I'm sick and tired of living in a place where I could be targeted any second and being told "calm down bigot".
While an often-quoted (tongue-in-cheek) statistic is that you are
more likely to die from hot water scalding than by a terrorist attack, no one is denying ugly realities like the hordes of the self-proclaimed ISIL or lone wolf terrorists exist, or that they don't pose a threat. Problem is, you and I disagree on the scope and reasons of radicalization, and the possible solutions.
Namely, I argue that what leads those people to take up arms against "the infidel" is not religion
per se (if it were, a significant portion of my friends and colleagues wouldn't be friends and colleagues, but people looking for my scalp) and that therefore it's not Average Ali, or as you say, "British Islam", to be at the root of the problem.
What makes a terrorist is a plethora of social factors that's different from case to case, but generally leads to disenfranchisement and alienation. It may be poverty. It may be lack of opportunities. It may be the perception of racism. It may be fear of change, of the future, of a civilization that threatens the traditional way of life.
In this contexts, it is not hard for organizations that provide a strong sense of belonging (in this case: "you are a Muslim who adheres to the worldview of a specific cleric, or group of clerics") and a collective cause ("kill all the infidels, and go to heaven") to recruit and indoctrinate.
It's always the same patterns, the same mechanisms. Yesterday it was political terrorism, nowadays it's religious terrorism, tomorrow, who knows? all I know is that there will be some ****** bombing a subway station and people will all get riled up about whatever cause they'll say they were fighting for.
But I am quite tired of explaining this over and over to you. For further explaination on the idea,
the APA has a nice article that sums it up, surely better than I could ever do.
I was planning to close my post here, but there's something I found funny about your eschewed reasoning, which is...
I wonder if he would change his mind the time he is all alone and faced with someone telling him Islam is coming and not hearing a peep from the surrounding commuters as he's told he will be jumped when the time is right. Perhaps a break is a good idea.
Sure, we can work by hypothetics, and I'd have to admit I'd be quite upset by something like this happening. However, it has never happened to me, nor to anybody I know, nor to anybody anybody I know knows (and we're already talking about quite a lot of people here!), and I have all reasons to believe it to be extremely unlikely to happen. Again, I do happen to have more than a few Muslim friends and colleagues (past and present), and they're generally very chill about this "religion" thing. I don't see them telling someone that they "will be jumped".
But perhaps you are talking from your own (ever-increasing) experience, in which case I must intrude: has it occurred to you that perhaps you didn't hear a peep from the surrounding commuters because they assumed that "special someone" warning you of the incoming Islam be mentally deranged?
