Re: UK to ban controversial Islamist group
Reply #7 - January 10, 2010, 09:17 PM
Bad idea from an intelligence standpoint. Having public groups like that around, monitoring their membership and contacts of that membership is a good way to ID either active terrorist cells or people who could potentially go underground at some point in the future. And besides the intelligence angle, it will be spun by Islam4UK and their ilk as being government repression against Islam/Muslims.
The best way to counter this group has nothing to do with the government-- I'm aware of at least two counterdemos by moderate Muslims against these assholes (one by BMSD, not sure who did the other one). There needs to be better organization amongst the moderate Muslims to decisively counter, isolate and ostracize these types from the broader Muslim community in the UK. No dis to the ex-Muslims here who've been doing some awesome stuff, but the best hope (I think) for isolating the radicals in the UK (and elsewhere) is gonna have to come from more moderate Muslims getting better organized and taking action.
My advice to you Brits is stop relying on the government to fix this shit-- I think you've become too accustomed to expecting the government to fix everything for you (don't get me wrong, this has been happening in the US too, albeit at a slower pace), and this is not a problem that can likely be solved by the government without resort to very drastic measures (e.g. mass deportation of non-citizen Muslims, closing of mosques)-- when it comes to clamping down on a committed insurgency, if you're in for a penny, you might as well be in for a pound, because all half-ass repression will accomplish is strengthening the resolve of those you are fighting against and an increase in enemy recruitment. And very few people here I think would be down with the kind of full-scale repression required for the government to decisively stop the problem.
Look at the example of secularists in the Muslim world-- most of them have tried to enforce secularism through the brute power of the state, and it hasn't worked very well for them, has it? Turkey to an extent, but even they are seeing an Islamist revival (though not nearly to the extent of other countries). But Algeria? Iraq? And I'd be curious to see what happens to Syria if the current regime there is toppled anytime soon. Egypt's all but given up on trying to be a secular country-- making concessions to the Islamists and shooting the ones who threaten Mubarak's power is good enough for them.
Now, it is true that all of those are authoritarian states as opposed to liberal democracies, but the main difference is that living in a liberal democracy gives you a lot more room to organize solutions outside of the structures of the state. I'm hopeful that Iran will soon show the way forward in how to go from an oppressively religious society to a secular one-- even if the regime falls tomorrow, it will take a few decades to make a complete transition to a fully secular society, but things are looking promising, and as much of a cynic as I am, I do still kinda believe in the inevitability of social progress, generally-speaking. I guess there's still an idealistic anarcho-syndicalist deep inside of me somewhere, after all.
fuck you
Topic: Islam 4 the UK to be banned