As far as I see it, I don't regard Muslims who have no interest in the support of terrorist actions as having anything to answer for. The fact that they are Muslims doesn't interest me....The Kurds are Muslims and they are fighting and dying every day on the ground against IS.

I'm interested in the small set of religiously inspired radicals from within this group.

From these stats I can see that we have quite a problem with the status quo and.....I'll be honest I don't know what can be done about it.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

I think this is perhaps where you may be able to see things differently with a bit of tweaking.

This 'group' - as if they have something important in common - what is it? If you are including the 89% mainstream moderate muslims as being part of a whole which includes the extremist nutters then i think you are doing them a major disservice.

Separate them and marginalise the Sunni extremists. They are not part of the same group.

Big chest and massive boobs

[Link]

Indeed. And the only people who think they are representative of Christians and Muslims are themselves and their sympathisers or bigots from the other side. All cut from the same ugly cloth.

Edited by Kermit8 (22 Nov 2015 4.19pm)

Big chest and massive boobs

[Link]

Here is a link to the Breaking News Consumer's Handbook:

[Link]

It features this short list:

Attachment: breaking news consumers handbook.jpg (80.03Kb)

This is interesting to me. I have lived for a while in Philadelphia, a huge city which is demographically:

45.5% White
44.2% Black
6.9% Asian
2.3% from other races
2.4%Mixed Race
0.8% Native American
13.3% of the population were Hispanic and Latino. (and note, the 13.3% can identify as black/white/mixed in the above numbers)

I won't even get into the geography of race in Philly.

The point is, as one of the most if not the most "ancient" cities in America, there have been white people in Philly for a long time. And in fact, there have been black people in Philly for a long time, as slaves, as freed, as post-Emancipation.

The African American community in Philly is mixed in its religious identification, but the Muslim (and I mean Muslim, not Nation of Islam or Moorish Science Temple of America, etc. etc.) community is huge and has been for a long time and constantly growing, as a result of a million things, which can be as simple as dissastisfaction with Black Christian church attitudes in the older generations, and the "blindness" that many people see as coming with another generation of hoping for civil rights turning into actual rights, etc.

The black community in Philly and the Muslim community specifically does its own thing. Black neighborhoods feature black owned businesses, many of which are Muslim owned. Especially within the Muslim community, there is little desire to participate in city politics. Etc. etc.

Years and years of bad experiences have created a situation in which huge percentages of the population (of the city where Constitution was signed) have no interest in being a part of the so-called mainstream political or economic systems. And more and more people are finding a closer identification, a greater sense of community, etc. etc. within Islam than with evangelical Protestant churches.

If you asked some of the questions stirlingsays opened this thread with to a black person from Philly (or Washington DC or Detroit or the Bronx or Oakland or etc etc), whether or not they had gone to a regular public school, or an Afrocentric or Islamic charter school, whether they had gone to university or not, whether they identified as Muslim or not....

I think the numbers would alarm an American version of stirlingsays more than the numbers resulting from whoever's poll of the Muslim community in the UK do.

(responding to myself, with Matthau in the middle, as the saying goes, haha!)

That does not automatically make those people who live somewhere but don't like the way they're treated/looked/at by the white majority a terrorist threat. And I think it's okay for people who live in a country where their grandparents were not from, or parents, or who were born in another country themselves but have moved to pursue a better life/escape from a worse one....to disagree with the status quo government and society of where they live.

Then again, I also think it's okay for people whose family has lived in the same 25 mile radius for 100s and 100s of years to be unsatisfied and generally "anti" their native country/its government/etc.

That's what I'm saying.

Edited by mcduh (22 Nov 2015 4.40pm)