Islam is too aggressive..

[Fidel_Castronaut]

While the doctrines of Islam are repugnant, I don't necessarily see them immigrating as a problem. I actually think getting more Muslims to immigrate would be a good thing. Why? Because Muslims in the US are generally westernized and integrated into society. Generally. And if you live near someone it gets harder to hate them.

I work for a Muslim grad student. He's a nice guy, and he and others I know want to stay here. They like it here. Plus he doesn't treat me different than other assistants just because I'm female (no more than everyone else).

I think there's possibly a disconnect between the situation in some areas of Europe and that in the US.

There's certainly been a problem of (lack of) integration here in the UK to the point where there is a very obvious ghettoisation of communities within many of our inner cities, a large proportion of which are so-called 'islamic' communities. The more I look up the evidence the more I am convinced there is an 'us vs them' mentality in some of these constituencies, or rather, some elements within these communities and the religious hierarchies that still govern them.

I'm not sure where to pinpoint the blame here but certainly successive governments since probably the 50s have failed to address the issue of migration and the integration of different people (way of living, their ideas and beliefs etc) into the larger society. It's not a ubiquitous trait of successive generations of migrants that they separate themselves off from the rest of society (and I look to inner city London as an example of this - Afro Caribbean identities for example have integrated and excelled quite well), however many communities from East Africa and the Indian sub-continent have been left behind in terms of social and economic progression in relation to other demographics. e.g. Brits who trace their lineage back to Bangladeshi Muslim migrants consistently perform lower than every other demographic in the UK, earn less and die younger. Pakistani Muslims are not much better, and neither are East African Muslim communities.

There's clearly an issue here. What it is I can't say, but I suspect the ghettoisation of these communities has left them isolated and insular. This probably explains why many people in these communities are disaffected with 'the west', and why they turn to those insular pressures for their identity. To say migration is the issue however I think misses the glaring point that, taking the London 7/7 bombings as an example, the guys who perpetrated it were not migrants. They were British, one form near me in Telford. They were born and raised here, yet identified with an ideology that originated from a part of the world they'd likely never visited from people they probably knew very little about. What does that say about the society in which we live where a boy can look towards the extremism of the Saudi peninsula and say "I agree with them more than I agree with the person I live next door to"?

As to my personal beliefs - I think Islam is insidious and infects those who are disaffected with a romantic goal that is both destructive and unattainable. Extremism, I think, festers in many Mosques under the surface, but there's too little research (not for want of trying) to directly evidence it. We only see glimmers of it (such as the trojan horse scandal here in the UK where extremist Muslim clerics attempted to take over local schools by removing headteachers and unsympathetic governors), but we also see the tragic results when it goes unchecked (9/11, 7/7 etc).

I like this article. It started me off on my PhD research into a similar topic and still resonates with international affairs today IMHO:

http://mtw160-198.ippl.jhu.edu/login?aut...ilpott.pdf