Archive for the ‘Multiculturalism’ category

Atbashian: Ohio State U Terror Attack is the Story of Immigration

November 29, 2016

Atbashian: Ohio State U Terror Attack is the Story of Immigration, Truth Revolt, Oleg Atbashian, November 29, 2016

ohio_state_attacker_cop

A rant by an America-loving immigrant.

Ohio State University jihadist, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, was not just a Muslim immigrant from Somalia. He had the coveted refugee status, which means the US government provided him with food, shelter, and education grants. What made him so mad at Americans that he went on an indiscriminate killing rampage? Was it something he heard from ISIS – or was it the school-approved “social justice” rhetoric about how much he suffered in this country as a Muslim? It could be both, not necessarily in that order.

The University police officer who shot and killed him, Alan Horujko, is another young man from an immigrant family. His ancestors hailed from Ukraine or any of the bordering areas in Poland, Belarus, Slovakia, or another Eastern European country. They’d be shocked to hear that someday the U.S. government would feed and house immigrants – especially the types of immigrants that have a proven record of going on murderous rampages and indiscriminately killing and maiming Americans simply for being Americans.

Based on these two examples, which type of immigration is beneficial to America and which one is harmful?

The answer is obvious, but here’s the kicker: current immigration laws, as written by the late Senator Ted Kennedy, make it next to impossible for any European to obtain a green card (it took me 20 years to get mine). Instead, the law focuses on “multiculturalism” and “diversity,” which means the preference is given to immigrants from the Third World countries who are least likely to assimilate. By now the entire world is aware of the benefits that come with the “refugee status”; for many it is the equivalent of winning a life lottery: guaranteed food stamps, subsidized housing, free healthcare, grants, and other perks on the taxpayer’s dime.

If today’s laws were in existence at the time when the Horujkos came to America, there would be no Alan Horujko around to stop the jihadist because his ancestors would be turned away. America itself would also be different, looking more like a Third World country in its ways, culture, and system of government. Terror attacks would be the norm and human life would have as little value as it has in Somalia.

Knowing this, any sensible American would demand an urgent overhaul of these insane immigration laws. Unfortunately, proponents of the existing system have been able to condition American conservatives to see red at the very mention of “immigration reform” because it sounds like a “liberal” idea. By and large, traditional conservatives seem to have convinced themselves that all that’s needed is simply to “enforce the existing laws,” oppose “illegal immigration,” proudly support “legal immigration,” and forget about any reforms. By doing that they effectively support a continuation of multiculturalism that precludes assimilation and renders the proverbial “melting pot” obsolete.

Indeed, any reform conducted by a leftist government is likely to make things worse. But the leftist hold on the U.S. government will be over as early as January. Once the Trump administration takes office, we should demand a completely new set of immigration laws based on a cardinally different philosophy.

This is not an argument to filter people by race or ethnicity, but rather by their individual readiness to assimilate into the American culture by accepting American values and American way of life.

It’s not racist to want your children to be safe when they walk the streets, ride the trains, or, in this case, go to school after a Thanksgiving break. We need an immigration system that would let more Horujkos in and keep Abdul Razak Ali Artans out.

* * *

On another note, three weeks ago I was arrested for hanging these anti-terror posters on George Mason University campus. Given today’s terrorist attack on Ohio State campus, these posters turned out to be prophetic (PBUH).

41005-gmu_2_posters_600

Will the George Mason authorities apologize to me now and drop the charges? I have three more hashtags for them:

#IToldYouSo
#TheIrony
#IDontHoldMyBreath

In the meantime, the Muslim Students’ Association at Ohio State is promoting such events as “The Trump Era: Battling Normalized Islamophobia” under this completely non-violent banner:

41209-msa_trump_era

And on December 2 they have a scheduled Discussion with OSU Police Department:

“We will have a discussion about the police relations with the muslim (sic) community and how we can adress (sic) distrust. In a time where bigotry against minority communities is prevalant (sic) it is important for our community to have friends within the Law Enforcement Community.”

Why do bad things always happen to their community?

Perhaps, if only their community could meet with the other community to talk about their communities sooner, much bigotry could have been prevented – and a community of 11 random non-Muslim students wouldn’t be in the hospital today with stab wounds and fractured skulls. And Abdul Razak Ali Artan would have abandoned the jihadi community and set his mind on helping the Catholic community that took care of him when he first came to join the American community. Or maybe not.

* * *

On yet another note, if Abdul Razak Ali Artan voted for a U.S. president this month, who did he vote for? In Ohio, according to reports, Somali immigrants are being driven to the polls by the van load, while many of them don’t even speak English, which makes them unlikely citizens. Abdul is said to have been a “permanent resident,” which comes before citizenship. So if he did vote, can we now chuck his vote from the much discussed “popular vote” number? In fact, how many more votes like his are there in the “popular vote” of which Hillary is so proud?

From The People’s Cube

A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Germany: October 2016

November 27, 2016

A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Germany: October 2016, Gatestone InstituteSoeren Kern, November 27, 2016

Residents of Essen complained that police often refuse to respond to calls for help and begged city officials to restore order. One resident said: “I was born here and I do not feel safe anymore.” City officials flatly rejected the complaints.

The Sarah Nußbaum Haus, a kindergarten in Kassel, said that “because of the high proportion of Muslim children,” and because of the different cultures of the children, the school was “renouncing” Christian rituals.

During the first six months of 2016, more than 2,000 migrants who requested asylum were found to be carrying false passports, but German border control officers allowed them into the country anyway. Migrants with false papers could be linked to the Islamic State, security analysts warned.

German President Joachim Gauck said he believed that Germany will eventually have a Muslim president.

Muslims are attacking Christians at refugee shelters throughout Germany. “The religious minorities in refugee accommodations are now experiencing the same oppression prevalent in their countries of origin,” according to the NGO Open Doors.

The Federal Statistics Office reported that the birthrate in Germany reached the highest level in 33 years in 2015, boosted mainly by babies born to migrant women.

A 49-year-old Syrian refugee in Rhineland-Palatinate is seeking social welfare benefits in Germany for his four wives and 23 children.

October 1. Two migrants raped a 23-year-old woman in Lüneburg as she was walking in a park with her young child. The men, who remain at large, forced the child to watch while they took turns assaulting the woman.

October 2. A 19-year-old migrant raped a 90-year-old woman as she was leaving a church in downtown Düsseldorf. Police initially described the suspect as “a Southern European with North African roots.” It later emerged that the man is a Moroccan with a Spanish passport.

October 2. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble called for the development of a “German Islam” to help integrate Muslims in the country. In an opinion article published by Welt am Sonntag, he wrote:

“Considering the diverse origins of Muslims in Germany, we want to promote the development of a German Islam, the development of self-assurance of Muslims living as Muslims in Germany, in a free, open, pluralistic and tolerant order, according to our laws and the religious neutrality of the state.

“There is no doubt that the growing number of Muslims in our country today is testing the tolerance of mainstream society. The origin of the vast majority of refugees means that we are increasingly dealing with people from very different cultures…. In this tense situation, we should not allow for the emergence of an atmosphere in which well-integrated people in Germany feel alien.”

October 4. Münchner Merkur reported that the 2016 Munich Oktoberfest recorded its lowest turnout since 2001. Visitors reportedly stayed away due to concerns about terrorism and migrant-related sexual assaults.

2073This year’s Munich Oktoberfest recorded its lowest turnout since 2001. Visitors reportedly stayed away due to concerns about terrorism and migrant-related sexual assaults. (Image source: Flickr/Sergey Zhaffsky)

October 6. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on a German intelligence study which found that almost half the German Salafists who left for Syria or Iraq were active in mosques. “The mosques continue to play a central role in the radicalization of Islamists in Germany,” a spokeswoman for the German domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), said. The ongoing study analyzes the background and course of the radicalization of persons who left for Syria or Iraq. The study has collected data from 784 Islamists who left Germany or were actively trying to leave the country. The BfV estimates that there are 9,200 known Salafists in Germany.

October 6. More than 400 residents of the Altenessen district in Essen met local politicians in a televised “town hall meeting” to discuss spiraling violence and crime perpetrated by migrants in the area. Residents complained that police often refuse to respond to calls for help and begged city officials to restore order. One resident said: “I was born here and I do not feel safe anymore.” City officials flatly rejected the complaints. Mayor Thomas Kufen said: “Altenessen is not a no-go area, the people here are just angry.” Police Chief Frank Richter added: “I am sick and tired of hearing about no-go zones in Essen.” He insisted that Essen und Altenessen are perfectly safe.

October 7. The Sarah Nußbaum Haus, a kindergarten in Kassel, announced that it would not be celebrating Christmas this year, “because of the high proportion of Muslim children.” According to local media, there will be “no Christmas tree, no Christmas stories and no Christmas spirit.” Non-Muslim parents said that celebrating Christmas is a normal “part of the integration process to get to know the new culture.” School officials responded by saying that because of the different cultures of the children, the school was “renouncing” Christian rituals. They also said that teachers at the school are now required to ensure that the children do not exchange their sandwiches, to prevent Muslim children from eating pork.

October 8. Welt am Sonntag reported that during the first six months of 2016, more than 2,000 migrants who requested asylum were found to be carrying false passports, but German border control officers allowed them into the country anyway. Migrants with false papers could be linked to the Islamic State, security analysts warned.

October 10. Jaber al-Bakr, a 22-year-old refugee from Syria, was arrested after police found explosives in his apartment in Chemnitz. He was suspected of plotting to bomb an airport in Berlin. Two days later, he hanged himself in a jail in Leipzig.

October 14. German President Joachim Gauck, who is stepping down for health reasons, said he believed that Germany will eventually have a Muslim president. Of the eleven German presidents so far, nine have been Protestant and two have been Catholic. Gauck’s statement caused a stir in Germany. Some said that all German citizens are eligible for the position, regardless of confession, and others said a Muslim president would further divide society. Vice President of the European Parliament Alexander Graf Lambsdorff said: “A mullah with a turban would be impossible, but a representative of modern, enlightened Islam, such as the mayor in London, of course.” The Office of the President told Bild that the oath of office would never be changed from “so help me God” to “so help me Allah.”

October 14. Green Party politician Volker Beck called on Germans to learn Arabic so that they can communicate with migrants who do not speak German. When asked on NTV how migrants can integrate if there are no German speakers in many parts of German cities, he replied: “Other countries are more relaxed about the fact that, in some areas, a different language is spoken by a migrant community. In the US, you will find your Chinatown, you will find areas where Mexicans live, or whatever community is strong in a city.” He also said it was good that German is not spoken in many German mosques. “Arab sermons are a piece of home,” he said.

October 14. Volker Kauder, a key member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, threatened internet giants such as Facebook and Google with fines up to 50,000 euros ($53,000) if they fail to tackle online hate speech. The move comes amid a rise in anti-immigration sentiment in Germany.

October 15. A Syrian migrant disrupted a wedding at the Karmel Church in downtown Duisburg. He burst into the building and began fondling a statue of the Virgin Mary while shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (“Allah is the greatest.”) After undergoing a psychological evaluation, the man was released. The incident is one of a growing number in which Muslim migrants have disrupted or vandalized German churches.

October 16. A 16-year-old boy and his 15-year-old girlfriend were walking along the banks of the Alster, a lake in the heart of Hamburg, when a stranger ambushed him from behind and plunged a knife into his back. The attacker then pushed the girl into the water and walked away. The girl survived, but the boy died of his wounds. The suspect, a “southern-looking” (südländischer Erscheinung) man in his early twenties, remains at large. Police say the victims were not robbed and there is no evident motive for the crime: The suspect appears to have randomly stabbed the boy just because he felt like it. The Islamic State later claimed responsibility for the murder, but German police cast doubt on that claim.

October 17. The German Press Council reprimanded the weekly newspaper, Junge Freiheit, for revealing the nationality of three Afghan teenagers who raped a woman at a train station in Vienna, Austria, in April 2016. The press council said the nationality of the perpetrators was “not relevant” to the case, and by revealing this information the newspaper “deliberately and pejoratively represented the suspects as second-class persons.” In the interests of “fair reporting,” the council demanded that the newspaper remove the offending item from its website. The newspaper refused to comply, and said it would continue to publish the nationalities of criminal suspects.

October 17. The German branch of Open Doors, a non-governmental organization supporting persecuted Christians, reported that Muslims are attacking Christians at refugee shelters throughout Germany. The NGO documented 743 incidents between May and September 2016, but said they were only the “tip of the iceberg.” The report said:

“Many of the refugees concerned have previously been persecuted and discriminated against in their Islamic countries of origin and have therefore fled to Germany. The religious minorities in refugee accommodations are now experiencing the same oppression prevalent in their countries of origin.”

October 17. The Federal Statistics Office reported that the birthrate in Germany reached the highest level in 33 years in 2015, boosted mainly by babies born to migrant women. The rate was 1.5 births per woman in 2015, up from 1.47 births in 2014, and the highest figure since 1982 when it was 1.51. For German women, the birth rate increased only slightly from 1.42 children per woman in 2014 to 1.43 in 2015. For women of foreign nationality, the rate increased from 1.86 to 1.95 children per woman.

October 18. Sigrid Meierhofer, the mayor of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in an urgent letter (Brandbrief) to the Bavarian government, threatened to close a shelter that houses 250 mostly male migrants from Africa if public safety and order could not be restored. The letter, which was leaked to the Münchner Merkur, stated that local police had responded to more emergency calls during the past six weeks than in all of the previous 12 months combined.

October 18. Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that during the first eight months of 2016, more than 17,000 migrants sued the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) for not giving them full refugee status. Most Syrian refugees in Germany receive only partial asylum status, known as subsidiary protection, which delays family repatriations by at least two years. According to Süddeutsche, 90% of the refugees who challenged the subsidiary protection status in court won their case and were granted full rights under the Geneva Convention. Refugees with full status are allowed immediately to submit applications to bring spouses and children to Germany. If all of the 17,000 migrants win their cases, hundreds of thousands of additional migrants would be allowed to come to Germany.

October 19. Bild reported that a 49-year-old Syrian refugee in Rhineland-Palatinate is seeking social welfare benefits in Germany for his four wives and 23 children. The man, identified as Ghazia A., told Bild that “according to our religion, I have the duty to visit and be with each family equally, and not show any preferential treatment.” Local officials told the newspaper that the family is integrating well and all of the children are going to school.

October 19. A 29-year-old migrant from Syria appeared in court on charges of sexually molesting ten children in Freiburg and Müllheim. The father of one of the victims took a photograph of the suspect, but police waited ten days before acting on the lead.

October 19. A 16-year-old German-Moroccan girl appeared in court on terrorism charges. In February 2016, when she was 15, she stabbed a police officer with a kitchen knife at the central train station in Hanover. Prosecutors say she was conducting a “martyrdom operation” for the Islamic State.

October 20. Pupils at a grade school in Garmisch-Partenkirchen were required to memorize and recite the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith (“There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger.”), in both German and Arabic, for an interfaith chapel service.

October 21. In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, Islam expert and Green Party member Kurt Edler said that Syrian migrants should be allowed to set up their own city in Germany as a way to prevent radicalization. He said: “Why do not we set up a New Aleppo in Pomerania? Then we can show that what the British and Irish emigrants have done in the North East of the USA is also possible with us.”

October 24. A group of Serbian teenagers in Hamburg were handed suspended sentences for gang-raping a 14-year-old girl and leaving her for dead in sub-zero temperatures. The judge said that although “the penalties may seem mild to the public,” the teens had all made confessions, appeared remorseful and longer posed a danger to society. The ruling, which effectively allowed the rapists to walk free, provoked a rare moment of public outrage over the problem of migrant sex crimes in Germany.

October 24. A YouGov poll found that 68% of Germans believe that security in Germany has deteriorated over the past several years. Also, 68% of respondents said they fear for their lives and property in German train stations and subways, while 63% feel unsafe at large public events.

October 25. Seven migrant boys, some as young as seven years old, sexually assaulted three girls (ages 9, 11 and 14) at a public swimming pool in Berlin.

October 25. The German edition of the Huffington Post published an article by a Syrian migrant named Aras Bacho in which he demanded that all signs and products in Germany be translated into in Arabic to make life easier for migrants. He wrote:

“As a refugee I believe that in Europe the street signs should be translated into Arabic. Likewise, food packaging should be in Arabic. It should also be possible to take exams in Arabic…. Most refugees have been driving in Syria. It would be helpful if the road signs were in Arabic. We should help these people more, no matter what it costs.”

October 25. Police in five German states raided a dozen apartments and a refugee shelter as part of a counter-terrorism investigation. Fourteen Chechens, all asylum seekers who arrived in Germany in 2013, are at the center of a probe into “terrorist financing.” No one was arrested.

October 25. A group of Muslim children shouting “Allahu Akbar” threw stones at a visiting Ethiopian priest who was walking to a chapel in Raunheim. Police said the priest was targeted because he was wearing a cross.

October 27. A ten-year-old girl was raped while she was riding her bicycle to school in Leipzig. Police published a facial composite of the migrant suspect with the politically correct warning: “This image is to be published only in print media products in the Leipzig region. Publishing it on the internet, including on social media such as Facebook, is not covered by the court order and is therefore not allowed.”

October 27. Officials in Monheim donated 845,000 euros ($890,000) of taxpayer money to two Islamic associations, to build mosques in the town. The money will be used to purchase land for the mosques, the construction of which will be paid for by the Turkish government. Mayor Daniel Zimmermann said he hopes the mosques will promote Muslim integration. “I hope the mosques will be city-shaping and also architectural monuments,” he said. The grant is subject to only one condition: the minarets must not be more than 25 meters (80 feet) high.

October 27. Deutsche Welle reported that the parents of a German teenager face prosecution for refusing to allow their son to enter a mosque during a school field trip. The parents were fined 300 euros ($315) for their son’s truancy. The prosecutor’s office in Itzehoe is now reviewing whether or not the parents should appear in court because they did not pay the fine. The school’s principal, Renate Fritzsche, said that there are no exceptions to Germany’s mandatory school law. The goal of education, Fritzsche emphasized, is to teach children about other cultures so they will be able to interact and tolerate them.

October 27. Berliner Zeitung reported that a 19-year-old Syrian migrant, identified only as Shaas Al-M., scouted out potential terror targets in Berlin for the Islamic State. He was allegedly actively recruiting assassins in Germany and was preparing to attack when he was arrested in March 2016. The man, who received religious and military training with the Islamic State in Syria, arrived in Germany in the summer of 2015 posing as a Syrian refugee.

October 28. Reuters reported that many Arab mosques in Germany are more conservative than those in Syria. The report states: “A dozen Syrians in six places of worship in three cities told Reuters they were uncomfortable with very conservative messages in Arabic-speaking mosques. People have criticized the way the newcomers dress and practice their religion, they said. Some insisted the Koran be interpreted word-for-word.”

October 28. A mob of 17 Muslim migrants sexually assaulted two women in front of a church in Freiburg. Police arrested three of the men, all from Gambia, who arrived in Germany as refugees in 2015 and had previously been detained for other crimes.

October 28. Der Spiegel reported that Justice Minister Heiko Maas wants to make it easier for German courts to void child marriages. There currently are 1,475 married adolescents in Germany; 361 of them are younger than 14 years, 120 are 14 or 15 years old. According to German law, young people above the age of 16 may marry, but only if the other spouse is 18 and a family court gives a so-called exemption. Maas wants to tighten the criteria for this. The exemption is to be granted only “if the intended marriage does not affect the welfare of the applicant.” Günter Krings (CDU), parliamentary secretary of state, said the measure does not go far enough. “For the sake of clarity of our legal system, we should consistently ensure that no marriages with minors can be concluded in our country, even in exceptional cases,” he said.

October 31. A 53-year-old woman attacked two police officers after they entered her apartment in Mülheim. The officers were checking in on her after she had allegedly thrown furniture out the window. When she refused to open the door, the officers broke it down. Once inside the apartment, the veiled woman attacked them with a box-cutter while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest.”) Police said the woman was a Muslim convert and was already familiar to police after a series of earlier incidents linked with Islamic extremism.

 

Gulag, Western Style

November 23, 2016

Gulag, Western Style, PJ MediaDavid Solway, November 22, 2016

newspeak

In the last analysis, this system of subjugation looks to be even more effective than the cruder techniques of its tyrannical counterparts. In the absence of public awareness and concerted pushback, we will have sold our birthright for a mess of political potage.

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There are various ways of quashing social and political dissent, some more effective than others. The “Soviet method” practiced in stringently repressive regimes—torture, imprisonment, the ever-expanding Gulag, summary execution—works extremely well in the shorter historical timeframe, until a people rise up in revolt or such demonic societies collapse from their own internal contradictions. Of course, the truly Stygian regimes, closed to the world, indifferent to economic pressures, and under the heavy boot of unbroken military control, such as North Korea, may persist indefinitely or until defeated in war. But generally speaking, the tried-and-true methods of political oppression are sufficient to the task of keeping a population in a state of enslavement for a prolonged historical period.

In the sphere of the liberal West, however, there are other means of subjection to the will of increasingly centralized governments. Because they tend to function gradually and under the radar, these tactics are enormously efficient in their deadening effects, going unrecognized until it is often too late to mount significant resistance. They operate through a process of curricular distortions, social pressure and incremental legislation targeting speech habits, facets of normal behavior, assumptions of what counts as morally legitimate, and financial and job security.

A useful technique for anaesthetizing the individual citizen and rendering him compliant is the erasure of authentic historical knowledge. We’ve remarked the success of this approach in the U.S. with the “history from below” or “people’s history” movement, associated with Howard Zinn, and the foregrounding of a bowdlerized version of Islamic history in American schools. Canada is no different. Eric McGeer, author of Words of Valediction and Remembrance: Canadian Epitaphs of the Second World War, writes: “In my last years of high school teaching I was increasingly infuriated and disgusted at the portrayal of Canada in the history textbooks assigned for use in our courses. There was no sense of gratitude in the textbooks, no empathy with the people of the past or an attempt to see them in their own terms, no sense of the effort people made to create one of the few truly liveable societies on earth. You would have thought that this country was nothing more than a racist, bigoted, this or that-phobic hotbed. My first lesson involved taking the book and dropping it into the waste paper basket and advising the students to do the same.” (personal communication). The study of history, McGeer concludes, is nothing now but a progressive morality tale and a mechanism of social engineering. Sounds a lot like Title IX. Pride in one’s nation, its accomplishments and sacrifices, is contra-indicated. There is more than one way of burning the flag.

The center-right consensus that has characterized Western nations has been under attack for some considerable time as nation after nation in the once liberal West gravitates progressively leftward. Robert Conquest’s Second of his Three Laws of Politics states that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” The consequence of Conquest’s Law is, inevitably, what Robert Michels in Political Parties called “The Iron Law of Oligarchy,” which formulates how democratic institutions tend to succumb to the rule of an elite—in our day, a progressivist camarilla that controls government policy and media outlets, and harnesses the energies of dissenting associations and cabals. In many countries, the democratic process has become or is on the road to becoming a mere formality.

The oligarchic agenda can be detected in the disastrous nationalization of the health care system; the decadence of an academy which indoctrinates rather than educates; the rise of destructive feminism and the feminization of the culture; the transgendering of everyday life—in Canada, for example, Bill C-16 has been tabled, making “gender expression” a prohibited ground of discrimination and potentially mandating non-binary pronouns such as zhi or hir, as is already the case in New York City where astronomical fines are levied for contravention; the special status ascribed to the incursions of anti-democratic Islam; the “abolition of the family,” as Marx and Engels urged in The Communist Manifesto; and the regulatory strangling of the free market economy and the conjoint attrition of the middle class. Additionally, the leftist project is materially facilitated by the growing prevalence of kangaroo courts run by committed activists of every conceivable stripe and in which no provision whatsoever is made to assist those too often falsely accused of discrimination or being in violation of some obscure code or policy of sanctioned conduct. The judgments handed down against those who have offended the sensibilities of favored identity groups will often involve harshly punitive forms of retribution that may cost a defendant his employment and his livelihood.

A Romanian friend who suffered through Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in his home country tells me that in many ways the situation in the “freedom loving” West is actually worse. In Romania, as in the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, most people knew that the regime was founded on lies and that the media were corrupt, time-serving institutions. Here, on the contrary, people tend to believe that the government is relatively, if not entirely, trustworthy, that the judiciary is impartial, and that the media actually report the news. Citizens are therefore susceptible to mission creep and are piecemeal deceived into a condition of indenture to socialist governance, an activist judiciary, a disinformative, hireling press corps, and left-wing institutions. People will vote massively for the Liberal Party in Canada and the Democrats in the U.S., not realizing they are voting themselves into bondage, penury and stagnation. The process operates insensibly and takes longer to embed itself into the cultural mainstream, but the result is alarmingly effective and durable. My friend has never read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or George Orwell’s 1984, but his layman’s insights and practical experience bear out Hayek’s scholarly analysis and Orwell’s dire warnings.

A totalitarian regime will control its citizens through propaganda, censorship, and outright violence, modes of oppression that are at least publicly demonstrable, evident to most. But knowing that the enchainment of the spirit is ultimately more reliable than the enchainment of the flesh, a democratic polity veering towards oligarchy will focus on propaganda and censorship as well, but in a far more subtle form. It will function mainly through public shaming rituals, social ostracism, rigid speech codes, Orwellian disinformation, and legal or quasi-legal assault. It does not need to depend on physical violence.

Fear of social rejection, the lure of groupthink, the pestilence of political correctness controlling what one may say and think, public apathy, historical ignorance, and especially the Damoclean sword of selective hiring, job dismissal, and financial reprisal go a long way to subdue a people to the will of its masters and consign them to a Gulag that may be less observable a such, but one that is nonetheless socially and economically crippling to individuals, families and businesses.

In the last analysis, this system of subjugation looks to be even more effective than the cruder techniques of its tyrannical counterparts. In the absence of public awareness and concerted pushback, we will have sold our birthright for a mess of political potage.

UK: Migrant’s foster mother finds he isn’t 12-year-old “refugee” but 21-year-old jihadi

October 23, 2016

UK: Migrant’s foster mother finds he isn’t 12-year-old “refugee” but 21-year-old jihadi, Jihad Watch,

(Someone deserves a Darwin Award. — DM)

The ignorance and kindness of Westerners is being exploited on a much larger basis than most people realize or than authorities are willing to admit.

“I’ll kill you and I know where your children are.”

Those are words that British authorities should ponder. But they won’t.

 

21-year-old-jihadi

“Cuckoo in the nest: Migrant foster mum reveals her horror at discovering ’12-year-old refugee’ in her care is actually a 21-year-old Jihadi,” by Nigel Bunyan and Chris Pollard, The Sun, October 22, 2016:

A FOSTER mum who took in a child refugee has told of her horror after discovering he was a 21-year-old jihadi.

Kind-hearted Rosie welcomed Jamal into her family after social workers said he was a 12-year-old orphan who had fled Afghanistan.

But she became suspicious when she noticed how hairy he was, and how adept he was at firing a rifle.

Jamal was rumbled when a dentist estimated he was a decade older than claimed. Taliban material and child abuse images were later found on his mobile.

The blunder comes after migrants claiming to be children were bussed to the UK from Calais’ Jungle camp. It is feared terrorists could use the same ruse.

Rosie, whose full name we are hiding to protect her from reprisals, said: “Adults are playing the system. It’s putting families like mine and society as a whole at risk.

“I don’t see anything wrong with dental and bone density checks. Some say they are intrusive and degrading. But having a man in your home who’s pretending to be a child is far more intrusive.”

When Rosie and husband Pete, 57, took in Jamal they all switched to halal meat.

She said: “He looked thin and I thought, ‘Bless him’. He was so humble, polite.”

He roomed with a boy, aged 13. Two girls, 12 and 14, were also in the house.

Alarm bells rang when the family went swimming and Rosie’s 13-year-old commented on how hairy he was.

At a climbing centre he shimmied up ropes with ease, and at a shooting range he stripped a gun before firing it.

On a bus to college he was told to get off by a driver who didn’t believe he was 16. Rosie, who lives in the South East, said: “It’s ridiculous how everybody else could see it but not the social workers.”

Jamal’s behaviour worsened. He put the 13-year-old in expert holds, demanded cash and got calls from unknown numbers.

One day he claimed he couldn’t pray because there were too many posters on his wall. The interpreter told him, “What do you mean? Allah doesn’t mind?”

His last words to Rosie were: “I’ll kill you and I know where your children are.”

She added: “I can’t say he was a terrorist but I do think he came from a training camp. He was a great actor.

“Every day I check the car, and that all the house windows are shut. I panic because I know he knows our routine.”

Since being arrested for an alleged assault, Jamal has been turned down for asylum but is appealing….

Anti-Semitism was required, Anti-Islamism is verboten

October 21, 2016

Anti-Semitism was required, Anti-Islamism is verboten, Israel National News, Janet Levy, October 21, 2016

In their recent documentary, Germans and Jews, filmmakers Tal Recanati and Junina Quint, portray Germany as having reached a nuanced reconciliation with its Nazi past by breaking the silence about it and facing it head-on.  Yet, several recent surveys of German attitudes toward Jews and the Jewish homeland reveal the persistence of strong, anti-Semitic attitudes that belie the filmmakers’ conclusions.

Indeed, Germany may actually be stoking anti-Semitism with its official policy of acceptance and open-mindedness toward Muslim immigrants, even to the point of allowing them expression of hatred toward Jews.  One of Germany’s major trade partners is Iran, hostile to Israel since the first Gulf War, and Germany continues to blame Israeli settlements for Middle East unrest.  Thus, Germany’s policy of acceptance and tolerance toward Muslims may actually mask an underlying anti-Semitism that stubbornly remains despite the passage of time.

The Surveys and Anti-Semitism Revealed

In 2011, a survey by the Freidrich Ebert Foundation,Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination, found that 49% of German respondents agreed with the statement that Jews were trying to take advantage of their people’s suffering during the Holocaust. Another 20% of Germans agreed that Jews have too much influence in their country, 30% agreed, “Jews don’t care about anything or anyone but their own kind.”

A 2015 study by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence from the University of Bielefeld found that 49% of Germans don’t want to hear anything about the Holocaust, 55% are angry that Germans are still accused of crimes against Jews, 28% responded that they can understand why people don’t like Jews considering Israel’s policies, and 27% say that Israeli policy toward Arab-Palestinians is not different from what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Third Reich.

In 2012, an Anti-Defamation League survey of Attitudes Toward Jews in 10 European Countries discovered the following about German respondents:  24% felt that Jews have too much power in international financial markets, 43% agreed that Jews talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust, 14% believe that Jews are responsible for the death of Christ, and 77% believed the government was doing enough to ensure the safety and security of its Jewish citizens.

The deep resentment and demonization of Jews revealed in the surveys are not indicative of a guilt-wracked, tortured people anxious to rise above the atrocities of the Nazi generation.  Clearly, large percentages of Germans still harbor harsh, anti-Jewish sentiments.

Muslim-Only Multi-culturalism

By contrast, Germans seem to apply the values of multiculturalism, diversity and tolerance to Muslims, bypassing Jews entirely.  Germany today houses Europe’s largest Muslim population, with the influx of Muslim refugees comprising almost 6% of the total population.  It leads the way as Europe becomes an increasingly multicultural and Islamic continent.  Yet, far from experiencing great anguish about dramatic increases in anti-Semitism that rose during the Holocaust, Germany appears indifferent toward the impact of Muslim interlopers on its Jewish population.

Paradoxically, Germany has accepted this wave of Muslim “refugees,” many of whom vacation in their war-torn homelands, while, the Third Reich persecuted Germany’s Jewish citizens, who, by and large, were productive members of society contributing substantially to the economy and culture of the state.  While Jews fled to avoid death camps and had few places to go during Nazi persecution, Muslims are welcomed in Europe.  Although more than 33 Muslim countries exist that could choose to accommodate Muslim refugees, five of the wealthiest – Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain – are unwilling to accept a single refugee.

During the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) which preceded the Third Reich, Jews, who were barred from certain professions, were disproportionately represented in law, medicine, journalism and retailing.  They were active in creative pursuits, business, diplomacy and government.  A Jew even drafted the Weimar Republic Constitution.  At the time, five of the nine German recipients of the Nobel Prize were Jewish scientists.  For the first time, German universities fully opened their faculties to Jewish scholars, including physicist Albert Einstein.

Although portrayed as “the enemy within,” a higher percentage of German Jews fought in World War I than any other ethnic group in Germany.  Over 12,000 gave their lives for their country.

Despite their sacrifice in that war, Jews were targeted beginning in the 1920s with wide circulation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery that claimed that Jews conspired to take over the world.

Given the contributions of a predominantly upright Jewish citizenry and their benign, contributory, integral presence in Germany, it is remarkable to consider what followed, even more so as we view today’s efforts to accommodate Muslim “refugees” who decline to work and integrate into German society and insist on shariah law supremacy in lieu of German constitutional law.  Further, Muslims in German have been linked to 69,000 crimes in the country in the first quarter of 2016!

Whether actively or passively, most Germans went along with the marginalization and demonization of Jews and the concomitant restrictive laws, ghettoization and, ultimately, the Final Solution.  Desperate Jews facing deportation to Nazi death camps were not widely welcomed as refugees by other countries.  Official German policy singled out Jews for ethnic cleansing to purify the Aryan race and made harboring and assisting Jews a crime punishable by death.

By comparison, today’s Muslims in Germany enjoy protections from persecution.  Social media is reviewed for offensive statements against Muslims.  Germans who openly object to the settlement of Muslim “refugees” are charged with incitement and hate speech, forced to pay fines and/or endure probation or suspended sentences.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel has gone so far as to chastise her fellow countrymen about those “with hate in their hearts”… “who seek to marginalize others.”  It is indeed striking to comprehend the gaping dissimilarities between official German policy toward its productive Jewish population during the Third Reich with the protections, generous entitlements and privileges afforded to today’s mostly parasitic Muslim refugee populations that refuse to become part of German society and are massively over-represented in every category of crime.

The official narrative, vastly different from the past party line about the Jews, is that the influx of Muslim refugees is having a positive, multi-cultural influence on Germany, that Islam is truly a religion of peace not represented by ISIS, and that random acts of terrorism have nothing to do with Islam.  Evidence for this distorted, benign view is non-existent and stands in sharp contrast to the Third Reich view of evil Jews as “subhuman” creatures infiltrating Aryan society, inhuman and unworthy of life itself.

This apocryphal perspective is further buttressed by efforts by German authorities and the media to conceal the dramatic rise in rapes, assaults and murders perpetrated by Muslim migrants.  Following the Cologne sexual attacks on New Year’s Eve during which 1,200 women were assaulted by groups of men described as Arab or North African, the North-Rhine Westphalia government ordered a cover-up to include the elimination of the word “rape” from police reports.  Of the 2,000 men involved, the authorities identified only 120 and they were given suspended sentences of a year or less.

The German media takes great pains to obscure the religion, nationalities and motives of Muslim assailants and often refrains from reporting incidents altogether to avoid charges of racism or xenophobia. In 2013, in an extreme case of Germany’s so-called open-mindedness, the prestigious Ludwig-Borne literary prize was given to a philosopher who sympathized with Islamic terrorist organizations and equated the 9/11 attacks with the Holocaust, the Allied bombings of Nazi Germany and the atomic bombing of Japan.

Anti-Semitism Revived

Reminiscent of the Third Reich era, displays of Jewish hatred and agitating against Jews are in full bloom in today’s Germany. Radical Islamic protestors are permitted to yell, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” “Jewish s—t” and “Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come out and fight on your own.”  Yet those who call for the preservation of German culture, protest the massive influx of Muslim “refugees,” religious fanaticism and Islamic separatism and radicalism are shut down, depicted as Nazis, prosecuted for hate speech, fined and even jailed.   Appallingly, it has been alleged that the German government is busing in counter-protest groups to create opposition to anti-immigrant rallies.

Lutz Bachmann, the founder of PEGIDA, the organization that opposes the Merkel migration policy that has brought more than 1 million “refugees” to Germany last year, was convictedof inciting racial hatred which constituted an “attack on the dignity” of refugees and fined close to $11,000.  Quite a turnabout from a country that forced Jews out of their homes into ghettos, then death camps, encouraged its populace to turn them in and fomented Kristallnacht against Jewish businesses.

This past summer, the creators of a Facebook forum for AFB, an anti-refugee movement, were found guilty of hate speech for conducting online discussions about the migrant issue.  A teenage girl who posted a video, in which she expressed her fears for her safety, had her FB page taken down.

It defies belief that a Germany that once prized its Aryan identity to the point of committing genocide has gone so far as to encourage its citizens to submit to Islam and shariah.  A current television ad asks Germans to “Enjoy difference, start tolerance” by wearing the “beautiful hijab.”  Instead of requiring Muslims in Germany to adhere to cultural and social norms, parents have been warned not to let their daughters wear revealing clothing to avoid “misunderstandings” by Muslims who are thought unable to control themselves at the sight of a short skirt or bikini and will harass the girls.  Islamic education has even been introduced into German schools.  Seven out of Germany’s sixteen federal states now offer some form of Islamic religious education.

The pundits who claim “Holocaust guilt” as the driving force behind the present day pandering to Muslims and their demands are off track.  It is implausible to reconcile today’s Muslim “refugee” policies with stubbornly intransigent anti-Jewish sentiments and rationalize it as a reaction to Third Reich atrocities.

The popularity in Germany of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS), belies claims of profound Holocaust guilt.  The BDS movement singles out Israel for criticism while ignoring the human rights violations of true tyrannical states.  It uses false analogies of apartheid and Nazi Germany against Israel and attempts to damage Israel economically and put a stop to academic and cultural exchanges.  It seeks to boycott Israel on all levels and to delegitimatize and eliminate Israel as a Jewish state.  In July, NGO Monitor discovered that the German government had been donating millions of euros to groups promoting BDS.   This, at the same time they were providing generous entitlements to Muslim refugees, despite the fact that they include ISIS supporters and that 13% of the refugees believe that suicide bombings are justified, according to a Pew Research poll.

Today, Germany is the top European trading partner of Iran, with sizable business interests in the Islamic terrorist state.  Yet German officials consistently condemn the only democracy in the Middle East, while displaying reticence to criticize Muslim Palestinian murderers of Israeli Jews.

In 2011, the German Foreign Ministry supported a UN Security Council resolution to condemn Israeli settlement construction as “illegal.”  Its top diplomat, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle went so far as to meet with then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran.

The fixation on blaming construction projects in Israeli communities for the lack of Middle East peace and blaming Israel, not Palestinian terrorists, while, at the same time, pursuing a lucrative relationship with the Islamic terrorist state of Iran, contradicts the existence of any heartfelt remorse for anti-Semitism, past or present.  When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Chancellor Merkel to express his disappointment about Germany’s position on the U.N. resolution, the Muslim “refugee” champion, who favored forcing Israeli Jews alone to freeze settlement construction, rebuked Netanyahu for “failing to advance peace” by telling him, “How dare you.  You are the one who is disappointing us.  You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.”

The hubris of this perverted policy in light of the yet un-atoned transgressions of the Holocaust and extant anti-Semitism is stunning.  European leaders like Merkel remain mum about continuing anti-Semitism and persist in vilifying the Jewish State, a country on the front lines of the war against Islamic terrorism.  At the same time, they pursue policies of Muslim appeasement and prohibit criticism of Islam in the name of multiculturalism.  Merkel and her compatriots are thus paving the way for continued crime, civil unrest, the rise of Islam within their borders, and the ultimate destruction of their countries. 

What Should Americans Be Talking About?

October 17, 2016

What Should Americans Be Talking About? Gatestone Institute, Judith Bergman, October 17, 2016

Should Americans uphold the Judeo-Christian values, which have governed Western civilization until now? Or should they quietly allow the defeat of those values by a false liberalism — false, because it is anything but liberal — which will allow values, such as that of Islamic sharia religious law to settle over the United States? Will people willingly surrender their own culture in order to avoid becoming victims of intimidation?

Worse, these policies often come in the seemingly benign-sounding terms of “diversity”, “multiculturalism”, “peace”, “anti-racism”, and “human rights”; but are often used in an Orwellian way to mean their own opposites. “Diversity” means, “It is great to look different so long as you think the same way I do” and is also an acceptance of Islamic values. “Anti-racism” often means, in a racist way, anti-white or anti-Jew. “Human rights” now means a political agenda. “Peace” is used to mean the destruction of Israel. “Multiculturalism” means any culture except the Judeo-Christian one — regardless of whether that culture supports denigrating women, slavery, flogging, amputating limbs, murdering gays and the intolerance of all other religions and cultures. These inversions of language are having devastating consequences not only on university campuses, but also throughout the U.S. and abroad.

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all [that] the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” — Muslim Brotherhood, 1991.

The question of whether to submit to these policies, as Europe is doing, or to uphold freedom, as Israel is doing, has arrived in the United States. The choice Americans make will immeasurably affect not just the US, but, despite sounding melodramatic, the future of Western civilization.

For the American voter, issues of immense urgency to the survival of the free world — such as individual freedom, dispassionate enquiry and freedom of speech and thought, which we dangerously have come to take for granted — are being derailed by crude language and behavior, when Americans need to be paying attention to serious threats to the United States, its allies and to the values of the West.

Internationally, these threats come from Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and countless terrorist groups.

Domestically, they appear in the form of massive corruption — financial and otherwise — that is visibly hollowing out American institutions, such as the FBI (the failure to follow investigative procedure, followed by calls for FBI Director James Comey’s resignation); the Department of Justice (the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal, and the Attorney General meeting with a former president whose wife is under investigation); the State Department (email leaks are still yielding up evidence of collusion between the Clinton Global Initiative and the State Department under Hillary Clinton); the IRS (targeting conservative non-profits, and raiding the businesses of private citizens, who disagree with policy); the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to acquire power over every puddle in America) and the Executive branch in the “I have a pen and I have a phone” president’s dealings with Iran.

There have also been attempts by outsiders to incite racial and religious anarchy. The entrepreneur George Soros, for example, donated $33 million to turn events in Ferguson, Missouri from a local protest into chaos.

1952There have been attempts by outsiders to incite racial and religious anarchy. The entrepreneur George Soros, for example, donated $33 million to turn events in Ferguson, Missouri from a local protest into chaos. (Image source: World Economic Forum)

Instead of helping Americans to create a safer, more prosperous way of life, the Ferguson events destroyed a community, devastated small business owners, and eroded security, the rule of law, and any hope for a better future. Who benefits? Creating chaos embeds a political dependency: rather than helping people to climb out of poverty, it keeps them voting for politicians to “rescue” them.

Jews and Israel are also targeted — often, regrettably, by other Jews, who appear naïvely to hope that they will thereby “immunize” themselves from attacks on Jews. Recently, for example, an article accused the U.S. Republican presidential election campaign of “significantly enhancing the presence of antisemitism in the public arena.”

Seriously?

While “conservative” radicals, such as white supremacists do exist, they are not even close to overtaking the mainstream discourse. That space, rather, seems to have been filled in the last decades by self-described “liberals” who now seem to dominate it to such a degree that the Dean of Students at the University of Chicago, John Ellison, felt obliged to write a letter warning prospective applicants not to expect a “safe space.” “Conservative” radicals are not the ones hunting down Jews — “liberals” and Islamists are victimizing and shutting them out.

Ironically of course, the liberals have not yet figured out that the agendas of these two groups are incompatible (as in gender equality); perhaps they are trying to “immunize” themselves, too.

Public debate in the US, particularly in the next few weeks, really needs to be about choosing what policies would actually improve the lives of Americans. Should they uphold the Judeo-Christian values, which have governed Western civilization until now? Or should they quietly allow the defeat of those values by a false liberalism — false, because it is anything but liberal — which will allow values, such as that of Islamic sharia religious law to settle over the United States? Will people willingly surrender their own culture in order to avoid becoming victims of intimidation?

American university campuses, which should proudly be championing debate of all ideas, have instead been rife with antisemitism for years, mostly because a “thought police” obsessed with identity politics — another way of saying my race, religion, skin color or sexual proclivity is good, yours is not — has overtaken campuses and turned them into embittered war-zones. It is postmodern Stalinism.

Worse, these policies often come in the seemingly benign-sounding terms of “diversity”, “multiculturalism”, “peace”, “anti-racism”, and “human rights”; but are often used in an Orwellian way to mean their own opposites. “Diversity” means, “it is great to look different so long as you think the same way I do” and is also and acceptance of Islamic values. “Anti-racism” often means, in a racist way, anti-white or anti-Jew. “Human rights” now means a political agenda. “Peace” is used to mean the destruction of Israel. “Multiculturalism” means any culture except the Judeo-Christian one — regardless of whether that culture supports denigrating women, slavery, flogging, amputating limbs, murdering gays and the intolerance of all other religions and cultures. These inversions of language are having devastating consequences not only on university campuses, but also throughout the U.S. and abroad.

The glue that brings “liberals” and Islamists, such as the Muslim Students Association (MSA) in the US (a front[1] for the Muslim Brotherhood), together in a common cause is the goal of eradicating Israel — of course always only under the euphemisms of “helping Palestinians” and “Peace,” even though Jihadi camps for children were organized first by Palestinians.

A 1991 official document authored by the Muslim Brotherhood outlines its strategic goals for civilizational jihad in North America. It depicts the Muslim Brotherhood’s plans for civilization jihad in the United States stating:

“The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all [that] the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers… [W]e must possess a mastery of the art of “coalitions”, the art of “absorption” and the principles of “cooperation.”

The question of whether to submit to these policies, as Europe is doing, or to uphold freedom, as Israel is doing, has arrived in the United States. The choice Americans make will immeasurably affect not just the US, but, despite sounding melodramatic, the future of Western civilization.

________________-

[1] In a 1991 official document authored by the Muslim Brotherhood, outlining its strategic goals for civilizational jihad in North America, the Muslim Students Association was mentioned as “one of our organizations and the organizations of our friends”, that is, a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood. The document was entered as evidence in the 2008 Holyland Terror Funding Trial.

 

Romania: Lawsuit Launched to Stop Bucharest Mega-Mosque

October 13, 2016

Romania: Lawsuit Launched to Stop Bucharest Mega-Mosque, Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, October 13, 2016

The original deal called for a “mutual exchange” in which Romania would build a new Orthodox Church in Istanbul, while Turkey would build the mosque in Bucharest. In July 2015, however, Prime Minister Victor Ponta revealed that the Romanian government had abandoned the Istanbul church project because it is “not allowed under Turkish law.” Ponta approved the Bucharest mosque project anyway, saying it was a multicultural symbol of Romania’s acceptance of the Muslim community.

Ponta’s decision to approve the mosque, which will mimic Ottoman-era architecture, was greeted with outrage in a country that was under Ottoman Turkish domination for nearly five centuries until 1877.

“This plan is not about worship, it is about marking the territory of their authority through a monument.” – Ozgur Kazim Kivanc, a Turkish activist opposed to Erdoğan’s destruction of public commons to build mosques.

“Once Islam enters a land, that land becomes Islamic and Muslims have the duty to liberate it someday. Spain, for example, is Islamic land, and so is Eastern Europe: Romania, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia…” – Omar Bakri Muhammad, a prominent Sunni Islamist cleric.

“We consider the disposal of free land which, ironically, belonged to the family of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, who was beheaded by the Turks on August 15, 1714, to be a betrayal of the Romanian people.” – Pending lawsuit calling on the court to annul the government’s grant of free city land for the mosque project.

Opponents of a proposed Turkish mega-mosque in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, have filed a lawsuit against the government in an effort to halt the project. The court is set to begin hearing the case on October 14.

The lawsuit seeks to reverse a June 2015 decision by the Romanian prime minister at the time, Victor Ponta, to approve construction of what could become the largest mosque in Eastern Europe — second only to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul — on a large tract of city-owned land in northern Bucharest.

The property, valued at more than four million euros ($4.4 million), is being provided for free by the Romanian government, while the construction costs, estimated at three million euros ($3.3 million), are being paid for by Turkey.

Ponta said the mosque will reap economic benefits for Romania because Turkey is the country’s leading non-EU trading partner. The mosque’s critics, including an array of Romanian academics, historians, politicians, anti-immigration groups and even some Muslims, counter that not only will it increase Turkish influence over Romania, it will also encourage Muslim immigration to the country.

The Bucharest mosque is the result of more than a decade of talks between the Romanian and Turkish governments. The original deal called for a “mutual exchange” in which Romania would build a new Orthodox Church in Istanbul, while Turkey would build the mosque in Bucharest.

In July 2015, however, Ponta revealed that the Romanian government had abandoned the Istanbul church project because it is “not allowed under Turkish law.” Ponta approved the Bucharest mosque project anyway, saying it was a multicultural symbol of Romania’s acceptance of the Muslim community.

Ponta’s decision to approve the mosque, which will mimic Ottoman-era architecture, was greeted with outrage in a country that was under Ottoman Turkish domination for nearly five centuries until 1877.

“Turkey attempts a symbolic conquest of Europe through these mosques,” said Tudor Ionescu, leader of the anti-immigration Noua Dreaptă (New Right) party. “I don’t know why we are the recipients of such a ‘blessing.'” Noua Dreaptă has organized protests against the project where people have chanted, “Romania is not a Turkish province.”

1945Romanians protest against a proposed Turkish mega-mosque in Bucharest, April 10, 2016. (Image source: RT video screenshot)

Critics say the large size of the mosque is out of proportion to the small size of Bucharest’s Muslim population. The 13,000 square meter (140,000 square foot) project, to be situated near the Romexpo trade fair grounds, includes a mosque for 2,000 worshippers, a Koran school, a library and a recreational center.

Bucharest is home to around 9,000 Muslims who are being served by ten mosques scattered throughout the city. The Muslim population of Romania is 65,000, or less than one percent of the country’s population of 19.5 million. Most are ethnic Turks and Tatars living in the Dobrogea region of eastern Romania.

In an interview with Balkan Insight, historian Ionut Cojocaru said:

“It is a bit surprising, building such a big mosque in a country where the number of Muslims is very small. This is just a sign of Turkey’s neo-Ottoman policy, which is designed to promote its economic and political interests all around the Balkans.”

Turkey has been on a mega-mosque building spree across the Balkans and Eastern Europe as part of an effort by Ankara to expand its influence — and its brand of Islam — in the region.

In interviews with Balkan specialist Michael Bird, several observers said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s international mosque-building program is part of a plan to project Turkey as the pre-eminent Muslim nation.

“Ultimately every mosque abroad with a Turkish brand name seems to contribute to the discourse of Turkey as a leading Islamic power,” said Kerem Oktem, Professor of Modern Turkey at the University of Graz.

Ozgur Kazim Kivanc, an activist opposed to Erdoğan’s destruction of public commons to build mosques, added:

“The Roman Empire used to build temples on the places they took over to remind people of their conquest. We believe the instinct is the same. Places of worship are not compulsory for a belief system to spread — especially in Islam. This plan is not about worship, it is about marking the territory of their authority through a monument.”

Former Romanian President Traian Basescu worries that the Bucharest mosque could fuel Islamic extremism in the country. He has said the mosque project is “irresponsible” and a threat to national security. On Facebook he wrote:

“Perhaps you cannot imagine a subway station in Bucharest, during rush hour, where a young man would blow himself up in the name of Allah. Or perhaps your intelligence cannot help you imagine young Romanians who have failed in life being sent off to training camps in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan and brought back to Europe in order to bring us the benefits of the Islamic State.”

Islamic State has repeatedly stated that Romania and other parts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans are part of its “pan-Islamic Caliphate.” Omar Bakri Muhammad, a prominent Sunni Islamist cleric who has recruited British jihadis for Islamic State, has alleged that Romania is Islamic territory. In an interview with the Bulgarian daily 24 Chasa (24 Hours), he said:

“Once Islam enters a land, that land becomes Islamic and Muslims have the duty to liberate it someday. Spain, for example, is Islamic land, and so is Eastern Europe: Romania, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia…”

Basescu has also said he believes the mosque — the first purpose-built mosque in the Romanian capital (the existing places of Muslim worship in the city are buildings converted into mosques or prayer rooms) — is not actually meant for Bucharest’s Muslim population, but for Muslim migrants who will arrive in the years ahead.

During a visit to Romania in April 2015, President Erdoğan said the mosque will be the “the most beautiful expression of dialogue and solidarity between the two countries.”

A Romanian Muslim leader, however, expressed skepticism about Turkey’s intentions. “We heard about it on TV, like everyone else,” he said. “We are Romanian Muslims, but now the Turkish are coming and they get the land. When they complete the building, they won’t even allow us there. So we are sold, thrown out.”

During an official visit to Turkey in March 2016, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis tried to reassure Erdoğan that the mosque project is moving forward, despite mounting opposition at home. Commenting on the trip, the daily România Liberă wrote:

“Apparently Iohannis demanded nothing but a measly Orthodox chapel that will probably be built somewhere on the outskirts of Istanbul in exchange for the construction of the mosque…. Erdoğan has inherited from the Ottomans the skill of making his guests feel more important than they are. … Iohannis was welcomed with a military ceremony including the firing of 21 cannon salvoes which only sultans offer their guests. … In the end, however, Erdoğan will despise him for letting himself be tricked and making it so easy for him to turn the president of an EU state into a vassal of his court.”

Some Romanian politicians are now calling for a referendum on the mosque. More than 90% of the public is opposed to the project, according to an online survey conducted by the mainstream newspaper Gândul.

Meanwhile, the pending lawsuit calls on the court to annul the government’s grant of free city land for the mosque project. The lawsuit states:

“We consider the disposal of free land which, ironically, belonged to the family of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, who was beheaded by the Turks on August 15, 1714, to be a betrayal of the Romanian people. In the current context in which all of Europe is being brought to its knees by terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists, we are entitled to fear the establishment of Islamic learning schools. We believe the Romanian state is unable to ensure the security of its citizens, and approving a mega-mosque in Romania could set a precedent with unintended catastrophic consequences.”

With The Terror Threat Growing, Europe Changes Course

August 31, 2016

With The Terror Threat Growing, Europe Changes Course, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Abigail R. Esman, August 31, 2016

Sixteen years ago, when Dutch commentator Paul Scheffer published his “Multicultural Drama” declaring that multiculturalism in the Netherlands had failed, the response was swift and angry. Critics across Europe called him racist, bigoted, nationalistic. Others dismissed his views as mere rants and ramblings of a Leftist in search of a cause.

Not anymore.

With over 275 people killed in 10 Islamic terrorist attacks since January 2015, Europeans harbor no more illusions about the multiculturalist vision: where immigrants from Muslim countries are concerned, that idealist vision has more than just failed. It has produced a culture of hatred, fear, and unrelenting danger. Now, with European Muslim youth radicalizing at an unprecedented rate and the threat of new terrorist attacks, Europe is reassessing its handling of Muslim communities and its counterterrorism strategies and laws.

Among the changes being considered are a reversal of laws that allow radical Muslims to receive handouts from the very governments they seek to destroy; restricting foreign funding of mosques; and stronger surveillance on private citizens.

Chief among the new counterterrorism approaches is a program to coordinate intelligence data among European Union countries – a tactic that has not been pursued with any regularity or such depth before now. But following the November attacks in Paris, the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD initiated weekly meetings among intel agencies from all EU countries, Switzerland, and Norway, with the objective of sharing information, exchanging new clues, insights, and suspect alerts, and discussing improvements to a Europe-wide system of counterterrorism and intelligence.

Through these meetings and the improved shared database, it is now possible for each country to contextualize its intelligence and understand links between individuals and various groups from one city to another – and so, between radicals and radical groups as they pass through a borderless EU.

Concurrently, EU members are now beginning to share information about web sites and even details about private citizens where needed. Most countries had been reluctant to make such exchanges, citing both privacy concerns and the need to protect their sources. Other cooperative efforts include an EU initiative begun in February 2015 to counteract Islamic extremist propaganda. The project received a major €400 million boost in June, indicating the high priority Europe now places on fighting recruitment.

Earlier this month, Europol began a new effort to screen refugees still awaiting placement in Greek asylum centers. According to a report from Europa Nu, an initiative between the European parliament and the University of Leiden, Europol agents “specifically trained to unmask and dismantle terrorists and terror networks” will be dispatched to the camps to try to prevent terrorists from infiltrating the flood of refugees to Europe.

Some EU measures, however, have been based more in politics than counterterrorism, including efforts to crack down on the ability of radical Muslims to benefit from welfare programs. British citizens, for instance, reacted with outrage when it was discovered that the family of “Jihadi John” had received over £400,000 in taxpayer support over the course of 20 years. In Belgium, Salah Abdeslam, the terrorist accused of participating in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, pulled in nearly €19,000 in welfare benefits from January 2014 and October 2015, according to Elsevier. And Gatestone reports that more than 30 Danish jihadists received a total of €51,000 in unemployment benefits all while battling alongside the Islamic State in Syria.

Such concerns have also spread to the United States. Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, introduced the “No Welfare For Terrorists Act.”

“Terrorist victims and their families should never be forced to fund those who harmed them,” he said in a statement. “This bill guarantees this will never happen.”

But not all of Europe’s new approaches to the terror threat are being coordinated out of Brussels. Many more, in fact, are country-specific, such as England’s decision to follow an example set earlier by the Netherlands and Spain, separating jailed terrorists and terror suspects from other prisoners. The measures follow others the country adopted after the July 7, 2005 bombings of a London underground and buses, to criminalize “those who glorify terrorism, those involved in acts preparatory to terrorism, and those who advocate it without being directly involved,” the New York Times reported.

In fact, prisons worldwide, including in the U.S., have long been viewed as warm breeding grounds for radicals and potential terrorists. Ahmed Coulibaly, the gunman at the Porte de Vincennes siege in January 2015, was serving time for a bank robbery, for instance, when he met Cherif Koauachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers. Both converted to Islam there. It was in that same prison that the two encountered Djamel Beghal, an al-Qaida operative who attempted to blow up the American Embassy in Paris in 2001.

Hence many experts now argue in favor of isolating those held on terrorism-related charges as a way to stop them from radicalizing their fellow inmates.

Yet British officials have until now resisted creating separate wings for terror suspects, arguing that doing so gives them “credibility” and makes it harder to rehabilitate them. But a recent government report on Islamist extremism in British prisons forced a change in thinking, in part by noting that “other prisoners – both Muslim and non-Muslim – serving sentences for crimes unrelated to terrorism are nonetheless vulnerable to radicalization by Islamist Extremists [sic].”

Similarly, France, the site of the worst attacks of the past two years, also balked at first at the idea of separating terrorists from other prisoners, arguing that doing so “forms a terrorist cell within a prison.” But the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015 changed all that. Now, officials are even going further, looking at other potential sources of radicalization: the mosques.

Shortly after the Bastille Day attack in Nice, Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced plans to ban foreign financing for French mosques as part of an effort to establish a “French Islam,” led by imams trained only in France. France hosts dozens of foreign-financed mosques – many sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Morocco – which preach Salafism, an extreme version of Islam practiced in the Saudi Kingdom and the root of much radical Islamist ideology. And according to a new report on counter-radicalization, about 300 imams come from outside France.

That same report also calls for “regular surveys” of France’s 4-5 million Muslims,according to France 24, in order “to acquire a better understanding of this population in a country where statistics based on religious, ethnic, or racial criteria are banned.”

Both proposed measures have been met with resistance. The “surveys,” as even the report itself notes, are a means of circumventing laws against gathering information on the basis of religious criteria – and so, go against democratic principles. And many French officials also oppose the ban on foreign funding for mosques, arguing that French government intervention in places of worship contradicts separation between church and state. Besides, they claim, radicalization doesn’t take place there anyway.

But Dutch authorities and counter-extremism experts are not so sure. The announcement earlier this month that Qatar would finance an Islamic center in Rotterdam, for instance, set off alarms even among Muslim moderates, including Rotterdam’s Moroccan-born mayor Ahmed Marcouch. There are good reasons for this. The Salafist Eid Charity, which sponsors the project, has been on Israel’s terror list since 2008, according to Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad. Moreover, in 2013 the U.S. Treasury Department accused the charity’s founder, Abd al-Rahman al-Nu’aymi, of providing funding for al-Qaida and its affiliates, and named him a “specially designated global terrorist.”

Plans for the center sound much like those of the now-abandoned plans for New York’s “Ground Zero mosque,” with sports facilities, prayer space, tutoring for students, Islamic child care, and, reports Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, imam training.

Yet the center’s prospective director, Arnoud van Doorn, a convert to Islam and former member of the far-right, anti-Islam political party PVV, insists that any fears about the project are unfounded. “Our organization has nothing to do with extremism,” he told theNRC. “We want only to provide a positive contribution to Dutch society.”

Notably, though, France’s proposal to ban foreign mosque funding and the Qatari backing of the Rotterdam center point to some of the deepest roots of Europe’s radical Islam problem, and, despite all the new initiatives now underway, the greatest challenges to ending it. When Muslim immigrants came to Europe in the 1970s, they carved prayer spaces wherever they could: the backs of community grocery stores, in restaurants and tea rooms. But these soon became too small to handle the growing Muslim population. Mosques – real mosques – would have to be built.

But by whom? The Muslim communities themselves were too poor. Western governments, wedded to the separation of church and state, could not subsidize them with taxpayer funds. And so the door was opened to foreign – mostly Saudi – investment, and the placement of Saudi-trained and Saudi-backed imams in European mosques. Europe had, in essence, rolled out the welcome mat for Salafism.

Now they want to roll it in again. But is it too late? Even as Western intelligence is now uniting to fight radical Islam, Islamic countries are pooling together in Europe to expand it. The result, as Manuel Valls told French daily Le Monde, is that, “What’s at stake is the republic. And our shield is democracy.”

Hence as the number attacks against Western targets increase, many Europeans are coming to understand that preserving the core of that democracy may mean disrupting some of the tenets on which it’s built, like certain elements of privacy, for instance, and religious principles that violate the freedom that we stand for . It is, as it were, a matter of destroying even healthy trees to save the forest. But in this tug-of-war between the Islamic world’s efforts to shape the West, and Western efforts to save itself, only our commitment to the very heart of our ideals will define who wins this fight.

Mutti Merkel Finally Admits: Germany Mishandled the Refugee Crisis

August 31, 2016

Mutti Merkel Finally Admits: Germany Mishandled the Refugee Crisis, PJ MediaMichael Van Der Galien, August 31, 2016

merkel eyesIrish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, left, speaks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a round table meeting at an EU summit in Brussels on Friday, Feb. 19, 2016. British Prime Minister David Cameron pushed a summit into overtime Friday after a second day of tense talks with weary European Union leaders unwilling to fully meet his demands for a less intrusive EU. (Martin Meissner, Pool)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel finally had admitted that she made serious mistakes in dealing with the refugee crisis.

In an interview published today in a German newspaper, Mutti Merkel explains:

There are political issues that one can see coming but don’t really register with people at that certain moment – and in Germany we ignored both the problem for too long and blocked out the need to find a pan-European solution.

She continues:

We said we would deal with the problem at our airports since we don’t have any other external EU boundaries. But that doesn’t work…We didn’t embrace the problem in an appropriate way. That goes as well for protecting the external border of the Schengen area.

This is downright shocking coming from Merkel. A blind man could see that she mishandled the crisis by opening her welcoming arms to an unlimited number of immigrants from the Middle East — people who do not share German culture and values — but Merkel constantly bragged:“Wir schaffen das,” meaning “We can do this.” Obviously, Germany couldn’t, but it’s mighty kind of her to finally admit her mistakes.

Sadly, that’s where our praise for Merkel has to end.

The reason Merkel admitted that she mishandled the situation isn’t that she’s truly sorry for turning Germany into one big refugee camp; it’s that she feels a rival and new conservative party breathing down her neck. I’m talking, of course, about Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany).

The AfD has a few important ideas: to limit immigration, to reduce spending, and to dismantle the European Union by returning it to the trade bloc it was supposed to be in the first place. If the AfD gets its way, Germans will pay significantly lower taxes while their country gets its sovereignty back. It seems to me that these aren’t bad ideas — which doesn’t mean I also support every single one of their other policy proposals.

This new party is quickly rising in the polls, while polls also show that up to two thirds of German voters want Merkel out at the next elections.

In other words, Merkel is only admitting she made “mistakes” (by the way, they weren’t mistakes as much as conscious policy decisions caused by her firmly held belief in multiculturalism) because she fears she might lose next year’s elections.

Merkel is and will always be a believer in multiculturalism and the Great European™ project. The only way for Germans to take their country (and their taxes!) back is by ousting her.

France: After the Third Jihadist Attack

July 23, 2016

France: After the Third Jihadist Attack, Gatestone InstituteGuy Millière, July 23, 2016

(Please see also, Another Day, Another Jihad Massacre. — DM)

♦ Successive French governments have built a trap; the French people, who are in it, are thinking only of how to escape. The situation is more serious than many imagine. Whole areas of France are under the control of gangs and radical imams.

♦ Prime Minister Manuel Valls repeated what he already said 18 months ago: “France is at war.” He named an enemy, “radical Islamism,” but he was quick to add that “radical Islamism” has “nothing to do with Islam.” He then repeated that the French will have to get used to living with “violence and attacks.”

♦ The French are increasingly tired of attempts to exonerate Islam. They know perfectly well that all Muslims are not guilty. But they also know that all those who committed attacks in France in recent years were Muslims. The French have no desire to get used to “violence and attacks.” They do not want to be on the losing side and they feel that we are losing.

Nice, July 14, 2016: Bastille Day. The evening festivities were ending. As the crowd watching fireworks was beginning to disperse, the driver of a 19-ton truck, zig-zagging, mowed down everyone in his way. Ten minutes and 84 dead persons later, the driver was shot and killed. Dozens were wounded; many will be crippled for life. Dazed survivors wandered the streets of the city for hours.

French television news anchors quickly said that what happened was almost certainly an “accident,” or when the French authorities started to speak of terrorism, that the driver could just be a madman. When the police disclosed the killer’s name and identity, and that he had been depressed in the past, they suggested that he had acted in a moment of “high anxiety.” They found witnesses who testified that he was “not a devout Muslim” — maybe not a Muslim at all.

President François Hollande spoke a few hours later and affirmed his determination to “protect the populace.”

Prime Minister Manuel Valls repeated what he already said 18 months ago: “France is at war.” He named an enemy, “radical Islamism,” but he was quick to add that “radical Islamism” has “nothing to do with Islam.” He then repeated what he emphasized so many times: the French will have to get used to living with “violence and attacks.”

The public reaction showed that Valls convinced hardly anyone. The French are increasingly tired of attempts to exonerate Islam. They know perfectly well that all Muslims are not guilty. They also know that, nevertheless, all those who committed attacks in France in recent years were Muslims. They do not feel protected by François Hollande. They see that France is attacked with increasing intensity and that radical Islam has declared war, but they do not see France declaring war back. They have no desire to get used to “violence and attacks.” They do not want to be on the losing side and they feel that we are losing.

Because the National Front Party uses more robust language, much of the public votes for its candidates. The National Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, will undoubtedly win the first round of voting in the presidential election next year. She will probably not be elected in the end, but if nothing changes quickly and clearly, she will have a very good chance next time.

Moderate politicians read the public opinion polls, harden their rhetoric, and recommend harsher policies. Some of them might demand harsher measures, such as the expulsion of detained terrorists who have dual citizenship and the detention of people that praise attacks. Some have even called for martial law.

Calm will gradually return, but it is clear that the situation in France is approaching the boiling point.

The recent attacks served as an accelerant. Four years ago, when Mohamed Merah murdered soldiers and Jews in Toulouse, the population did not react. Most French did not feel directly concerned; soldiers were just soldiers, and Jews were just Jews. When, in January 2015, Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered, an emotional reaction engulfed the country, only to quickly vanish. A huge demonstration was organized in the name of “freedom of speech” and the “values of the republic.” Hundreds of thousands claimed, “Je Suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”). When, two days later, Jews were murdered again in a kosher grocery store, hardly anyone said “I am a Jew.”

Those who tried to speak of jihad were promptly reduced to silence. Not even a year later, in November, the Bataclan Theater bloodbath did not lead to protests, but was a deeper shock. The mainstream media and the government could no longer hide that it was an act of jihad. The number killed was too overwhelming; one could not just turn the page. The mainstream media and the government did their best to downplay anger and frustration and to emphasize sadness.Solemn ceremonies with flowers and candles were everywhere. A “state of emergency” was declared and soldiers were sent into the streets.

But then the feeling of danger faded. The Euro 2016 soccer championship was organized in France, and the French team’s good performance created a false sense of unity.

The Nice attack was a wake-up call again. It brutally reminded everyone that the danger is still there, deadlier than ever, and that the measures taken by the authorities were useless gesticulations. Memories of the previous killings came back.

Attempts to hide that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the terrorist in Nice, was a jihadist fooled no one. Instead, it just created more anger, more frustration, and more desire for effective action.

Days before the Nice attack, the media reported that the parliamentary inquiry commission report on the Bataclan Theater attack revealed that the victims had been ruthlessly tortured and mutilated, and that the government had tried to cover up these facts. Now the entire public discovered the extent of the horror, adding fuel to the fire.

France seems now on the verge of a revolutionary moment; it would not take much to cause an explosion. But the situation is more serious than many imagine.

Whole areas of France are under the control of gangs and radical imams. The government delicately calls them “sensitive urban zones.” Elsewhere they are bluntly called “no go zones.” There are more than 570 of them.

Hundreds of thousands of young Muslims live there. Many are thugs, drug traffickers, robbers. Many are imbued with a deeply rooted hatred for France and the West. Recruiters for jihadists organizations tell them — directly or through social networks — that if they kill in the name of Allah, they will attain the status of martyrs. Hundreds are ready. They are unpinned grenades that may explode anywhere, anytime.

Although possessing, carrying and selling weapons are strictly regulated in France, weapons of war circulate widely. And, of course, the Nice attack has shown once again that a firearm is not necessary to commit mass murder.

Twenty-thousand people are listed in the government’s “S-files,” an alert system meant to identify individuals linked to radical Islam. Most are unmonitored. Toulouse murderer Mohamed Merah, the murderers of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, and many of the terrorists who attacked the Bataclan Theater were in the S-files. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the terrorist who acted in Nice, was not.

France’s intelligence chief said recently that more attacks are to come and that many potential killers wander freely, undetected.

Doing what the French government is doing today will not improve anything. On the contrary. France is at the mercy of another attack that will set the powder keg ablaze.

Doing more will lead to worse before matters get better. Regaining control of many areas would entail mobilizing the army, and leftists and anarchists would certainly add disorder to disorder.

Imprisoning whoever could be imprisoned in the name of public safety would imply more than martial law; it would mean the suspension of democratic freedoms, and even so, be an impossible task. The jails in France are already full. The police are outnumbered and showing signs of exhaustion. The French army is at the limit of its capacity for action: it already patrols the streets of France, and is deployed in Africa and the Middle East.

1578 (1)The French army is at the limit of its capacity for action: it already patrols the streets of France and is deployed in Africa and the Middle East. Pictured above: French soldiers guard a Jewish school in Strasbourg, February 2015. (Image source: Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia Commons)

Successive governments have built a trap; the French, who are in it, are thinking only of how to escape.

President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls bear all the guilt. For years, many in France supported any movement that denounced “Islamophobic racism.” They passed laws defining criticism of Islam as a “hate crime.” They relied more and more on the Muslim vote to win elections. The most important left-wing think tank in France, Terra Nova, which is considered close to the Socialist Party, published several reports explaining that the only way for the left to win elections is to attract the votes of Muslim immigrants and to add more Muslims to the France’s population.

The moderate right is also guilty. President Charles de Gaulle established the “Arab policy of France,” a system of alliances with some of the worst dictatorships in the Arab-Muslim world, in the belief that France would regain its lost power thanks to this system. President Jacques Chirac followed in the footsteps of de Gaulle. President Nicolas Sarkozy helped overthrow the Gaddafi regime in Libya and bears a heavy responsibility for the mess that followed.

The trap revealed its lethal effects a decade ago. In 2005, riots across France showed that Muslim unrest could lead France to the brink of destruction. The blaze was extinguished thanks to the appeals for calm from Muslim organizations. Since then, France has been at the mercy of more riots.

The choice was made to practice appeasement. It did not stop the rot gaining ground.

François Hollande made hasty decisions that placed France at the center of the target. Seeing that strategic interests of France were threatened, he launched military operations against Islamist groups in sub-Saharan Africa. Realizing that French Muslims were going to train and wage jihad in Syria, he decided to engage the French army in actions against the Islamic State.

He did not anticipate that Islamist groups and the Islamic State would hit back and attack France. He did not perceive the extent to which France was vulnerable — hollowed out from within.

The results put in full light a frightening landscape. Islamists view the landscape and do not dislike what they see.

On their websites, they often quote a line from Osama bin Laden: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will naturally want to side with the strong horse.”

They appear to think that France is a weak horse and that radical Islam can bring France to its knees in a pile of dust and rubble. Time, they seem to think, is on their side as well — and demography. Muslims now make up about 10% of the French population; 25% of teenagers in France are Muslims.

The number of French Muslims who want Islamic sharia law applied in France increases year after year, as does the number of French Muslims who approve of violent jihad. More and more French people despise Islam, but are filled with fear. Even the politicians who seem ready to fight do not take on Islam.

Islamists seem to think that no French politician will to overcome what looks more and more like a perfect Arab storm. They seem to feel that the West is already defeated and does not have what it takes to carry the day. Are they wrong?