By Damian Thompson
The cabinet is increasingly divided over what to do about Muslims. That has been obvious for some time, and an article in The Economist explains what has gone wrong. It's a subtle and closely argued piece, but I'm in the mood for crude generalisations. Here goes.
Which is the bigger threat - Islamic terrorism or Muslim ghettos? Now, obviously we can't definitively answer that question: if a group of Islamist "radicals" successfully explode a dirty bomb in (say) Manchester city centre, then obviously we will look back and see the fight for social cohesion as a bit of a sideshow. We'll wish we had put more resources into anti-terrorism initiatives.
But, as the Economist article makes clear, the old argument that you fight terrorism by empowering British Muslim "moderates" is looking pretty shaky these days. Predicting who is going to become an Islamic terrorist is as haphazard an enterprise as anything in social science: it's as unreliable as the "psychological profiling" of serial killers, now increasingly recognised as a pseudoscience. Read more ...
The cabinet is increasingly divided over what to do about Muslims. That has been obvious for some time, and an article in The Economist explains what has gone wrong. It's a subtle and closely argued piece, but I'm in the mood for crude generalisations. Here goes.
Which is the bigger threat - Islamic terrorism or Muslim ghettos? Now, obviously we can't definitively answer that question: if a group of Islamist "radicals" successfully explode a dirty bomb in (say) Manchester city centre, then obviously we will look back and see the fight for social cohesion as a bit of a sideshow. We'll wish we had put more resources into anti-terrorism initiatives.
But, as the Economist article makes clear, the old argument that you fight terrorism by empowering British Muslim "moderates" is looking pretty shaky these days. Predicting who is going to become an Islamic terrorist is as haphazard an enterprise as anything in social science: it's as unreliable as the "psychological profiling" of serial killers, now increasingly recognised as a pseudoscience. Read more ...
Source: Telegraph Blogs
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