Fifth of the European Union will be muslim by 2050

While "ideas" are important you must place them in the context in which they developed and came to prominance. I won't argue with you on the Reformation, clearly you have a better grasp of that subject than I. However, don't you believe that the historical context played a contributing factor to the development of those ideas? the development of sophisticated trade and prosperity in Italy and the Netherlands and the rise of the mercantile class as an example?

Much of the context for the "radical-Islamist" ideology lies in the the cold war; western support for the Saudi establishment despite it's woeful human rights, or the Taliban who were "ideologically" incubated in the Soviet invasion cannont simply be dismissed, and the failure of Arab nationalism to offer unity, let alone a credible threat to Israel, the Gulf Wars I, II and III and other conflicts contributed to the Islamic resurgence, compare Egypts socio-culturul outlook in 1970 to the present. And what of the biggest nonstate players, the al-Qaeda "network"; Who formed them? Western intelligence, financed by the Saudi, etc etc. Afghanistan brought together the most extreme Muslims together from across the Muslim world, most moderate Muslim voices were eradicated. Where in that is there a differentiation between Islamist and western interests? Mohamad Saqique Khan didn't mention global Jihad, and theology as his motivation for the London bombings he mentioned Iraq, he could not have carried out the attack without the ideology, but equally so without the context. None of which supports the the idea that the western establishment is this naive, innocent observer standing at the periphery.

So will solving the Palestinan-Israeli conflict banish the ideology? No, because removing grievances doesn't simply banish an Ideology once it has been created and has some following. The solution like the root cause lies in both ideological and material reform. There must be viable alternative ideologies like democratic reform, and material economic prosperity. Within even Saudi Arabia there are both constructive and unconstructive scholars and arguments, the level of thought may not be upto western standards but it exists, and in Pakistan as elsewhere hardline Islamists have consistently performed poorly at elections which is why they wish to replace the system; and stand opposed by both secular and moderate voices. I do not speak of appeasement of the Islamists and their methods, but neither should we fall into the trap of reducio ad hitleriums when speaking about objectives as appeasement.

Like every other faith there is a spectrum of beliefs, ancient sects like the Nizariyyun are as liberal today as reform Jews, and Episcopalians. There are the Sufi on the mystical side, and the new progressive movement in North America. If your defining a Muslim by the standards set by the most radical elements your not doing justice to the whole.

Most doesn't equate with all scholars, and that doesn't take into account what ordinary Muslims believe. Muslims like anyone else who believes homosexuality should be met with a death sentence should be condemned, but simply claiming all Muslims believe that is lazy, and prejudice. You seem intelligent enough to know better.

I think this is well expressed wishful thinking. We need to deal with Islam as it is rather than some lovely image of how we would like it to be; and in terms of European Islam and Islam in its Middle Eastern heartlands the liberal progressive voices are a beleaguered and threatened minority, the loudest voices are those of the Islamists. Thinkers like Tariq Ramadan (not all of whose views are unobjectionable) are certainly few and far between. So far as populations are concerned the Guardian poll I have already cited reveals mainstream Muslim opinions which are highly problematic for secular Western democracies. Without essentialising Islam or abandoning the dissenting reformers its very easy to present an empirical case that Islam as it actually exists in Europe and the majority of religio-ideological trends taking place within it are decidedly troubling.

...but neither should we fall into the trap of reducio ad hitleriums when speaking about objectives as appeasement.

Just because the Islamists are so haughty doesn't mean you've got to spend all your attention and resources on dealing with them, while ignoring the rest of them, fact is you've got a proportion of your citizenry who are feeling alienated, that requires sensible polices rather than than maligning them all, treating them as aliens, or pretending their going to simply disappear.

If the Muslim population is to grow by the numbers estimated (which is debatable); then Europe should start putting in the effort to integrate them, rather than whining.

1) You take Mohamad Saqique Khan at his word, which I suppose I invited you to do when I said we should take what the Islamists say literally, but I would regard his statement as deliberate propaganda tailored to the audience he wished to receive it. It is better to look at what Islamists say amongst themselves, and to focus on the leaders and not the pawns.

2) You cite the example of Western support for the Mujahidin in Afghanistan against the Soviets and then suggest:
"None of which supports the the idea that the western establishment is this naive, innocent observer standing at the periphery"
On the contrary, I would argue that the American's actions there displayed an unbelievable naïveté and short sightedness, as indeed much of American foreign policy - even of the smugly realpolitik variety - historically has. Clearly though they were not mere observers. But the Americans did not create the ideology they were financing, and did nothing themselves to shape its development - indeed they barely understood it, which neatly comes back to my point that we must separate out the causes of ideas spreading or becoming prominent and their ideological genesis.

The genesis of the ideas which the Mujahidin adhered to has little or nothing to do with the Americans or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it has something to do with the broader more longstanding narrative of decline within the Muslim world since the glory days of the Caliphate which any assault on Islam can easily fit into. And is of course rooted in literalist interpretations of the Qu'ran and Hadiths which are prevalent in Saudi and Egyptian strains of Islamist thinking. The ideological roots of Islamism are far older than democtratic Western states, and though specific reformulations of such ideas are of course flavoured by the context of the time (the Khilafat movement in British India for example) we must acknowledge the continuity of these ideas across time. In the end the USSR and the USA were pretty much interchangeable infidel entities in the eyes of the Islamist discourse.

3) "So will solving the Palestinan-Israeli conflict banish the ideology? No, because removing grievances doesn't simply banish an Ideology once it has been created and has some following."
Would you say the Arab-Israeli conflict created the ideology, or that it had a limited impact on re-tailoring it in some settings and simply helped to attract a great many followers to the Islamist banner? I am of course arguing the latter.

4) When you speak of "constructive" Saudi scholars, who are you talking about, and are all of their views palatable to a Western audience or are they merely less offensive than their opponents? The discourses in the Arab world are often so extreme in my view that even the 'moderates' and 'progressives' can be quite scary. If Western publics were exposed to comprehensive translations of the kind of narratives and arguments that take place in the Arab world on many subjects they would be appalled, most people don't know the half of it.

Take Tariq Ramadan, a European Muslim scholar who has some very worthwhile opinions for his fellow Muslims on a whole range of subjects. Even he has some pretty objectionable views. The problem is that you can't choose your dissenters, Solzhenitsyn and Martin Luther were both antisemitic but nonetheless great figures of resistance against authority. I think there is a place for anyone who can help to reform Islam by speaking to Muslim audiences in a palatable way, but I don't think we should embrace what they say as Westerners.

5) Lastly I would like to point out that the commonalities (indeed transhistorical as well as transgeographic) of Jihadi aims, actions and doctrine are clearly discernible to any rational observer, and that these are more significant than the differences of context and particularity to the overall outcome. You merely have to look at the operation of Islamist ideas from Urumqi to Chechnya, to Mindanao, to see the commonalties in contexts which have nothing to do with Anglo-American foreign policy. Being too nuanced and overcontextualising everything runs the risk of one becoming a morally relativistic anthropologist of Islamic ideas and violence, bogged down in detail and unable to see the wood for the trees - we need to construct a metanarrative of the nature of Islamism, not to deconstruct any chance of a meaningful response.

Pathetic Ambrosio! using Latin to make yourself sound smarter than you actually are, when in truth we both no your a hillbillie from a country whose only notable contribution to the world is kicking balls into a net...keep up feckless wonderer!

Integration just doesn't happen, it has never happened anywhere in history and it will never successfully happen in the West in the future.

Over the last 150 years or so, the general trend in Europe and elsewhere has been toward the creation of ethnically-based states—“ethnostates”. This trend did not end with the close of World War II. Indeed, the high point of ethnic homogenization in Europe was in the two generations in the immediate aftermath of World War II. As a result of this massive process of ethnic unmixing, the ethnonationalist ideal was largely realized: for the most part, each nation in Europe had its own state, and each state was made up almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality. During the Cold War, the few exceptions to this rule included Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. But these countries' subsequent fate only demonstrated the ongoing vitality of ethnonationalism.

While the recent spreading of the European Union imperium has given rise to a great deal of “post-nation” rhetoric, it has in fact been accompanied by an astonishing multiplication of ethnostates, split out of Yugoslavia and the former USSR — not to mention, of course, the Czech/Slovak division. Ethnic conflict is apparent as well throughout the developing world, and will likely lead to more partitioning and nation-creation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.

But a huge anomaly has arisen. Recently, Western societies have embarked on a public policy project in which the ethno nationalism of white people is officially proscribed as an unadulterated evil. Multiculturalism only is encouraged and viewed as morally superior. Western Whites find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Although World War II marked the defeat of the ethnonationalist National Socialist movement, it resulted in a Europe that was more accurately divided into ethnostates than ever. But World War II also saw the triumph of the political and cultural Left. These two cultural facts have been at odds ever since.

German National Socialists remain the bogeyman of the political and cultural Left to this day. The Left is utterly dedicated to eradicating any vestiges of European ethnonationalism. Opponents of immigration are routinely labeled “racists” or “Nazis” for advocating policies that are, in fact, the norm in the rest of the world. Thus Israel favors Jewish immigrants, Spain favors people from its former Latin American Empire, India its “Non-Resident Indians” (NRIs), China favors the Overseas Chinese. In a global context, it is the Western insistence on universalist criteria for immigration that seems provincial.

Whatever the drawbacks to ethnic nationalism (and the most obvious is the bloodshed that sometimes accompanies the creation of ethnostates), it has at least three overriding advantages:

1) Because of closer ties of kinship and culture, ethnically homogeneous societies are more likely to be open to redistributive policies such as social welfare.


2) Sociologists such as Robert Putnam have shown that ethnic homogeneity is associated with greater trust of others and greater political participation.


3) And finally, as noted also by historians of European modernization, ethnic homogeneity may well be a precondition of political systems characterized by democracy and rule of law.

Political correctness in the West cannot be maintained without constantly ratcheting up the social controls on individual thought and behavior. Western societies will experience increased ethnic conflict. Their governments will increasingly be obliged to enact draconian penalties for deviations from political correctness. And probably also to “correct” ethnic imbalances in social status and political power—much as the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires of old were forced in their declining years to constantly bargain with rising ethnic pressure groups. Democracy, representative government, and freedom will be likely casualties.

Multiculturalism produces deep, frequently irreconcilable divisions within a society and ultimately, causes group-based competition for resources and political power. These can be very hard to mediate.The difficulty of establishing democracy and the rule of law in societies divided by ethnic conflict is a major theme of the contemporary world.

Were you wearing the brown shirt of the Sturm Abteilung when you typed that Miss kickflif? that rant from "Here comes the ethnics" was very 'Germany 1920's'.

Were you wearing the brown shirt of the Sturm Abteilung when you typed that Miss kickflip? that rant from "Here comes the ethnics" was very 'Germany 1920's'.

Western foreign policy was not just criminally short sighted during the cold war, it was brutally self-serving, the Islamists and the western establishment had broadly similar objectives/methods; so it's unsurprising they pooled resources, and not just in Afghanistan.

Debates that exist only within elite bubbles or academia, and ones that involve self appointed community leaders fail to address the legitimate aspirations and needs of the young.

The Islamist-western conflict is mealy the most superficial layer of underlying issues and conflicts.

Spinning the meta-narrative without contextualization risks being propagandist, and only perpetuating the conflict.

No, she's no Germaine Greer but she is constructive.

If for example the Tamil of Sri Lanka were Muslim, the Tigers would plausibly have formulated their struggle in terms of an Islamist discourse

It's unsurprising that commonalities exist given the context and populations of the conflicts you mention, crises invite the most easily adoptive radical ideologies.

I believe radical Islam is a response to a general crisis within the Islamic world, the Arab-Israeli conflict for many in the Arab world sums up that crisis succinctly; weakness in the face of western superiority, and a feeling of utter helplessness in the face of perceived western aggression. There are other factors like the the search for identity and unity in what are artificially created states, a lack of political accountability, the abundance of oil in region....etc