Originally Posted by
World's End Stella
I like this bit:
'He is generally regarded as a moderate voice within Islam'
So a moderate voice within our Muslim communities is comfortable qualifying an elderly man being beaten to death with a theological justification. Which sort of illuminates the rather enormous elephant in the room in this whole Islam/Terrorism debate.
Specifically, to what extent is there a correlation between a general culture of intolerance and violence within our Muslim communities, and the more extreme forms of intolerance and violence that we see with ISIS and Al Qaeda? Or to put it in practical terms, do men and women within our Muslim communities who hold homophobic beliefs, who think that women should cover up and not leave the home without a male relative and who support forced marriages (to use but three examples), in some way contribute to the radicalisation of members of their communities? And if so, isn't true that we will only solve this problem when our Muslim communities understand this relationship and work with us to address it?
That or we could just go down the Guardian route and blame Western imperialism, racism and capitalism until we turn blue in the face.