So your contention is that all these people's families are perfectly fine with them going to the Levant for a little sun and frolic? If they have such a support base for all these terrible things then why do they have to hide where they are going? I'm no friend to organized religion, but I remember enough about the so-called rules of jihad to remember that you need your father's permission. When you start going on about "the Muslims" you're the mirror image of all these assholes like Qaradawi that go on about "one Ummah" and the "rope of Allah"
I think the contention is that this does not matter - it is an intolerable situation. I think the contention is that having a subgroup in society with 1% of their people willing to kill cannot possibly be contained by a police force, and cannot possibly peacefully exist alongside other groups.
Add to that the fact that 50% or more of those muslims will protect the 1% extremists from the police force in all but the most offensive cases.
Let's face facts here : islam is a religion that was created in a massive war, that is on occasion blamed for starting the dark ages by cutting off all sea based trade in Western Europe and more than half of land based trade. The ideology internalized war during it's formation period. Hell, in the hadith you find plenty of references why the early caliphs "chose" islam, and the reason was they were at war. The religion survived only because it could convince large amounts of people to fight anyone else around them. Further in it's history it spread by war and it is absolutely unique in the sheer amount of genocides that just happened to take place just at the edge of islam, at the point where it was spreading. The biggest slaughter in history, the Mongol conquest of India, with the lower end of death toll estimates at over 3 times the WWII total death toll (over 30 times bigger than the holocaust), and may have killed half a billion (close to 100 holocausts), was an islamic expansion war.
And I wouldn't worry about them going to the middle east - or anywhere - that's temporary. This will spread, and the time will come when the fight is simply local.
The biggest slaughter in history, the Mongol conquest of India, ... may have killed half a billion
Wow.. That's incredible considering that the WORLD population in 1200-1300 was only 400m people. In fact, it's so incredible, I think I'm going to need to see some references.
It is incredible. The reason they could kill so many is that they were at it for several hundred years and attacked different regions. So the population had some time to replenish before the next series of genocides started. Individual campaigns had death tolls in the 10-50 million range. There were 6 major campaigns. Several had multiple decades of genocide.
And of course, death tolls are a guessing game, as are population figures. So yes there are legitimate arguments about these figures.
Ah, I see this is the Isaac Asimov approach to Islamic historiography.
I don't think even Will Durant would toss around numbers like that. And 50% of Muslims sheltering extremists is a totally indefensible number. Maybe after the whole country had been subjected to sustained modern propaganda techniques of the sort we have not yet seen any Islamist regime deploy.
