Richard Landes takes a look at the Economist's recent cover story, Tales from Eurabia, an attempt to whitewash the concept of Eurabia, and does his usual admirable job demolishing their arguments. In his post, Who’s Afraid of Eurabia: Fisking the Economist, he quotes from the article a comment I have seen numerous times in relation to violent and al Qaeda inspired Muslim young men:
Arguments about alienation are also more complicated than they first appear. Many European terrorists were either relatively well-off or apparently well-integrated. The Muslims who torched France’s suburbs last year were the ones who seldom attend mosques. [Emphasis mine-SW] First-generation immigrants (with the strongest ties to the Muslim world) seem to be less radical than their European-educated sons and daughters. And the treatment of them is far from uniform either: for all the American charges of “appeasement”, the FBI is a downright softie compared with France’s internal security services.
His comment:
Here’s a good case of intellectual obfuscation. All the details here appear in my previous comment to indicate there’s something to worry about. Here it appears as a laundry list to illustrate how “complicated” matters are with no analysis… in other words as an impediment to drawing any conclusions. And the fact that we have varying kinds of hostile Muslims in Europe — from the “well-integrated” born-again Muslims to the scarcely disciplined racaille of the French suburbs — does not mean there is no connection between them. But of course, that would mean considering hostility to Western values and life-style (including women’s rights) as a source of the problem… and we all know it’s just America and Israel they hate.
By all means, take a look at his article. I would just like to add that the fact that so many Muslim wanna-be terrorists in Western Nations have backgrounds that are non-religious or ignorant of Islam, should hardly be reason for comfort. These young men do not need to go to Mosque to know they belong to the Ummah. Furthermore, it is actually advantageous to radical Imams to have a pool of relatively ignorant young men from which to recruit.
To those without much grounding in Koranic studies, this is how the media and the Islamists present their Islamist narrative:
Join us and you will be the "man"! You will have the power, you will be surrounded by submissive women, with sanctioned freedom to express your most primal urges against the infidels and dhimmis.
This must seem irresistible to those who are marginalized. What could be more appealing to someone who doesn't like school, doesn't value education or hard work, and, because they have been told from birth how wonderful they are even in the absence of being able to add or spell, deserve to be on top? (The residents of the banlieus share many of the same "values" with the ghetto culture of the worst of our Rap "stars" who refer to women as b*tches and hos while idealizing violence.)
And to those who have worked their way through the system and still can't get a job (France) or have succeeded materially but find their spirits malnourished by Western materialism (England) or have been trained in the culture of entitlement (Sweden), Islam offers a way to find meaning while still providing sanction for their most base instincts.
The fact that self selected Imams offer religious justification for burning cars, raping unveiled girls (who are asking for it by their provocative dress, anyway) and assaulting the hated and envied Jews, is just icing on the cake.
That the Economist, or anyone else, should take comfort that ignorance of the Koran will somehow be protective against authoritative Wahhabi and Salafist interpretations of the Koran to young men who thirst for good times, power, and meaning merely shows their own ignorance of human nature at its lowest common denominator.
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