georgeob1 wrote:I think Setanta's point above is well-taken. However, middle class Moslems in Britain don't have much in common with the postulated poor, isolated individual in Afghanistan who may indeed have nothing much to lose and few available gains from the modern world. By virtue of their participation in the modern culture and economy of the UK and the choice they made to go there, they have become a part of that society and owe it a measure of allegiance -- which, I believe, is Steve's point.
I have no quarrel with that point of view. I would simply point out that those who have acted as terrorists within the British community of which they are a part have also "lived apart" within that culture, and are often young and impressionable. My point was about the
degree to which fanatics are able to recruit within a culture.
In Afghanistan, few people have much to lose, and recruitment by the Taliban is both easy, continuing and, presently, on the increase. However, consider the neighbor of Afghanistan--Pakistan. The Taliban are so called from an Arabic word which can be rendered in Roman characters as
talib, meaning a seeker, and usually used to denote a student, and more specifically, student in a madrassa. Sheikh Omar and the other leaders of the Taliban were refugees from the socialist regime in Afghanistan, and the subsequent Russian invasion. In Pakistan, they attened madrassas, and became
talib, students, and in the aggregate, the Taliban. (There is more than one Taliban in the world, but i'll leave that aside so as not to muddy the waters.)
Yet the activities of fundamentalist terrorists in Pakistan are very limited. There have been a few assassination attempts against General Musharraf, but only one note-worthy effort which came close. By and large, Musharraf and company are able to keep a lid on fundamentalist militancy in Pakistan for two reasons--they keep out of the tribal areas which border Afghanistan, and most Pakistanis
do have something to lose. Their prosperity may be paltry by western standards--but they are prosperous in comparison to Muslims of the middle east who don't live in oil-rich countries.
Indonesia is a Muslim nation, as is Malaysia. Both countries enjoy a prosperity unequalled in the "non-oil-producing" Muslim nations to the west, and fundamentalist terrorism is very minor, a few incidents, for example, in Indonesia, which, with more than 100,000,000 citizens, is the world's largest Muslim nation.
It would be helpful to examine the proportion of the population of British Muslims who actually constitute a threat of violence. How does that compare to the proportion of, for example, Palestinians who are willing to resort to violence? Fundamentalists won elections in Algeria, but the military were unwilling to give up the fruits of western prosperity, and so overthrew that fundamentalist government by force. For a few years thereafter, there some bombings and shootings--but basically, the majority of the Algerian population enjoys a relative prosperity which has made it difficult for fanatics to recruit large numbers. The military junta in Algeria can keep a lid on their fundamentalist malcontents because not only is there little profit for the average Algerian in violent opposition to the junta, there is a prosperous profit in keeping one's head down and avoiding trouble.
The most dangerous places in the Muslim world are Palestine and Afghanistan, precisely because so much of the population of each has so little to lose. As one examines carefully other nations with significant Muslim populations, one can see the degrees of success of fanatical fundamentalists in recruiting followers and perpetrating violence. It is a terrible, terrible mistake that too many people make in simplistically assuming or stating that all Muslim nations are constituted exactly the same with regard to religiously-motivated fanaticism.
(EDIT: I also meant to point out that assassination attempts against someone like General Musharraf--who is basically a military dictator--would as easily occur in a non-Muslim nation, or in a prosperous nation. It cannot be ascribed solely to Muslim fundamentalism; it is one of the "downsides" to the military dictator career-path.)
