Upping the Terrorist's Ante

Dymphna over at the Gates of Vienna has an extremely interesting post up about "The Muslim Boys" --a ruthless gang in Great Britain that embraces Islam:

The emnity of other criminals doesn't deter them. Nor does police action. One thing which does anger them-mortally so for their victims-are peers who fail to convert to their way of thinking, or who backslide. They are dealt with summarily and without mercy. Forced conversions are a new twist on an old terror; for the bruvs, it's all a part of loyal family feeling. David Cohen, a journalist from The Evening Standard, reports this conversation with "Winston," a Muslim Boy who agreed to be interviewed:

Here's how gang member Winston describes "conversion". "You got to be Muslim to be in our group," he tells me. "If you not down [cool] with Muslim, we visit your home, maybe strip you naked in front of your f***ing mother, we put a gun in your mouth. We give you three days [to change your mind], then, if you not down with it, we f***ing blow...

She makes an extremely provocative comparison of Catholicism in Haiti and its transformation when it came into contact with the Haitian's belief system:

Islam is learning a bitter lesson in underclass Britain. It is a lesson the Catholic Church learned in Haiti, when the African population subverted Christain saints to their own native religious needs. Try as they might, the Catholic missionaries never prevailed; voodoo and Catholic saints were intertwined in a complicated but completely Haitian worldview. It worked for the Haitians; it subverted the Church. Now, in Britain, the Poverty Driven Children are re-imagining Islam for their own needs.

Unfortunately for the terrorists in Islam, a new generation of jihadists just upped the ante.

Read the entire post. I especially like the Haiti analogy and the image of one belief system modifying another when the two come into contact. I wonder if that concept is something that we could consciously use to deal with the Jihadis...? It reminds me how the threat of the "Africanized Kiler Bees" (an extremely aggressive bee that began to take over in the southern U.S.) was somewhat neutralized by mating them with the more docile indigent bees. The resulting hybrid was not particularly dangerous.

"The Muslim Boys" story illustrates one resultant variant of the Jihad mindset when mixed with an even more virulent belief system; but wouldn't it also be possible to dilute that mindset in the same manner by "mixing" it with something else? Maybe aggressive democratization and individual freedom? Just asking....