One in 9 Brits a Muslim

[frankthring]

One in 9 Brits being a Muslim is what is predicted by 2050 according to a
major new study of religion in Europe. Even worse - perhaps - Britain has
the highest level of non-believers or non-Christians so that by 2050 the number
of Christians in Britain will be in a clear minority.
The same research claims that this is not the case in other North European
countries, such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden, where the Protestant
faith will still stay the dominant religion.
The demise of Christian Britain hardly matters if you are not a Christian or do not
care about religious faith... Though the growth of the Muslim faith might have
dangerous implications....
What do you think ?

[Porn Baron]

It seems white Brits are becoming less religious. will there be any point in having Christmas or Easter hoildays by 2050. Will we become like the yanks? Happy hoildays everyone? Or maybe just have Christmas day as a normal work day? It would be better to have holidays during the summer maybe?

I too have noticed Christianity is still quite strong in other parts of europe. In Russia the orthodox church has become very strong and Putin has alligned himself with it. Russians are very conservative and traditional. They really fear Islam. It's rapidly growing there too.

[number 6]

The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful people , a few cranks let the side down. Same as any religion.

[Milk Tray Man]

number 6 wrote:

> The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful people , a few cranks
> let the side down. Same as any religion.


Except that it's specifically the Muslim "cranks" who are causing mayhem and slaughtering thousands all over the world as they seek to impose their 7th century tyranny and barbarism on everyone else. THAT is the difference. And there's more than just "a few" of them.

[David Johnson]

Well out of a billion and a half Muslims I guess it is a few, isn't it?

Mind, a few can do a lot of damage, see Tony Blair for reference, along with Bush and others, responsible directly or indirectly for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. True, not decapitated by swords, but generally blown to bits or incinerated.

And Blair and Bush didn't even have the excuse of believing in a 7th century version of a religion and instead allegedly "believed" in a dodgy dossier. After all, they were supposed to be from the "civilised" countries.

[Milk Tray Man]

None of which excuses or justifies what IS and the rest are doing now.

[David Johnson]

Have I stated anywhere, ever, that it does? For me that is a given.

Nothing can justify it, but what I would suggest is that the reasons why groups like ISIS develop are many and complex. I don't recall ISIS existing in Saddam's Iraq, do you?

[Porn Baron]

Interesting view of the rise of ISIS and the role of Iran.

Jessica Stern and J M Berger have produced a clear and succinct account of the rise of the fanatics in Isis: the State of Terror. Given how little attention was paid to it before it suddenly grabbed a swathe of territory, you might be forgiven for believing that Isis arose from nowhere in the sands of Iraq and Syria. ?The world awakened to the threat of Isis in the summer of 2014, but that is not where the story begins,? write the authors. This book?s achievement is to demonstrate how Isis fits within the spectrum of blood-soaked jihadism.

Stern and Berger believe that Isis ?emerged from the mind? of a street thug from the Jordanian city of Zarqa, who called himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. After a career as a petty criminal, he arrived in Afghanistan in 1989 ? just in time to miss the great struggle against the Soviet occupation. But Zarqawi came at the right moment to fight his fellow Muslims in the Afghan civil war which followed the Soviet departure.

Zarqawi then returned to his native Jordan only to be jailed for trying ? and failing ? to carry out a string of terrorist attacks. After leaving prison, he returned to Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden gave him command of an al-Qaeda training camp. Then came September 11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Like other al-Qaeda commanders, Zarqawi fled westwards into Iran, where he appears to have benefited from the protection of the regime.

By 2002, an Anglo-American invasion of Iraq seemed inevitable. Sensing an opportunity, Iran allowed Zarqawi to travel across its territory and enter northern Iraq in late 2002. Just as the Kaiser?s Germany transported Lenin from Switzerland to Russia in 1917 ? delivering him ?like a plague bacillus?, in Churchill?s phrase ? so Iran conveyed the virus represented by Zarqawi to Iraq.

The Shia rulers of Iran are natural opponents of al-Qaeda?s Sunni zealots, but the evidence suggests that the two have sometimes been tactical ? if mistrustful ? allies against a common Western enemy. So it was that al-Qaeda?s plague had arrived in Saddam Hussein?s domain, courtesy of Iran, even before the invasion. By the time that American and British tanks rolled across the Iraqi frontier in 2003, Zarqawi was already in position to organise an insurgency. Later that year, he proclaimed the birth of ?al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers?.

When in 2004 his men captured Nicholas Berg, an American contractor, Zarqawi personally beheaded the hostage on camera and pioneered the depraved online videos that would later become an Isis hallmark.

Yet this Sunni zealot decided that the struggle against the occupiers was of secondary importance. From 2005 onwards, he set out to kill as many Iraqi Shias as possible ? a bitter irony given that Zarqawi owed his very presence in Iraq to the indulgence of Shia Iran. He sent suicide bombers to kill hundreds of Shia pilgrims converging on the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala; later, he bombed the golden dome of the sacred Askari shrine in the town of Samarra. This wanton slaughter of the Shia earned Zarqawi a furious rebuke from Ayman al-Zawahiri, then bin Laden?s deputy and now the leader of al-Qaeda.

In a 6,300-word letter to his bloodstained subordinate, Zawahiri wrote: ?Many of your Muslim admirers among the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia. The sharpness of this questioning increases when the attacks are on one of their mosques. This will not be acceptable to the Muslim populace however much you have tried to explain it.?

Zarqawi ignored this warning and broke away from al-Qaeda. He continued a frenzied slaughter of the Shias until his death in a US air strike in 2006.

[David Johnson]

Interesting. The history of global politics involves a myriad of unlikely alliances and a huge number of examples in which a country's ally becomes an enemy and vice versa.

[Stripey]

frankthring wrote:

>
> One in 9 Brits being a Muslim is what is predicted by 2050
> according to a major new study of religion in Europe.
> What do you think ?

Show us the study - and who wrote it - and then there'll be something to comment on.