full-face veil, selling ice cream from the window of a van with a picture of Mickey Mouse.
The three sisters, aged between 30 and 34 had been with their children on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia but failed to return home eight days ago….
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank that promotes an anti-extremism message, said women were being drawn to the conflict zone not because they wanted to become “Jihadi brides” of fighters on the front lines, but because they felt culturally and socially isolated, believed Muslims were being persecuted, and were attracted by Islamic ideals.
In other words, it’s all the Infidel’s fault. Muslims need do nothing to stop “radicalization.”
Bradford cafe owner Aziz Ahmed, 56, said British Muslims recognized the problem of radicalization and were working hard to confront it.
“We have been talking in the mosques: Who are these people that actually brainwash these people? And it certainly isn’t the mosques,” Bradford cafe owner Aziz Ahmed, 56, told Reuters….
Take his word for it on that! Reuters will!