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| Britain | |
| 'Implosion' in Muslim world fuelling refugee crisis: UK ex-foreign minister | |
| 2016-02-06 | |
| [ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Civil wars crippling many Muslim states and fuelling a global refugee crisis are driven in part by major struggles within Islam that cannot be ignored, former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on Wednesday. This "implosion" in many Muslim-majority countries has forced people from their homes in "unheard-of" numbers, said Miliband, now head of the New York-based humanitarian group International Rescue Committee. Miliband spoke at the international affairs think-tank Chatham House in London. He will take part in a major conference on Thursday in the British capital that aims to raise billions of dollars from donors to respond to the Syrian crisis. "More people are fleeing conflict, they're fleeing conflict significantly in Muslim-majority countries, so the implosion in the Islamic world, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, is driving it," he said. Venturing into what he called "tricky territory", he added it would be dishonest not to report that his organization's work was increasingly focused on crises in Muslim-majority countries. "It seems to me there are big questions, big debates happening within Islam about the reconciliation of Islam to modernity, to democracy, of different segments within the Islamic tradition," he said. "To pretend that that's not part of the story wouldn't be right," he added, without elaborating. In several war-torn countries, bad boy Sunni literalists such as the Taliban and Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... are battling other Muslims who want the faith more adapted to the modern world or belong to a minority sect such as Shi'ism. Miliband added his analysis did not apply to the whole of the Muslim world, citing Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country, and Bangladesh as two examples of countries that did not fit into the narrative. "It's not right to pretend that all Muslim-majority countries are undergoing this implosion," he said. "But I think if you look at the story in South Asia over the last 30 years and the story in the Middle East over the last 20 years, then that's part of the story." Miliband said the Syrian crisis was a long-term issue, with large numbers of refugees likely to be living in Leb, Jordan, ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... and other countries for many years, and this called for a change in the scale and nature of the response.
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| Posted by:Fred |