June 6, 2007: According to a recent survey, some 60
percent of British Moslems believe Moslems were not responsible for the July 7,
2005 terror attacks in London. Over 20 percent of British Moslems believe that
the British government was behind those attacks. Where do British Moslems get
these ideas? Like most people everywhere, they get such information from mass
media. But in the last two decades,
cable TV news has become available for overseas audiences in many parts
of the world. Thus migrants can move to the West, make lots more money, live
better lives, and continue to get TV newscasts from the old country. As most
web users now know, news media in different parts of the world, report the same
events very differently. In the Moslem world, the news media likes to push the
idea that all their economic and social problems are caused by the West,
mainly the Christian West. The general
idea is that there's this vast conspiracy by the West to keep the Moslems down
and destroy Islam. Since most Moslem states are run by dictators or monarchs,
there is often official support for this fantasy. It distracts the people from
the real source of their problems. While many Moslems figure out that this myth
is, well, a myth, they learn to keep quiet about it, lest they be condemned
(and physically harmed) for being a "Western spy."
In the past, migrants would change their attitudes
as they were exposed to Western media (which has its own set of myths, but is
vastly more open to different ideas.) No more. Moslem migrants get off the
plane from the old country, and within a short time, they are looking at the
same newscasts they consumed back home. When they attempt to discus world
affairs with the locals, they quickly find a vast difference of opinions. Most
Moslems recoil and retreat into an insular migrant mind set. This is why you have
Moslems in places like Britain, or anywhere else in the West, clinging to old
country myths, even with a lot of contradictory evidence confronting them
daily.
Many Moslems do move away from these fantasies.
Thus we have 40 percent of British Moslems acknowledging that Moslems were
responsible for the July 7 attacks. But many of those do not consider the
Moslem world responsible. Moslems tend to migrate from parts of the world where
civic responsibility is not taken as seriously as in the West. Islam, an Arabic
world, means "submission," and that has eroded the sense of personal
responsibility over the centuries.
The children of immigrants have, historically, more
rapidly adopted the attitudes prevalent where they live. But the satellite news
stations make it easier for the kids to keep their heads back in the old
country. And back there, visions of revenge against the West, and support for
Islamic terrorism, give many in the migrant communities murderous ideas.
