islamist extremists strike in france

[KareninsGirl]

My thoughts are with the victims of the latest barbaric act by Islamic extremists.

The world needs to wake up and defend itself.

RIP those who died and prayers for those critically injured.

at French magazine office www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30710883

This radio programme is pretty scary. Interview with a volunteer turned infiltrator into AlQaeda broadcast this evening. He describes how ISIS works, how it funds itself, how it recruits - and how each jihadist leaving to fight is supported by a network of people here, including with funding of up to £10000. 500 sent from the UK = tens of thousands backing them. Listen and shudder. End of days is their target.

The Report, BBC R4, Islamic State, 08/01/2015

Ok Back. Do you hear many Christian religious leaders saying 'actually, nobody's that fussed if you don't really mean it when you're reciting the Nicene Creed?' Or telling their congregations that, actually, the Bible's not to be taken seriously? Not in any church I've ever been to. We can accept that many, many Christians don't believe or follow the Bible to the letter, but we can't believe that of Muslims? Moderate Muslims should repeatedly explain themselves?

' We've been told that the Koran is the perfect word of god and no one can add or subtract a single word from it, but if Muslims are now admitting it might be written by man and bits of it may be bullshit then they could really help a lot by telling people that.'

Back - your words above will be highly inflammatory and offensive to any muslim mnetters and there are many on mn. Is this necessary?

www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/an-open-letter-to-moderat_b_5930764.html

You don't add or subtract from any religious text. You preach. The text remains the same.

With no preachers, the public would simply have the texts.

As we know, people in general don't follow texts, they follow leaders. Hence the need for preachers. The leaders can follow (or abuse) texts as they see fit.

If you want to start a thread about the Catholic Church being a problem too we can talk about how the 'nice' Catholics helped keep the child abuse going with their support and constant denial that decent Christians could do such a thing and how it was 'all anti-catholic persecution - they wouldn't say that about Muslims!'. I seem to remember a lot of "well if they did they were not really Catholic" too

Thanks for that lovely wee generalisation there, Back. Oddly enough, the Catholics who protected abusers are not generally regarded among us as 'nice.' I don't even think Papa Francesco's that keen on them.

Clearly, if you follow an ancient text with no interpretation whatsoever, it's just going to be gibberish.

'Reeks of Mossad'? I take it you are familiar enough with Mossad to make such a statement? Intrigued; all the police investigations so far point very clearly to two French Algerians and you decide to make libellous comments, with no evidence. Odd.

the Catholics who protected abusers are not generally regarded among us as 'nice.'

No I think you read that wrong. I wasn't saying you thought the ones who protected abusers were nice. I was saying the nice ones protected abusers.

If you still don't get it then another day we can do a thread on it. I've explained it many times before, but it takes a while to type it all.

cleanmachine in which direction is it highly inflammatory and offensive? It was a muslim mnetter who told me that the Koran is the perfect word of god and no one can add or subtract a single word from it. (not that no one should, but that it's physically impossible) Are you annoyed because that is true or because it isn't?

Obviously I don't believe it.

DoraGora actually you do add or subtract from any religious text. The whole bible for example is the end process of picking and choosing and someone who has studied the origins of koran might want to talk about how that came to say what it says.

But you are right that mostly what happens is that someone stands up and says "See where it says kill gay people and don't wear mixed threads? Well the killing gay people is god's word, but the bit about mixed threads doesn't apply any more"

Someone in the next town says it the other way around and both say that they are guided by god.

And they both hand out bibles without caring that it still says "kill gay people in it"

and when a gay person gets killed because of the bible (or koran0 they say "oh well they are not true Christians. You can't blame us"

if you follow an ancient text with no interpretation whatsoever, it's just going to be gibberish.

Well quite

People saying Islam is the only religion which has so much violence associated with it in the modern age.

No, all religions are NOT equally violent. Some have never been violent; some gave it up centuries ago. One religion conspicuously didn’t.- Richard Dawkins, 7/1/15

Back - your words above will be highly inflammatory and offensive to any muslim mnetters and there are many on mn. Is this necessary? - Inflammatory? If there's no debate, then we all know what happens. I have to listen to Abu Hamza, which is all part and parcel of living here. Please don't insult Muslim Mnetters by treating them like Jane Austen's women, whose sensibilities may be affected by a few harshly expressed words. Open, honest, and possibly inflammatory debate is the only way for us to move forward.

Cleanmachine what is your problem with what Back said?

Do Muslim mumsnetters not manage to deal with facts, is that the problem? Of course you are absolutely right there are LOTS of Muslim Mumsnetters. That is why Anything negative to do with Islam and as been pointed out there is rather a lot to choose from, gets denied or blamed on the West, the US, the Jews, anyone except Muslims of course.

Get real it is this stupid ignorant behaviour which will give rise to Farage and similar parties throughout Europe. You reap what you sow.

I am opened mouth at the facts that are coming to light about these brothers...both on no fly lists for years...known to have gone to Yeman for military training.

If we cannot remove this kind of enemy from within we are well and truly fucked.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30737156

I agree with Agent and I'm really surprised it's so hard for people to accept that Muslims can be just as 'bad' at their religion as anyone else. I've had so many Muslim friends and co-workers over the years, many of them drank and barely knew the Quran, none of them oppressed their wives, some didn't even really believe in god anymore but remained culturally Muslim for their families. It's just like any other religion, of course there are moderates or people who don't take it so seriously. Some of you make it sound like a cult or something.

A lot of these descriptions are also very Middle East-centric, if you go to Muslim communities in parts of East Africa for example there's no hijab, the mosque is just a hut, nobody does the daily prayers. If you go to Central Asia many Muslims are Sufis and venerate saints, which is normally a big no-no.

During the Bosnian War, a lot of fanatics from the Middle East went to Bosnia to help the Muslim forces. They were shocked to find that Bosnian Muslims drank, ate pork and married Christians. The two camps really didn't get on and in many places the Bosnians kicked them out because they were so intolerant and brutal.

So many recommendations are about educating Muslims and helping them integrate, well clearly we need to also educate people in the West about the huge diversity in Islam, about the many different voices within it. Maybe then people won't be so afraid, they'll see it's not about 'confronting Islam' but about supporting the tolerant voices and helping to marginalise the intolerant.

Tbh - I think we'd all be better off in a world without religion. I don't understand how people can - in this day and age - people can still believe in prophets and so forth.

thereyouare yes and this is why the quote you put above is so true, there can't be a security solution because there are too many people to track, you can't shut them all down without violating the civil liberties of lots of ordinary people.

You know who's really really good at counter-terrorism? Russia and China. And even then, they still have incidents. I don't think we want to go down that path.

It strikes me that we all agree more education is the key, even if for different reasons.

I think it's helpful to remember what we did in the cold war, when the 'communist menace' was all-consuming (and much more powerful). There was an enormous propaganda and information campaign, a huge amount of money and effort spent convincing people that liberal democracy was the way to go, in very positive ways. Carrots are always better than sticks. Why can't we do this today?

It's not really about Muslims being 'bad' at their religion. This is from the article I posted up earlier, a plea from a Muslim to other 'moderate' Muslims to explain to non-Muslims just what is currently going on:

For starters, it might help to read not only the Quran, but the other Abrahamic texts. When you do, you'll see that the Old Testament has just as much violence, if not more, than the Quran. Stoning blasphemers, stoning fornicators, killing homosexuals -- it's all in there. When you get about ten verses deep into Deuteronomy 20, you may even swear you're reading a rulebook for ISIS.

You may find yourself asking, how is this possible? The book of the Jews is not much different from my book. How, then, are the majority of them secular? How is it that most don't take too seriously the words of the Torah/Old Testament originally believed to be the actual word of God revealed to Moses much like the Quran to Muhammad yet still retain strong Jewish identities? Can this happen with Islam and Muslims?

Clearly from the above, the answer is a tried-and-tested yes. And it must start by dissociating Islamic identity from Muslim identity -- by coming together on a sense of community, not ideology.

Finding consensus on ideology is impossible. The sectarian violence that continues to plague the Muslim world, and has killed more Muslims than any foreign army, is blatant evidence for this. But coming together on a sense of community is what moves any society forward. Look at other Abrahamic religions that underwent reformations. You know well that Judaism and Christianity had their own violence-ridden dark ages; you mention it every chance you get nowadays, and you're right. But how did they get past that?

Well, as much as the Pope opposes birth control, abortion and premarital sex, most Catholics today are openly pro-choice, practice birth control, and fornicate to their hearts' content. Most Jews are secular, and many even identify as atheists or agnostics while retaining the Jewish label. The dissidents and the heretics in these communities may get some flak here and there, but they aren't getting killed for dissenting.

This is in stark contrast to the Muslim world where, according to a worldwide 2013 Pew Research Study, a majority of people in large Muslim-majority countries like Egypt and Pakistan believe that those who leave the faith must die. They constantly obsess over who is a "real" Muslim and who is not. They are quicker to defend their faith from cartoonists and filmmakers than they are to condemn those committing atrocities in its name. (Note: To their credit, the almost universal, unapologetic opposition against ISIS from Muslims is a welcome development.)

I feel the problem is that some young people in the Muslim communities in the West do not realise and are not being taught by parents, in Islamic schools and Mosques are not being taught that there are moderate ways to follow their religion. I used to teach in secondary school and some of the language that would come out of the mouths of many Muslim students was unbelievable. There didn't seem to be any dissention in the belief that any deviation from Islam was wrong, including open homophobia and prejudice against other faith groups. I was endlessly challenging offensive statements, but knowing I was practically talking to a brick wall of religious intolerance, the only argument I was left with was that they were absolutely not allowed to utter homophobic remarks in class. It was a waste of time trying to reason and educate them out of their opinion, as as far as they were concerned, however much they liked me as a teacher, and I never had any problems outside of this with them, whatever I said didnt count as I was below their religious leaders with regards to matters of morality and belief.
These were young people born and raised in largely secular and multicultural London schools. There was no doubt in my mind that these views were being passed on from parents and other religious influences in the home. When I was a teenager, we all questioned many aspects of our faith, in Catholic school. There was absolutely no dissention or questioning that I heard of Islam among the teenagers I taught. The way you moderate is to question and encourage free thought. If this is not allowed and is considered apostacy, I fear it will never change.

AgentCooper

Actually, rather a lot of "intellectual" Christian leaders do indeed say, quite openly, that most of the Bible...including many of the miracle claims in the NT...should be taken with a pinch of salt.

The last Archbishop of Canterbury (name escapes me for the moment) was hard pressed to say that he even thought the virgin birth was actually historically accurate.

Another man....a former Bishop of Oxford....said that, when it came down to it, all you really needed to be certain genuinely happened is the resurrection. Everything else could be regarded "poetically".

Back - your words above will be highly inflammatory to many muslim mnetters and there are many. Is it really necessary

And you have the nerve to contribute to a thread about freedom of expression with this kind of attitude?

Blimey.

Well said Caffee. I gave up. It was just too depressing.

Wet , you're back! Please don't leave - we are finally moving on this thread.

hear hear caffe