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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

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Will the West seize the Opportunity the Peshawar Massacre may offer…?

Could it be that the horrendous events in Peshawar this week might just become a turning point in the rise of violent Islamist extremism…? A ‘watershed moment’?, as Aamer Ahmed Khan postulates for BBC News. That great founding father of Sociology Émile Durkheim (1893) stated that when a particularly horrific crime takes place, there is often a drawing together of the community in a shared revulsion and outrage of the crime. This strengthens social cohesion – the sense of belonging to a community. For a day or 5 it may seem as though much of the world is a community – united and cohesive in its collective horror, outrage and sadness at the school massacre in Peshawar. Such is the public abhorrence that the pressure put on Pakistan’s politicians and military commanders may actually lead to them taking concerted offensive action against the Taliban. For too long Pakistan’s leaders have been divided amongst themselves as to whether the risk of trying to use the militants to exert influence in the region (especially Afghanistan) was worth the terrorist atrocities committed on Pakistani soil and the opprobrium of the Americans…or they were simply indifferent to what the Taliban (either side of the border)… Read More

Meanings in the Blood and Turmoil of Egypt

BBC journalist Tim Whewell has posted a brilliant and provocative analysis of the current crisis in Egypt entitled: Egypt Crisis: does Political Islam have a Future? In it Whewell characterises the conflicts which have erupted in Egypt as first the demand for the removal of Mohammed Morsi a month or so back by secularists and since then the demand for his reinstatement by Islamists. The desperate determination of the Egyptian secularists is summed up in Whewell’s piece by the Royal United Services Institute’s Shashank Joshi: “What we’re seeing is a coalition of liberal, secular, youth, revolutionary groups…who have decided that what they value is secularism at all cost, even if the cost is the shredding of every other liberal value that they hold.” While the brutality of the military in repressing the Cairo Islamists is shocking and has drawn condemnation from right around the world, there is ambivalence towards it from many Egyptian secularists. There is real distrust of the Islamists; and the fear meme has spread virally, as Whewell indicates when he says: “President Morsi was removed as much through fear of what he might do in the future as anger over what he had done already.” The Egyptian crisis… Read More

David Cameron’s right about Multiculturalism BUT…

This past weekend David Cameron pushed forward considerably ideas his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been moving progressively towards …. In essence, this is to say pretty explicitly that, if you want to be British, you need to buy into the British identity and British values. (Ironically, freed from the collective responsibility of Cabinet, Blair on these issues is almost certainly well to the right of Cameron these days – see: ‘Radical Islam’ and the Return of Tony Blair). Cameron criticised ‘state multiculturalism’ and argued the UK needs a stronger national identity to stop people turning to extremism. With MI6 warning last week that Britain faces an “‘unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers”, Cameron could hardly have ignored the threat from radicalised young Muslims; and it seems logical to ascribe their lack of identification with ‘British values’ as one cause of their radicalisation. In his speech on Saturday (5 February) Cameron accused multiculturalism of leading to a Britain of ‘divided tribes’. The prime minister posited that the multiculturalist dogma, which increasingly dominated political and social thinking from the early 1970s on, had meant the majority had to accord each minority ethnic group respect and the freedom to pursue its… Read More

Why is the West ignoring a Leading Moderate Muslim?

Are Western leaders and the Western media missing a critical opportunity to exacerbate the divisions in our Muslim communities, between the minority who advocate the use of terrorism to achieve the establishment of an Islamic hegemony and the majority who do not support such tactics and may even abhor them…? For about 5 hours on 2 March it was hot news: Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, had issued a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. He said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam. He regretted the fact that the Islamic teachings, which are based on love, peace and welfare, are being manipulated and quoted out of context to serve the designs of vested interests (such as al-Qaeda). He said that Islam spelled out a clear code of conduct during the course of war and gave complete protection to non-combatants including women, the old, children, etc – with trading centres, schools, hospitals and places of worship deemed to be ‘safe places’. Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is far from being the first to condemn terrorism. As a reaction to 9/11, just days… Read More

Should the BNP appear on the Beeb?

There are few things guaranteed to get the knickers of the British ‘chattering classes’ in a twist more than the British National Party (BNP). It’s bad enough that they exist at all – that they are gaining significantly in electoral support in 21st Century Britain is simply unbelievable! And now the BBC are considering having them on ‘Question Time’…how utterly disgraceful!! People who vote BNP are clearly small-minded, uneducated, unthinking and immoral racists. It’s a harmonic of the BLUE and GREEN vMEMES which condemns the BNP and which condemns those who vote for them. It’s a variant harmonic of these vMEMES which has led the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to take the BNP to court on the charge that the latter’s constitution is discriminatory as it does not allow membership to those of a non-white ethnicity. And it’s another variant harmonic of these vMEMES which has drawn up the forthcoming Equality Bill (2009). The problem with these approaches is that, rather than understand what it is about the BNP that gains support from substantial numbers of people, they attempt to suppress the BNP. However, Nick Griffin and the top echelon of the BNP are smart characters. They have got… Read More

A growing Spiral Dynamics Influence in the Middle East

As proud as I am of Centre for Human Emergence – UK (CHE-UK) , as grand as our ambitions are – and partially redesigning the United Kingdom is pretty ambitious!! – as committed to them as I am and as daunting as the challenges we face are, it seems at times relatively ‘small beer’ compared to what the Center for Human Emergence Middle East (CHE-ME) is up to. Our members don’t live in a semi-hot war zone, with the ever-present threat of real violence (whether terrorist activities – suicide bombers and rockets – or heavy-handed military responses such as in Gaza at the start of this year). The UK might be bothered about corruption in government, desperate to recover from what is being labelled as the worst recession since the 1930s, very unsure of itself as a multi-cultural society in certain parts of the kingdom and iffy in its relations with the EU whilst at the same time being uncertain as to the changing constitutional relationship between its 4 constituent countries. But CHE-ME is faced with a real and frequently violent conflict between one country (Israel) and the stateless land of a dispossessed people it occupies (Palestine), with that stateless land… Read More