And because you did RE at school you know more about Islam than religious scholars?

I hate to give credit to the Mail, but I know from personal experience that some social workers are motivated by a political box-ticking agenda and simply will not listen to reason.

Among others, I used to work with a young Kosovar, 15 years old, unaccompanied minor. This was way back in the early years of the "asylum crisis" and the social services really had no clue what to do with kids found alone in shipping containers without their families. After lodging him with a bunch of Kurdish men, they eventually announced that he'd go to stay with a foster family. We all celebrated, as the kid desperately needed some stability and maybe even someone to occasionally have a conversation with.

The family were an extremely strict Bangladeshi Muslim family. The Kosovar hated it, started coming to school on the edge of tears.

I called the SS and asked if some change could be made, to be told that "we have taken the boy's cultural background into consideration and it is vital that he stays with this family."

I objected, given that this kid was from Kosovo, was thoroughly secular in every way despite having been named after a famous Turkish sultan, quite liked a bacon cob when he could get one and - most importantly - was utterly miserable staying with this family with their unutterably alien culture.

No. He was a Muslim and that was that.

He didn't stay there very long, and hated every day he stayed, but the boxes were ticked and that was that.

So yeah, it happens.

You had me freaked out there. Never thought you were that old , or of that inclination.

Very much agree.

I know a lawyer who used to work on cases of foster care. He defended parents who were trying to get their children back. He said many of the foster families are only in it for the cash and in many cases only made things worse. He also said social services were hopeless. Often they didn't take minutes at important meetings and it was difficult to verify afterwards who had said what or precisely what had been decided. Decisions were often based on gut feeling and stereotypes and facts were not duly checked. Inconvenient facts were ignored rather than taken into account. People passed the buck all the time and very few people had the balls to stand up and accept the responsibility for bad decisions.

It was horrible. The stories I could tell!

They don't have an easy job, to be fair, and some of them are utterly brilliant, hardworking professionals with brains and hearts.

But quite a lot of them - too many of them - are not.

The story in the Mail seems entirely plausible. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say likely.

ftfy

Well more than the "religious scholars" whose interpretation of Islam turns their students into criminals facing the death penalty under Sharia Law

Why on earth did the Daily Mail choose a stock photo from Getty images, of a family in Taipei by the looks of the tower behind them, and then blur out the womans face? Its clearly not the family in question, nor is the photo even relevant to the article.


Oh, thats right, its readers are morons who are too gullible to see that the photo is entirely unrelated and only intended to show those muzzies as burka-wearing fanatics.


As you were.

The story seems to have moved on with new developments:

Seems they don't have a clue which team they bat for.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...t-Muslims.html

Poor kid.

Thats nothing compared to how it was reported on Breitbart.

It should go without saying that the media's role is to inform and not to skillfully manipulate the news to incite religious and/or religious hatred. If we've learnt anything from 1930s Germany, its that when you start to caricature and demonise an entire population the results are invariably not good.

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The flipside is that there's a shortage of Muslim and ethnic foster families and stories like this are not exactly going to inspire them to sign up... why would they??

I very much hope that there are sufficient numbers of well meaning people out there in all walks of life and of all creeds and persuasions who will not be swayed by the negativity, and do what is right.

That said, I am happy the story did come out like this. If it had been suppressed and then come out later it would have been oil on the fires of conspiracy theorists, and there would have been a far nastier reaction.

I guess this is the difference between the way British and German media handle such stories.

To me it was a non-story. The judge has even said he had no concerns about how the child was taken care off. I mean the main points of contention were:

- Child wasn't allowed their favourite pasta cause it had bacon in it. Hardly newsworthy. Perhaps if the mother was so concerned she wouldn't be an alocholic drug taker who sells her body?
- The family spoke English but apparently spoke a different language around the child. I guess the child would be better off around the mother while she was snorting lines off a client's dick?
- The family forced the child to learn this other language. So what? I was forced to learn French at school and hated it. Can I get a story in the times?

Foster care is NEVER the ideal scenario. The ideal scenario is to have a loving and caring family and to always be safe. I'm confident the child was in a far better environment with these Muslims....with or without carbonara

Bearing in mind that religious education is largely forbidden in schools in the US, I'd say that I have a slightly better grasp of different faiths than the average person, who may only know about faiths from the media, in that I don't have to search Google for a lot of the basic stuff, such as the divisive aspects of a belief in transmogrification. I can walk into a place like Hagia Sophia and recognise the contrasting cultural and religious symbolism that belies the history of the place.

I firmly believe that if you want your kid to be an agnostic or atheist, the best route is to send them to a R.C. High School. Our R.E. classes stripped away the mystique of the different faiths. Out of all the people I know who went to R.C. schools, I can count on one hand how many still have a faith, and none have changed faith or joined religious based cults. It's the best immunisation you can get

Right...I'm going back to reading about the blonde Caliphates of Cordoba, the Umayyad conquest, and Islamic troops first landing in Spain in 711 A.D. Interesting stuff......

In fact that photo was from the Times article that broke the story. The Mail lifted the article and took what looks like the same picture as the Times but photoshopped a full face veil onto the woman.

Islamic Terrorism can't be defeated from the outside, eg. military, police, etc...only contained...because it is an ideology that's based on Islam. There is a huge recruiting base, and no lack of recruits. Globally. Why are so many people willing to kill/die for Islam?

I would guess because in many parts of the world, they live the religion, it's deeply ingrained, praying 5x daily, eating only certain foods and fasting, ... when people are so obedient to their belief, they are easier to be manipulated by Imams who have certain agendas (ie: radical Islamists).

I would be interested to hear other people's opinions.

Mine keep getting modded of late

I think that is definitely part of it, but not the full story, beacause as others have said, there have also been peaceful periods in Islamic History.

I think it also has much to do with tensions between the Islamic World and the West. Islamic traditionalists see a massive imperialist drive by Western nations to establish puppet governments in their countries and to introduce Western values and culture by stealth.

When people say, there have been more Muslim victims of Islamic terrorism than Western ones, what they miss is that in the eyes of the extremists, the partly secularized governments of their countries and the non radicalized people on the street and all around them are part of the Western cancer that is threatening and eroding their version of Islam. They are thus not killing Muslims for the sake of killing muslims but killing the Muslims who are too westernized.

So when the terrorists set off a bomb they have some mystic means (hand of God?) to murder only the Muslims who are too westernized and too ensure any passing deeply religious and traditional Muslims are spared

Edit - you mean like in June when Tehran was targeted by suicide bombers and teams of gunmen when they stormed Iran's parliament and the nearby shrine of Ruhollah Khomeini or in February when a suicide bomber entered the main hall of the Shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan, Pakistan and detonated his payload amid dozens of worshippers.

Shia Muslims are as bad as "imperialist lapdog" Muslims in the eyes of ISIS and their fellow travellers.

Sure, so we agree they are not Westernised, secular Muslims but "genuine" Muslims but from a different sect?