Politics Thread (encompassing Brexit) - 21 June 2017 onwards

[Dr The Singh]

2 hours ago, Captain... said:

Do they? 

 

Are you suggesting all white middle class male christians should be profiled and thought of as a danger? I would fundamentally disagree with you on that point.

Right wing fundamentalist do, yes, a major problem.  Some.may say white middle class Christians in Charlestone have a problem,  a I bet people  I in Charlestone do say  a that,, as do people in Rotherham say male Muslim Pakistanis have a problem.  If there is a problem, which we know there is, should we not highlight it.  Closer to home, I was brought up in Braunstone and during my youth, I would say white working class have a problem with ethnic minorities, what's the difference in that statement.

 

When did I say anybody should be profiled, I said that there is a problem, I never said I have a solution. 

[Dr The Singh]

17 minutes ago, Swan Lesta said:

Islamist and Islamism in terminology familiar to me refer to peoples who would like and support the rule of Islam - which I would imagine is many Muslims. But does not necessarily mean by means of terror or force, simply advocates of the faith.

I would hate to think muslims would advocate a rule or set of rules that would denigrate all others as dhimis

[Nick]

25 minutes ago, MattP said:

The Oxford dictionary definition is quite clear.

Didn't realise we were on Countdown.

[Nick]

28 minutes ago, MattP said:

The Oxford dictionary definition is quite clear.

 

Out of interest, let's assume you are right again, do you think the Westminster bomber might have liked the rule of Islam? 

 

I have a sneaky feeling he might. 

I'm pretty sure he would of but for me the term refers to a wider collective. Both the term Islamism and Islamist I've never used to mean in a terror context. Apologies for the confusion!

 

However I am still interested to know how you'd write the policy document for immigration in relation to similar and dissimilar cultural beliefs? You get my point, right? Would Catholics, Jews, Christians, Baptists, get into the country utilising your policy document? How do you decide on a belief/culture led basis?

[Buce]

30 minutes ago, MattP said:

The Oxford dictionary definition is quite clear.

 

Other dictionaries disagree:

 

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/islamist

 

 'a person who believes strongly in Islam, especially one who believes that Islam should influence political systems'

 

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/islamist

 

'An Islamist is someone who believes strongly in Islamic ideas and laws'

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Islamism

 

.1 :  'the faith, doctrine, or cause of Islam'

2 :  'a popular reform movement advocating the reordering of government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam'

 

Maybe it would help clarify the discussion if one states which definition they are using?

[Nick]

1 hour ago, MattP said:

How is the person who struck the people on Westminster Bridge not an Islamist? 

 

I get the feeling you actually don't know the definition of the word do you?

 

I'll help you...

 

Islamist

ˈɪzləmɪst/

noun

1. 1.

   an advocate or supporter of Islamic militancy or fundamentalism.

   "radical Islamists"

adjective

1. 1.

   relating to, advocating, or supporting Islamic militancy or fundamentalism.

   "hardline Islamist groups"

 

Okay so, thanks for your offer of help.

 

Now take a look at what you've posted. Mr 'the dictionary definition is quite clear'  

 

You do know the difference between militancy and fundamentalism right?

 

I get a feeling it might be you who doesn't know the definitions of the word.

 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, MattP said:

I don't even understand that question.

 

I called the Westminster attacker an Islamist and you started calling me Hitler and claiming I was calling all Muslims bad.

 

You've spent the last two pages arguing about communities, cultural, relationship, reasoning and values within the Muslim community and then we find out you don't even know what an Islamist is.

 

I'd go for a lie down if I were you. 

 

So heres another spin doctor soundbite  

 

I've spoken about culture - not that you have read or understood anything - just jumped on it with your same old rhetoric...and i've not mentioned relationship, reasoning or values - they are just bollox you've added to try and somehow shame me - but it's backfired a tad.

 

I'd go for a lie down if I were you.

 

Whilst you are there consider an immigration policy based on excluding people with differing cultural values and what that might look like and what that says about you.

 

 

[Nick]

2 hours ago, Buce said:

 

Other dictionaries disagree:

 

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/islamist

 

 'a person who believes strongly in Islam, especially one who believes that Islam should influence political systems'

 

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/islamist

 

'An Islamist is someone who believes strongly in Islamic ideas and laws'

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Islamism

 

.1 :  'the faith, doctrine, or cause of Islam'

2 :  'a popular reform movement advocating the reordering of government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam'

 

Maybe it would help clarify the discussion if one states which definition they are using?

 

Cheers for that Buce,

 

I couldn't be bothered to argue - I just think we need to be clear what we are speaking about which is where all this started. And it should be safe to understand how others interpret meaning and why they might take offence.

Edited 17 August 2017 by Nick

[Nick]

1 hour ago, Dr The Singh said:

I would hate to think muslims would advocate a rule or set of rules that would denigrate all others as dhimis

 

I've no idea if thats what it would look like - ISIS aren't exactly honouring protected people or citizens are they... And thats for me where fundamentalism and Islamist beliefs don't necessarily have to involve militant violence or terror say as a precursor.

 

[Nick]

2 hours ago, MattP said:

Thought I'd bring this piece from Douglas Murray back as it's quite relevant to a few things talked about in the last two pages, well worth a read about our denials.

 

The Islamists are telling us what they want, we just aren't listening: The meeting place of the two worlds could not have been more sharply defined. In Manchester Arena, thousands of young women had spent the night singing and dancing at a show in Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman tour. Songs such as the hit ‘Side To Side’ were performed: ‘Tonight I’m making deals with the devil/ And I know it’s gonna get me in trouble…/ Let them hoes know.’

 

Waiting for them in the foyer as they streamed out was Salman Ramadan Abedi, a 22-year-old whose Libyan parents settled in the UK after fleeing the Gaddafi regime. A man whose neighbours said he must have been radicalised in Manchester, ‘all those types’ having been driven out of Tripoli. So it was that on their exit from the Manchester Arena, these young women — out for nothing more than a good night — met a literalist from the Islamic faith. A man for whom the concept of a ‘dangerous woman’ was not a joke, not about ‘empowerment’ and certainly not a metaphor. Abedi would have believed it was real: devil, hoes, the lot.

 

Even after all these years, all these attacks and all these dead, the West still keeps asking the same question after events like those of Monday night: ‘Who would do such a thing?’ The answer is always the same. Sometimes the culprits are home-grown. Sometimes they are recent arrivals. Sometimes they have been in the West for generations, eat fish and chips and play cricket. Sometimes — like last month’s attacker in Stockholm, or last year’s suicide bomber in Ansbach, Germany — they arrived in Europe just a few months earlier. Sometimes people claim the perpetrator is a lone wolf, unknown to the authorities. More often it turns out (in a term coined by Mark Steyn) to be a known wolf, in the peripheral vision of the security services.

 

Yet still our society wonders: what would make someone do such a thing? The tone of bafflement is strange — like a society that keeps asking a question, but keeps its fingers lodged firmly in its ears whenever it is given the answer.

Only last month this now traditional national rite was led by no less a figure than the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall. At the beginning of April, Westminster Abbey was the venue for a national act of mourning for the victims of the previous month’s terrorist attack. The Dean used his sermon — at what was billed as ‘a service of hope’ — to announce that Britain was ‘bewildered’ by the actions of Khalid Masood.

‘What could possibly motivate a man,’ asked the Dean, ‘to hire a car and take it from Birmingham to Brighton to London, and then to drive it fast at people he had never met, couldn’t possibly know, against whom he had no personal grudge, no reason to hate them, and then run at the gates of the Palace of Westminster to cause another death? It seems likely we shall never know.’

 

Actually, most people could likely make a guess. And had the Dean waited just a few days, he could have joined them. Masood’s final WhatsApp messages, sent to a friend just before he ploughed his car along Westminster Bridge, revealed this Muslim convert was ‘waging jihad’ for Allah. The Dean was hardly going to get back up into his pulpit and say: ‘Apologies. Turns out we do know. It was jihad for Allah.’ The impossibility of that scenario speaks to the deeper disaster — beneath the bodies and the blood — of the state we’ve got into.

For their part, the Islamists are amazingly clear about what they want and the reasons why they act accordingly. You never have to read between the lines. Listen to Jawad Akbar, recorded in the UK in 2004 as he discussed the soft targets he and his al Qaeda-linked cell were planning to hit. The targets included the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London. What was the appeal? As Akbar said to his colleague, Omar Khyam, no one could ‘turn round and say “Oh they are innocent”, those slags dancing around.’

It is the same reason why ten years ago next month Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed (an NHS doctor and an engineering PhD student respectively) planted a car bomb outside the glass front of the Tiger Tiger club on London’s Haymarket on ladies’ night. They then planted another just down the road in the hope that those ‘slags’ fleeing from the first blast would run straight into the second. It is why when Irfan Naseer and his 11-member cell from Birmingham were convicted of plotting mass casualty terror attacks in 2013, one of their targets was — once again — a nightclub area of the city. In familiar tones, Naseer speculated on these places where ‘the kuffar [a derogatory term for non-Muslims], slags and whores go drinking and clubbing’ and ‘have sex like donkeys’.

 

Where does it come from, this hatred the Islamists hold — as well as everyone else they loathe — for half the human species? Even moderate Muslims hate it when you ask this, but the question is begged before us all. What do people think the burka is? Or the niqab? Or even the headscarf? Why do Muslim societies — however much freedom they give men — always and everywhere restrict the freedom of women? Why are the sharia courts, which legally operate in the UK, set up to prejudice the rights of women? Why do Islamists especially hate women from their faith who raise their voices against the literalists and extremists?

 

Do people think this stuff comes from thin air? It was always there. Because it’s at the religion’s origins and, unlike the women–suspecting stuff in the other monotheisms (mild though they are by comparison), too few people are willing to admit it or reform this hatred, disdain and of course fear of women that is inherent in Islam. It is a constant of Islamic history, along with the Jews, the gays and the ‘wrong type of Muslim’: always and everywhere, the question of women. It’s our own fault because we have been told it so many times. As the Australian cleric Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali famously said to 500 worshippers in Sydney in 2006: ‘If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside without cover, and the cats come to eat it, whose fault is it — the cat’s or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.’

This view is itself barely covered over.

 

Such disdain is what led to the abuse of hundreds of girls in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxfordshire and elsewhere across this country in recent decades. The fear is what led to the Pakistani Taleban beheading Shabana — one of the region’s most famous dancers — in the Swat Valley in 2009. And to the stoning of Ghofrane Haddaoui in Marseilles (yes, Marseilles) in 2004.

 

Obviously, in the wake of Manchester, there are security questions to address. Not least how someone once again known to the authorities could have made such a devastatingly effective explosive device. Certainly it shatters the comforting narrative we have told ourselves in Britain over recent years, that the security services are one step ahead of the terrorists on most things other than the (essentially impossible to prevent) knife and car jihad attacks.

But what we seem most likely to dodge yet again is the possibility of learning any proper lessons at all from this.

 

Theresa May and other politicians stress we will never give in. And they are right to do so. But beneath the defiance lie deep, and deeply unanswered, questions. Questions which people across Europe are increasingly dwelling on, but which their political representatives dare not address.

 

Exactly a year ago, Greater Manchester Police staged a carefully prepared mock terrorist attack in the city’s shopping centre to test response capabilities. At one stage, an actor playing a suicide bomber burst through a doorway and detonated a fake device while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘Allah is Greatest’). The intention, obviously, was to make the scenario realistic. But the use of the jihadists’ signature sign-off sent social media into a spin. Soon community spokesmen were complaining on the media. One went on Sky to talk about the need ‘to have a bit of religious and cultural context when they’re doing training like this in a wider setting about the possible implications’.

 

Assistant Chief Constable Garry Shewan was hauled before the press. ‘On reflection,’ he admitted, ‘we acknowledge that it was unacceptable to use this religious phrase immediately before the mock suicide bombing, which so vocally linked this exercise with Islam. We recognise and apologise for the offence that this has caused.’

Greater Manchester’s police and crime commissioner, Tony Lloyd, followed up: ‘It is frustrating the operation has been marred by the ill-judged, unnecessary and unacceptable decision by organisers to have those playing the parts of terrorists to shout “Allahu Akbar” before setting off their fake bombs. It didn’t add anything to the event, but has the potential to undermine the great community relations we have in Greater Manchester.’ Perhaps when the blood has been cleared from the pavements of Manchester, someone could ask how many lives such excruciating societal stupidity — from pulpit to police force — has saved, or ever will save?

 

In Piccadilly Gardens, at lunchtime on the day after the attacks, crowds of people listened to a busker play the usual post-massacre playlist: ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Alright’. But just like the renditions of ‘Imagine’, the buskers are wrong. We need to do more than imagine. We need more than love. Everything is not all right. We need to address this problem, and start at the roots. Otherwise our societies will continue to be caught between people who mean what they say and a society which won’t even listen. And so they’ll keep meeting violently, these two worlds.

 

On Monday night, Ariana Grande was in her traditional suspenders, singing: ‘Don’t need permission/ Made my decision to test my limits/ ’Cause it’s my business, God as my witness…/ I’m locked and loaded/ Completely focused.’

 

Outside, waiting, was someone who was really focused. It is time we made some effort to focus.

 

 

Sorry but Murray's plans for less Islam and to reduce immigration plays totally in to the hands of terrorist groups - he's got it all wrong and has had for a really long time. 

[Guest MattP]

Good grief, insecure much Swan

 

Do you still think I'm Hitler to describe the Westminster attacker as an Islamist? 

 

I can't wait to see you put this effort into defending those who want us all to live under devout Christian rule. Going to be entertaining. 

[Dr The Singh]

10 minutes ago, MattP said:

Good grief, insecure much Swan

 

Do you still think I'm Hitler to describe the Westminster attacker as an Islamist? 

 

I can't wait to see you put this effort into defending those who want us all to live under devout Christian rule. Going to be entertaining. 

If that happens I'm moving to ......shit, I'm foOKed..

[Guest MattP]

2 minutes ago, Dr The Singh said:

If that happens I'm moving to ......shit, I'm foOKed..

We are both moving to reclaim the Punjab in a Anglo-Indian gay marriage.

[Dr The Singh]

1 minute ago, MattP said:

We are both moving to reclaim the Punjab in a Anglo-Indian gay marriage.

Were defo foOKed....

 

I'm the man plus your defo an ugly gay

Edited 17 August 2017 by Dr The Singh
Meh

[Guest MattP]

1 minute ago, Dr The Singh said:

Were defo foOKed....

 

I'm the man plus your defo an ugly gay

Bears we are known as...

[Nick]

16 minutes ago, MattP said:

Good grief, insecure much Swan

 

Do you still think I'm Hitler to describe the Westminster attacker as an Islamist? 

 

I can't wait to see you put this effort into defending those who want us all to live under devout Christian rule. Going to be entertaining. 

 

 

Thats not what happened but you know that.

 

I joking called you Adolf for your immigration policy based on cultural similarity - which after 3 times of asking you haven't responded with a criteria.

 

[Dr The Singh]

5 hours ago, Swan Lesta said:

 

I've no idea if thats what it would look like - ISIS aren't exactly honouring protected people or citizens are they... And thats for me where fundamentalism and Islamist beliefs don't necessarily have to involve militant violence or terror say as a precursor.

 

The Qur'an and surahs are quite clear, I suppose Dubai would be probably the most relaxed situation?

[Nick]

1 minute ago, Dr The Singh said:

The Qur'an and surahs are quite clear, I suppose Dubai would be probably the most relaxed situation?

Would I still be allowed to drink in hotels?

[Dr The Singh]

3 minutes ago, Swan Lesta said:

Would I still be allowed to drink in hotels?

Me and you may also be able to hold hands on hotels, if you wore a burka

[Nick]

Just now, Dr The Singh said:

Me and you may also be able to hold hands on hotels, if you wore a burka

We've done that in the Swan and Rushes and the Font before now and it just confused your kids - I'm over it.

[Webbo]

38 minutes ago, Dr The Singh said:

Were defo foOKed....

 

I'm the man plus your defo an ugly gay

I've met you, are you sure Matt's the ugly one?

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Swan Lesta said:

 

 

Sorry but Murray's plans for less Islam and to reduce immigration plays totally in to the hands of terrorist groups - he's got it all wrong and has had for a really long time. 

For what it's worth, I happen to think this is rubbish.

 

Anyway, on another subject - a Tory writing in the Guardian about the Tory leadership. Bizarre but true. 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/17/tory-moderniser-free-market-social-conservatism-jacob-rees-mogg 

[Nick]

16 minutes ago, toddybad said:

For what it's worth, I happen to think this is rubbish.

Did you hear him on the radio the other month?

 

 

 

[Dr The Singh]

6 minutes ago, Swan Lesta said:

Did you hear him on the radio the other month?

 

 

 

He was on BBC Asia network giving his love for Malkit Singh

[Nick]

6 minutes ago, Dr The Singh said:

He was on BBC Asia network giving his love for Malkit Singh

Yeah I'm sure he's massive player on the Bhangra scene. They call him the Punjabi Murray.

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Swan Lesta said:

Did you hear him on the radio the other month?

 

 

 

No. 

For somebody who is pretty left leaning, I am much more 'centre' (at least) on some of these issues. Personally think it is time for a reality check for some people in this country. I want openness and inclusivity but I also don't want to pretend that lighting a candle and signing Don't Look Back in Anger is actually doing anything to solve a very serious issue.