El Genio de Oviedo wrote:
A lot to unpack unhere (not taking the piss)
Just catching up on this; I'm going to respond without quoting everyone line by line.
The attack in Kansas was carried out by a white man against people of "Middle Eastern appearance" (he thought he was killing Iranians although his victims were Indian). During the attack he ranted about visas and residence. It was a very purely racist anti-migrant attack, an act of "stochastic violence" that it's reasonable to theorise was enabled by the climate of fear and loathing accompanying Trump's executive orders and the rest of his administration's agenda re migrants.
I think it's reasonable to politicise it. I feel similarly about the Dylann Roof massacre in Charleston and the recent multiple murder at a mosque in Quebec City. But I also agree that not every act of violence is an act of political terror. Given the prevalence of unhinged Islamophobic discourse—for example the persistent neurosis about the security threat from refugees fleeing Middle Eastern conflict zones—I do think it's beneficial to draw attention to, and politicise, and condemn reactive and racist white violence.
I also think Y's point about the perpetrators so commonly being isolated, alienated and unhappy men, whatever their ethnicity, religion or political persuasion, is incredibly relevant.
When it comes to Islam, I don't see all the different acts of violence carried out under an ostensibly Islamic banner as categorically equivalent. Though they are interlinked, I don't draw an equivalence in terms of Islam between acts of "homegrown terror" like the July 7 bombing, the tactical massacres of ISIS, and the authoritarian acts of violence that occur in Saudi Arabia.
In my opinion, the first arise from social exclusion, racism and a libidinal urge for revenge; the second from extreme economic hardship, and the chaos and political instability of geopolitical struggle by proxy; and the third as the result of a strategic alliance deemed necessary alongside an extreme statist conservatism enabled by oil wealth. Islam is in many ways a superficial connection between them.
I don't agree Turkey is a bellwether in relation to the future of Islamic integration in western societies.
Turkey has a unique historical and geographical relationship to political Islam. It is the capital of the former Ottoman Empire. It is a non-Arabic Islamic society with a proud secular, nationalist history that elected a government rather like an Islamic version of Germany's CDP in response to being rebuffed by the EU. Now it's faltering into dictatorship for a host of economic and geopolitical reasons that will not apply in other countries, and seeing a renewal of authoritarian Sunni politics for similarly unique reasons.
"Demographic trends" with respect to Islamic "dynamism" in western nations are always wildly overstated by Islamophobes. For example, in 2006 at the height of the vogue for New Atheism, Sam Harris wrote Letter to a Christian Nation in which he claimed that:
"Islam is now the fastest-growing religion in Europe. The birthrate among European Muslims is three times that of their non-Muslim neighbors. If current trends continue, France will be a majority-Muslim country in twenty-five years - and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow."
Ten years later it's evident these claims were as laughable then as similar statements still are now. Sam Harris is an idiot, a bigot and a thug.
The global south (though not some cohort designated as "Islam" specifically, and certainly not the problematic political Islam we've come to recognise as a consequence of the strategic alliance of the US, UK and NATO with Saudi Arabia and others) is guaranteed to assume a greater importance in world affairs in future.
Considering the sharp economic injustices that have prevailed throughout the world during the period of western expansion and hegemony, this certainly should not be viewed as an intrinsically bad thing.
