The chair of the Quilliam Foundation, Maajid Nawaz, says the “Muslim patrol” problem will probably get worse.
He compared the Islamist vigilantes to extremists like the far-right Golden Dawn supporters in Greece and right-wing vigilantes in France who ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp.
Countries such as Denmark and Spain have also seen Islamist extremists trying to enforce their own sharia law, he noted.
All were imitating Hitler’s Brownshirts by “enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods,” said Mr Nawaz, who spent years in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group.
What a nightmare.
Such vigilantism is not a new phenomenon in England; it has just been directed against heretical Muslims. One family had their windows smashed and car vandalised because their daughter married a Christian. A politician was barraged with threats and obscenities because she wore trousers.
I’m not sure things will get bad as Greece, though, at least for the moment. I mean – jeez.
Yes, threats and violence from religious extremists trying to enforce “their version of the law” are a nightmare, as anyone who has had to get through them to get to an appointment at Planned Parenthood can testify.
And if the authorities crack down on them, they will start screeching “Persecution! This is why we MUST have these patrols, to protect ourselves from the anti-Muslim police!”
And, unfortunately, we have a very similar thing here in the US: as I recall, there are several Hassidic neighborhoods in New York that have effectively outlawed women from walking on the sidewalks or riding public buses that go through the area.
This is so disappointing! I was hoping this post would be about some resurgence of the Hermetical Order of the Golden Dawn and applying rational skepticism to magical thinking. *sigh*. I am le disappoint
Not so much on the religious-law motivation necessarily, but in the US, if you are x, there are gangs somewhere who will bash you for it.
We had this guy speaking in Ottawa the other day:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2013/02/04/ottawa-gavin-boby-anti-mosque-muslim.html
Having previously heard about the situation in London (from eg. B&W), I can see where he’s coming from, but his approach seems all wrong. It’s not about where you put the mosque, and we don’t want Muslim ghettos any more than we want ultra-Orthodox Jewish ones; it’s about saying firmly to the extremists: the public streets are secular space, your rules do not apply outside your own walls.
This is the context people need to know about in debates over the islamic veil. It’s a source of frustration when people on the left minimize the context going on around the “free, individual choice” to put it on.
I have an idea to help with the problem, and at the same time make happy those who think atheists need to reach out to the religious:
We could donate some lovely big signs along the theme of the Uncle Sam “I Want You” posters, but with a nice picture of Mohammed pointing his finger and saying “I want you infidels and fags and sluts to stay away from this Muslim area.” Then everyone would know where they should or shouldn’t be.
Politicians and the police will do nothing about this in the UK.
The Quillam Foundation are an unreliable source speaking to a right wing newspaper.
Please be skeptical.
The three-stage dialectic of liberalism:
1.) Why not?
2.) What harm could it do?
3.) How we were supposed to know?