Extremism, Islam and British appeasement: how Islam has become Britain's "national religion" by default

I've written before about how Islam has slowly encroached into Britain's national imprint, through using the language of "freedom of expression" to defend the interests of its extremists.

As I wrote in that article:
"Islamofascists have been able to preach their violent, undemocratic and pernicious ideas under the protection of "free speech"; at the same time, they have also been allowed to conduct behaviour that could land any British non-Muslim in prison, while claim the right to religious expression; and most subversive of all, have denounced and threatened anyone who criticises their faith, ideas or behaviour with violence"

There are regular stories in the press about this, and another one this week (highlighted by Nick Cohen) displays to what extent the BBC, Britain's national broadcaster, and the Liberal Democrats (part of the government), have succumbed to the will of extremist Islam.

It is as though the very institutions of Britain and its ruling politicians have given up on the idea of real, universal, freedom of expression: freedom of expression is dying as an idea in Britain because no-one in authority believes it is worth fighting for, at least when it comes to Islam.

This seems to be how "freedom of expression" is defined in Britain these days: the state will defend your freedom of expression, unless your point of view questions something about Islam. Thus Islam holds the unique and vaunted position in The UK of being the only religion people are terrified of offending.

In this way, it has become the "default" religion of The UK, by virtue of its unassailable status.

A state within a state?

From a practical point of view, then, extremist Islam has been given almost free rein in The UK. While the police and intelligence services may closely monitor the more radical parts of Muslim society in Britain as part of the "War On Terror", on a day-to-day basis, the authorities do not interfere with the actions of the Muslim community.

On the surface, this may seem a good thing, but this also means that the authorities have been turning a blind eye to cultural practices that are clearly illegal in British law, and would get any non-Muslim in conversation with the police if they repeated the same behaviour.

When I talk about "cultural practices", I'm talking about domestic violence that goes unreported by battered wives; arranged (and underage) marriage that is got around in the Muslim community by being organised in Pakistan rather than in Britain; marriage between relatives, that creates children with deformities and cognitive dysfunction; there was the famous case of the "rape ring" in the Greater Manchester area, which suggests an endemic culture of misogyny; there is the incendiary rhetoric that goes on in the mosque and in the community (the police are paid to monitor this, however); and finally, the idea that all Muslims' first loyalty is to their faith, their family, and only lastly their country.

While the danger of the last point can be over-stated (if you compare this to the "Red Scare" back in the day), the effect that extremist Islam has had on British culture in the past ten years has been noticeable and undeniable. The policies of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey have been called "creeping Islamisation", but in a different way the same could be said of life in Britain.

Assigning blame

Ten years ago, for example, there was no stigma attached to criticising (or simply discussing) some aspects of Islam. In the light of the 9/11 attacks, shining a strong spotlight on Islam seemed like only the most natural thing in the world.

In Britain, this "critical eye" seemed not to last very long, though. Because Britain had had a culture of tolerance, its defenders said, it was unfair to overly-blame "every Muslim" for the terrorism of its extremists. This is a fair point, but at the same time every "ordinary" Muslim has a moral responsibility to stand up to the extremists and pick apart their false arguments and dangerous rhetoric. This has not really happened.

So on one hand the Muslim community has shown weakness as a whole towards its own radical brethren, and thus allowed the radicals to hijack the faith and hold the rest hostage. On the other, some in the British establishment have held up the historical "culture of tolerance" as a sign that Britain didn't really have "a problem" with Islam and its Muslim population; unlike, say, France.

This is complacent and it misses a crucial point, though. Historically, the wave of Muslim South Asians who came to Britain after the Second World War to fill in a weakness in the British economy and labour force: in other words, the arrival of these populations to Britain was a sign of Britain's fundamental weakness and failure of its Imperial model. The empire had collapsed in on itself, almost literally, from a population point of view.

I'm not saying this was a mistake; simply a sign of the times. However, it is possible that the relative weakness of the British state after the Second World War was simply storing up problems for later. While those South Asian immigrants who arrived were subjected to local prejudice, racism and (sometimes) worse for decades, from an official government point of view, they were allowed to live, culturally and religiously-speaking, much the same way as before.
And here begins "the problem" that the British establishment refuses to accept it created. The British government, by the Sixties and Seventies, believed it was creating something like a "multi-cultural" nation. But it some crucial cultural respects, especially in regards to the Muslim community, it wasn't: it was creating mono-cultural ghettos in towns and cities with sizeable Muslim populations.

When "multiculturalism" goes wrong

This form of so-called "multiculturalism" was mostly a sham when it came to the Muslim community, because they either tended to be encouraged to move to post-industrial towns in the North, or to poor inner city areas in larger cities, such as Birmingham and Leicester, to name two. And when immigrants are not encouraged to integrate, but allowed to stay together, the result is a closed-off community. When you introduce religion into the mix, you have a potential time-bomb on your hands, as Britain has seen post-9/11.

By the Nineties, "multiculturalism" had become part of the establishment's "PC" campaign, so that by the late Nineties, the Muslim community was one of many parts of Britain's "multicultural tapestry" that became "Cool Britannia". Britain was "cool" because it allowed different cultures and religions to freely exist without government sanction, or so it thought.

This brings us to the present day, where the British tolerance for "the other" has become almost a fetishisation in parts of the establishment, while the Muslim community has become increasingly dysfunctional. I say dysfunctional, but what I really mean is that the extremists have seized the banner for the whole of the Muslim community. A combination of weakness within the Muslim community, and the British establishment's weakness for allowing "culture" to trump freedom of expression (or even the proper application of the law), have brought us to the current situation.

It is not "multiculturalism" that has brought about this situation: it is the state actively allowing (even encouraging) mass mono-culturalism in some parts of Britain for decades, then congratulating itself on its own "tolerance".

Real multiculturalism does exist in some cities in Britain: places where there are dozens of nationalities living in the same neighbourhood. This is what multiculturalism really means: when people exchange their cultures freely while living in a third country, for example. But this tends to be where Muslims do not make up a noticeable chunk of the local population.

When you have a weak state and a weak community, you allow the social conditions for extremism to breed, take root, and finally control others through fear.

This is what has happened in Britain over the last ten years.

Psychopathy, Capitalism, and the definition of evil

What it means to be "evil", or carry out "evil" acts, is a morally-loaded question, but the most generally-accepted answer is that "evil" behaviour deliberately harms other people, and humanity in general.

It is commonplace to describe people such as Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, and Pol Pot as "evil", because they deliberately sought to kill and persecute people. But what is more specific is that these individuals had a skewed view of morality that allowed them to justify acts that any sane person would instantly call evil and immoral. In other words, these individuals were all psychopaths, because their view of morality was either absent entirely, or so far from the norm as to be unrecognisable.

I talked recently about two types of sadism. Firstly, the sadism of an amoral psychopath, who makes decisions based purely on their relative merit to themselves, regardless of the consequence on others; this is simple amorality, where "morality" doesn't enter the equation, and decisions are a simple and heartless cost-benefit "calculation".
Secondly, I talked about a more malignant sadism, which combines "sadism" with "pleasure": the enjoyment of others' suffering. This is another form of psychopathic sadism, but where the suffering the psychopaths causes is to create personal satisfaction (like Hitler's persecution of the Jews, or OBL's desire for "jihad" against the West).

I bring this point up again to clarify what I therefore see as two forms of "evil" (or sadism) that exist, and how they are implemented; one whose basis is largely ideological, and another that it largely emotional.

Amoral Sadism as an Ideology

It's said by some that Capitalism is "evil". But what this really means is that Capitalism is amoral. There is no "moral code" written into the economic theory, because the purpose of Capitalism is the pursuit of profit. While some have made some mealy-mouthed attempts at justifying its effect on humanity, its most famous contemporary ideological thinker, Ayn Rand, was much more straightforward in the clarity of her logic. And in spite of Capitalism's obvious amorality, she counter-intuitively argued that Capitalism was the only moral form of economic ideology because it best represented the principle of human freedom at its zenith.

Rand's perspective turned morality on its head, as well as inside out, as I've said before. For Rand, any ideology that imposed limits on a person's personal freedom of choice was immoral. Using this thinking, it made almost all government actions immoral by definition, except for the role of defence against invasion and applying an agreed rule of law. Paying taxes for any other government service, therefore, was an immoral act, according to Rand, as it forced people to pay for services they didn't knowingly choose (as government would here choose how to spend the money, not the individual); in other words, tax was equated with theft.
Not only that, but Rand said that altruism was evil, because any "help" from outside imposed another's will on individuals, and took away the chance for someone to find money by their own means (as was therefore psychologically damaging to a person's self-confidence). So not only does this ideology pit the individual against the collective will, it also turns selfishness into a virtue, and charity into a vice.

Rand's view was that improvement in society came about only through the actions and decisions of individuals, and that the only rational way of living was to view everything through self-interest. Doing things for the benefit of others was not only illogical, in her view; it was also immoral. Like the cynicism of a psychopath, Rand believe that a rational person would only do something if it was for their benefit; the only "morality" of a decision was if it was advantageous or not, not what its effects on others would be. This is how Capitalism is comparable with amoral Sadism: Rand made Capitalism's mindset equivalent to that of a psychopath.

In Rand's view, poverty caused as a result of Capitalism was therefore inevitable, but also government or collective action to alleviate poverty was wrong because it took away the individual's chance for self-improvement. Better that a poor person learn through their own errors than be given a hand-out. Rand saw American Capitalism as the exemplar of this system, as it had thrived on the back of unrestrained Capitalism, but also fed an ethic of proud self-reliance into even the poorest.

The irony here is that it makes the poor celebrate the rich as Ubermensch, while the rich have no incentive to care about the poor.

The supposed "ethics" of Rand's ideology (Objectivism) are simple cause-and-effect: a self-reliant person in a self-reliant system would quickly want to improve himself, as his empty belly would quickly remind him. For all Rand's clever words and counter-intuitive logic, the system she is advocating is only one step higher than anarchy, except that the government maintains basic law and order. With the rich already secured in this system, it is therefore almost equivalent to the preconditions for Fascism.

Rand was a vociferous critic of Communism (as well as Fascism, even though her ideology has resulted in more-or-less the same effect). But what Rand shares with Communism is an amorally Sadistic mindset. What the CEO of a multi-national company and Stalin have in common is an amoral focus on goals. Whether the goal is to maximise profit or maximise grain production, the mindset is the name; the only difference is in the detail of the method. While a sane CEO wouldn't set about systematically eliminating his workforce (like Stalin did when he slaughtered millions of rebellious peasants), he certainly wouldn't flinch at firing them if it was financially prudent to do so.
Besides, in many ways, a private company is no different from a dictatorship. The most important thing is keeping the stock prices up and the shareholders happy; both these are achieved through the maximisation of profits and minimising costs. Morality doesn't come into it, unless it's advantageous for the company's image (when "enlightened self-interest" comes into the equation). All that differs are the details; the principles are the same. This is where the skills gained from business become relevant in the field of politics and government.

Malignant Sadism as a mass emotion 

I've said that Amoral Sadism, as a form of evil, is evident in Capitalism as well as Communism. Malignant Sadism, on the other hand, is a more emotional and hate-filled form of evil. While Amoral Sadism is cold and heartless, Malignant Sadism is angry and vicious, filled with blood-lust.

This form of "evil" comes from a more primal root; the love of the self and the hatred of the "other", as well as a fetishisation of violence itself. Bound up in this is the sense of victimhood, tugging on the emotional aspects of the brain. Whereas Amoral Sadism is more ideological, Malignant Sadism as a mass emotion stems from the ideas of nationalism and religion.

"Morality" in this form is interpreted in more emotional terms, so therefore requires little intellectual justification. Amoral Sadism is able to bypass this issue of "right and wrong" by saying that it is irrelevant; this type of mass Malignant Sadism bypasses the intellectual issues over "right and wrong" based on simple nationality and creed.

Hitler is the most famous example of this in the 20th century, using nationalism as an excuse for evil. More recently, massacres have occurred in Rwanda based on nationalism, as well as in the former Yugoslavia, based on nationality and religion.

Then there are the countless religious wars over the centuries, justifying evil in the name of God. Osama Bin Laden is but the latest example of this, as Al-Qaeda and its affiliates use the religious scripture as justification for mass murder, deprivation and tyranny. The Catholic Inquisition was responsible for mass torture, and so on.

Nationalism and religious fanaticism are the main exemplars of mass Malignant Sadism, as they are both inherently narcissistic creeds, and enjoy visiting violence upon their enemies. For them, violence against the enemy is righteous, and therefore to be encouraged and praised. This is the difference between this form of "evil" and amorally-sadistic Capitalism, for example.

But evil will always find a name for itself.

Why religion and politics don't mix: From Northern Ireland to Syria, The Arab Spring and Turkey

I wrote an article last year about the relationship between intelligence and free thought. While religion provides the function of giving a moral code to humanity, it also takes away from humanity the ability to arrive at a judgement using their own intellect. When that judgement is a political one, the influence of religion should be looked at even more critically.   

The link between church and state (or religion and politics) has been severed in Europe for as long as anyone can care to remember. In America, that link is more nuanced, but still there on paper, if not always clearly there on the floor of Congress.
Secularism has been established in the West as the method to separate religious teachings from the official business of government.
In the UK, the most recent example of an openly-religious leader was former PM, Tony Blair, who waited until he stood down as premier before converting to Catholicism; then again, there were his infamous shared prayer-meetings with former US President, George W Bush, which were ridiculed in the British press. In a secular state, when a premier's private religious views become openly-displayed habits, ridicule is probably the best reply to remind a politician that religion is a private matter outside of the realm of government. So he then made sure to keep his religious sentiments more to himself.

Staying in the UK, the problem of what happens when when religion and politics fuse together is seen daily across the water from London, in Northern Ireland. The clash of two Christian branches, Catholicism and Protestantism, led to a sectarian conflict. After the thirty years of "The Troubles", the religious divides are as sharp as ever, even if the violence has subsided. The politics of Northern Ireland are divided as always; the Catholics voting one way, the Protestants another.
Not long ago, the province was ruled by Rev. Ian Paisley, a hardline Protestant priest. While his rhetoric had undergone a massive toning-down compared with his earlier days, Paisley had been the recipient of the polarisation of the two sides. Until the late '90s, when the "peace process" had begun in earnest, the main Protestant party was the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP); after this point, Protestant views became more intransigent against surrendering their position in favour of the Catholics, and flocked to the more hardline Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), represented by Paisley. So for a time in the 2000s, Paisley became the provincial head of government, in tandem with his Catholic deputy (and former terrorist) Martin McGuinness.  More recently, trouble has flared up again from the Protestants, who rioted as a result of a compromise with the Catholics over the flying of the British flag from government buildings in the province. But the UUP are finished as a political force, and the hardline DUP still hold sway over the Protestant vote in Northern Ireland, demonstrating that religion is often anathema to moderation.
For Brits who live on "the mainland", the politics of Northern Ireland is an unfathomable mess.

The same can be said of Syria, but in this, Syria's "troubles" are far more extensive, horrifying, and potentially explosive.
Like its neighbour Iraq, Syria is a religious melting-pot of four or five major religious and ethnic denominations: Sunni Muslims, Alawite (Shia) Muslims, Druze (Muslims), and Christians (of a few different Orthodox churches). And there are also the Kurds, too, who are a significant ethnic minority in the east. Given the delicate religious mix, it has seemed sensible that secularism would be the best way to avoid a sectarian war. That had been the case during the French Mandate between the First and Second World War, and also after Syria became independent.
Things became more complicated (and a ticking time-bomb of resentment) when Hafez Al-Assad, an Alawite, took power in the sixties. Although he officially continued the secular (and quasi-socialist) form of government, he began to fill the government with fellow-Alawites, who were far outnumbered by Sunni Muslims in the general population.
This reached a head when there was a Sunni "uprising" in the early eighties, which was brutally suppressed, and also suppressed to the outside world. It was only finally after the "Arab Spring" in 2011, when Hafez's son, Bashar, was in power, that the Sunnis were able to properly make their voices heard against the persecution and maltreatment from the Alawite-led "secular" government.
The problem with the Assad regime in Syria was not that it was secular; it was that it was clearly not secular, but favoured the Alawites (and to an extent, the Christians) at the expense of the Sunni majority. The rebellion against Bashar Al-Assad's government then quickly took on a religious dimension, which has broadened ever since, attracting the attention of Al-Qaeda-linked fighters to the Sunni Muslim side. The original aims - to make Syria a "free" country - has become confused amidst the conflicting aims of two major factions fighting on the ground against the regime, as well as the conflicting aims of the foreign powers (the West and the Gulf States) that supply them.
The rebels' political aim of "freedom" has now become merged with the religious aim of creating a Sunni Muslim-majority state, which has spurred-on horrifying levels of violence and reprisals on both sides.
For the West, the politics of Syria has become and unfathomable mess.

Thus in Northern Ireland, thus in Syria.

The "Arab Spring" that first sprouted in Tunisia, which toppled regimes there and in neighbouring Libya and Egypt (as well as, indirectly, Yemen), was meant to be about freedom and democracy.
These states had been ruled for decades by secular dictatorships. During the Cold War, America tolerated this as it feared what the result would be if the Arabs gained the right to vote with their religious conscience. Iran was a short lesson that matched its greatest fears: what had originally been a "democratic" revolution against Iranian Shah, turned into an Islamic revolution when anti-Shah secularists, lacking a clear leader of their own, sided with the Muslim conservatives to install Ayatollah Khomeini as an "apolitical" leader.

The "Arab Spring" took its inspiration from contemporary Turkey, which had put some of the West's fears of mass Islamic revolution across the Middle East to rest.
While the Arab world had been under the thumb of American-backed secular dictatorships, Turkey had been a secular democracy since the around the Second World War, or thereabouts. To be fair, its form of "democracy" was far from perfect, and in some areas bore little relation to the West, such the strong weight that the military had over how the country was governed (and intervened directly when it felt necessary). Furthermore, grievances by ethnic and religious minorities tended to be swept under the carpet in the name of unity.
But some conservative Muslims felt that for too long Turkey's secular democracy was not properly representative of its religious values, and that the various official parties had brushed their views under the carpet like with other marginalised groups. One person who held this view was Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had been istanbul's mayor during the nineties.
Knowing how Turkey's political system effectively banned religious parties from parliament, he created the AK ("Justice and Development") Party, which was not overtly religious; conservatively Muslim in values, but capitalist in economics and tolerant and pro-European in outlook (or so it seemed). Once his party came to power in 2002, he emphasized the need for "democratic" reforms that broadened freedom of (religious) expression; similarly, he sought to "democratise" Turkey by removing the influence of the army. It was this, and the steps to improve Turkey's economy, that earned him the respect of the West. It was for these reasons that the West had felt reassured by the "Arab Spring's" inspiration from Turkey.

We know now that this story does not end well. As in Turkey, as in The Arab Spring.

While Erdogan in Turkey was "democratising" the country, the West was wilfully ignoring the real purpose for the "reforms", while also ignoring the obvious signs over the years of creeping authoritarianism and Islamification, as I've explained before.
The same process can be seen in the Middle East, post-Arab Spring. While Arab states are ruled by AK Party-like groups, they make the claim that because they are the largest party, it means they have a mandate to implement Islamic policy. Thus they subvert the purpose of democracy for religious purposes to mean Islamic majoritarianism. All those who therefore do not subscribe to a religious government are therefore against the popular will.
The hideous irony is that two years on from the Arab Spring, with his reaction to the Gezi Park protests, Erdogan has finally been recognised by the West as the religious authoritarian he was all along, while using the masquerade of democracy to achieve his aims; and now the Arab Spring bears all the hallmarks of following the same pattern as Erdogan's "Turkish Spring" at the ballot box in 2002.

This is another example of why religion and politics don't mix. The result is often ugly.

Pakistan is another example of what happens when you have religious parties in a (supposedly) democratic system. Politicians then start using religion as a weapon against their enemies; the same has been done in the past in neighbouring India during the rule of the Hindu nationalist BJP. Religion was used as a weapon there by Hindu politicians to blame Muslims; the result was massacres and the destruction of religious sites.

Let the religious leaders stick to the religion, in the confines of their religious places. Let politicians stick to the politics, in the dull confines of their drab government buildings.
Let the religious leaders deal with personal morality, and the politicians deal with social policy.
And never the two should meet!

Censorship, religion, liberalism and the West

I've recently been reading the excellent book by Nick Cohen called "You Can't Read This Book"; though a more accurate title would be "You Should Read This Book".

Cohen tackles the long-overlooked issue of censorship in the modern era; specifically in the last twenty-five years since the publication of Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses". He focuses on censorship based on fear of reprisal from religious groups (including Islamists and Hindu extremists); he also looks at the ways that the rich and powerful use their influence to silence critics (in the workplace as well as in the media), in particular how the UK's absurd libel laws are abused to silence unwanted publications, and use such crippling financial punishments to keep others quiet.

As Cohen points out, we naively think that we are living in an unprecedented age of freedom. But there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

It's worth remembering what "freedom of speech" really means in the West, and what is needed to maintain it. "Freedom of speech" means you are free to say what you like: criticise, lambast, or insult, if the mood suits you. If a person doesn't like what you say, they are free to reply in a like mind. As long as what you say is not openly dishonest, "freedom of speech" means exactly that: the freedom to say what you like.
Of course, we are all human. If you say what you really think all the time, you may quickly run out of friends and get into fights with strangers. But when you live in a country that abides by the principle of freedom of speech, hearing things you don't like from time to time is the price you pay. As the saying goes: if you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen.

If you can't handle people's criticism, then go somewhere where you won't be criticised.

It is this basic principle that comes to mind when I think about the frenzy of hate that was first stirred by the publication of "The Satanic Verses", and more recently by the Danish cartoons that poked fun at Mohammed and Islamic Fundamentalism.
The rise of Islamic Fundamentalism put the West's liberal values to the test. The vast majority of Muslims in the West are moderate; many of those are non-practising Muslims born in the West, or brought up in the West, who have little in common with the way Islam is practised in the Middle East or Pakistan. But Islamic extremism in the West is a more recent phenomenon, one that has grown in the last twenty years or so, often as the children of Muslim immigrants became seduced by the simplicity of the "old culture".
This reverence of the "old culture" in Islam is a simple reversion to the tenets of Sharia law and a literal understanding of the Koran. There is no room for compromise; you either obey or are an infidel. In this mentality, Western liberalism was the enemy: "freedom of speech" was therefore an enemy of Islam.

The publication of "The Satanic Verses" was the first time that the liberalism and "free speech" in the modern era were tested by the reactionary forces of Islamic Fundamentalism, and were found sorely lacking. In his novel, Rushdie, in the middle of a contemporary tale about South Asians in Britain, he took a look at the origins of Islam, and drew his own conclusions. For doing that, a "fatwa" was pronounced upon him by Ayatollah Khomeini: in effect a declaration of war by Iran's supreme leader against the person of Salman Rushdie.
The liberal West's reaction was two-fold: publishers were terrified of publishing works that might be deemed offensive to Islam (which could mean almost anything that was not openly supportive or sympathetic); and Western liberals turned on those who were willing to speak their minds on the injustices of Islam, called them "racists", or criticised those authors for putting the lives of the wider public under threat by their irresponsible actions.

This tendency by liberals to misrepresent and black-mark those who are still willing to hold up the values of free speech is the most shameful way in which the West has turned its value of "free speech" on its head. For the meaning of "free speech" for the last twenty years, especially from some aspects of the liberal elite, has come to mean tolerating the views of those who wish to destroy and kill them. This might be justifiable if it meant that the liberal elite were at least free to equally deride and discredit the intolerant and hateful words of the Islamic Fundamentalism they indulge, but they were not.
The traumatic experience of Salman Rushdie's "fatwa" left the West's liberal elite too terrified to challenge the reactionary forces of Islamism, as they still are today. Thus it has given the extremists the "proof" that the liberal West was soft and decadent, there for the taking. If no-one in the West was ready to intellectually fight for its core values of free speech, while at the same time indulging those of Islamic extremism, what did that say for how strong they thought of their own?

Islamic Fundamentalism has grown around the world, and in the West in particular, on the back of the idea that Muslims are victims to a Zionist conspiracy, and that the West is a decadent and morally vacuous society in league with the Zionists. In this mindset, it makes "Zionism" and the West legitimate targets. If the West is to destroy this perception, its own values must be restored and fought for on the intellectual battlefield.

"Freedom of speech" is one of the West's most integral values. As said before, this means accepting hearing things that you won't like. To act violently whenever someone pokes fun at you or criticises you is not the act of an adult living in a civilised society: it is the act of a petulant child.
Islamists living in the West who are offended by cartoons that make fun of their religion are therefore entirely missing the point of living in the West. If they do not like, they always can choose to live where they know their views will not be challenged. In fact, it would be fair to say that for the West to recapture the full value of "free speech", such outraged Islamists should be encouraged to do so; the alternative is to create a state within a state where Islamists have complete control over their religion, and no-one is able to challenge them under threat of death. To an extent, in the UK in particular, this already exists in faith schools that clearly flout the basic tenets of Western values; possibly even the law itself. When there are imams that live in the UK that encourage violence against "infidels" what they are really saying is: I do not accept the values and laws of the UK. This is what the law, police and prison is for.

If religious extremists (of any faith) who live in the UK cannot accept criticism and advocate violence against Britons, they have no place in a free society. It is as simple as that.

The views here are not based on racism; and they are certainly not based on right-wing conservatism. The points made here are simply about free speech and rationalism. It is irrational and self-defeating to have a society based on free speech that is terrified of speaking freely about Islam, or any other religion. Similarly, it is irrational and self-defeating to have a section of a free society (such as Islamic Fundamentalists) that are against freedom.

The irony is that Islamic Fundamentalists come the the UK and other Western nations in order to take advantage of freedoms unavailable in their own country. The best method to fight against Fundamentalism is education and intellectually challenging its ignorant and prejudiced points of view. This is what should be done in countries such as Pakistan, as well as in towns and cities in the UK where Fundamentalism is growing in Muslim communities.
Where this method fails, the law should swiftly step in to prevent female exploitation, hate crime and worse.

Your Will Is Not Your Own: why intelligence is linked to free thought

I recently read a Daily Mail article that talked about Canadian study linking prejudice and conservative thinking with people that have had lower intellectual capabilities as a child, here.

Am I surprised by the link? No, not really. It doesn't take a genius to work out that reactionary politics is a draw for those who look for simplistic explanations and easy solutions.

For an obvious example, there is a reason why the left-wing is more sympathetic towards the unemployed that the right. Norman Tebbitt, the infamous vanguard of the Thatcherite right, said that unemployed people were lazy; they didn't have a job because they couldn't be bothered looking for one, his own father, when out of work "got on his bike and looked for a job".

Clearly, life is more complex than that. While it's true that there are always a small percentage of people who genuinely are work-idle, the vast majority are unemployed due to a wide number of social and economic factors. People who are left-wing tend to see this; people on the right, often don't.

The same thinking goes for poverty: the left-wing cites the huge number of social and economic factors involved that can create and exacurbate poverty; the right may well just as well say people are poor because they lack the motivation to better themselves.

I could go on. Immigration is another famous example. The conservative right claims that immigrants take away jobs that would normally be available to natives; forgetting the fact that most immigrants do the jobs that natives usually don't want to do. This is true in Dublin and Doncaster as much as it is in Dubai. Again, while there may be a small proportion who are there to milk the generous benefits of living in civilised society, the vast majority start from the bottom rung, and only make any progress through working far harder and in far worse conditions than the natives. Immigrant-bashing from the right is not only wrong-headed, it's also immoral.

What is evidently true is that it's only by looking at any issue with the complete range of factors that a rational answer can be arrived at. This is what the scientific study mentioned in the Daily Mail is getting at: rationalism and free-thought (rather than prejudice and narrow-mindedness) go hand in hand with intelligence. Anyone bringing easy answers to complicated issues is using either lazy thinking or, bluntly, missing something in the head.

Does that mean that Karl Marx was smarter than, say, Ayn Rand? Well, there's a convincing argument that relying on simplistic models of society and human nature, as Ayn Rand does when arguing in favour of a complete free market, is not backed up by any real evidence. Whenever Rand's ideas were put into place, they tended to result in the opposite of what she intended.

Am I saying that Communism is therefore intellectually better than Capitalism? Communists certainly believed they were, and when the Soviet Union existed, those in power in Moscow (at least, at the start) believed that they were involved in some kind of quasi-scientific venture.

What went wrong with Communism is that it forgot that people by nature want to have free-will. That was one reason why Capitalism, for all its faults, was ultimately more successful: the attraction of free-will, over the will of the state, won the day.

However, the Great Crash of 2008 brought the flaws of Capitalism into sharp focus; nowadays, people would rather the state have a bigger role in society; they would rather sacrifice some of their "free-will" in order to ensure stability in society as a whole. That demonstrates the fact that many people understand that life is not an "either-or" choice; life is complicated and messy, and that's why there needs to be a middle ground between the things that individuals do best, and the things that government can do best. Few people these days would agree with Ronald Reagan that "government is the problem". In that sense, people nowadays are more left-wing than they were, say, thirty years ago: they recognise much better, and in much greater detail, what things individuals do well, and what things government should be responsible for.

This issue of free-will doesn't only apply to politics. Although I am not openly religious (I have stated on my Facebook page that I am a Stoic Pantheist), the issue of free-will and religion can't be avoided while we're on the topic. Just as some right-wing people prefer the certainty that simple answers give (which also allows them to abrogate their thinking to those in power), people who are religiously conservative prefer the simple answers that their divine texts give.

Therefore, by definition, people who blindly rely on a religious text, without using their own minds to decide if it is something justifiable, cannot be considered rational or intelligent. Those who willingly choose to throw away their free-will to a religious text without question, are implicitly admitting to their own intellectual emptiness.

Some people, however, explain their conservative habits through national "culture"; a catch-all word that can be used to excuse the most abhorrent human behaviour, as well as an excuse for those already of weak mind and evil intent, to carry out their moral depravity.

There are many possible examples I could cite. The example in Pakistan, of a TV show host harassing young couples in a park to check if they are married, is relatively mild one. In Azerbaijan, journalists throwing false allegations at a pop star in a live question-and-answer session, is another. In Croatia, young couples may also be harassed by locals if they are suspected of not being married. In the USA, doctors who carry out abortions can be killed.

So what I am saying does not necessarily depend on the religion itself; it depends on the extent to which people decide to use religion or "culture" to pursue their own prejudices and ignorance. It is perfectly possible to be rational and free-thinking, and religious; a good example I saw recently was the conduct of the Amish people in rural USA, who follow the Bible more closely than the conservative fanatics, but with none of the blind ignorance and fervour. The Amish can calmly and rationally explain why sex after marriage is a good idea; the Taliban cannot. The Amish can calmly and rationally explain why their men and women wear the old-fashioned clothes they do; the Wahhabists cannot.

Your will is your own. To rely on one simple answer for everything, whether it be from "culture", a religious text, a one-size-fits-all solution, or a knee-jerk reaction, is demeaning to your own intelligence and humanity.