"UK home to 23,000 Jihadis"

[user666999]

This is the title from a Times article today. Bloody hell. This is a shockingly high number. I find this really scary. There really needs to be some major plan rather than just more waffle from this useless Government. I just don't see how this genie can be put back in the bottle and I think things will only get worse.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/huge-scale-of-terror-threat-revealed-uk-home-to-23-000-jihadists-3zvn58mhq

Survival? Get a grip. Scare mongering tosh.

Didnt the US have rules in place until recently to state anyone who had visited or was from Cuba was not permitted back onto american soil? Maybe we need a similar rule.

It is playing directly in to the hands of the handful of 'head snake' terrorists to continue with this othering of Muslims. Like it or not, many of these men are second generation, British born Muslims who have never been anywhere but here and yet still are being drawn towards the ideology that threatens our society. One way of beginning to tackle the problem of terrorism is understanding how it starts. What is wrong with the lives of these young men that leads them to believe that attacking children is the best course of action?

Being spat at in the streets, being called names, being shamed and beaten up and ignored and jeered at because of your skin colour or your religion is going to make you angry and resentful. It's going to make you vulnerable to someone with ugly ideas turning your head.

It's uncomfortable for us as a nation to realise that we are part of the problem. Our foreign policies have caused a lot of these issues. We constantly invade because we feel we have the god given right to destabilise and 'try to help' other countries and communities and cause resentment and unrest. We allow our governments to stand beside the US and bomb entire countries, regardless of civilian casualties, to try and stamp out an ideology that we have no small part to play in creating.

You can't fight these types of terrorists with more violence, or only violence. You have to start at the root, and by doing so we have to accept that vast swathes of us are racist, xenophobic and unwilling to accept differences in other people. After Brexit I heard an untold number of sentences starting 'I'm not racist, but...' and it's very telling.

We don't fix this by sending troops in to other countries, we don't fix this by rounding Muslims up and interrogating them. In fact, our intelligence services have said this week that one of the reasons they have managed to foil so many plots is the Muslim communities working together worth them and informing them of any suspicions they may have.

I've recently heard an interesting way of boiling this down to simple maths. It was concerning insurgents in Afghanistan but the logic is there for individual potential terrorists here.

Say you have 10 insurgents and you kill 2, how many are left? The answer should be 8, right? Except not here, it's 20. For each of the 2 men you kill who were dead set that they are right, there are six men that weren't sure, be they friends, cousins, brothers etc. Except you've just killed their friend/cousin/brother, so now they are up in arms too. So in this case, 10-2=20.

ill say it again - we aren't going to win this with mass deportation, mass interrogation, bombing, fighting, othering. The only way to start is by going right back to the root cause and figuring out how we can stop it first on our soil and then addressing our catastrophic foreign policies.

That is a brilliant post MooMoo.

Being spat at in the streets, being called names, being shamed and beaten up and ignored and jeered at because of your skin colour or your religion is going to make you angry and resentful. It's going to make you vulnerable to someone with ugly ideas turning your head.

It's like you still think we're living in the 80s or something. A lot of these people come from heavily Muslim areas, where they are the majority. It's just as likely to be them spitting on a non-muslim person as the other way around. So why aren't people from all groups doing suicide bombing? This is a ridiculous argument.

Well said, MooMoo and Fanjo.

Am I the only one to be very suspicious that this close to the election all these 'ooh, threats from immigrants, whatever will we do!' threads are appearing like mushrooms all over MN suddenly?

Hmmm.

I think we'll do what we've always done. Keep Calm and Carry On.

What we won't do is feel we have to vote for Strong and Stable Theresa the Trump-Pleaser to keep us safe.

Fantastic post Moo

Moo
Thank you

Yes, it's so odd that posts about extremist Islamist terrorism are suddenly springing up on MN and people want to discuss it.

Why could it possibly be?

Has anything happened that might have prompted these threads?

Carebear for the same reason that the vast majority of Muslim men don't go around suicide bombing. It isn't the many, it's the few. And I think you'll find that disillusioned white male and female teens have their own specific set of problems, radicalisation is just (largely) targeted at Muslims.

FWIW, I am of Muslim descent, my grandfather married a white British woman. They were both harassed, ridiculed, abused in the street circa 1930 - one for being a different race/religion, the other for daring to marry a Muslim. My father and his siblings were treated appallingly throughout their school days and into adulthood, they all have terrible stories of racism to tell. My brother and I, who are in our late twenties, have also been spat at, told to 'go home' called racist names and been physically assaulted throughout our teens, and we live (or I lived, I've moved away) in Essex, which was very multicultural. This stuff still exists.

And I think you'll find that disillusioned white male and female teens have their own specific set of problems, radicalisation is just (largely) targeted at Muslims.

MooMoo What do you think are the reasons that radicalisation is largely targeted at Muslims?

Sad to hear you've experienced that, MooMoo. :(

That was a genuine, open question, by the way.

MooMooTheFirst

We are talking about Jihadism. My point is in 21st century Britain there are many groups who face acts of discrimination, but we have a particular problem with Islamic extremism at the moment, which indicates that feeling discriminated against is not the root cause.

You have to realise if you had not been brought up in Essex but parts of east London, Luton, Birmingham or Manchester, where Muslims are in a large majority especially in schools, the situation would be reversed and it is the white kids who are targeted. I know of cases of this personally.

One thing that is important to remember about the Manchester bombing is that the perpetrator's views were highlighted to the authorities by teachers from his high school and people at his mosque as long ago as 2012. As with any form of extremism, disaffected young men tend to become part of these groups and it's important to take this into consideration too.

CrossWordSalad I suppose it would make more sense if I said Muslim extremists are targeting other Muslims for radicalisation? So the Muslim extremists look for vulnerable/disillusioned men first within Muslim communities, probably because they have connections, be that friends or relatives or whatever within them and/or it's easier for them to move within them. Of course, white British men/women are also radicalised and convert but it's not as common. Again, I would say this means that we still need to look at our country and society as a whole... what is happening to our young people that leave them so vulnerable to this?

Does that answer your question?

I do understand what you're saying carebear and I'm not saying that if racism/xenophobia/whatever disappeared over night then this particular problem would disappear completely. What I am saying is that we are part of a problem, not as individuals necessarily but as a whole, that facilitates never-going-to-change-their-minds, full on kill-everyone-that-is-not-a-believer extremists preying on and nurturing their ideas in certain young men. It's not a nice truth but it's definitely there. Bear in mind as well that I am specifically talking about home grown, British born terrorists here.

That number is extremely optimistic.

I think that muslims should integrate with non muslims, so they can share and experience the country they have adopted. It's extremely rare to see a muslim family living outside their own communities, which in turn isolates them and creates hostility and suspicion. A lot of schools are either predominantly white or predominantly muslim. At a young age children will form their opinions of others who are different, so we need to ensure that all cultures mix together and grow up together side by side. Ignorance of other cultures is a breeding ground for others to take advantage of that ignorance which allows radicalisation to start to formulate. I think getting hold of muslim children whilst they're young is the key, before seeds are planted in their minds by the extremists in their communities.

It's a bad combination of insular communities and angry testosterone filled young (mostly) men who are unsure of their identity in 21st century chaos. And IMHO the stupidity of religion.

Thing that gets me is, when someone emigrates to the US, they become American and are indeed proud to be. Same with Australia or Canada.

In the UK this doesn't happen. It seems that in the UK, multiculturalism simply doesn't work. Why not? Who knows.

Sorry, rambling more than anything really.

How is 'Jihadist' defined? Ok, this maybe just semantics but...'Jihad' in the most basic meaning is facing a 'struggle trying to follow the straight path', Well, that is all of us? Difference with Muslims is the straight path means defending their religion...you can defend your religion by educating another person about Islam, you can defend your religion by living by the law of the land in which you live, showing others by your example of living peacefully can be defined as Jihad.

So, the media and the idiots who wear the term as a badge, use this word as it is, taken out of context, some convoluted meaning...These 'defenders of Islam' who abandoned the very meaning of Islam, who fail to follow basic commandments of Islam...these idiots are far from Muslim!

*Jihadi