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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32927 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Quran damaged at school recorded as ‘hate incident’ by police

The home secretary has expressed concern after the police recorded a “hate incident” at a school where four pupils allegedly caused “slight damage” to a copy of the Quran.

West Yorkshire police became involved at Kettlethorpe High School, Wakefield, after a Year 10 pupil said to be autistic was told to bring in a copy of the Islamic holy book by friends after losing a video game. It was damaged, allegedly after being dropped in a busy corridor.Four pupils were suspended for a week and the police intervened as false rumours spread that it had been set alight.

Inspector Andy Thornton addressed concerned parents at the local mosque and told them the damage was being treated as a “hate incident”.

Tudor Griffiths, the headmaster, said there had been “no malicious intent” but the pupils’ actions were “unacceptable”. Wakefield council said the Quran had suffered “slight damage”.

You can also watch this hostage apology video from the mother, apologizing, earnestly explaining Islamic dogma while wearing a hijab like she's some Dhimmi. I don't know how to put my contempt for that entire situation into words.

This to me seems like more confirmation of by now an ancient belief of mine: being an alleged victim group that's willing to kill people is worth more than the sum of its parts. If everyone just admitted that the fear here was that Muslims would riot, hurt the family or just generally misbehave there would be no doubt that what happened was deeply ominous and the police - and everyone - would have to pick a side.

However, because there's the patina of victimhood, actions that should be deeply worrisome instead get to be written off as defending against racism. A Swedish man being able to reliably trigger violence by burning a book is somehow not a worrying signal from the minority group, it's about Swedish "far right" types. We wasted a lot of time debating whether Charlie Hebdo was "Islamophobic" , as if it had anything to do with the price of tea in China.

The desire to cast all ethnic groups as oppressors and victims prevents basic analysis here.

The standard argument I've seen against hate speech law is that we can't punish what's in people's minds. But maybe we can add: you can't trust people to treat minorities and their differences sensibly. As in: we're apparently doomed to conflate "racism" against "gooks" for owning all of the grocery stories with being worried about groups that can be reliably triggered into illiberalism and, even worse, outgroup violence by not-even violations of medieval norms (this isn't the first time that straight lies have been used to enflame this issue)

And nobody can do anything with this information. Cause it's racist.

And yes, I think it possible the police acted quickly (and out of proportion) to forestall the sort of drama we've seen elsewhere when Islamic norms are violated. Hell, it might have even been to the boy's benefit for people to hear that the police are on it so they don't seek self-help (until everyone lets it go). But, if that's your local maximum, you're far too close to Pakistan for my liking.

Astafgorilla! this is beyond parody.

Although you could have made that exact same statement about every nudge that got the UK to where it is now and be just as accurate. But that phrase has lost all meaning by now.

Reading through the responses in the common UK subreddit it seems to be unanimous condemnation/shock at this chain of events. Usually, there is some ambiguity that allows the wokes to argue for the Muslims, but that doesn't seem to be evident for this specific case. Nonetheless, I wouldn't hold my breath for anything positive change to arise from this.

The UK really backed themselves into a corner with their Muslim issue, it seems to me they are going to end up like the US where they have to permanently deal with a group of people that hates their guts and causes much mischief but there is absolutely nothing that they can do about it, and given birth rate trends, the Muslims will eventually within a generation or two reach a sizeable enough mass that you can't just beat them into submission like the UK could (totally should) do right now. The silver lining is that many of these problems arise because the non-Muslims have to actually mix and mingle with the Muslims, if they end up becoming like Blacks in the US, they will eventually segregate to the point that both groups are out of sight out of mind for both groups. I am sure quite a few parents updated their priors about Muslims in the UK proceeding this event. Going to take a few more.

This is doubly funny for me, someone who lives in a Muslim country that refused to let in any Syrian refugees and cracks down on any instance of radicalism (within its borders) with the might of the sun. All the west had to do was to deal with radicalism with extreme prejudice and point towards the Muslim Gulf states that do the exact same thing for plausible deniability. But no one said mind viruses can't kill their hosts.

the Muslims will eventually within a generation or two reach a sizeable enough mass that you can't just beat them into submission like the UK could (totally should) do right now

Muslims birthrates are getting lower everywhere but in Britain ? I understand their minority is mostly derived from some very rural part of Pakistan, that's thought of as 'country bumpkins' even in Pakistan, but given even modest pressure from the institutions, they should stop being such a problem.

One thing I absolutely do not understand is, why Britain hasn't banned their first cousin marriage practices, which they do serially, which resulted in a 3% minority being 10 fold overrepresented in the category of severely disabled people. I was told that first cousin marriage, practiced serially is almost the same thing as brother-sister incest.

Optics of warehousing vast amounts of disabled people aside, this is probably harming them as a group in a major way, as inbreeding depresses IQ substantially. (~10 pts was found in inbred Muslim children in India vs their non-inbred Muslim neighbors)

but given even modest pressure from the institutions, they should stop being such a problem.

Yes, this was the counsel of hope that was endlessly given over the years. Basically a "hang tight" to all of the immigration skeptics. It was all supposed to work out (and, cynically, if it doesn't you can't exactly unscramble the eggs).

I don't know if there was ever good reason for believing this, or Europeans just looked across the pond at the integration of Irishmen and Hindu-Americans and assumed it would be the same for them with Muslims.

It's been a few years since I've checked on the issue, but iirc there was an issue in polling of younger Muslims being too or perhaps even more radical than their parents.

There was notable enough illiberalism in polling that public figures originally pushing for limitations on "Islamophobia" had to admit it didn't go as smoothly as expected

It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs. Twenty years ago, when, as chair of the Runnymede Trust, I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims. Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong. We estimated that the Muslim population of the UK would be approaching 2m by 2020. We underestimated by nearly a million. We predicted that the most lethal threat to Muslims would come from racial attacks and social exclusion. We completely failed to foresee the urban conflicts of 2001 that ravaged our northern cities. And of course we didn’t dream of 9/11 and the atrocities in Madrid, Paris, Istanbul, Brussels and London.

For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.

...

It should come as no surprise that Muslim liberals are in despair. They knew all of this long ago. And unlike the political elite and the liberal media, they recognise that British Muslim opinion is hardening against them. The journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has had to seek police protection because of her liberal views, argues that the optimistic belief that time and social contact will naturally lead to the integration of Muslims is mistaken: “You know, we [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed — in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”

Almost the platonic ideal of "act like all minorities are the same then get mugged by reality"

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