[Serious] Far-Right Extremism Is a Global Problem

[The Grand Nudger]

I'd also add, just as a point of fact - islamic extremists kill more innocent muslims than The West™ for exactly the same reasons that domestic extremists are the wests greater concern with respect to innocent westerners.

I'll throw this up here for anyone who likes to read boring shit.

It is far too easy for analysts who are not Muslim to focus on the small part of the extremist threat that Muslim extremists pose to non-Muslims in the West and/or demonize one of the world's great religions, and to drift into some form of Islamophobia—blaming a faith for patterns of violence that are driven by a tiny fraction of the world's Muslims and by many other factors like population, failed governance, and weak economic development.

It is equally easy to avoid analyzing the links between extremist violence and Islam in order to be politically correct or to avoid provoking Muslims and the governments of largely Muslim states. The end result is to ignore the reality that most extremist and terrorist violence does occur in largely Muslim states, although it overwhelmingly consists of attacks by Muslim extremists on fellow Muslims, and not some clash between civilizations.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/islam-and-...-extremism

There's a bit that speaks to my previous post in there as well - and, ofc, a chart.

Extremism Poses a Critical Threat to the Ability of Largely Islamic States to Meet the Needs of Their Rapidly Growing Populations

The data and trend charts in the seventh section provide a wide range of metrics showing the other pressures that divide largely Muslim states, and that can drive their populations towards extremism. Each can be a study in itself, but it is clear that many Muslims feel their governments are corrupt and that secular options fail to protect them and provide adequate future opportunities.

Population pressure and corruption are critical factors, as are ethnic and sectarian divisions and hyperurbanization. Youth lack jobs and opportunity in many states, and per capita incomes are sometimes critically low.

The challenge for those states, right now, is to both reduce the pressures that society feels in order to move them away from extremism - it's about feelings..not smarts....while preventing the infiltration or capture of critical services that the extremists must, by necessity, attempt to control in order to exert their authority and legitimacy over the same.

We have a tendency to see these people a particular way (and the linked paper goes on at length about that) which is both wrong, and actively harmful to the goal of suppressing extremism. It isn't because they are uneducated that they are extremists, it is because they are extremists that they seem to be uneducated. Largely, terrorist organizations have failed to capture these services, or fail to be stable - but they're making gains there. They're making gains on the backs of smart people with much better ideas of how to manifest an extremist state. Making gains on the backs of our mistaken beliefs about them.

I think it's clear that the us has an identical challenge, it's something that should unite us, or at least could. That, ultimately, is the aim of making the us a global power for good.