The Islamophobia split on the left.

[Ajidica]

I would love to see some numbers on this, because while I agree that a significant amount of well off people get recruited to such things.. I've always been under the impression that poorer parts of the world with poor infrastructure and social nets are fertile breeding grounds for recruits, and that's why ISIS for example is able to grow at such a rapid pace.

I actually wrote a paper on the subject if you are interested.
Basically, the results indicate that poverty isn't really a driving force behind people becoming involved with terrorism. Rather, the opportunities available to them is what drives terrorism.
EDIT: Which after I thought about it for a bit, is pretty much what Eric Hoffer was getting at back in the 50's with True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements where his thesis basically was that people join mass movements to give their own lives a sense of value and power.

(Yes, the model itself is only a basic linear model, but my results were consistent with 'professional' studies on the topic so I decided it was good enough for a class paper. If I were to update it, I would go back and include variables on levels of secondary education achieved in the country, and do other research to see what variables are correlated with GINI coefficient to get at inequality.)

As for the foreign recruits, they are without shadow of doubt mostly middle class.

I can't seem to find the article with a quick google search, but about a month ago, the BBC had an article on Turkish recruits to ISIS. Their investigation suggested, at least from this region in Turkey, ISIS recruiters were focusing their efforts on poor young males.
I don't think we have enough information to indicate one way or the other right now the primary demographic of ISIS recruits.

 

[classical_hero]

Many of ISIS recruits are from the west and most of the were well off.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

Well the core of the problem seems to be greed and hypocrisy. US has 40 bases in region to support one of the most opressive regimes? Joke... I heard about how Afganistan used to be a tolerant place till the outer powers have started messing up with it. Joke... The West is happy as long as it can keeps its supremacy and cheap resources and labour for its lavish livestyle -- forget about justice and democracy. Joke!

 

[jackelgull]

That's a popular line but it's not true. The Arab World is far from the poorest region of the globe but it's the hotbed of religious extremism and terrorism in general. Again, the people who blew themselves up on 9/11 were all middle class and college educated. People who had at their disposal all that the West can offer.

Some of the most notorious terrorists were very wealthy individuals. Rich countries like the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia produce lots of terrorists. Even the rank-and-file fighters and terrorists are more often than not educated and financially above average.

But is the wealth distribution equal? And you misunderstand me, poverty is not the only cause for extremism, but the Muslim extremist movements are not unique in appealing to only the middle class educated Muslims. They are there, but by far the largest base of support are the poor.

 

[warpus]

I actually wrote a paper on the subject if you are interested.
Basically, the results indicate that poverty isn't really a driving force behind people becoming involved with terrorism. Rather, the opportunities available to them is what drives terrorism.

Wow, as if I asked for data and you're knocking on my door with an academic paper on the subject. That's pretty awesome, thanks for sharing!

Interesting too. I will have to look at it closer sometime this weekend.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

BTW this is how you fight terorrism:

Link to video.

 

[~Corsair#01~]

I always found it a bit curious that some currents of thought will excuse pretty much any ideology or religion of the damage its followers cause and blame it instead on "economic factors".

I'm not familiar with anybody who has made that argument. Political, yes. Economic, no.

The believers in that imbecile position hold that all religions are morally equivalent, and extremism bred by material conditions is what leads to differences. That's obviously BS. Some religions can be plain evil on their very core, others can be harmless superstitions. Why pretend otherwise when it's so freakin' obvious?

Luiz, you have a basic understanding of history. You know the holocaust happened. You know Europeans exterminated the entire native population of the Caribbean and replaced them with with slaves that they raped and worked to death and then brought over wave after wave of more slaves to replace them and brutalised and murdered them in the same way. You know this.

So how can you justify the idea that people who are Muslims are inherently more violent than Christians, Jews or atheists? From an empirical point of view, that idea is laughable.

I think you'd find that they mostly come from middle class backgrounds, while the leaders are almost exclusively rich. Extremism requires a lot of conviction. Nobody is going to blow themselves up for something they don't care deeply about. This means a lot of reading, a lot of lectures, and all sorts of other stuff that require study and free time - luxuries that the poor lack. As I said, the bulk of the terrorists are not coming from very poor countries, and much less from very poor families.

This article has the story of a specific individual who became a suicide bomber for ISIS:

“He was a kid, a child,” Mohammad said. “He saw Sunni oppression in Iraq and he told me: ‘The American army is killing us. [Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Ali] al-Sistani and Shiite groups are killing us. The Iraqi government is killing us, oppressing us and raping women and killing kids. I want to kill them all.’”

Note the fact that he seemed more concerned about the rape and murder of his fellow Sunni Muslims than about specific details of Islamic doctrine.

 

[~Corsair#01~]

...
But that doesn't change how fundamentally correct Harris is in his criticism of contemporary popular Islam itself.
And notice these qualifiers. Cause that is what it's about: You don't get to bake yourself the perfect Muslim. You'll have to work with the median. And that's pretty tough for a lefty, anti-racist, genderinclusive-minded person to do if they do it in an honest fashion.

At the end of the day some ideas are better than others. And at the end of day one has to accept that conteporary popular Islam, as non-monolithical as it is, is the way it is, because of a number of such ideas.

I'm an atheist. I regard Muhammad as a scumbag and a fraud and regard the "ideas" that underpin the Islamic religion with contempt. However having said that, we have to treat Muslims as people. We cannot say (for example) "the Islamic religion says homosexuals are evil" and then judge all Muslims on that basis.

There are two reasons for this:
Firstly, religious doctrines do not exist in an absolute sense. There are only interpretations. You can look at documents as large and self-contradictory as the Quran or the Bible and justify any ideology or its polar opposite by the process of selection.

Second, religion is a matter of identity as much as it is as a matter of adherence to a particular code of values. Arguably more so. Most Muslims are not religious. They are Muslims because their parents were Muslims and they follow the religion because it is part of their ethnic identity not because they follow a particular ideology.

On the subject of criticising Islam, I think we need to be very careful. Islam is different from religions such as Judaism or Christianity because there is a significant body of people in America and elsewhere who advocate war against Muslims.

Critics of evangelical Christianity do not advocate murdering hundreds of thousands of people in the US south in order to promote their idea of "secularism". However, some critics of Islam such as Sam Harris do encourage and promote this kind of violence against Muslims.

 

[Borachio]

However, some critics of Islam such as Sam Harris do encourage and promote this kind of violence against Muslims.

Does he really? Can you provide an example of him doing this? He seemed such a reasonable fellow, and all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris_(author)

Hmm. Blah, blah, blah. Quaker father, Jewish mother. Blah, blah, blah. Well.

He does seem particularly hostile towards Islam. But advocating violence against Muslims?

advocates a benign, noncoercive, corrective form of intolerance, distinguishing it from historic religious persecution. He promotes a conversational intolerance, in which personal convictions are scaled against evidence

 

[luiz]

I'm not familiar with anybody who has made that argument. Political, yes. Economic, no.

Really? You're not familiar with the argument that material conditions shape people's behavior and is the ultimate "driving force" of history?

Luiz, you have a basic understanding of history. You know the holocaust happened. You know Europeans exterminated the entire native population of the Caribbean and replaced them with with slaves that they raped and worked to death and then brought over wave after wave of more slaves to replace them and brutalised and murdered them in the same way. You know this.

So how can you justify the idea that people who are Muslims are inherently more violent than Christians, Jews or atheists? From an empirical point of view, that idea is laughable.

Who said anything about Muslims being inherently more violent? I said that some religions and ideologies can be more violent than others. As it stands today, Islam is more violent than Christianity. That's not to say that Islam is the most violent religion ever.

This article has the story of a specific individual who became a suicide bomber for ISIS:

Note the fact that he seemed more concerned about the rape and murder of his fellow Sunni Muslims than about specific details of Islamic doctrine.

Well yeah, that's one guy. And a lot of journalists like to push the story that desperation leads to terrorism. They must find it poetic or something. But it's not what I see on most cases. Desperation didn't lead bin Laden, nor the 9/11 hijackers, nor al-Baghdadi, nor all those radicalized Madrassa students.

 

[luiz]

I'm an atheist. I regard Muhammad as a scumbag and a fraud and regard the "ideas" that underpin the Islamic religion with contempt.

From any objective analysis Mohammed was a great reformer who radically improved the morals of the 7th Century Arab world, including the rights of women.

He was an ambitious warlord, but was also a sincere humanist (for 7th Century standards).

 

[Arakhor]

As it stands today, Islam is more violent than Christianity.

Presumably, you mean that Islam inspires more violence than Christianity. By virtue of being an inanimate belief system, it can't in itself be violent.

 

[luiz]

Presumably, you mean that Islam inspires more violence than Christianity. By virtue of being an inanimate belief system, it can't in itself be violent.

Here's the thing. A religion or ideology can be more violent than another (of course, by that I mean encouraging people to commit more violence).

A lot of people counter this pointing to bloody passages on the Old Testament which not only encourage but demand violence. That's fine and well, but also irrelevant. As Corsair correctly stated, religious doctrines don't exist in any concrete sense, only the interpretations. The interpretation of Christian doctrine by virtually every denomination in the world is quite benign. The interpretation of Islamic doctrine, not so. Several widely accepted interpretations of several points of Islamic doctrine are malevolent.

As I said in my first post, if this changes then it changes. Right now it is how it is.

 

[luiz]

Interpretation of Christian doctrine lending cover to anti-gay hate, rampant sexism, violent classism (after having cut back on the racism somewhat just recently) in many places isn't exactly benign.

That's even less common (as in quasi-universal). But it's a trend and not a conincidence.

Gay rights is an area where a lot of Christian interpretations are still quite malevolent. But most denominations, like the Catholic Church and mainline Protestantism, have at least a "neutral" approach to homosexuality nowadays. They may not champion gay rights but they certainly don't condone persecution either. The problem are mostly evangelical sects.

As for "violent classism": eh, no? Christian doctrine is about charity, humility, focus on the spiritual rather than material, etc. If you exclude the bizarre "prosperity theology" cult, which is anything but Christian, you won't see much classism in modern interpretations of Christian doctrine at all. Au contraire, several interpretations are openly hostile to rich people (liberation theology, for example).

And the vast majority of Christian denominations are likewise a force for the good nowadays as far as race relations go*

*Another point. Just like it's silly to judge Mohammed based on our modern standards, it's silly to judge the past Church.The Church was certainly not free from racism in the past, but it was nevertheless the institution that did the most to protect Amerindians and Africans in the New World from the worst abuses of slavery. In the case of Amerindians, the Church was ultimately responsible for banning their enslavement, and threatened with excommunication the Portuguese adventurers who traveled the hinterlands enslaving Indians. In the case of Africans, they didn't oppose it in totality, but were always pressing for more humane treatment of slaves and for manumission whenever possible. In the US and Britain, the abolitionist cause was first and foremost pushed by Christian fanatics. John Brown? Religious nutcase. Thaddeus Stevens? Hardcore Christian. So, just like Mohammed, very far from ideal from a modern POV, but still an improvement for the morals of the time.

 

[El_Machinae]

I'm not disagreeing with ideas up thread., but could there be a selection effect? We only notice the terrorism of the well-to-do, because only they have the resources to get our attention? At least, it's to be considered.

I think poverty is still a big part, since it's poverty and persecution of the weak umma that motivates their brothers to arms. Think how often you're incensed past moral reasoning due to the mistreatment of someone you've decided is on your 'team'.

 

[brennan]

In some parts of the world religion has had to give up it's strangle hold on (alleged) morals and philosophy. In others it hasn't. Don;t think for one minute that if Christianity got back to the level of societal influence it had a century ago that your neighbours wouldn't be burning heretics in the street again. People don't change.

 

[CavLancer]

Anyway, i think a big problem here is that among the people critical of mainstream Islam those without an ulterior motive are a small minority.
First many are devout Christians and/or racists who want to claim their religious-ethnical identity was better.
And then there's people like Maher and Harris who to a varying degree want to derive justification for US foreign policy from this.
And then, surely there is a smaller group of people, say, in the US, who favor isolationism, don't come from a point of view of Christian supremacy but are in it for their intense dislike of immigration (some sort of Libertarians, whatever).

Now, of course that's all bad.
But that doesn't change how fundamentally correct Harris is in his criticism of contemporary popular Islam itself.
And notice these qualifiers. Cause that is what it's about: You don't get to bake yourself the perfect Muslim. You'll have to work with the median. And that's pretty tough for a lefty, anti-racist, genderinclusive-minded person to do if they do it in an honest fashion.

At the end of the day some ideas are better than others. And at the end of day one has to accept that conteporary popular Islam, as non-monolithical as it is, is the way it is, because of a number of such ideas.
And in that regard, some qualified generalisation must be allowed.
It's the commonly understood nature of generalisations of this type that they mean some form of "most" rather than "all" and that their assertion is at least implicitly affirmed by that portion of the people categorised.
You always have your 1 random devout Catholic who believes god commands them to be a gay porn star and beat up beggars for being beggars.
That doesn't render generalising statements to a contrary effect about mainstream Catholicism and the people who subscribe to it incorrect or bigoted.


I'm not going to get into a protracted debate here.
Just inserting this as the opinion of one anti-interventionist (check), pro immigration (check), anti-racist and irreligious (check) bleeding heart, do-gooder liberal (check, check, check).
Take it or leave it.

Of course when they drag women into the local stadium and leave their brains all over mid field that's okay because they're not Catholic, right?

Really, I'm a bit perpetually shocked how western women's groups like the howling mad lesbian ultra commie left aren't continually demanding that all Muslim men be shot in a stadium.

 

[brennan]

How can they concentrate on trivial stuff like that when men are looking at them in the street without permission?

 

[CavLancer]

Its a tough one.

 

[Borachio]

Really, I'm a bit perpetually shocked how western women's groups like the howling mad lesbian ultra commie left aren't continually demanding that all Muslim men be shot in a stadium.

It's quite a good question, imo.

I think, judging from the mad lesbian ultra commie lefties that I know (all three of them, and I'm obviously not a popular member of their circle), they're basically stunned into silence by the enormity of it. I also rather think they're against shooting anyone. As am I. And they probably blame Muslim women for putting up with it. Though I'm far from certain about that.