The Real Reason the Islamic State Successfully Recruits Fighters

Ted Bromund below has a good point but I think we can go a bit further with it.  WHY do some immigrant Muslims  and their families fail to assimilate? In answer, I think we first have to note the great dissonance that a Muslim living in an advanced society experiences. 

His religion tells him that, as a Muslim, he has the truth that others do not and that he is therefore superior to non-Muslims.  That might pass muster in Muslim lands but transfer him to a prosperous Western country and he will find it very difficult to maintain that belief. 

As he looks at the people around him, it will be crystal clear that they have better lives than he does.  Access to sexual satisfaction will impinge strongly as will the lack of ANY religious obligations in a post-Christian society such as Britain or Western Europe.  Westerners don't have to hoist their posteriors in the air five times a day, for instance.  And in all sorts of ways, he lives a much more restrictive life.

Most Muslims cope with that reality somehow but, for various reasons, a minority do not. And the one who does not is in a rage to see  that others are living better lives than him and wants to take out that rage on someone.  On rare occasions he takes it out on others in the society where he lives but mostly he wants company in his anger so he finds the outlet he needs by fighting for ISIS.  And ISIS does have some vague promise of asserting that Muslim superiority he believes in


Which country has the highest percentage of its Muslim population fighting for the Islamic State as foreign recruits? Algeria? Afghanistan? Indonesia? Nope.

Try Finland. No. 2 is Belgium, followed by Ireland and Sweden.

What do these countries have in common, besides being European? They're wealthy, democratic and have high levels of education, health and income. They also have very low levels of economic inequality.

These findings appear in an eyebrow-raising report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, an economic research nonprofit, whose recent work also identified another important factor driving radicalization: a lack of assimilation. In other words, the Islamic State draws heavily from groups who do not adopt the culture of the country in which they live in and do not truly become a part of it.

These conclusions fly in the face of conventional wisdom: that radicalization flows from economic inequality. "Our results show that ... economic conditions are not the root causes of the global development of ISIS foreign fighters," the report says, using another common name for the Islamic State.

In fact, the report finds strong positive correlations between Islamic State recruitment and high gross domestic product per capita as well as high rankings in the Human Development Index and the Political Rights Index, two composite economic measurements. In short, most Islamic State recruits come from societies replete with comforts and rights.

So what convinces young men in such advanced societies to join the Islamic State? A failure to assimilate, according to the National Bureau report. To measure that, the organization looked at indices for ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization developed by Harvard researchers and calculated the probability that two random individuals in any society would not share the same ethnicity, religion or language.

European countries have low fractionalization levels and lack an assimilationist ethos, which means that Muslim immigrants do not acculturate. "The difference with America is the melting pot," one of the report's authors, Efraim Benmelech, said in a phone interview.

In other words, the report supports the common-sense proposition that a disgruntled population that does not feel it is part of something greater than itself is likely to have members who will fall prey to itinerant snake-oil salesmen such as Islamic State recruiters. I and others have written about this link for some time.

Some European leaders also make this point. British Prime Minister David Cameron has said repeatedly that terrorism is not really caused by Western foreign policy, poverty in the Middle East or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. "Even if we sorted out all these problems," he once said, "there would still be this terrorism."

Many who believe those three causes are to blame, however, persist. The French socialist economist Thomas Piketty -- whose 2013 bestselling book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," warned about gaping wealth inequality in the West -- laid blame for the Islamic State on all three in an article in Le Monde written just after the November terrorist attack in Paris. "Only an equitable model for social development will overcome hatred," he wrote.

The authors of the National Bureau paper, however, write their findings "directly contradict the recent assertions by Thomas Piketty. ... The large number of foreign fighters coming from highly equitable and wealthy countries like Finland, Belgium, and Sweden ... run contrary to those claims."

Benmelech told me on the phone: "Public housing could lead to segregation, because you are placed in a neighborhood with people just like you," he said. Inequality, where mobility exists, can spur striving.

He later added in an email: "There is growing awareness, at least anecdotally, of the lack of assimilation as an important cause in terror recruiting. However, it is yet to be determined whether income inequality promotes or degrades assimilation. Some European countries may be more generous than the U.S in providing social benefits, but it is unclear whether this social safety net increases the likelihood of assimilation.

"While the U.S. is infamous for its high degree of income inequality, its 'melting pot' culture that promotes assimilation may be one of the best deterrents against radicalizing people to join ISIS -- and may explain why the United States ranks a distant 36 in the number of ISIS foreign fighters compared to its Muslim population."

Considering the anti-assimilation bent of current U.S. immigration policy, however, this is cold comfort. Is a European-like atmosphere in our future? It's a question worth asking, sooner rather than later.

SOURCE






Affirmative action for women in physics opens the door to pseudo science

Parasites in the scientific community have contributed zero to string theory, says string theorist Luboš Motl

Sabine Hossenfelder has shown us once again how convenient the life on the border of the scientific community is for dishonest and incompetent science-hating charlatans and saboteurs similar to herself:  "Dear Dr B: Why not string theory?"

The tolerance for chutzpah seems to be unlimited for the people around her. OK, so why not string theory, Ms Hossenfelder? The first sentence of her rant is even more insulting than the title:

"Because we might be wasting time and money and, ultimately, risk that progress stalls entirely"

Wow. That's quite a "reason" to abandon the most fundamental research in science.

First of all, the most incredible word of the sentence is "we". Sabine Hossenfelder isn't "we". She has never done any string theory and she cannot do any string theory because she clearly isn't in the same league as the people who are doing string theory, have done string theory, or are at least capable of learning and/or doing string theory.

Also, she has never contributed any time or money to the fundamental research in science. On the contrary, she is a textbook example of a bogus quasi-researcher who devours a part of the money that should be going to science by pretending to be doing "the same thing" as the actual researchers except that something is missing.

Nothing ever comes out of it. Many people in the scientific bureaucracy don't care because to increase the density of the female reproductive organs in the physics departments is more important for their "success" than any contributions to science.

Hossenfelder must have learned this word "we" from her former boss Smolin who also loved to pretend that he can also be called a string theorist if you wish – probably everyone can, Smolin liked to suggest – no one in the public would dare to care that both of them are just incompetent crackpots who play the role of "scientists" representing the stupidest morons in the general public.

OK, this word "we" has elevated my adrenaline level brutally. But let's focus on other, equally important aspects of her proposition. She says that scientists or the society shouldn't be doing the scientific research on string theory because we could be wasting time and money.

Wow. One may equally say the same thing about any meaningful scientific research (and exploration) because almost by definition of the research, we can never know in advance whether we find out something, how much we find out, and how important it will be. This uncertainty is an absolutely inseparable part of any exploration.

When Christopher Columbus organized his voyages to "China and India", he also didn't know and no one knew how great the implications would be. But he knew that something important could be discovered in this way – and as we know, it was more than correct. Similar comments apply to pretty much every explorer, inventor, or discoverer in the history. Exploration and research always bring the risk of a disappointment but curious people simply can't resist, anyway, and that's the powerful force that is responsible for most of the progress of the mankind because a significant fraction of these things does bring something great.

Whether we pay attention to her "we" or not, Hossenfelder simply admits that she has nothing to do with the spirit of research and exploration. She just doesn't belong there. While a part of the research money is being wasted, she must greatly suffer, too.

At any rate, despite their whining, she and similar Šmoits won't be able to stop the curious people's curiosity and their drive to find the truth and discover new things. It's the curious people's time and money that is spent for doing amazing things and not hers.

More HERE (See the original for links)






Prominent Australian do-gooder goes too far with his politically correct nonsense

LISTEN up guys – and that includes all you ballbreaking sheilas reading this – it’s time to man up and fight back against the gay political correctness garbage infesting our lives.

Last week’s moronic video by the laughably entitled Australian of the Year David Morrison was, for me, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I can no longer sit around passively on my backside, as so many of us have done for decades, while this never-satisfied army of politically correct censors inflict their retarded ideologies on our language and freedom of speech.
Australian of the Year David Morrison is merely a stooge for political correctness in his video Words at Work.

Mr Morrison, get knotted. It is my language and I will use it how I choose.

I love our language. I love its innuendo, its cheekiness, its bawdiness and its sarcasm. I love its variety, its ever-changing colloquialisms and its garden of delightful hidden meanings and wicked word plays.

English, going back to Chaucerian and Shakespearean times, is without a doubt the most fun, inventive and versatile language on the planet.

No other language offers the richness of meaning and subtlety. No other language lives, breathes and constantly adapts itself as does our mother tongue.

And very few other languages have its wealth of rude, crass, hilarious, cutting, insightful and sarcastic means of causing offence and poking fun at ourselves and at others.

And in Australia, courtesy of our mixed Cockney and Irish backgrounds, the Aussie version of English has held its own in terms of inventiveness, coarseness and subversive humour.

So I will no longer be cowed by the quasi-socialists and self-pitying misery brigades of the Left in Australia who endlessly seek to mould how we think and behave by the process of limiting what words, phrases and concepts are deemed to be “appropriate”.

It’s time to hit back with a campaign to encourage politically incorrect thoughts and words: #unPCwithme, or something like that.

Listen to this balderdash (what a great word! No doubt they’ll try and ban it soon, too) from the former Chief of the Army and now Chief Nanny-state Wowser of the Year in his ludicrous video:

“Every day at work, there are hazards that you walk past without realising just how dangerous they are,” was his opening line – accompanied by Hitchcock-style Psycho music to ramp up the fear.
Harden up guys and all you ballbreaking sheilas who can’t cope with the language of the workplace.

(Note also the deliberate use of “that you walk past” in the script, designed to echo the speech that made Mr Morrison such a leftie hero in the first place).

“Some things are just plain bad for you – I’m talking about the power of words,” he intones, as he stares with a disapproving sneer at … a poster that says “Clean up after yourself. Your mum doesn’t work here!”

The offence, presumably, is to suggest that it is only mums who clean up after messy boys and girls, whereas in our brave new PC world of the Left’s imagining dads must of course do their fair share of the housework too.

Well, Mr Morrison, have I got news for you.

I suspect that in about 90 per cent of normal Aussie households, most of the cleaning up does indeed get done by mum because dad couldn’t be arsed or is too busy watching telly or too hungover to care. It ain’t a perfect world, but at least it’s a tidy one.

Mr Morrison then drivels on about other things we dreadful people in the workforce do and say, such as using the word “guys” as a generic term for men and women (Hollywood Valley Girl slang circa the ’80s), or – Shock! Horror! – using the word “girls” to address a group of, er, girls (sorry – self-important, smug, sanctimonious, whingeing workplace Wendys would be a better description of those depicted in the video).

Oh, and we mustn’t call our female co-workers “feisty” or “ballbreakers”, even when that’s what they are, because we don’t employ the same words to describe our feisty, ballbreaking male co-workers.
I suspect Mum does the cleaning in 90 per cent of normal Aussie households.

True. We tend to use far blunter anglo-saxon words like (children stop reading please) “f--kwit”, “d--khead”, and a certain part of the female anatomy. Give me “ballbreaker” any day. It’s far more imaginative.

As part of #unPCwithme, I encourage universities and workplaces to set up the opposite of the politically correct and nauseating “safe spaces” that have proliferated in recent years, such as the now infamous Oodgeroo Unit at QUT.

Instead, let’s see some specially designated “unPC spaces” or “PC-free time” in which individuals may assemble with the express purpose of nobody giving a rat’s what anybody else says or how they say it.

If you don’t want to hear it, don’t go. But if you want to be able to crack jokes, says daft things, be sarcastic and poke fun at stereotypes without fear of David Morrison popping up over your shoulder, feel free. Chaucer and Shakespeare would be the first to rock up.

SOURCE






BBC is accused of discrimination after launching search for new One Show reporter who is from 'an ethnically diverse background' and has a northern accent

The BBC wants a new One Show reporter to be from an 'ethnically diverse background' and have a northern accent, it was claimed today.

Corporation chiefs have been accused of 'pushing their own agenda' after reportedly specifying how they want the new journalist to look and sound.

It comes after a row erupted when white applicants to two script-writing positions said they were turned down because they were white.

A memo sent within the organisation states the One Show is looking for a male, over 30, from a ethnically diverse background and with a regional accent, preferably Scouse or Mancunian, The Sun reported.

Employment law lecturer Dr Jonathan Lord told the paper: 'It smacks of the BBC trying to implement their own agenda above employment legislation.'

The BBC insisted freelance roles are 'open to all', but that the corporation wants TV to 'reflect the ethnic and region make-up of the UK'.

A  spokesman said: 'This was not a job advert and we're not looking for a new host of the One Show.

'We use dozens of freelance reporters on the One Show each year and we are seeking to encourage a wider pool of people to consider making a contribution. All casting decisions are based on merit.'

The One Show, which airs at 7pm on Mondays to Fridays, is currently hosted by Matt Baker, who is from the North East, and Welsh-born Alex Jones.

Last week, applicants for two junior script-writing positions hit out after being told the roles were only open to people from 'ethnic minority backgrounds'.

A 26-year-old media graduate who applied for one of those roles said: 'It's racial discrimination to disregard someone based on them being any race.  'It's just wrong and as far as I know it is illegal. Coming from the BBC, it's amazing.'

It is also claimed workers at the corporation could soon have to declare their family income and details of their upbringing in bid to gauge how 'middle class' they are.

In 2014, a report by a government social mobility commission found more than a quarter of staff at the BBC were privately-educated.

Viewers last week praised stand-in One Show host Angela Scanlon, who appeared while Alex Jones was away.

Some fans of the show said the Irish presenter should be brought onto the programme full time.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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