Cultural Weapons That Radicalize Europe's Muslims
By Olivier Guitta
While classical techniques of indoctrination from outfits like the Muslim Brotherhood have been quite documented (The Croissant has extensively covered this issue), a new insidious technique to radicalize the Muslim population in the West is being implemented.
I just wrote an article for InFocus on the new "cultural weapons".
To read the whole article, please click here.
Here is an excerpt:
In November 2005, the French banlieues (suburbs) erupted in violence. While most analysts insist that the violence was not Islamist in nature, the vast majority of the rioters were young Muslims rebelling against the state. They torched cars, destroyed private property, clashed with police, and, in one case, even killed a bystander. France's ruling elite was shaken to its core.
Even if Islamists were not directly involved in this sudden outburst of violence, their efforts to demonize the state had influenced at least a portion of Muslim youth. Indeed, European branches of global Islamist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Tablighi Jamaat, have successfully alienated young Muslims from the state using an array of cultural weapons.
Islamist Schooling
In 2004, two clandestine Islamist pre-schools in the suburbs of Paris were shuttered by French authorities. They were run by Salafists who were teaching four-year-old children how to read and write Arabic, as well as the vitriolic Salafist version of the Quran. They were also teaching these children that as Muslims, they were to demand to be treated differently than other French people.
This is unfortunately far from an isolated phenomenon. Jean-Pierre Obin, the top French national education official, issued a 2004 report documenting the fact that Muslim students often described their nationality as "Muslim." When told that "Muslim" is not a nationality and they are French, some children insisted that they couldn't be French since they are Muslim. In some cases, students were taught to believe that their secular teachers were "liars." Obin believed that these disturbing instances were the result of indoctrination by several Islamist organizations—primarily the Muslim Brotherhood—that denounce "integration as an oppression." They seek to take these Muslims out of the French nation and bring them instead to the "Muslim nation," even if they live on French soil.