Is Viewing Islamist Jihad Clearly, Islamophobia?

"The survey was conducted by ICM Research for the Channel 4 documentary, 'What British Muslims Really Think', which aired on April 13."
"The 615-page survey found that more than 100,000 British Muslims sympathize with suicide bombers and people who commit other terrorist acts. Moreover, only one in three British Muslims (34%) would contact the police if they believed that somebody close to them had become involved with jihadists."
"In addition, 23% of British Muslims said Islamic Sharia law should replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations."
"Thirty-nine percent of Muslims surveyed believe women should always obey their husbands, compared to 5% for non-Muslims. One in three British Muslims refuse completely to condemn the stoning of women accused of adultery."
"The poll also found that a fifth of British Muslims have not entered the home of a non-Muslim in the past year."
"Of the British Muslims surveyed, 35% believe Jewish people have too much power in the UK, compared to 8% of non-Muslims."
Soeren Kern, Gatestone Institute

The argument goes that Europe's Muslims have not been integrated into the society they now live within, and as a result they have been marginalized, which explains why they have, in France and in Belgium, packed themselves into the ghettoes in the outskirts of Paris and Brussels, the banlieues that are effectively "no-go" zones for non-Muslims and those representing the internal security apparatus of police and political offices.

That same argument depends heavily on finding Europe itself guilty of bias and racism, withholding opportunities from Muslims, responsible for the fact that so many young Muslim men are unemployed, and resulting from that it's little wonder that they have become rabidly anti-social, committing mayhem in a volatile expression of their discontent. This also explains, of course, their attraction to the appeal of Islamist terrorism.

Belgium in particular is cited as a hotbed for Islamist fanaticism, the reason why Belgian Muslims are over represented in the numbers of their men who have flooded into Syria to fight alongside Islamic State, and who have returned with their proud new skills to threaten Europe. The attack on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket were special gifts to Paris courtesy of French Muslims. The November 13 attacks in Paris were love letters from Belgian jihadis, who planned another spectacular but aborted it in preference to a speedier-occuring atrocity at Brussels' airport and metro.

Originating mostly from Morocco and Turkey the underprivileged Belgian generations have ensconced themselves in their ghettoes of preference, Mollenbeek and Schaerbeek, close to the very administrative heart of the European Union. As symbolism goes, that's fairly powerful. From out of these dark places of crowded humanity clad in veils and rage, came the 2005 commuter train bombings in Madrid, and the shootup at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

Sympathy goes out to the 'moderate' Muslims in Europe, who deny that the jihadists exemplify Islam at its very roots, and defy any critics to cast Islam in any light other than a religion of peace. Those who disagree are guilty of Islamophobia, and they are the problem, certainly not Islam. So France and Belgium failed to adequately integrate the Muslims who immigrated there to become citizens preferably there than to live in their countries of origin, oppressed and disadvantaged.

And then there is Britain, a country which offered full opportunities of assimilation to the Muslim populations who migrated there; Muslims sit in Parliament, they are knighted, and Sharia law courts proliferate in Britain. Muslims now represent 5.5% of Britain's 64-million population. And of the 3.5-million British Muslims a new poll has addressed the fact that 100,000 express what can only be referred to as radical Islamic views supportive of Islamist jihad and terrorism.

The third-largest population in the EU resides in Britain, after France, and Germany. Former head of Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, has warned of a growing "chasm" between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain that "isn't going to disappear any time soon." The newly released poll, according to Mr. Phillips makes clear "the unacknowledged creation of a nation within the nation, with its own geography, its own values and its own very separate future. I thought Europe's Muslims would gradually blend into the landscape. I should have known better."

Muslim clerics, wherever they happen to be in Europe or for that matter North America, Australia, wherever, have been free to proselytize, to incite, to emphasize the unassailable superiority of Islam and the duty of the faithful to engage in jihad. Private Muslim schools, madrassas paid for by Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, continue to proliferate where Salafist Islam is taught, to ensure that young Muslims understand their obligations to Islam.

Prisons have become incubators for Islam; the presence within the penal system of an over-abundance of Muslim men bespeaks not their relative numbers in society, but their over-representation as criminals in any society they gravitate toward. "Moderate" Muslims are distressed that their religion has become a byword for terror. Yet the imams who organize themselves to decry jihad continue to cast responsibility not on Koranic prescriptions but on misunderstandings of Islam and the Koran which the West is responsible for.