To say that in the light of what has happened in Paris we mustn't give the extremists what they want..?

[AWholeLottaNosy]

I'd like to reproduce an article in The New Statesman which is basically saying that the aims of these attacks is to increase anti Muslim prejudice, increasing attacks on these communities ( as we've already seen in France) and thereby increasing the sense of alienation and hostility towards the West and recruiting more terrorists...?

www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-attack-really-struggle-over-european-values

I believe MistressMia.

I expect nothing more than that from you kawliga

Mia I don't believe you are lying but you are interpreting things in a skewed way, IMO, maybe understandably but your words are harmful.

That Muslim was not saying it was acceptable or that many would kill.

His got even more depressing over night didn't it? Fuck. How can a grown adult with all the peices to the puzzle still be so ignorant?

Yes. :(

I agree the men quoted in that article sound scared and worried that further atrocities will be provoked, not in their name.

Mia I do like yur posts and do agree with you but I fear you are dangerously close to trying to speak for all Muslims (I mean the post about the man praying on the train.) There are different branches of Islam!
Just as Choudary has no right to speak for all Muslims (and is stepping perilously near to blasphemy himself in doing so) you cannot speak for the Muslims who pray on trains. (Perhaps it was a very long train journey, or he had a long car ride next, or he has recently arrived from a country where this is normal. Perhaps he wants to campaign for prayer carriages on long distance train lines. It's peaceful. That's good.)

Having said that, I agree that we must be resilient and not cave in to these veiled threats to stop criticising Mohammed.

On a theological level I cannot accept the idea that people can harm God/Allah in any way, that insults will have any effect. If one believes God/Allah to be omnipotent and invincible, how can cartoons or insults of unbelievers harm God? It isn't Allah/God who is hurt, it is the pride of the extremists and activists.They then step into God's shoes, cannot be God and so are gods and become devilish.
There is nothing new here.

The men sound scared? Stop transferring your sensitivities into this interview. There's no way of telling if they are scared. The only thing you can take from it is they are asking for special exceptions to made for religion within our current legal framework. Not going to happen.

Exactly, Thereyouarepeter.

Am not transferring any sensitivities, thanks.

I'd also like to open up discussion around something else or have someone point me in the direction of where I can read more about this. The more I hear about this then more I'm ashamed. Jews are leaving France in droves. 100,000 in the last year or so. There are armed guards at EVERY synagogue and Jewish school in Paris. Hate crimes against Jews are growing massively and the vast majority are committed by Muslims. Are we in our quest for tolerance of Islam complicit in all of this? I'm still working this through in my head.

Indeed I am not the one transferring sensitivities.onto it.

Mia you can't force you're interpretations on everyone else otherwise what is the difference between you and the extremists.

I have read your posts on other threads and have appreciated an insight. But more and more I'm realising that your views are one sided and extreme and you havea tendency to misquote patters and news reports to suit your own agenda.

Ok...explain how you arrived at scared as an emotion from the words below. They might be scared for all I know, no way of telling from that article.

Misquote posters .

Thereyouarepeter I think we all need to stop lumping all Muslims together. I think where there are such hate crimes, the authorities should be investigating the places their ideas come from; the schools and training centres, religious centres and places of religious teaching, and observe and find out and root out the origin of the hatred. Because that cannot be tolerated. I think it will be a very small cell in each country, with perhaps only a few religious teachers. But it is growing and it needs to stop at the point of the incitement to hatred coming from the religious teachers and their followers.

*their = the perpetrators of the hate crimes.

Exactly.

This "quest for tolerance of Islam" that people keep moaning about is merely a quest to not lump all Muslims together as terrorists and terrorism supporters.

Cat cushion...thanks for the response.

I'm a man and a big fan of the feminism boards on mumsnet I've learnt so much. So can someone explain to me why we can view sexism from men as a class but cant transfer the same logic to islam/ Muslims. Everyone keeps talking about their muslim friends attitutudes and nit judging everyone the same but when you look at say hate crime statistics/ domestic abuse statistics/ misogyny within muslim communities and attitudinal surveys of Europeon Muslims amongst other sources of data it shows very clearly the problems of the community. And the answer to this...more tolerance.

Now this type of analysis might not be possible so just trying to figure out why.

Well I personally wouldn't view all men as sexist.

Generalisation is wrong.

End of.

Which just goes to prove you don't understand the argument. That's not what anyone is saying. At least I can see where you coming from and why now.

Will you stop patronising me please?

The friends, born in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, said that defiling the prophet should be considered a criminal offence because it was effectively incitement to hatred

I think there hasn't been enough made (in the media) of the fact that Charlie Hebdo satirises all religions, not just Islam. Similarly, Newsnight should have shown some of these other cartoons the other night, alongside the one of Mohammed it showed in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo - because it then looks as if only one faith is being satirised or "targeted".

I think members of all religions need to accept that if they live in a liberal/ democratic/modern state, they cannot / should not expect outdated laws to be brought back in order to fit in with their beliefs (like conviction for blasphemy).

On the other hand I also wonder if some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were damaging to the extent that they increased racial hatred - the National Front being prevalent - the effects of which would be felt by Muslim communities.

But satire is just satire in the end. If you don't like it, don't buy the magazine. Don't expect the rest of us to do the same. We have battled to get to this relatively democratic, open and secular position and should not be pressured to backtrack (is my message to the friends in Tower Hamlets).

Thereyouarepeter I think that is a big question and should be in a thread of its own. I don't want to derail this thread to become about your question. To answer it requires unpacking it, why are 'men' regarded as a class, in feminism? I don't frequent the feminist boards and am not entirely comfortable with speaking for why men are spoken about that way. You would have to ask them! If pushed to give an uniformed personal opinion, I would say if you look at the demographics in Europe, there are more men with more power and more money and it has ever been thus. So it is this which they refer to, and the whole network of systems which perpetrate it. Whereas France and most other European countries are not predominantly Muslim. And these terrorists are not representative of the Muslim communities. The Islam they claim to be killing for is flawed and not really truly Islam because they have changed it to suit their own agenda. Ultimately they are pitting themselves against Islam, as most Islamic leaders, rulers, teachers etc across the world have said.

Thereyouarepeter makes an interesting point. I think liberal feminists well and truly get their knickers in a twist attempting to marry their feminist values with their tolerence for a religion - islam - which has as its central aim the subordination of women.

It's generalisations galore from you two