Well spoken Waynio spot on matey very intelligent post, also Tynesider it has become increasingly obvious where your loyalties lie you are racist plain and simple and don't give me the I'm not racist but argument I hear it every day from the racist idiots of the EDL And other far right numbskulls. This crime was commited by two individuals with thier own agenda who did not speak for the Islamic community they spoke for themselves only, lets us respect the memory of the murdered soldier and his family and also the murdered 75 year old Asian gentleman who was brutally murdered in a racist attack 3 weeks before may they both rest in peace
@ G0UDG Calling a laughable race card as per usual, I wouldn't have expected anything less from YOU! Since when was voicing opposition against religious Islamic extremism and murder racist? In that thinking, That makes just about every other Muslim who agrees with my views the same so called "racists". It's not racist to question/opinionate yourself on failed/failing political policies. I have honest views and concerns, There are many, many people like me, So keep up the insulting claims cowboy. I'm sure the EDL will disappear back into the woodwork once the likes of the UAF and failed far leftist policies (Iraq, Afghan, Immigration, extremism, welfare state et all.) have been positively dialogued and addressed. Would everybody getting along negate the dream of a Marxist/Communist state?
In short I think you are saying that we should look only at the mental state of murderer and to treat each case as isolated, denying the common motivation as stated by the various terrorists involved in this and in past attacks. So now where some more murderous thugs have tried fire-bombing a mosque, do we have to set aside their political views and look solely at their mental state. Or do we conclude that there are some nasty fascist/rascist groups delighted to use this poor soldiers death to spread some hate and misery around and that the police/MI5 should stepping up their efforts in this area?
There ya go I knew I was right about you Tynesider posting that picture of The fascist known as steven lennon have you not seen the news reports lately Help for heroes refused his donation and also any other donations from any member of the English delinquent league, you are an insult to the memories of those who sacrificed their lives to save Democracy,freedom and equality for all regardless of race,disability,religious belief etc. WW2 was NOT fought to keep Britain British it was fought for the reasons stated above I will debate with you no more As I refuse to give racist idiots/Bigots and fascists a platform with which to peddle your messages of racial and religious hatred
It is OK to feel passionately about things, and this is a topic that people understandably feel passionate about. But I don't think it is helpful to start accusing people of being racist (or any other kind of -ist) just for having a different opinion. That is not a rational argument. So let's all take a deep calming breath, OK? Psychological formulations consider the network of relationships between a whole bunch of contributing, modulating (i.e. shaping) and moderating (i.e. strengthening or attenuating) factors. The trick is to consider what are the central factors at the centre of this web of relationships. Where does it all start? What is at the bottom of it? And what happens to the rest of the web if you pull this thread? As I said before, you can't kill ideas. Ideas can't kill either. Ideas just are. What is more important is what attracts some people to certain ideas to the extent that they will kill for them (in quite atrocious ways, at that). Is it about the idea itself? You and I know a bit about fundamentalist Islam, but that doesn't turn us into fanatical murderers. Quite the contrary: we think that idea is crazy, evil. We reject it. So mere exposure to the idea is not what makes people homicidal maniacs. There has to be something else about those people that, when exposed to the ideology of fundamentalist Islam, makes them feel a quite strong attraction to the idea; something inside them that resonates strongly with that kind of ideology; something that makes them embrace it and feel that it finally makes sense of their world and gives meaning to their existence. Something that makes them kill for it. These people are lost, intensely angry with and alienated from the world, looking for a likeminded group to belong to, and a cause to give them focus and purpose for their rage. They are cocked and loaded guns looking for someone to point them at a target and pull the trigger. You can ignore all these complicated psychological factors and just focus on the idea, like they do. It's a lot easier, because these ideas are by their nature attractively simple and thus make for easy attributions and apparently easy solutions. Like video nastiest turned Jamie Bulger's killers into little psychos; like FPS video games turn high school kids into school shooters. Drugs turn people into junkies. Porn turns people into sexual deviants. Fundamentalist Islam turned these guys into rabid killers. Let's ignore the messy, complex reality: deprived childhoods with hopeless futures on marginalised estates, early exposure to violent crime and trauma, childhood neglect or abuse, growing up in a society that glorifies firearms as a means of maintaining that society (seriously, pause on that one for a minute), a lack of wise and moral adults to serve as role model substituted by exposure to celebrities and 'leaders' who are shallow, self-obsessed, immature and corrupt; their experience of growing up in a society that values material wealth, power and sex more than spirituality, community and love. Because if we look at all those complex problems, then we have to realise that this is one hell of a tricky issue to understand, let alone solve, and that along the way it may require a long hard questioning look at our own societal norms and values rather than those of the fundies. Welcome to psychology. It's a messy business. Ideas don't kill people. People kill people. Never take your eye of that basic fact.
Certainly There is nothing wrong at all with Islam itself. I believe there is a problem in that it is easier for a malevolent preacher to persuade their flock to commit such acts as these than it is in some other religions. This is because it is taken as the direct word of God, literal and non-negotiable. Furthermore it formally exists only in Arabic so generally here these young mean are completely dependant on the preacher to tell them it's meaning. This isn't actually a criticism of Islam, but a statement of circumstances and the reason why it is more likely that a young Muslim may form this country will choose to commit an atrocity that a young Christian. As with many where religion or religious do wrong, it is the human element rather than the religious texts that are at fault. Given this, you cannot ask the police and security security services to ignore the religious aspect and look purely on psychological/medical factors. However defeating the ideas behind these evens cannot be done by the state, but will take an effort within the Muslim people here to push back again these people who are a far greater threat to the live of their children than to anyone else's.
You are still too focused on the idea. This is not about Islam, whether moderate or fundamentalist. It is not even about religion. If these guys hadn't found fundamentalist Islam, they would sooner or later have found some other extremist group/ideology to call their own and killed for it --whether it was gang culture or something else. What makes extremist ideology so attractive to some people and not others? That is the question, and you won't find the answer in the ideology. That's just the focal point. I mean, how many extremist ideologies are there? Based in religion, in notions about race and ethnicity, in political ideals, in ideals about animal rights or ecology? Police and security services would do well to look at psychological factors (and many in fact do) because of all the thousands of Muslims listening to that firebrand preacher, only a few will actually commit a terrorist act. You can't put all of them under surveillance. But you can profile them and predict which ones will be trouble.
But isn't there a problem that there are a lot more listening to those firebrands to create the few that become terrorists than in another religion/ideology. Is the problem solely with the more susceptible people in the audience, or also with the man speaking the words and his objectives? Again I'm asking if you can solely look at the guy with the meat cleaver without having any concern about the guy that put the idea in his head?
Rather than spending infinite time and resources rounding up anyone and everyone who might be a pedophile, it's far easier to educate the children. When you give children good information, and provide the support they need to understand the information, more often than not they'll be able to use the information to decide whether or not that stranger really has a piece of candy, or whether Uncle Bob should really be as hands-on as he is. The same principle applies here, to an extent. You can't prevent people from ever encountering fundamentalists. What you can do is provide people a reasonable alternative, along with the information and support they need to make the decision on their own. The alternative is to continue to marginalize people and hope that your religion/sports team/personal cause is better armed than the opposing side.
This was the reason for why priests were so effective in controlling the public in medieval times. Priests could read. The plebs (with few privileged exceptions) couldn't. Priests were well read and educated, thus in a position of massive power and influence. I will maintain, and always have, that religion was never in the Priests interest, it was merely used as a political tool for controlling the masses and for waging war(s). Pattern recognition is important. Things may appear to be different. But are still the same.
The guy who put the idea in his head has mental issues of his own, but in the end he is not the one wielding the cleaver. Nor would you or I, if we listened to his speeches, turn into cleaver-wielding maniacs. As I said before: ideas just are. They don't do anything. People do. Moreover: you can't kill an idea. You can't stop people thinking or talking about ideas that you don't like or consider dangerous (a fallacy, because ideas just are) unless you want to turn this into a police state. That would lead to censorship and brainwashing, which plays in the hands of extremist thinking. Extremist preachers brainwash. Police states censor. Our antidote, as Supermonkey says, should be to raise children who can think critically and compassionately and are immunised against extremist memes.
That's propaganda if ever I heard it However, if you enjoy a challenge, fair enough... You're completely wrong that ideas "just are". One could say anything and everything just is, but in the case of ideas one can make an objective judgement on their usefulness, practicality, suitability, and therefore morality. For example "I should put my hand in the fire" is an idea, undoubtedly, and a dangerous one at that. I believe you're misinterpreting the fact that the same idea, passed to two different individuals can have different outcomes. One may reject it; One may embrace it, and so on...but each individual is an ecosystem of ideas. Interpretation is simply the assimilation of an idea in to the preexisting ecosystem. It is that ecosystem defines the strength of any particular idea - Some overcome dangerous ideas; Some don't. You say that "[ideas] don't do anything. People do."...but people are the physical instruments of those ecosystems of ideas. The buck stops there, my behaviorist friend.
Just so I am clear are you saying that the rise of the EDL is also due to metal health issues? Are hatred jealousy and prejudice just symptoms that the can be treated by the NHS? Is there ever a case that you are facing an ideology that needs to be fough against, both from a security standpoint and in debate? Again to prevent misreading I have no time for the arguments both on the extreme right and from these militant islamicists that we are in a fight between "Western values" and all of Islam, I hold that these views are of a fringe, but no so small a group that they can be ignored. But somethign is wrong here and it isn't goign to get solved by builing a new youth centre or two or having a couple of conferences. I suspect that most muslims in this country don't liek the likes of Mr Chowdury and many pretty extreme preachers that are doign the rounds but the rest but perhaps feel that they don't want to highlist this as it may increase predjudice against Muslims in general. Moreover some things bother me. Why are there no protests against the slaughter of Muslims by Al-Queda or their affiliates? Is it really OK to blow up a Shia Mosque beacuse they are from another sect. And in Afganistan, why is what the British are trying to do there so bad? Is the current government that worse there than the situation in 2001? Are the Taliban really to be taken as the only voice of a diverse country and be allowed to take over just because rthey are willing to be more ruthless than the rest? Where is the march against Al-Queda for blowing up a queue of poilice recruits in some dusty town? Or is there some "displacement" here? Is there a case that "the West" (and frequently "the Jews") are ging given the blame for all that is wrong in the middle east, Afgainstan and Pakistan and some African countries?
Ideas can be dysfunctional: i.e. badly suited to fulfilling the function that they serve. I can have the idea that in the current economical climate I will have to work harder to achieve what I want. Or I can have the idea that competition from immigrants has to be eliminated before I can achieve what I want. Which idea is more functional to achieving what I want? Which will work better, and be more likely to lead to success? The problem with using terms such as "dangerous" is that they are subjective, emotive judgements. "Functional" and "dysfunctional" are pragmatic, objective terms: ideas work for their purpose (which is for an individual to function and thrive in harmony with their environment), or they don't. Shades of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene here. But keep in mind that that way of looking at evolution, useful perspective as it is, is just a metaphor. Genes do not really have intentionality. Neither do memes. They just are products and instruments of function. You are basically touching on notions of free will (and hence, personal responsibility), which are very tricky ideas(!). To what extent are we conscious, self-reflective, self-directed agents of our lives and to what extent are we just governed by survival instincts and drives, shaped by millions of years of evolution? To what extent are the ideas/memes generated by the cognitive processes and mechanisms of survival entities in their own right, hijacking and shaping our brains and minds for the function of their own propagation, and to what extent are they just products and instruments of that survival mechanism's functioning? Dawkins flipped the relationship between life forms and their genes on its head to emphasise the role of genes in the evolution of life forms. But that doesn't mean that is how you should look at it literally. At best you can say that both perspectives are true (for a given value of 'true') at the same time. Yes, and no respectively. Some mental health issues are the result of a not very functional society (look around you: does this world strike you as very sane and functional?) and only a more functional society can 'treat' those. Yes, but the crux of the matter is how you fight against it. You cannot kill an idea. You can only immunise people against it. Actually, youth centres are exactly the way you solve this. Example: one of my in-laws is part of a volunteer group in Nottingham, who go out at night in the city centre with thermos flasks of coffee and... they just talk to whoever they find on the street: the homeless, night time revellers, wandering youths and drunks. That's it. Just a cup of coffee and a chat, no biggie. No sermons. No ideology. Just a chat about whatever the person is happy to talk about. The result? Vandalism dropped by 50% in a month. Why did it work? Because people who wander the street at night vandalising **** tend to be those who feel marginalised and disenfranchised. Chatting to them and offering them coffee, in some small way, makes them feel connected to society again. It is a small, seemingly trivial act against the backdrop of the often huge mess of their lives. But the irony is: these people feel so deprived, so rejected, that they will grasp any hand outstretched (even that of an extremist preacher). And even the littlest act will go a long way. Politicians don't like such approaches because the public doesn't like them, because they don't appeal to the idea(!) that big bad problems (or bad people) require big, drastic solutions: that crime should always be harshly punished; that the satisfying act of condemning is more important than the messy, unpleasant bit of understanding. But both research and practical example show time and time again, that pound for pound, what makes the most difference in changing society is those small local community centres and small local initiatives. Community. It matters, 'cause we are a tribal species. You want people not to attack our tribe? Make them feel part of it. That is seen by Muslims as an internal affair, so to speak: an issue about Muslims that concerns Muslims (the protests you speak of are happening in the Middle East, not in the UK). And because it is regarded as an internal affair, the Brits in Afghanistan are seen as outsider interlopers. We wouldn't accept it if another nation came to sort out the UK for us, even with the best of intentions. Hell, just look at how you guys feel about the EU. Again, we are a tribal species.
I think we need both carrot and stick, we need to try and help young people but we alos need to come down hard on those leading them down the right path. What we've had is the "Prevent" strategy that has dumped a lot of money into community groups some of which are pretty far to the extermes themselves. I don't want to fund a preacher telling youths that is is forbidden to kill soldiers here but encorages to kill them everywhere else to say nothing of what he thiks of other Mulsim sects, Hindus, Jews, gays....... Some years ago I read Ed Husain's book about how he fell in with these groups as a young man and how he turned away from the ideology without in any way turning against his religion. I though it very revealing about the motivations and attitudes involved. I think some of these preachers are pushing an idelology that is a dangerous thing - mostly more dangerous to the youths invloved than to the rest of us. I would liek to see more of a push back from these communities fo rthe sake of their own children who are at most risk and I would like to the see the goverment making it a lot harder for these preachers to carry on as they have over the last few years. Probably what is really needed is some leadership to emerge from these communities, but so far much of that leadership has preferred to minimise critiscism of the problem in their midst and talk more of "Islamophobia". The critisism of the murder of this soldier was more fortright, though whether that fact that the killers were converts from outside their community was part of this is hard to say.
I think that you are still getting too hung up on the idea and ignoring the dynamic. This risks one becoming part of it (what we defend against, we create etc. --a well-known phenomenon in life). Even if you could drag extremist preachers out of their mosques, deport them, imprison them, shoot them, it would not change anything about the attractiveness of the idea. It would just go underground and would, if anything, become more attractive. Because some ideas (religion included) thrive on adversity; it validates and reinforces them. It is built into the meme. Consider the dynamic. Think of it as an addiction: the extremist preacher is the drug pusher, the convert the addict. The drug addiction aims to fill a deep emotional hole. Even if the drug addict has to commit crime, betray and harm those he loved, become outcast, risk death, he will do that to get his high. Perversely the adversity becomes part of the dynamic: the greater the deprivation and suffering, the greater the yearning for, and reward of the high. How do you solve this? By persecuting the drug dealer? By outlawing drugs? Cutting the addict off? What happened to the War on Drugs™? What is happening to the War on Terror™? Are we, as Walle says, recognising patterns yet? The only way you can stop the drug trade and drug related crime is to stop drug addiction. The only way to stop drug addiction is to give people better ways to fill their emotional holes, and preferably, to raise people without holes in the first place. Make them able to look after themselves, resilient to adversity and able to recognise BS when they see it. Children need to be raised better. And it takes a community to raise a child. Of course, some communities are better at confronting tricky issues than others. In the olden says you didn't talk about mental health, or sex, or drugs. Even today not only parents, but entire communities are decidedly uncomfortable with discussing such issues openly. And the Muslim community, like the Roman Catholic one, is not known for being empowering, emancipated or open-minded at all. That is not a coincidence: more extreme ideas and belief systems are about keeping the tribe in check and treat competing ideas and beliefs as a threat, and hence as "dangerous" (another reason why you should never make such attributions to ideas). Community change needs to happen at community --i.e. grass roots-- level. The government is **** at that. It often dumps a random amount of money on a council that thinks that hiring a building and designing some programs by committee without doing any research first is the way to go (note: no social or community psychologists involved). Meanwhile community initiatives set up by locals that actually work are starved of funds. Because there is no credit to be taken, see? Most government initiatives, like grants and awards, are political: driven by ego and personal agenda. Somewhere at some level is a politician who wants to take credit for something, and if they can't they are not interested.
The analogy between the problem of islamist radicalisation and drug-pushing is poor. For a start the obvious solution to the drug sisutation - legalisation - doesn't have an obvious parallel. What goverment prohibitions would you remove in order to help? allow them a bit more hate-speak? Pehaps a safe environment for killing unbelivers? Sure there is a dumb "war on drugs" (no TM, don't be glib). It doesn't work and we could reduce the amount of harm to wider society by legalisation, though possibly at the cost of increase harm to any who became addicted that might have been deterred by the law. The "War on Terror" which it should be noted did not cause 9/11, is a bit of a silly political catchphrase for a move to premption as opposed to reaction. (The Clinton-era response to terrorist acts being to fire off a couple of cruse missile to somewhere hard to spell and go back to playing hide-the-cigar). In the intervention in Afganistan in 2002, it did make set back the Al-Queda organisation and did also improve the lives of many Afgans who where living under a frankly barbaric Taleban regime. The move to draw back from Afganistan to attack Saddam was a disaster. (Whether or not the West might have had to intervene in Iraq at some future point is a more complex counterfactual which would take us a long way off topic). I really don't see where you go on this. We have a man sitting in a room telling a dozen young men that there religion obliges them to Jihad and telling that that Jihad means killing people. People like you and me, for example. Do we need to understand this man more and talk about his motivations or do we need to shop him spouting this evil crap?
