Thread: German Study Claims Devout Islamic Youth More Violence-Prone

German study claims devout Islamic youth more violence-prone
Jun 5, 2010, 17:29 GMT

Berlin - The more devout a young Muslim male in Germany is, the more likely he is to resort to violence, according to a federally financed study seen Saturday by the German Press Agency dpa.

The study, based on interviews with 45,000 boys and girls aged 14 to 16, also concluded that male supremacist views and a preference for violent videos and computer games link closely with mosque attendance among the young. It compared Christians and Muslims.

The as-yet-unpublished research was jointly conducted by the federal Interior Ministry and the KFN criminology research institute in Hanover headed by Christian Pfeiffer. Dpa obtained a copy in Berlin.

In a conclusion, the authors said the finding might be explained by hypotheses of Rauf Ceylan, an ethnic Turkish scholar in German who studies religion.

They said Ceylan had discovered that a majority of mosque clergy in Germany encouraged their congregations to practice a conservative form of Islam and to preserve their ethnic roots.

More than half of German Muslims, who make up 5 per cent of the population, have Turkish roots.

The findings characterised imams or clergy as men working only temporarily in Germany with no knowledge of the German language, preventing them from developing a positive attitude to German culture or from questioning male dominance.

The study

suggested those views were transferred to young people at the mosque, whereas non-devout boys picked up more liberal German attitudes. Pfeiffer wrote: 'This is not a problem with Islam, but a problem with their education in Islam.'

Contacted for comment by dpa, Ceylan warned the interpretation might be simplistic and said many other factors had to be taken into account.

KFN conducted interviews in 2007 and 2008 in 61 cities with the aim of detecting how religious belief influences attitudes and behaviour. It found that young people who were intensely Christian were less likely to be violent than the average.

The study also argued that agnostic migrant children were the fastest to integrate, readily considering themselves as German and aiming for the highest educational achievements. By contrast, only 16 per cent of young Muslims aimed for the highest school-completion certificate.

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/ ... ence-prone

U.S. Ties Own Hands, Blindfolds Itself Regarding Religious Extremists

By David North, June 11, 2010

The news article from Germany carried a chilling lead sentence:

The more devout a young Muslim male in Germany is, the more likely he is to resort to violence, according to a federally financed study...

The "federal" mentioned in the story is the German federation, not our own, and it serves to remind us how reluctant our government is to examine the impact of religious extremism.

Can you imagine the U.S. government funding a comparable study? Even at a time when U.S.-raised Muslim extremists – like the two from New Jersey arrested as they were heading for Somalia – are clearly becoming a threat? I cannot.

Unlike most of the advanced democracies in the world, our census does not even ask a simple question about religious preferences.

Our government's reluctance to go after religious crazies operates across the board. Note, for example, the continuing presence of polygamous, ultra-orthodox Mormons in those little towns at the Utah-Arizona border. Polygamy is against the law, and the resulting big families in those communities are, apparently, largely on welfare, but governmental intervention is rare, even though the welfare claims certainly could be challenged, as this site indicates.

This reluctance to know about how a few religious groups misuse our federal programs extends to the field of immigration, as I reported in an earlier blog. USCIS, deliberately, does not keep statistics on which fringe religious groups are misusing the R-1 program for nonimmigrant religious workers, a program that often, later, brings green cards to the people involved. At the appeals level, USCIS goes so far as to eliminate any reference to the name of the church appealing a staff decision that an R-1 petition not be granted.

These are the decisions of the Administrative Appeals Office. The texts are partially available, with the reasoning displayed, but the names of the aliens, the churches, and even the churches' lawyers are obliterated with sweeps of black ink. Sometimes the AAO clerks are careless and references to the churches in the texts of the decisions survive.

How can you manage a decision-making program when you do not inform all concerned that applicants from camp P, for instance, are much more likely to be questionable than those from camps A-O and Q-Z?

Getting back to the German study, based on thousands of interviews with boys 14-16, it concluded that "male supremacist views and a preference for violent videos and computer games link closely with mosque attendance among the young....the study also argued that agnostic migrant children were the fastest to integrate, readily considering themselves as German and aiming for the highest educational achievements. By contrast, only 16 per cent of young Muslims aimed for the highest school-completion certificate."

You can bet that our government would not even consider funding such a useful study.

http://www.cis.org/north/religious-extremists

Links within the original are available at the source link above.