What frightens extremists?

[Hibbyradge]

http://p.twimg.com/A5J6_CcCYAAdZWQ.jpg

[steakbake]

Extremism exists through ignorance and education is the key. People who lead extremism can be educated themselves, but they willfully pursue their agenda. What frightens them more than most is their potential converts having more enquiring and therefore open minds.

It's not armies and police forces that should be being deployed in places like Afghanistan or the tribal regions of Pakistan, but classrooms and educators.

Same goes for here in the UK. You can't change people's lives by punishing them through the benefits system. Labour thought it was by giving everyone degrees. The Tories think its by creating schools of excellence to create elites. People need basic opportunity, self direction and to create aspirations for themselves. Folks are written off too easily by the existing structures and a one-size-fits-all approach, looking to replicate the middle classes. For some people, success in their education is learning literacy, some skills to take to the work place and being able to make good choices in the direction of their lives, despite some of the chaos around them: building self confidence and self worth. You don't need a posh academy or a university degree for that.

[Phil D. Rolls]

http://p.twimg.com/A5J6_CcCYAAdZWQ.jpg

Is the answer "giants"? They certainly scare me.

[da-robster]

Sort of tangential here, but this article is very interesting: http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Muslim_Statistics_%28Terrorism%29

Basically suicide bombers are less likely to be illiterate farmers than sons of oil barons. There were similar patterns in Russia and with people like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and to a lesser extent in the UK (just look at the backgrounds of some of the leaders of the communist party). It's also not a coincidence that in places like Tunisia and Egypt graduate employment rates are actually lower than non graduate rates.
A combination of low social mobility and falling living standards for everybody apart from the elite is a recipe for disaster.

[Phil D. Rolls]

Sort of tangential here, but this article is very interesting: http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Muslim_Statistics_%28Terrorism%29

Basically suicide bombers are less likely to be illiterate farmers than sons of oil barons. There were similar patterns in Russia and with people like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and to a lesser extent in the UK (just look at the backgrounds of some of the leaders of the communist party). It's also not a coincidence that in places like Tunisia and Egypt graduate employment rates are actually lower than non graduate rates.
A combination of low social mobility and falling living standards for everybody apart from the elite is a recipe for disaster.

Poor people are brought up to accept their lot. Middle class kids are brought up to be aspirational. When they perceive a barrier to their goals, they re more driven, and better educated, to chalenge the status quo. Lastly, with a network of influential friends, they are harder to suppress. That's what my history teacher said t school.

[LeighLoyal]

Literacy has had a pretty devastating affect. The Madrasas in Pakistan alone have grown from about around 100 in 1940 to over 40,000 in 2008. Chart your Islamic terrorism explosion from that. Ignorance by rote.

[--------]

Literacy has had a pretty devastating affect. The Madrasas in Pakistan alone have grown from about around 100 in 1940 to over 40,000 in 2008. Chart your Islamic terrorism explosion from that. Ignorance by rote.


Literacy - teaching people to read - is NOT the problem. Would you rather have Muslim children unable to read for themselves?

Education is about giving children the skills to cope with life, to earn a living, to develop themselves as human beings in the fullest sense of the words. Teach a child to read, write, and count, and you've given that child the basic equipment for life. Teach a child to think for himself or herself, and you've given that child the equipment to grow and mature into an independent, free woman or man.

It's when the school steps over the line dividing 'education' from 'indoctrination' that the trouble starts. I think it's fair to say that only a minority - a small minority - of schools in Pakistan step over that line.

"Madrassa" is simply the Arabic word for "school". Not all madrassas are hotbeds of Islamic extremism; not all madrassas are training-grounds for terrorism. Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich may think they are. Mitt Romney almost certainly agrees with them. Barack Obama quietly goes along with them. But a madrassa is simply a school.

The word is closely related to the Hebrew word 'midrash', meaning (guess what?) - 'school'.

The increase in the number of madrassas in Pakistan over the last 70 years is actually an increase in the provision of basic education rather than an increase in Islamic extremism.

It's arguable that the way in which the US school system represents (or rather, misrepresents) the history of the USA is just as dishonest and disabling in its own way as any propaganda peddled by totalitarian states in their school systems.

'The American Dream'? 'Manifest Destiny'? 'From Sea To Shining Sea'? There's been a lot of blood shed and lives destroyed by those three 'ideals'.

Read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James W Loewen.

And you wouldn't believe some of the things I was taught about the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution.

Or maybe you do ...

[CropleyWasGod]

"Madrassa" is simply the Arabic word for "school". Not all madrassas are hotbeds of Islamic extremism; not all madrassas are training-grounds for terrorism, even if Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich think they are.
.

:agree: I shudder every time I hear that word used in a pejorative sense.

[(((Fergus)))]

:agree: I shudder every time I hear that word used in a pejorative sense.

We should shudder about those madrassas that are used not as places of study and enquiry (as in the Hebrew "midrash"), but as places of brainwashing and incitement. What really frightens extremists most is their own darkness and perversity and they seek to blot it out through indoctrination in some "holy" rite. Where it become a problem is when they seek to exorcise those demons by attacking them not within themselves, but in other people, or rather in people on whom they have projected those demons. In the process, they live out the very darkness and perversity they believe they are escaping from. They give themselves a "holy" seal of approval for what is an utterly diabolical intent.

[hibsbollah]

Depends on which extremist youre talking about. In the case of the odious Melanie Phillips (a regular on BBC Question Time), its Obama that scares 'em.

http://melaniephillips.com/america-goes-into-the-darkness

[--------]

Depends on which extremist youre talking about. In the case of the odious Melanie Phillips (a regular on BBC Question Time), its Obama that scares 'em.

http://melaniephillips.com/america-goes-into-the-darkness


Wow! So we'd have been safer with Romney and HIS LDS/Aryan Brotherhood/NeoCon/Tea Party cronies?

I find that rather hard to believe .... :rolleyes:

[Haymaker]

Depends on which extremist youre talking about. In the case of the odious Melanie Phillips (a regular on BBC Question Time), its Obama that scares 'em.

http://melaniephillips.com/america-goes-into-the-darkness


****ing hell... She's a ****!

[--------]

****ing hell... She's a ****!


You might very well say that ... :agree: