| Teach Your Children Well What Were They Thinking? Whoever said "Tradition is what you remember when you have forgotten everything else" probably was not praising those who, in old age, have become obsessed with traditions and rituals. Obsession with traditions, selective memory loss and a willingness to abandon one's capacity to reason is rapidly becoming, in many Western countries, a young-peoples' psychosis. More and more it's young people we see performing this or that religious ritual like mindless automatons. This is especially true of young Muslim men, whose scriptures are not meant to be reflected upon but memorized, then simply recited at least five times a day while prostrating themselves in the direction of Mecca. For young people who have never experienced the old ways this obsession with traditions appears to come from contact with teachers, religious scholars and preachers versed in the old ways. This contact being facilitated, if not forced, by parents who want their children to adopt traditions and customs which they themselves questioned when they were young. The same parents who fled oppressive or dysfunctional regimes to live secure productive lives in the West. They are the same parents who now insist that the religion that created most of the conditions that made their lives miserable in their native land be taught to their children, or at least accommodated in the public school system, in their adopted countries. What did these parents think would happen to their children when they insisted that they be taught – whether it be in madrassas or mosques or public school system (private system in Britain) – religious instructions and traditions that deny that humans have “human rights”; that preach that women are inferior to men and that only those who believe in Allah are deserving of compassion and mercy? What did they think would happen to young people who were taught that any society that is not governed according to the Koran and the sayings and the example of the self-proclaimed Prophet Muhammad must eventually submit to the will of Allah or be destroyed? What did they think would happen to young people who are compelled, day-in and day-out, to listen to clerics and teachers vilify Western Civilization and its accomplishments? What would happen is that their children would develop an admiration for the people who want to destroy that very civilization and replace it with a primitive, superstitious, mythical way of life typical of the Dark Ages, the Age which saw the birth of Islam! In Britain, according to a poll for a Conservative think-tank, what has happened is that a growing number of young Muslims are embracing radical Islam, with more than a third wanting Sharia to replace British law. In a poll conducted by a British think-tank more than a third of British Muslims age 16-24 wanted to live under Islamic Law not British Law, while only 17 percent of Muslims 55 and older wanted to. More young Muslims would see apostates, those who abandon Islam, summarily executed than their parents. More young Muslims would see women covered than their parents. ... This comes after a startling poll for Policy Exchange, the think-tank with close links to the Tory leader, which reveals how younger Muslims hold aggressively more extreme views than their parents. A poll of 1,003 Muslims by Populus found that more than a third of 16 to 24-year-olds wanted to live under Islamic law, while only 17 per cent of the over 55s questioned said they did. Meanwhile, 31 per cent of young Muslims said they believed that if a Muslim converted to another religion they should be punished by death, compared with 19 per cent of the over 55s. The deep divisions between the generations are most starkly illustrated over attitudes to the hijab, with 74 per cent of young people preferring Muslim women to wear them compared with 28 per cent of the over 55s. The survey also found that 13 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds said that they admired organisations such as al-Qaeda that are prepared to fight the West, compared with 3 per cent of their parents’ generation. Extreme youth: the Muslims who would swap British law for Sharia. The Times, January 29, 2007 A similar radicalization of Muslim youth is happening in Canada. In a poll conducted by Environics Research Group in conjunction with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; 27 percent of Muslims asked about the attacks planned by 18 Muslim men and boys last summer – including kidnapping and beheading the Prime Minister – answered that these were justified; 18 percent said they were sympathetic to those who planned these attacks that would have caused massive loss of life in the most brutal fashion and the murder of the Prime Minister. The media put on their rose-tinted glassed and called the results of the poll positive, after all, only 27 percent of Muslims polled said they were not "very proud to be Canadians.” That leaves only 189,000 Canadian Muslims of whose loyalty you could not be absolutely sure if the battle between democracy and theocracy gets ugly, or uglier.
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