The Fight for the Muslim Vote: The British Election

[Big Dumb Patriot]

[QUOTE=awcmon;47682655]being first generation doesn't inherently make you radical

nearly my entire local community is made up of first-generation asian immigrants and nearly all of them hold the belief that because they were allowed into the country, it is their responsibility to adapt to the local customs, even if they don't like it. They all believe that as it was their choice to come to the country, they have no right to complain.

it's not like they completely ditch their own beliefs either, it's just that they don't make it very public and don't expect other people to cater to them.

generally[/QUOTE]

I didn't mean to imply that it did! I just meant that being first a generation immigrant typically means that you likely still have a strong link to your cultural heritage. Many Muslim immigrants grew up in environments where religion dominated almost every aspect of daily life, making it arguably the most important aspect of their cultural heritage, which isn't necessarily the case for Asian immigrants. It's only natural that out of that environment will come a notable number of people who live religion as a lifestyle, and of them a percentage that could be reasonably called "zealots." Religious fervor takes longer to dilute than general cultural norms and etiquette, because religion is held much more closely to peoples' hearts, but it does and will with time.

It is extremely important to keep in mind, however, that even among the percentage of Muslim immigrants who could be reasonably considered zealots, the number of people who turn [I]violently radicalized[/I] is essentially nil. The latest report indicated that only about 0.0002% of British Muslims are active in violent religious groups like ISIS. The other zealots are essentially comparable to Fundamentalist Christians in the US -- awkward, unsettling, and vocal, but basically harmless. Give it twenty years of cultural mingling, and they will be such a small minority of the total population that they'll be relegated to goofy background noise, like the Westboro Baptist Church.

Of course, this only applies to people who could reasonably be called "zealots," which I'd argue is a pretty narrow slice of the pie.