It’s really no big secret how the majority of women are treated in the Middle East and in most of the Muslim world. It is also no big secret what the content of the Qur’an and Sunnah says about women and how these writings are interpreted today by a large portion of the Muslim world. At best, women are treated as second class citizens and as property.
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The sexual abuse incidents in Europe have exposed the logical flaws in the Swedish debate about immigration and they also show how unprepared Sweden and Europe are in facing the challenges that have arisen because of the migration crisis.
After women were assaulted by “asylum seekers” in several places in Europe, it emerged that it also had happened in Sweden. However, in Sweden this had happened in August 2015 at the “We are Sthlm” festival where about 150 girls had been victims of sexual abuse by “refugee youths” from Afghanistan.
The reason that this August 2015 incident was not reported until January 2016, was because one of Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, and the Swedish police, who had access to the information, did not report these incidents to the public.
Dagens Nyheter is known as a newspaper that romanticizes immigration and multiculturalism but the actions of the police shocked many in Sweden, because the police are one of the institutions in Sweden that many Swedes have great confidence in. The explanation that the police chief Peter Ågren gave for not reporting the sexual abuses in August 2015 was:
“This is a sore point, sometimes, we do not dare to say how things really are because we believe it will play into the hands of the Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats). We have to take responsibility for this within the police.”
The fact that a Swedish police chief was making political considerations came as a shock to a country that never had to think about what political views the police have. In Sweden, the general view is that police chiefs who let their political views affect their job are found in other countries, mostly in dictatorships, and not in Sweden. That the police chief wants to disfavor the third largest party in the Swedish parliament just makes the situation even more uncomfortable. It must also be said that Sweden’s national police commissioner, since 2015, Dan Eliasson, holds openly hostile views against the fastest rising party in Sweden. One of the famous tweets of the national police commissioner is that he wants to “vomit” over the party-leader of the Sweden Democrats.
At the same time, the Swedish police’s work with newly arrived migrants is completely classified. It is impossible for Swedes to know about the security situation in the homes where “asylum seekers” are staying, or how many of the newly arrived migrants have broken the law.
But this whole situation also reveals much about the important role of culture in the immigration issue. The migration crisis has not only created huge economic costs. Large parts of Sweden and Europe have learned in a furious pace that all migrants coming into Europe have not become feminists or liberals when they crossed the border. Many migrants have brought their cultural framework which includes a clear “non-European” view of women.
It’s really no big secret how the majority of women are treated in the Middle East and in most of the Muslim world. It is also no big secret what the content of the Qur’an and Sunnah says about women and how these writings are interpreted today by a large portion of the Muslim world. At best, women are treated as second class citizens and as property.
During 2015, 70 percent of the 162,877 asylum seekers in Sweden came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, 64 percent of the Syrians, 82 percent of the Afghans and 73 percent of the Iraqis were men. The ordinary Muslim “refugee” to Sweden is a young man, so young Muslim men’s views against women in the Muslim world becomes relevant.
The Muslim countries’ legislation can be easily found on the Internet. There are thousands of books on what role women have in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq and the oppression they are enduring every day. Despite this, many in Sweden are surprised that this kind of sexual abuse has occurred. It is as if the Left in Sweden lacks any knowledge of how other cultures view women in other parts of the world.
One would hope that the fact that so many women have been attacked in Europe by young male asylum seekers would make the Swedish Left wake up. After the sexual abuses in Cologne Kerstin Weigl, the columnist for Sweden’s largest newspaper Aftonbladet, wrote:
“All men know that it is wrong to assault women. Yet it happens. It is done in different ways, based on different conceptions of what is accepted, what a man can allow himself, to get away with. But this is everyday life. And in at least me there is a reflex to avoid drunk Swedish men in group. The crucial difference is that Swedish women know that they can notify the police and be taken seriously.”
Two days after her column, where her message was that Swedish girls will “be taken seriously” by Swedish police, it emerged that the police had covered up sexual abuse against girls because the perpetrators were Muslim “asylum seekers”. The Swedish Left’s response to sexual abuse committed by “asylum seekers” has been to portray all Swedish men as rapists in to get away from the fact that those who were behind the latest sexual abuses have been “asylum seekers”. But it is an assertion that feels strange to the Swedish people, who have never seen similar sexual abuses like those committed by the newly arrived “asylum seekers”.
In addition to the Swedish Left’s lack of understanding that all the migrants who come to Sweden will not become feminists at the border, they have also completely missed the power relationships between cultures. 1.6 billion people are part of the Islamic cultural sphere. Sweden has approximately 9.5 million inhabitants. If someone comes to Sweden from a part of the Muslim world, and ends up in a situation where he/she has to choose between Islam and Sweden, the person will usually choose Islam, because Islam is the stronger party. What the Left in Sweden has missed is that the values of 1.6 billion people ends up being stronger than the values of 9.5 million Swedes.
As Sweden does not have a policy of assimilation and has not had any such policy since 1975, there are not many immigrants that are assimilated in the Swedish society and power relations between the Islamic world and Sweden makes it problematic for Muslims to voluntarily embrace the Swedish culture.
It is not only Swedish women who will face a “cultural challenge” in the coming years that will make their lives more frightening and insecure. Women and children who have immigrated to Sweden and live in accommodations for “asylum seekers” live risky and precarious lives as well. Despite the fact that the Swedish police does not report about the security situation in the accommodations of “asylum seekers”, there has been reports about rape attempts in these accommodations, in Swedish media.
The fact is that if you come into Europe and then migrate through safe countries all the way to Sweden, then you are not really a refugee. A refugee seeks refuge at the first safe country. Having thousands of frustrated young men with a medieval attitude towards women in a country where women have a liberal way of life creates the conditions for a cultural confrontation. We have already seen some of the consequences of such a cultural confrontation in the sexual abuses that occurred in different cities in Europe.
Sweden and Europe will learn that even if democracy, freedom, equality between women and men and human rights are things that are respected in Europe, there are cultural discourses in which these things are not respected. Sweden and Europe will learn in the near future, the hard way, why women do not go out alone on the streets of Kabul.
The difficulties that Europe will face is a consequence of ignorance and arrogance disguised as ideology. There has been an establishment that has had an illusion that people belonging to an expansionist civilization like Islam will come to Europe and then when they’re here, they’ll just embrace European values. The establishment in Europe has believed that young men who have been brought up with a medieval view towards women will suddenly start respecting women. This establishment is now colliding with reality and thus finds itself in an ideological crisis.
The multicultural ideology that gives influence to non-European cultures in European nations is under current circumstances a threat to Europe and the European nations’ identities and freedoms.
Europe and Sweden are compelled to embrace an ideology, because of the massive migration that has taken place, where the society has to stand up and support the national culture and let this culture continue to steer the development of society while having a workable policy of assimilation without empty phrases and political slogans, that can be implemented.
The sexual abuses, carried out by “asylum seekers”, in European cities are a part of a larger crisis that right now is about how women should dress, and how and where women should move, but in the long term it will be about issues that concern the entire European society. If European nations do not firmly confront this Islamic “cultural challenge,” then they will pay a much higher and painful price than they have done so far.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Obama keeps telling us what America isnot. What does He think she is? Does He think that Obama’s America is America, or that His supporters are what America is? Does He think they make America great? Will America become acceptable to Obama, and hence “who we are,” only after He or His successor finishes her fundamental transformation?
By virtue of the now-implemented Iran nuke “deal,” Iran’s possession of an atomic and/or hydrogen bomb will be delayed for a few years unless she cheats (as in the past), reneges on the “deal” or out-sources nuke development to her long term partner, North Korea.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is now reaping the benefits of more than $100 billion in immediate sanctions relief plus a settlement of Iranian claims amounting to $1.7 billion.
Secretary of State John Kerry said today that the settlement is $400 million debt and $1.3 billion in interest dating back to the Islamic revolution. That’s separate from the sanctions windfall Iran will receive.
Iran will also benefit on a long-term basis from trade with countries formerly prohibited by sanctions.
Back in June 2015, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei had outlined the general policies of the country’s 6th quinquennial development plan.
On defense and security, the proclamation necessitated an increase in Iran’s defense capabilities at the level of a regional power in order to fulfill the national interests by allocating at least 5 percent of the national budget to boosting the defense power. [Emphasis added.]
With increased funding, Iran will be able to increase its already substantial support for Shiite terrorism throughout the Middle East; it will likely do so.
Iranians continue to experience Islamic human rights. Here’s a link to an article titled The Real War on Women in a Nightmarish Islamic Stateby Dr. Majid Rafizadeh. An Iranian-American political scientist and scholar, he is the president of the International American Council and serves on the board of the Harvard International Review at Harvard University.
When it comes to executions, girls are systematically more vulnerable due to the Islamist penal code of Sharia law.
Let’s take a look at the Islamist state of Iran, which creates its laws from the legal codes of Sharia and Quran. The first type of discrimination is related to age: girls are held criminally accountable at the maturity age of 9 Lunar years. (This will automatically put girls at a higher risk of execution by the court.)
Iranian ruling politicians hold the highest record when it comes to the most executions per capita in the world. Intriguingly, in the last two years that the so-called moderate, Hassan Rouhani, has been in office, there have been more than 2000 executions conducted in Iran. That is nearly 3-4 executions a day.
More importantly, Iranian leaders are also the largest executioner of women and female juveniles. Some of these executions were carried out on the mullahs’ charge of ‘Moharebeh’ (enmity with Allah), or waging war against Allah, ifsad-i Fil Arz (Sowing Corruption on Earth), or Sab-i Nabi (Insulting the Prophet). [Emphasis added.]
There are three methods of execution for women and female juveniles: 1. Stoning 2. Public hanging 3. Shooting. Some women are also beaten so severely in the prison that they die before reaching the execution. Shooting, which is the fastest method of the three for execution, has not been used since 2008. Instead, the most common method to execute women is public hanging or stoning. Some of these women are flogged right before they are hanged. Public hanging not only imposes fears in the society but also aims at dehumanizing and controlling women as second-class citizens. According to the Islamist penal code of Iran, women offenses are classified as: Hadd, Diyyih, Ta`zir, and Qisas. [Emphasis added.]
Please read the entire article. Isn’t it heartwarming that “we” are giving even more than a mere $100 billion to Iran? Perhaps some of the new money can be used to buy sharper stones and new devices for hangings. How about some new torture devices?
Islam, The Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates
The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas-affiliated Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claims to represent Muslims in America. They do represent those who favor terrorism and despise human rights (in the name of which they ironically claim to act).
[T]he Council on American-Islamic Relations, is a prominent Islamic group, but which has a long history of involvement with extremist and terrorist causes. In 2009, during the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial, U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis concluded that, “The government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR… with the Islamic Association for Palestine, and with Hamas.” [Emphasis added.]
During the trial, CAIR was designated an “unindicted co-conspirator.” As a result of CAIR’s apparent links to a terrorist movement, the Justice Department in 2009 announced a ban on working with CAIR. The FBI also severed relations.
[F]or the past seven years, the Obama White House has opened its doors to the entire spectrum of radical Islamist groups, just like CAIR. These groups have rationalized the actions of Islamic terrorist groups that have killed Americans, warned American Muslims against cooperating with law enforcement, smeared genuine Muslim moderates like Zuhdi Jasser and Asra Nomani as traitors and accused anyone who dared to utter the term “radical Islam” as “Islamophobic.” These are the groups that the White House should have marginalized. The fact that Obama legitimized radical Islamist groups will be his real legacy. [Emphasis added.]
Very few American Muslims, however, seem to feel that CAIR is a legitimate ambassador for American Islam. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, about 88% of American Muslims said that CAIR does not represent them. Muslims all over the world, in fact, apparently do not think CAIR is a moderate or legitimate Muslim group: in 2014, the United Arab Emirates, a pious Muslim state, designated CAIR a terrorist organization, along with dozens of other Muslim Brotherhood organizations.
In reality, American Muslims are extremely diverse, and no single group can claim to speak on their collective behalf. American Islam comprises dozens of different religious sects and political movements, many of which advocate distinctly different ideas. But for Islamist bodies such as CAIR, it suits their agenda if American Muslims are portrayed as a monolithic community. If American Muslims can be seen as homogenous, then a group such as CAIR has a better claim to represent their interests.
Even CAIR’s own research, however, undermines their claim to speak on behalf of American Muslims. A 2011 report reveals that a majority of American mosques are not affiliated with any American Islamic body.
Addressing a conference in 2000, Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, a Muslim cleric and secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly, explained that, “[CAIR] is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization. It works in the United States as a lobby against radio, television and print media journalists who dare to produce anything about Islam that is at variance with their fundamental agenda. CAIR opposes diversity in Islam.”
In truth, CAIR only speaks on behalf of a small extremist ideology that, as discovered by federal prosecutors, emerged across the United States during the 1990s out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Although CAIR does not represent American Muslims, it managed, before the Holy Land Foundation terror trial in 2008, to persuade a great many people that it did. Enough time has passed that CAIR seems to believe it can try this move once again.
state that Congress believes the Muslim Brotherhood fits the State Department’s criteria of a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The Secretary of State would be required to designate the Brotherhood within 60 days or to provide a detailed report explaining why it does not. Three U.S.-based Brotherhood entities named in the bill are CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). [Emphasis added.]
The House version of the bill (HR3892) was introduced by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) with Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Randy K. Weber (R-TX), Diane Black (R-TN) and Mike Pompeo (R-KS) as original cosponsors. They are now joined by Reps. Steve King (R-IA); Steven Palazzo (R-MS); Kay Granger (R-TX); Jim Jordan (R-OH); Steve Stivers (R-OH); Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA); Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL); Charles W. Dent (R-PA); Bill Johnson (R-OH) and David A. Trott (R-MI).
HR3892 was referred to the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security on December 4, 2015. Two cosponsors, Rep. Gohmert and Rep. Trott, sit on that subcommittee.
The Senate version of the bill (S2230) was introduced by presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and later cosponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). It was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 3. Two of Senator Cruz’s presidential rivals, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sit on that committee and have not taken a position on the bill.
Although the bill has yet to earn bi-partisan support at this early stage, it is supported by members of Congress from different spectrums of the Republican Party. It includes endorsers of the presidential campaigns of Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and John Kasich and not only supporters of Ted Cruz.
If enacted by the Congress, Obama will almost certainly veto it. If He signs it, He will ignore or bypass it as He often does.
Britain recently declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Here are thirteen quotes from the British Government’s review and Prime Minister Cameron’s official statement:
1. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s foundational texts call for the progressive moral purification of individuals and Muslim societies and their eventual political unification in a Caliphate under Sharia law. To this day the Muslim Brotherhood characterizes Western societies and liberal Muslims as decadent and immoral. It can be seen primarily as a political project.”
2. “Aspects of Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security.”
3. “From its foundation the Muslim Brotherhood organized itself into a secretive ‘cell’ structure, with an elaborate induction and education program for new members…This clandestine, centralized and hierarchical structure persists to this day.”
4. “The Hamas founding charter claims that they are the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood treat them as such. In the past ten years support for Hamas (including in particular funding) has been an important priority for the MB in Egypt and the MB international network.”
5. “From at least the 1950s the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood also developed an international network, within and beyond the Islamic world. Europe became an important base for the growing Muslim Brotherhood global network.”
6. “The wider international network of the Muslim Brotherhood now performs a range of functions. It promotes Muslim Brotherhood ideology (including through communications platforms), raises and invests funds, and provides a haven for members of the Brotherhood who have left their country of origin to continue promoting Brotherhood activity.”
7. “[F]or the most part, the Muslim Brotherhood have preferred non violent incremental change on the grounds of expediency, often on the basis that political opposition will disappear when the process of Islamization is complete. But they are prepared to countenance violence—including, from time to time, terrorism—where gradualism is ineffective.”
8. “Muslim Brotherhood organizations and associated in the UK have neither openly nor consistently refuted the literature of Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb which is known to have inspired people (including in this country) to engage in terrorism.”
9. “[The review] concluded that it was not possible to reconcile these [MB] views with the claim made by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in their evidence to the review that ‘the Muslim Brotherhood has consistently adhered to peaceful means of opposition, renouncing all forms of violence throughout its existence.’”
10. “In the 1990s the Muslim Brotherhood and their associates established public facing and apparently national organizations in the UK to promote their views. None were openly identified with the Muslim Brotherhood and membership of the Muslim Brotherhood remained (and still remains) a secret.”
11. “[MB fronts] became politically active, notably in connection with Palestine and Iraq, and promoted candidates in national and local elections…sought and obtained a dialogue with Government….were active members in a security dialogue with the police.”
12. “The Muslim Brotherhood have been publicly committed to political engagement in this country. Engagement with Government has at times been facilitated by what appeared to be a common agenda against al Qaida and (at least in the UK) militant Salafism. But this engagement did not take into account of Muslim Brotherhood support for a proscribed terrorist group and its views about terrorism which, in reality, are quite different from our own.”
13. “Senior Muslim Brotherhood figures and associated have justified attacks against coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The linked article goes on to note that
The U.S. government, without even conducting any kind of review of its own, issued a statement to the Investigative Project on Terrorism rejecting any ban or even any “de-legitimizing” of the Brotherhood at all. [Emphasis added.]
Do the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates represent Obama? Are they or Obama “what we are?” I don’t think so and hope not.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and reformation of Islam
In Heretic (which I reviewed here), Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote,
For years, we have spent trillions on waging wars against “terror” and “extremism” that would have been much better spent protecting Muslim dissidents and giving them the necessary platforms and resources to counter that vast network of Islamic centers, madrassas, and mosques which has been largely responsible for spreading the most noxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism. For years, we have treated the people financing that vast network — the Saudis, the Qataris, and the now repentant Emiratis — as our allies. In the midst of all our efforts at policing, surveillance, and even military action, we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it. [Emphasis added.]
Here is a video of which Hirsi Ali was the executive producer. It features Muslim and former-Muslim women discussing Islam and the Islam-mandated male domination of women.
Here’s a video characterizing Hirsi Ali as an “Islamophobe.”
Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Azeezah Kanji — the featured speaker in the above video — has been very active in disparaging Hirsi Ali and Honor Diaries. Like CAIR, she has ties to the Obama White House and was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2011. What changes in Islam does Ms. Kanji champion? None, apparently, of those intrinsic to it.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the CAIR, condemned Hirsi Ali as “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide.”
On becoming a U.S. Citizen
Who better represents American values? Hirsi Ali, once a refugee from Somalia and a proud citizen of the United States since April 25, 2013, or President Obama? In the immediately linked Wall Street Journal article, she offers suggestions on American immigration with which I plan to deal in a subsequent post. In the meantime, here is her 2014 address at the William F. Buckley Program at Yale University on the clash of civilizations. If you have not yet watched it, please do so. If you have watched it, please do so again. I just did. Every time I watch it, there is something I had not previously considered.
Conclusions
To Obama and His acolytes, Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance; the Islamic State, its equally non-peaceful and intolerant franchisees and other comparable terrorist organizations are “not Islamic.” If “not Islamic,” what are they?
Despite Obama’s many statements and gestures, He has yet to convince any Islamic terrorist group that it is not Islamic. He has convinced them only that He is ignorant of Islam, a liar or both. Perhaps He needs a better joke writer.
was very striking for the one-sidedness and disproportion of the president’s concern for religious suffering.
President Obama worried that “politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or fellow citizens.”
But he couldn’t bring himself to worry aloud about the Christians being driven from Middle Eastern countries, the churches being burned from Nigeria to Malaysia, or the 22 Coptic Christians who were beheaded on video on a beach in Libya by Islamic supremacists.
Will our next president at least make a concerted effort to un-transform Obama’s America? Will he name and fight our enemies, foreign and domestic? Or will he simply “go with the flow” and do none of the above. Much depends on who it is and on the composition of the Congress.
During the Democrat Party debate on January 17th, Hillary Clinton “linked herself to the president again and again. And again.” An Obama clone to continue Obama’s fundamental transformation of America is the opposite of what we need. Nor will merely “fixing” broken parts of the governmental apparatus with duct tape and bailing wire be satisfactory. As I wrote last September, To bring America back we need to break some stuff.
In later posts in this series, I hope to deal with immigration, race relations, the ways in which Obama is distorting the Constitution, the decline of education and Obama’s very foreign foreign policy.
♦ Some 30 Muslim men thought that the woman was in violation of Islamic sharia law, by being in Sweden unaccompanied by a man. They thought that she should therefore be raped and her teenage son killed.
♦ Two Swedish citizens were convicted by a Gothenburg Court of joining an Islamist terror group in Syria and murdering two captives. Video evidence showed one victim being beheaded. “Every night when I have gone to bed, I have seen a head hanging in the air.” — Court Chairman Ralf G. Larsson.
♦ Sometime during the night, the victim was awakened by the Iraqi as he raped her. The woman managed to break free and locate a train attendant. At first, the woman did not want to call the police. “She felt sorry for him [the rapist] … and was afraid he would be deported back to Iraq.”
♦ One week after Sweden raised its terror alert level to the highest ever, the police raised another alarm — saying their weapons are simply not good enough to prevent a potential terror attack.
November 4: The Swedish Immigration Service sent out a press release, saying that it had hired close to a thousand additional employees since June. The Immigration Service now has over 7,000 employees, including hourly workers and consultants — double the 3,350 employees who worked there in 2012. Most of the new recruits work with the legal processing of asylum applications, but the units dealing with receiving migrants and filing their initial applications have also expanded considerably. As if the record influx of migrants this autumn were not crushing enough, the Immigration Service also had trouble retaining its staff. Employees complain about being badly treated: they are always expected to be on call, and possibly even work Christmas Eve.
November 4: Bobel Barqasho, a 31-year-old Syrian, was sentenced by Sweden’s Supreme Court to 14 years in prison. Before his case reached the Supreme Court, Barqasho had been sentenced by a lower court to 9 years in prison, then acquitted by the Court of Appeals. In February 2013, Barqasho threw his wife off a sixth-floor balcony. Against all odds, the woman survived the 13-meter (about 43 feet) fall, but was badly injured. When she woke up after five weeks in a coma, her head was held together by a helmet, her face felt loose, and her teeth were gone. In the Court of Appeals, the defense managed to plant reasonable doubt about the man’s guilt by claiming the woman was depressed and had jumped of her own free will] so the Court of Appeals set him free. By the time the Supreme Court pronounced its sentence of 14 years, Barqasho had disappeared. He is now being sought by Interpol.
November 6: The Grönkulla School in Alvesta closed after reports of a rape at the facility spread on social media. A Somali boy had apparently been sexually harassing a 12-year-old girl for some time. On October 17, he allegedly took his attentions a step farther, pulled the girl behind a bush and raped her. The girl’s father had been unsuccessful in trying to get the school to address the problem earlier, but even after the reported rape, the school’s management did not act. The boy was allowed to continue going to the school – just on a schedule different from the girl’s. Her distraught parents told the news website Fria Tider: “We are being spat on because we are Swedish.” In protest against the school’s management, many parents, viewing the school as having sided with the perpetrator, moved their children to other schools.
November 9: Social commentator and whistleblower Merit Wager revealed on her blog that administrators at the Immigration Service had all been ordered to “accept the claim that an applicant is a child, if he does not look as if he is over 40.” A staggering 32,180 “unaccompanied refugee children” had arrived during 2015 by December 1 — since then another 1,130 have come — and the government finally decided to take action. If its proposition is approved by Parliament, everyone who looks adult-aged will be forced to go through a medical age-determination procedure. One of the reasons Sweden stopped doing these in the first place, was that pediatricians refused to take part in them. They said the procedures were “unreliable.”
November 10: A 28-year-old Iraqi man was prosecuted for raping a woman on a night train between Finland and Sweden. The man had originally planned to seek asylum in Finland, but had found the living conditions there too harsh. He had therefore taken a train back to Sweden. In a couchette (sleeping car where men and women are together), the rapist and two other asylum seekers met one of the many Swedish women whose hearts go out to “new arrivals.” The woman bought sandwiches for the men; they drank vodka. When two of the men started groping the woman, she told them to stop, yet chose to lie down and go to sleep. Sometime during the night, she was awakened by the Iraqi as he raped her. The woman managed to break free and locate a train attendant. To the attendant’s surprise, the woman did not immediately want to press charges. The court documents state: “The train attendant asked if he should call the police. At first, the woman did not want him to do so, because she did not want to put N.N., an asylum seeker, in a tough spot. She felt sorry for him… and was afraid he would be deported back to Iraq.”
The man was given a sentence of one year in prison, payment of 85,000 kronor (about $10,000) in damages, and deportation — but will be allowed to come back to Sweden after five years.
November 10: An Algerian and a Syrian asylum seeker were indicted for raping a Swedish woman in Strängnäs. The men, 39-year-old from Algeria and 31-year-old from Syria, met the woman in a bar one night in August. When the woman left, one of the men followed her, pulled her to the ground, and assaulted her. Afterwards, the woman kept walking, and ran into two other men — the Syrian and another unidentified man — and was raped again. The Syrian reportedly also spit her in face and said, “I’m going to f–k you, little Swedish girl.” The men, who lived at the same asylum house, denied knowing each other when questioned by the police. The verdict was announced on December 1. Rapist number one was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison, 117,000 kronor (about $14,000) in damages, and deportation to Algeria. Rapist number two was convicted of aggravated rape and sentenced to four years in prison. He cannot be deported, however, because “there are currently hindrances towards enforcing deportations to Syria.” He was also ordered to pay the woman 167,000 kronor (about $20,000) in damages.
November 13: A trial began against eight Eritrean men, between the ages of 19 and 26, who according to the District Court, “crudely and ruthlessly” gang-raped a 45-year-old woman. She had been waiting in a stairwell for a friend when the men invited her into an apartment. Inside, she was thrown on the floor, held down, beaten and brutally raped. When questioned by the police, she said, “It felt as if there were hands and fingers everyplace. Fingers penetrated me, vaginally, anally. It hurt very much. I could feel the fingernails.” She said she could also hear the Eritreans laughing and speaking in their own language while they raped her. “They seemed to be enjoying themselves,” she said.
When two of the men started fighting over who should rape her next, she tried to flee, but one of the men hit her over the head; she fell unconscious. After coming to, she escaped out a window and was able to reach a neighbor.
The District Court of Falun established that several men had taken part in the attack, but the District Attorney was unable to prove who had done what. Therefore, only one man was convicted of aggravated rape, and sentenced to five years in prison. The others were sentenced to only 10 months in prison for helping to conceal a serious criminal offense. After serving their time, the men will be allowed to stay in Sweden.
November 14: The Swedish Security Service, Säpo, warned again of Muslim terrorists hiding among migrants. The number of individuals listed as potential security threats has tripled this year, and includes several hundred who may be ready to carry out “Paris-style” attacks. As the Immigration Service has a huge backlog in trying to register all 150,000 asylum seekers who have come to Sweden so far in 2015, there are probably also many migrants that would be considered potential security threats.
November 14: Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Margot Wallström, made yet another strange statement with diplomatic consequences. The day after the Paris attacks, in an interview with Swedish Public Television, Wallström was asked, “How worried are you about the radicalization of young people in Sweden who choose to fight for ISIS?” Wallström replied:
“Yes, of course we have a reason to be worried not only here in Sweden but around the world, because there are so many who are being radicalized. Here again, you come back to situations like that in the Middle East, where not least the Palestinians see that there isn’t any future for us [the Palestinians], we either have to accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”
Two days later, the Swedish ambassador to Israel, Carl Magnus Nesser, was called to a meeting at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Its spokesman, Emmanuel Nahshon, later told Reuters, “The Swedish Foreign Minister’s statements are appallingly impudent… [She] demonstrates genuine hostility when she points to a connection of any kind between the terror attacks in Paris and the complex situation between Israel and the Palestinians.”
In a formal statement, the Swedish Foreign Ministry denied that Margot Wallström’s remark had connected the Paris attacks with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Swedish Conservative (Moderaterna) Member of Parliament, Hanif Bali, sarcastically tweeted that it seemed the Foreign Minister is suffering from an “obvious case of Israel-Tourette’s.”
November 18: The Authority for Civil Protection and Contingency Planning (MSB) warned that the asylum situation was not only “very strained,” but that things keep getting worse — and that in some parts of Sweden, the authorities can only function until the end of December. Meanwhile, the Immigration Service calculated that another 13,000 beds are needed in so-called evacuation accommodations. “The problem cannot be fully solved even if the Armed Forces help provide more housing or if the MSB could arrange more tent accommodations,” the authority wrote.
The massive influx of asylum seekers has also led to native Swedes “being crowded out of the health care and social services systems,” according to the MSB. “It [the MSB] is so busy handling unaccompanied children and asylum seekers, that there simply is not enough time to tend to the everyday functions, such as healthcare and social services,” said Alexandra Nordlander, Chief of Operative Analysis at the MSB, to the daily tabloid, Aftonbladet.
November 19: A fire broke out at Lundsbrunn Spa, a few weeks after plans were announced to convert the historic building into the biggest asylum-seekers’ home in Sweden. According to the police, the fire was not an arson, but started in a wood-pellet stove.
Many hotels and spas have transforming themselves into asylum-seekers’ housing, in order to profit from lucrative deals offered by the Immigration Service. Lundsbrunn Spa, near a mineral spring, dates back to 1890; in 1817, a hospital was established on the grounds. The nearby village is home to fewer than 1,000 people, so when Lundsbrunn Spa decided to accept an offer from the Immigration Service, the village faced a doubling of its population. The owners of Lundsbrunn wrote on the Spa’s website that they see the transformation from spa to asylum-seekers’ home as a temporary measure.
November 20: Norwegian businessman Petter Stordalen, the billionaire owner of Nordic Choice Hotels, announced that the chain’s many properties in Scandinavia and the Baltic states would no longer serve their guests sausage and bacon for breakfast. The breakfast buffet of the Nordic Choice’s Clarion Hotel Post in Gothenburg was named earlier this year the best hotel breakfast in the world by the British newspaper, The Mirror. But apparently, this award did not matter. The cause for the hotel’s decision was cited as “health reasons.” The internet, however, was soon abuzz with speculation that the real reason was adaptation to Islamic dietary laws (halal). One week later, Stordalen backtracked. The reaction from hotel guests had been too strong. Many people vented their anger over the withheld bacon on Stordalen’s Facebook page. Stordalen commented: “The guests have spoken. Comfort Hotels are bringing back bacon.”
November 23: Hassan Mostafa Al-Mandlawi, 32, and Al Amin Sultan, 30, were indicted in the Gothenburg Municipal Court, suspected of having traveled to Syria in 2013 and murdering at least two people there. The charge was terrorist crimes, (alternatively crimes against international law) and murder. Chief Prosecutor Agnetha Hilding Qvarnström, of the National Unit for Security Cases, said: “The act [was] committed with the intent to harm the state of Syria and intimidate the people, thus the classification: terrorist crimes. The hard part is to clarify fully whether these men have been part of an armed group, and acted within the frames of the armed conflict, or not.”
The accused men came to Sweden, one from Iraq and one from Syria, as children, but grew up in Sweden and are Swedish citizens. They traveled to Syria in 2013, and joined one of the many Islamist terror groups there. According to the prosecution, they murdered two captured workers in an industrial area of Aleppo by slitting their throats. The prosecutor wrote that, “Al-Mandlawi and Sultan have both expressed delight at the deeds.”
During the trial, films of the executions were shown, but both men still denied having committed the crimes. Those present in court agreed that the films were among the most disturbing ever displayed in a Swedish court. First, they show a man having his throat slit, the blood gushing before he dies. Then, the other victim’s head is severed from his body, and the killer holds up the severed head to loud cheers from the others. The court’s chairman, Ralf G. Larsson, told the news agency, TT: “Every night when I have gone to bed, I have seen a head hanging in the air.”
The verdict was announced December 14: Both men were convicted of terrorist crimes and sentenced to life in prison. The verdict will be appealed, the defense lawyers said.
Two Swedish citizens were convicted by a Gothenburg Court of joining an Islamist terror group in Syria and murdering two captives. Video evidence (left) showed one victim being beheaded. When asked if she is worried about the radicalization of young people in Sweden who choose to fight for ISIS, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Margot Wallström (right), blamed Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
November 25: The municipality of Ängelholm proudly announced that it had managed to hire a world-famous star to sing at the 500-year anniversary of the city of Ängelholm. Mezzo-soprano Susanne Resmark, of La Scala in Milan and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, would now, for the first time, sing in her hometown. The denizens of Ängelholm would get to enjoy the Resmark, considered by many one of the best Mezzo-sopranos, in a free performance. Two days later, however, the local paper, Helsingborgs Dagblad, ran a story on how Resmark had posted on her Facebook page comments critical of Islam. This apparently sent representatives of the municipality into a panic; they cancelled the star’s performance. The journalist behind the story, Jan Andersson, admitted in an interview with Dispatch International that the paper’s reporters had gone over Resmark’s statements with a microscope, in an effort to force the municipality to cancel her appearance. “We did a damn fine job!” Andersson said.
November 27: One week after Sweden raised its terror alert level to the highest ever in the country (four on a five-point scale), the police raised another alarm — saying their weapons are simply not good enough to prevent a potential terror attack. “We are sent out without adequate weapons, only a nine millimeter service pistol. We are also told that there may not be enough protective vests and ballistic helmets. It feels like being sent out on a lion hunt with a pea-shooter and a jumpsuit made out of zebra meat,” wrote a police officer called “Christian,” in an internal incident report reviewed by the news agency, Siren.
His colleague, “Niklas,” wrote that he had to patrol, without a protective helmet, a location considered at risk of terror attacks, because none of the available helmets fit his head: “Without the right equipment, and with inadequate training in tactics and shooting, we still had to work as live targets without any kind of chance to defend ourselves or our [locations] against a potential attack.”
The police say they want to be able to use more powerful weapons, such as the HK MP5, a submachine gun that is popular with law enforcement agencies around the world. Few, however, have had the required training for it. Also, the existing MP5s are kept at police stations — not in patrol cars. Martin Lundin, of the Department of National Operations, conceded there was some merit to the criticism: “We will probably need more people who are able to handle that weapon in the future.”
November 28: A large mob at an asylum house in Nora tried to break into a room where a woman had barricaded herself along with her son. Some 30 Muslim men apparently thought the woman was in violation of Islamic sharia law, by being in Sweden unaccompanied by a man. They thought that she should therefore be raped and her teenage son killed. Asylum house staff called the police, who averted the plan.
♦ As long as we in the West are not prepared to take Muslims at their word when they claim to be waging bloody jihad because it is their religious obligation, we have no chance of repelling the current onslaught on the West.
♦ First to go will be the welfare states. Shrinking native populations cannot generate enough taxes to accommodate masses of immigrants with so few skills as to be effectively unemployable, or who do not want to contribute to “infidel” societies. Well before mid-century, the number of Muslims in Denmark will be large enough irreversibly to have changed the composition and character of the country.
♦ In the United States, a House of Representatives bill, H. Res. 569, has been sponsored that would censor one of the few countries left with freedom of speech. The bill, in accordance with the 10-year plan of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), would criminalize all criticism of Islam, worldwide.
♦ Will Muslim non-integration spell the end of the secular state as we have known it? Probably. Religion – or more accurately, Islamic ideology, which knows no distinction between religion and politics – is on the ascendant.
It was not supposed to have happened this way. In 1995 a number of EU member states signed the Schengen Agreement, integrated into European Union law in 1999. The signatory powers promised to abandon their internal border protection in exchange for a promise by the EU authorities that they would police Europe’s external borders. Then the EU authorities, while demanding that the Schengen states keep their borders open, spectacularly failed to honor their part of the agreement. There can be little doubt that the EU packed up, walked out and left its populations to their own devices.
Sadly, their policies have achieved the exact opposite of what they claimed to strive for. Instead of tolerance, we have witnessed division and irreconcilable enmity between cultures and ethnicities that often have nothing in common except a desire to squeeze as much out of the public coffers as they can. Instead of “inclusion,” Europeans have seen exclusion, low-intensity warfare, terror, no-go zones, rape epidemics, murder and mayhem.
Governments, parliamentary majorities and the stars of academia, the media and the commanding heights of culture cannot have failed to notice that their grand multicultural, Islamophile game did not produce the results they had promised their unsuspecting publics. Yet to this day, most of them persist in claiming that unfettered immigration from the Muslim world and Africa is an indisputable boon to Europe.
Recently, in the wake of the so-called “refugee crisis,” some of these notables have thrown out the script and are expressing concern that immigration is out of control. European governments are still allowing millions of so-called refugees to cross all borders and settle anyplace. According to the EU agency Frontex, charged with protecting Europe’s external borders, more than a million and a half illegals crossed Europe’s frontiers between January and November 2015.
Thousands of migrants cross illegally into Slovenia on foot, in this screenshot from YouTube video filmed in October 2015.
Right now there is an ever-widening gap between the people and their rulers. In a conference recently organized by the Danish Free Press Society to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the famous Muhammed cartoons, the British political analyst, Douglas Murray, noted that the European populations are reacting to decades of lies and deception by voting for political parties which, just a few years ago, were vilified as “racist” and “fascist.” Marine Le Pen, of the National Front party, has emerged as a strong candidate in France’s 2017 presidential election.
Perhaps the most momentous political earthquake in Europe was the recent 180-degree about-face by the Danish Social Democratic Party. Only a few years ago, it was a staunch proponent of Muslim immigration, and hammered away at anyone daring to deny the “cultural enrichment” brought about by the spread of Islam.
The leader of Denmark’s Social Democratic parliamentary group, Henrik Sass Larsen MP, on December 18 wrote:
“The massive migration and stream of refugees now coming to Europe and Denmark are of a magnitude that challenges the fundamental premises of our society in the near future… According to our analysis, the stark economic consequences of the current number of refugees and immigrants will consume all room for maneuver in public finance within a few years. Non-Western immigrants have historically been difficult to integrate into the labor market; the same applies to the Syrians that are now arriving. The more, the harder, the more expensive… Finally, it is our analysis that given our previous experience with integrating non-Western people into our society, we are facing a social catastrophe when it comes to handling many tens of thousands that are soon to be channeled into society. Every bit of progress in terms of integration will be put back to zero. … Therefore our conclusion is clear: We will do all we can to limit the number of non-Western refugees and immigrants coming to the country. That is why we have gone far — and much farther than we had dreamed of going… We are doing this because we will not sacrifice our welfare society in the name of humanitarianism. For the welfare society … is the political project of the Social Democratic Party. It is a society built on the principles of liberty, equality and solidarity. Mass immigration — as we have seen in, for example, Sweden — will undermine … our welfare society.”
Clearly, the Danish Social Democratic Party — the architect of Denmark as we have known it — has understood that there is political capital to be defended. It seems finally to have realized that it cannot persist in whittling away its accomplishments if it wants to keep its dwindling share of the votes.
One may speculate that if the Social Democratic Party means what it says, it might have an impact among Social Democratic and Socialist parties in other European countries.
However, as Douglas Murray also pointed out, Westerners suffer from the notion that regardless of how many jihadis, murderers and terrorists claim that their actions are motivated by their love of Allah, they cannot possibly mean it. There must be some other underlying “root cause” that the men of violence are not aware of, but which well-meaning Westerners are keen to tell them about: old Western imperialism, centuries of humiliation, racism, Israel, the Crusades, poverty, exclusion, the Muhammad cartoons, etc. And, of course, that it is all the fault of the West!
As long as we in the West are not prepared to take Muslims at their word when they claim to be waging bloody jihad because it is their religious obligation, we have no chance of repelling the current onslaught on the West. The latest sighting of this shift was just this week, in the form of a U.S. House of Representatives bill, H. Res. 569, to censor one of the few countries left with free speech. The bill, in accordance with the 10-year plan of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to implement UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, would criminalize, worldwide, all criticism of Islam. [1]
As long as the authorities are unwilling to protect their own populations from being overrun by foreigners, many of whom seem prepared to do them harm, we are likely to see the natives take protection into their own hands. On December 16, for instance, there was a violent protest in the small Dutch city of Geldermalsen, as the local authorities were trying to set up an asylum center behind the backs of the local population. No doubt the authorities were taken aback by the activism.
Western societies are based on an implied contract between the sovereign and the people: The sovereign — the king, the president, the government — promises to uphold law and order, protect his people from violence and foreign encroachment and apprehend and punish criminals. In exchange, the citizens promise not to take the law into their own hands. It follows that if the state fails to uphold its part of this social bargain, then the right — indeed the obligation — to protect oneself, one’s family, neighbors and the community, returns to the citizens.
There was also the recent spate of asylum-house burnings in Sweden. According to the Danish-Swedish website, Snaphanen, there have been 40 occasions during the past six months in which buildings intended to house asylum seekers have mysteriously burned to the ground — without anyone being hurt or killed. None of the perpetrators has been caught; no one has claimed responsibility. It all appears organized quite well.
Will citizen activism save Europe? Probably not. Vast areas are too far gone to be saved. Sweden is a broken country, as pointed out by Ingrid Carlqvist in several articles at Gatestone. By 2020, Germany may have 20 million Muslim residents.
We are probably beyond the point where effective change can be obtained by politics in the old sense, for the simple reason that central authorities are not strong enough to make their writ run throughout their national territories. This will spell the end of Europe as we know it, and people who cannot leave, or who choose to stand and fight, will be left to their own devices — and quite possibly entirely new modes of social organization.
First to go will be the welfare states. Shrinking native populations cannot generate enough taxes to accommodate masses of immigrants with so few skills as to be effectively unemployable, or who do not want to contribute to “infidel” societies.
What might post-European Europe look like? Think of Northern Ireland in the time of the Troubles or of ex-Yugoslavia during the civil wars of the 1990s.
When states break down, people’s first concern will be security. Who can and will protect my family and me?
For a long time in Europe there has been talk of “parallel societies” — in which the state ceases to function as a unitary polity — due to the cultural, religious and politico-judicial separation of non-Muslims and Muslims into incompatible and antagonistic enclaves.
There appears to be a growing realization among Danish demographers that third-world immigrants and their descendants, with or without citizenship, will constitute the majority of the Danish population before the end of the century.[2] A sizable segment of this third-world population will be Muslim, and well before the middle of the century, the number of Muslims will be large enough irreversibly to have changed the composition and character of the country.
Will Muslim non-integration spell the end of the secular state as we have known it? Probably. Religion — or more accurately, Islamic ideology — which knows no distinction between religion and politics, is on the ascendant as the constitutive principle among Danish Muslims. As Muslim institutions grow stronger, the Islamic court, or “din,” is bound to become even more powerful as the organizing principle of the Muslim parallel societies.
How will the old Danish, and nominally Christian, population react to this metamorphosis? To a large extent, that will depend on what organizing principle will determine the character of the Danish parallel society. Two possibilities stand out: “Danishness” and “Christianity.” “Danishness” would probably entail a society founded on a nationalistic or ethnic myth, whereas “Christianity” might be more ethnically inclusive and stress society’s Judeo-Christian and humanistic roots.
In either event, it is difficult to see how the secular state could survive, because the parallel societies will not be free to define themselves or determine their political systems or modes of governance. They will constantly be forced to maneuver in response to “the other’s” long-term objectives and immediate actions — as has been seen, for example, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Lebanon, Northern Ireland and the Basque provinces.
Under these conditions, the modern system of sovereign territorial states is likely to break down. We can only guess at what will replace it.
Lars Hedegaard, a Danish historian, journalist and author, established the Danish Free Speech Society in 2004.
____________________________________
[1] In accordance with the 10-year plan of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to implement U.N. Resolution 16/18 and criminalize all criticism of Islam worldwide, a group in the U.S. House of Representatives has sponsored H. Res. 569, in condemnation of violence, bigotry and “hateful rhetoric” toward Muslims in the U.S. This bill comes on the heels of Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s post-San Bernardino attack statement to the Muslim American community that she will prosecute anyone guilty of anti-Muslim speech. Passage of this legislation will be the death knell for the First Amendment and the end of any and all discourse and education about the threat posed by the global jihad.
[2] See, for example, the calculations of the Copenhagen University demographer Hans Oluf Hansen, Berlingske Tidende, August 21, 2005.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
The recent focus, to the extent that there has been one, has been on Islamist terrorists. Terrorists kill people; fortunately, they themselves often die in the process.
The cancer of Islamisation brings terrorists to western countries. Worse, it also destroys host civilizations from within. Terrorism is not a necessary component of that process and merely keeping terrorists out will not halt it. European supporters of the tumor have caused it to metastasize and thereby to weaken their civilizations. They are working hard to finish the job; if the process is not stopped, it will eventually kill those civilizations.
How about America? Will Europe show the way?
In this short Clarion Project video, a Sunni Muslim woman relates the levels of Muslim support for terror and for changing western law and culture to conform to Islamic (Sharia) law. Many Americans will find the numbers of Muslims involved to be surprisingly high. It’s very well worth watching.
In multiple Muslim nations, overwhelming majorities of Muslims support the death penalty for apostasy or blasphemy. Collectively, this means that hundreds of millions of men and women support capital punishment for the exercise of the basic human rights of freedom of expression and free exercise of religion:
Terrorism vs. the Islamisation Cancer
Few terrorists are needed to kill many people and to frighten more. Preventing the entry of additional Muslims into America would diminish the threat of terror but would not eliminate it: Muslim terrorists are often second or later generation citizens and the Muslim fertility rate is quite high.
Globally, Muslims have the highest fertility rate, an average of 3.1 children per woman – well above replacement level (2.1), the minimum typically needed to maintain a stable population. Christians are second, at 2.7 children per woman. Hindu fertility (2.4) is similar to the global average (2.5). Worldwide, Jewish fertility (2.3 children per woman) also is above replacement level.
To the extent that Muslim males impregnate multiple women, the male Muslim fertility rate is doubtless higher than for females. If each of three wives, made pregnant by the same husband, has three children that’s nine for that one man. Of course, not all Muslim men have three wives and some Muslim wives may use effective methods of birth control.
Compared to much of Europe, the Muslim population of the United States as a whole remains small and Islamisation has only begun. Preventing the entry of additional Muslims can significantly reduce the likelihood that our civilization will succumb to the cancer of Islamisation, but only if the threats are understood and acted upon. Otherwise, the cancer will metastasize, the pace will accelerate and a painful death will ensue.
Europe’s welcome to Muslims
Germany
It has been estimated that Germany’s Muslim population will quadruple within the next five years, rising to approximately twenty million. That estimate presumably takes into account the high Muslim fertility rate. The current population of Germany has been estimated at 82,544,395.
Here’s a video of a Green Party legislator who looks forward to the day when Germans will be a minority in their own cities.
And here are some happy new arrivals, responding to the kindness Europe has shown them.
Germany is already experiencing significant problems brought by its increasing Muslim population. Here are a few examples taken from the linked articles.
Asylum seekers are driving a surge in violent crime in cities and towns across Germany. German authorities, however, are downplaying the lawlessness, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiment. [Emphasis added.]
A confidential police report leaked to a German newspaper reveals that a record-breaking 38,000 asylum seekers were accused of committing crimes in the country in 2014. Analysts believe this figure — which works out to more than 100 a day — is only the tip of the iceberg, as many crimes are either not resolved or not reported.
The current spike in crime — including rapes, sexual and physical assaults, stabbings, home invasions, robberies, burglaries and drug trafficking — comes amid a record-breaking influx of refugees from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Western Balkans.
According to a classified document obtained by the German newspaper, Bild, the government now estimates that Germany will receive as many as 1.5 million asylum seekers in 2015, including 920,000 in the last quarter of 2015 alone. This figure is nearly double the previous estimate, from August, which was 800,000 for all of 2015. By comparison, Germany received 202,000 asylum seekers in all of 2014.
The document warns that with family reunifications, the actual number of asylum seekers could swell to more than seven million, based on the assumption that individuals whose applications are approved will bring between four and eight additional family members to Germany.
A growing number of women and young girls housed in refugee shelters in Germany are being raped, sexually assaulted and even forced into prostitution by male asylum seekers, according to German social work organizations with first-hand knowledge of the situation.
Many of the rapes are occurring in mixed-gender shelters, where, due to a lack of space, German authorities are forcing thousands of male and female migrants to share the same sleeping areas and restroom facilities.
Conditions for women and girls at some shelters are so perilous that females are being described as “wild game” fighting off Muslim male predators. But many victims, fearing reprisals, are keeping silent, social workers say.
At the same time, growing numbers of German women in towns and cities across the country are being raped by asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Many of the crimes are being downplayed by German authorities and the national media, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments. [Emphasis added.]
On August 18, a coalition of four social work organizations and women’s rights groups sent a two-page letter to the leaders of the political parties in the regional parliament in Hesse, a state in west-central Germany, warning them of the worsening situation for women and children in the refugee shelters.
[Please see a copy of the letter at the link]
After several blogs (here, here and here) drew attention to the letter, the LandesFrauenRat (LFR) Hessen, a women’s lobbying group that originally uploaded the politically incorrect document to its website, abruptly removed it on September 14, without explanation.
. . . .
Meanwhile, the raping of German women by asylum seekers is becoming commonplace. Following are a few select cases just from 2015:
[Please see the fifteen “select cases” at the link.]
. . . .
Meanwhile, parents are being warned to look after their daughters. Police in the Bavarian town of Mering, where a 16-year-old-girl was raped on September 11, have issued a warning to parents not to allow their children to go outside unaccompanied. They have also advised women not to walk to or from the train station alone because of its proximity to a refugee shelter.
In the Bavarian town of Pocking, administrators of the Wilhelm-Diess-Gymnasium have warned parents not to let their daughters wear revealing clothing in order to avoid “misunderstandings” with the 200 Muslim refugees housed in emergency accommodations in a building next to the school.
Aside from the letter which removed, where are the feminists? Have they no concerns or are they too self-centered or too afraid of being called “racists” or “Islamophobes” to speak?
As Muslim migration is being set to change German, and possibly European, demographics forever, Germany is gearing up for the new challenge — not by integrating and assimilating young Muslims in a free and democratic Western society, but by handing over the religious education of the next generation of German Muslims to Islamist radicals. [Emphasis added.]
Worse yet, German authorities see no problem in doing that. [Emphasis added.]
With Germany predicted to receive 800,000 migrants — mostly Muslims — this year alone, and millions more waiting to cross Europe’s unguarded borders, the Muslim population in Germany is seeing a historic rise from the current figure of nearly 6 million. Several German states including Bavaria, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia have introduced Islamic Studies in their public schools. The state of Hesse has become the first in Germany to offer Islamic education in public schools, with religious instruction starting as early as the first grade.
Giving young children religious and moral instruction might sound like a good idea, if not for the content of the newly written Islamic curriculum and the influence of Islamist elements over the recruitment of teachers. [Emphasis added.]
The writing of textbooks is being overseen by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB). In an agreement reached between the State of Hesse and DITIB, the organization will play a key role in setting the curriculum, selecting the teachers and monitoring the Islamic religious instruction. The organization is apparently assuming a similar role in several other key German states.
DITIB is the largest Muslim organization in Germany and controls several prominent mosques. The group depends heavily on the Turkish government for its funding, and maintains close ties with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist party, the AKP. [Emphasis added.]
The newly compiled Islamic curriculum for public schools in Hesse has come under great scrutiny. An independent report conducted by Abdel-Hakim Ourghi, who heads of the Faculty for Islamic Theology and Religious Studiesat the Freiburg University of Education, has sharply criticized the curriculum.
According to an article in Die Welt, Ourghi, a prominent Muslim scholar, has been raising concern about the activities of DITIB and other conservative Muslim organizations operating in Germany. “No one knows exactly what actually happens in Islamic classes in German primary schools,” he says. In his assessment, conservative Islam, the one dominant in Germany, is incapable of thinking critically about its past. [Emphasis added.]
According to Ourghi’s report, the textbooks fail to “confront the problematic verses of Koran.” The report also says that the curriculum fails in its most important purpose — integrating Muslims into the German society — as it fails to reconcile the “Islamic faith of the students with the reality of the western society” they are living in. [Emphasis added.]
Confronted with the damning report, Hesse’s Minister of Education and Culture, Alexander Lorz, dismissed the allegations and called the Hesse’s Islamic education a “success.”
The number of radical Salafists in Germany has more than doubled over the past five years, according to a new estimate by German intelligence officials. [Emphasis added.]
Salafists disguised as aid workers are also canvassing German refugee shelters in search of new recruits from among the nearly one million asylum seekers who have arrived in Germany this year from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
. . . .
Salafists — who follow what they say was the original Islam practiced in the 7th and 8th centuries — openly state that they want to replace democracy in Germany (and the rest of the world) with an Islamic government based on Sharia law. [Emphasis added]
Muslim radicals have begun enforcing Islamic Sharia law on the streets of Wuppertal, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, the state with the largest Muslim population in Germany. [Emphasis added.]
In what government officials say is a blatant challenge to the rule of law and the democratic order in Germany, groups of young bearded Islamists — some wearing orange traffic safety vests emblazoned with the words “Sharia Police” — have declared parts of downtown Wuppertal to be a “Sharia Controlled Zone.”
The self-appointed guardians of public morals have been distributing yellow leaflets that explain the Islamist code of conduct in the city’s Sharia zones. They have urged both Muslim and non-Muslim passersby to listen to Salafist sermons and to refrain from alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, gambling, listening to music, pornography or prostitution.
A seven-minute propaganda video in German, entitled “Sharia Police: Coming Soon to Your City,” shows a group of men led by a German convert to Islam, Sven Lau, roaming the streets of Wuppertal at night and pressing wayward youth to embrace radical Islam. In some instances, the men physically attempted to prevent young people from entering bars, casinos and discotheques; those who resisted were pursued and intimidated.
The influx of more than one million asylum seekers from Africa,Asia and the Middle East is placing unprecedented strain on Germany’s healthcare system.
Hospitals, clinics and emergency rooms across Germany are being filled to capacity with migrants suffering maladies of all kinds, and medical personnel, including thousands of volunteers, are increasingly complaining of burnout.
Diseases are also reappearing that have not been seen in Germany for years. German public health officials are now on the lookout for Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever, diphtheria, Ebola, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, malaria, measles, meningitis, mumps, polio, scabies, tetanus, tuberculosis, typhus and whooping cough. As refugee shelters fill to overflowing, doctors are also on high alert for mass outbreaks of influenza and Norovirus.
Compounding the challenge, tens of thousands of migrants arriving in Germany — particularly migrant children — have not been immunized, and German doctors are finding that needed vaccines are not readily available due to a lack of supply. Some German parents are panicking that there are not enough vaccines to immunize their own children.
Many migrants are also suffering from a host of traumas and mental illnesses. According to the Chamber of German Psychotherapists (Bundespsychotherapeutenkammer), at least half of all migrants arriving in Germany have psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and roughly 40% have contemplated suicide.
German hospitals are also being forced to hire a virtual army of interpreters so that doctors can communicate with asylum seekers, who speak dozens of languages, dialects and variants.
At the same time, German hospitals are increasing security to protect doctors and nurses from violent attacks by migrants who are unhappy with the medical treatment they are receiving. [Emphasis added.]
Muslim asylum seekers are enforcing Islamic Sharia law in German refugee shelters, according to police, who warn that Christians, Kurds and Yazidis in the shelters are being attacked by Muslims with increasing frequency and ferocity. [Emphasis added.]
Muslim migrants from different sects, clans, ethnicities and nationalities are also attacking each other. Violent brawls — sometimes involving hundreds of migrants — are now a daily occurrence.
Police say the shelters, where thousands of migrants are housed together in cramped spaces for months at a time, are seething cauldrons ready to explode. The police are urgently calling for migrants of different faiths to be housed in separate facilities.
Some politicians counter that such segregation would go against Germany’s multicultural values, while others say that separating hundreds of thousands of migrants by religion and nationality would be a logistical impossibility. [Enphasis added.]
As the consequences of unrestrained migration become apparent, the tide of public opinion is turning against the government’s open-door policy. Observers say that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the so-called most powerful woman in the world, may have met her Waterloo.
Christian migrants in German asylum centres are living under persistent threat, with many fearing for their lives as the hardline Sunni majority within the migrant population attempts to enforce Sharia law in their new host nation. The situation is so bad that Christians claim they live like “prisoners” in Germany, and some have even returned to Middle East. [Emphasis added.]
In the German state of Thuringia, Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow, one of the multiculturalists driving and celebrating the migrant crisis, has been forced to initiate a policy of separating and segregating different cultures as soon as they arrive in Europe.
“In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards have arrested my brother in a house church. I fled the Iranian intelligence, because I thought in Germany I can finally live freely according to my religion,” says Said, a Christian who fled persecution in his native country.
“But I can not openly admit that I am a Christian in my home for asylum seekers. I will be threatened,” he told Germany language paper Die Welt.
This year Germany prepares to absorb a million people in just twelve months – one per cent of its entire population – from numerous, diverse and alien cultures.
“We must rid ourselves of the illusion that all those who arrive here are human rights activists,” says Max Klingberg of the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR), who has worked with refugees for 15 years. “Among the new arrivals is not a small amount of religious intensity, it is at least at the level of the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.
Said is living in an asylum centre in southern Brandenburg, near the border with Saxony. “They wake me before dawn during Ramadan and say I should eat before the sun comes up. If I refuse, they say I’m a kuffar, an unbeliever. They spit at me… They treat me like an animal. And threaten to kill me.”
“… They are also all Muslims,” he adds.
But be of good cheer. Frau Merkel, a principal architect of Germany’s new wave of multiculturalism, was recently honored by Time Magazine as its person of the year.
In late summer, Merkel’s government threw open Germany’s doors to a pressing throng of refugees and migrants; a total of 1 million asylum seekers are expected in the country by the end of December. It was an audacious act that, in a single motion, threatened both to redeem Europe and endanger it, testing the resilience of an alliance formed to avoid repeating the kind of violence tearing asunder the Middle East by working together. That arrangement had worked well enough that it raised an existential question of its own, now being asked by the richest country in Europe: What does it mean to live well?
Merkel had her answer: “In many regions war and terror prevail. States disintegrate. For many years we have read about this. We have heard about it. We have seen it on TV. But we had not yet sufficiently understood that what happens in Aleppo and Mosul can affect Essen or Stuttgart. We have to face that now.” For her, the refugee decision was a galvanizing moment in a career that was until then defined by caution and avoidance of anything resembling drama. Analysts called it a jarring departure from form. But it may also have been inevitable, given how Angela Merkel feels about walls.
What was not inevitable but merely astounding was that the most generous, openhearted gesture of recent history blossomed from Germany, the country that within living memory (and beyond, as long as there’s a History Channel) blew apart the European continent, and then the world, by taking to gruesome extremes all the forces its Chancellor strives to hold in check: nationalism, nativism, self-righteousness, reversion to arms. No one in Europe has held office longer—or to greater effect—in a world defined by steadily receding barriers. That, after all, is the story of the E.U. and the story of globalization, both terms as colorless as the corridor of a Brussels office building. The worlds Merkel has mastered carry not a hint of the forces that have shaped Europe’s history, the primal sort a child senses, listening to a story, safe in bed. [Emphasis added.]
Once upon a time, there was a safe welfare state called Sweden, where people rarely locked their doors.
Now, this country is a night-watchman state — each man is on his own. When the Minister of Justice, Morgan Johansson, encourages breaking the law, it means opening the gates to anarchy. Mr. and Mrs. Swede have every reason to be worried, with the influx of 190,000 unskilled and unemployed migrants expected this year — equivalent to 2% of Sweden’s current population. The number is as if 6.4 million penniless migrants who did not speak English arrived in U.S. in one year, or 1.3 million in Britain.
And the Swedes are preparing: demand for firearms licenses is increasing; more and more Swedes are joining shooting clubs and starting vigilante groups. After a slight dip in 2014, the number of new gun permits has gone up significantly again this year. According to police statistics, there are 1,901,325 licensed guns, owned by 567,733 people, in Sweden. Add to this an unknown number of illegal weapons. To get a gun permit in Sweden, you need to be at least 18 years old; law-abiding; well-behaved, and have a hunting license or be a member of an approved shooting club. In 2014, 11,000 people got a hunting license: 10% more than the year before. One out of five was a woman.
. . . .
Even before the massive influx of migrants in the fall of 2015, Swedes felt a need to protect themselves — and with good reason. Since the Parliament decided in 1975 that Sweden should be multicultural and not Swedish, crime has exploded. Violent crime has increased by more than 300%, and rapes have increased by an unbelievable 1,472%. [Emphasis added.]
The politicians, however, ignore the people’s fear completely. It is never discussed. Instead, the people who express concern about what kind of country Sweden has become are accused of xenophobia and racism. Most likely, that is the reason more and more people are taking matters into their own hands, and protecting themselves and their families to the best of their ability. [Emphasis added.]
Sweden is fast approaching a complete collapse. More and more municipalities are raising the alarm that if the migrants keep coming at this pace, the government can no longer guarantee normal service to its citizens. In addition, ominous statements from government officials have left Swedes in fear of what tomorrow may bring. If the migrant wave keeps coming, in 10-15 years, Swedes will be a minority in their own country.
The Muslim population of Britain reached 3.4 million in 2014 to become around 5.3% of the overall population of 64 million, according to figures extrapolated from a recent study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. In real terms, Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France and Germany. [Emphasis added.]
Islam and Islam-related issues were omnipresent in Britain during 2014, and can be categorized into four broad themes: 1) Islamic extremism and the security implications of British jihadists in Syria; 2) the continuing spread of Islamic Sharia law in Britain; 3) the sexual exploitation of British children by Muslim gangs; and 4) Muslim integration into British society.
The article linked above next provides “a chronological review of some of the main stories involving the rise of Islam in Britain during 2014.”
Will Obama’s America be next? That would make Obama’s friends in Iran very happy.
In an article titled Paradigms lost: the U.S. Bruce Thornton remarks that the Europeanization of America must be reversed. We have the tools, but that is not enough. We need to use them.
We have to reject the failed paradigm of Brussels and restore the still vibrant paradigm of Philadelphia. Battered by a century of progressive assaults, the Constitution still gives us the means for turning back the erosion of [its] commitment to ordered liberty and citizen autonomy. The Bill of Rights, a federalism comprising sovereign state governments, a structure of divided and balanced government, and most important the regular federal elections in which we the people have the opportunity to hold our leaders and party accountable––all provide the mechanisms for changing course and initiate a revolution in the original sense of the word, a “rolling back” to the most consequential “paradigm shift” in political history––the Constitution. [Emphasis added.]
Finally, Geert Wilders’ November 15, 2014 address at the Heritage Foundation’s Restoration Weekend – a powerful close to this article.
Stockholm opened what is believed to be the world’s first rape clinic for men. More and more men are being subjected to homosexual rape in multicultural Sweden. 370 sex crimes against boys and men were registered in 2014, although the actual number of incidents is thought to be significantly higher.
Sweden’s strategy seems to be to keep the borders open and then redistribute the asylum seekers to EU countries that have an immigration policy completely different from Sweden’s open borders and generous welfare benefits. Whether other EU countries want to relieve Sweden’s burden remains to be seen.
Police documents show that 70% asylum seekers whose applications are rejected ignore the decision and stay illegally in Sweden.
The councilman argued that one should be able to talk about everything, so long as it is true. Two days later, he was forced to apologize and stress that he is not a racist.
Swedish authorities care more about the murderer’s future in his native Eritrea than they do about the risk that he will kill more Swedes.
Weapons smugglers have figured out a way to drive through customs checkpoints without being pulled over. The customs officers have orders never to stop cars with more passengers than there are customs officers present, according to the Lokaltidningen weekly newspaper.
The young men raped the girl, beat her and half-strangled her. The men, because they were believed to be under 18, were sentenced to juvenile detention. In six to nine months, they will be cruising Stockholm by night again.
On October 6, the radio program P4 Halland reported that an imam in Halmstad called homosexuality a “virus.” In a video posted on his mosque’s YouTube channel, the imam talked about raising children. He said that parents need to make sure their children have good immune systems, as there are many viruses floating around in society — one of them being homosexuality. The lecture was held in association with the Sobriety Movement’s Educational Activities (Nykterhetsrörelsens bildningsverksamhet). Its members immediately terminated their collaboration with the mosque.
Commenting in the Swedish media on the commotion that erupted after the imam’s statement, Mohamed Omar, an author and social commentator, wrote that this view of homosexuality is the rule rather than the exception in Swedish mosques: “As a Muslim, I have had the opportunity to visit mosques all over Sweden. Homophobia is the norm everywhere. I have heard far worse things than ‘homosexuality is a virus.’ In no mosque, I repeat nowhere, have I encountered teachings of tolerance for homosexuality.”
The imam’s statement was reported to the police, on suspicion of violating hate speech laws, but the investigation was immediately dropped. According to the prosecutor, the main purpose of the lecture was to talk about parenting, not to incite hatred against homosexuals.
October 7: TV4’s popular investigative journalism TV program, Cold Facts (Kalla Fakta), revealed that public health centers in areas with high immigrant populations perform so-called “virginity tests” on young girls. The practice was exposed when three young women of Middle Eastern descent were equipped with hidden cameras and sent undercover to three health centers. Another person, posing as the girls’ aunt, insisted on “virginity tests.” The doctors (several of whom were immigrants) ignored the loud protests from the girls, and examined them against their will. The doctors also offered, for a cash bribe, to issue “virginity certificates” for the girls.
October 12: Amid the snowballing “asylum anarchy” in Sweden, the government decided it was an appropriate time to hold something reminiscent of a revival meeting in Stockholm, under the slogan “Sweden Together.” Ingrid Lomfors, the new director of The Living History Forum, a Swedish public authority, opened the meeting by declaring that there is no such thing as Swedish culture — even though music from the Swedish historical musical Kristina from Duvemåla, written by ABBA members Björn Ulveaus and Benny Andersson, had been played moments before. As public reactions to Lomfors’s assertions were negative, even in the mainstream media, the next day she corrected herself, saying that what she meant was that there is no “unchanged” Swedish culture. Hanif Bali, a conservative Member of Parliament of Iranian descent, was one of many who protested loudly against Lomfors’s statement:
“To say that we should integrate people, even though there is nothing Swedish to integrate them into, I react very strongly against that. The Swedish culture is unique. Saying that there is nothing inherently Swedish just makes it all the more difficult for the people who have come here to become part of society.”
October 13: Three men were arrested as suspects in an August 24 hand grenade attack against police in the Stockholm suburb of Tumba. The hand grenade exploded a few feet from a police van, and the vehicle was riddled with over a hundred pieces of shrapnel. According to the police, it was just a fluke that no one was seriously injured or killed. The police also suspect there is a close connection between the Tumba attack and the armed robbery of a supermarket in Stockholm on October 12. A few days later, one of the three suspects, an 18-year-old man, was remanded on suspicion of armed robbery, aggravated larceny and attempted murder. The other two were released, but remain under suspicion.
A police van is riddled with shrapnel (left) from a hand grenade attack in Stockholm on August 24. The four policemen in the vehicle at the time could have been killed if the van had not been armored. At right, the Malmö police bomb squad disarms a hand grenade found in Landskrona, on September 22.
August 25: Local politicians in small southern county of Örkelljunga (population 10,000) wrote a desperate letter to the government; its signatories begged for help in solving the problems brought by the wave of asylum seekers. The Immigration Service has opened housing in Örkelljunga for about 250 asylum seekers in apartments, a former motel, and a number of private family residences — including housing for unaccompanied refugee children. An additional 100 units may open up in the Åsljungagården Hotel.
The local politicians wrote in their letter that crime rates have risen and that the police have been called on a number of occasions. Rape, assault, battery and shoplifting are mentioned, as is the temporary closing of the Centrumhuset youth center. At the largest housing facility, an old motel, there are 90 adults and children. The mix of various ethnic groups is said to have led to riots, threats and hunger strikes. The letter states:
“The situation affects everyone who lives and stays in our little county. The climate has grown tougher; many people feel scared and unsafe and with that comes the risk of increased xenophobia, antagonism and exclusion.”
The county swiftly received criticism from the mainstream media, and August 27 the Immigration Service let it be known that they have no intention of helping Örkelljunga. Immigration Service Press Officer Fredrik Bengtsson, quoted in the daily Helsingborgs Dagblad, was especially angry about the county’s criticism concerning different groups being placed together:
“If one thinks along the lines of placing asylum seekers any other way, you’re on a slippery slope. Separate housing for Christians and Muslims is not something we have in society. We have freedom of religion, and that applies to housing as well. You have to stop for a moment and think about it, because that’s not how we do things in society.”
August 26: Swedes heard the news that politicians in the nation’s three largest cities want to offer courses in “self-care and sexual matters” to gypsy women beggars. Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö are applying for 8.7 million kronor (just over $1 million USD) from the European Social Fund, for the project, and hope to reach 250 women. Twice a week they will attend class and get food, free health checkups and free hygiene- and sanitary articles and condoms. They will also receive compensation for “loss of work income.” Local politicians from opposition parties in Stockholm criticized the project strongly.
August 28: “Afrikas Horn,” an immigrants’ organization, reports another “Swedish” ISIS-warrior killed in battle. The man was in his thirties and originally from Somalia, but lived in the immigrant-heavy area of Vivalla in Örebro. The man was apparently one of three who have repeatedly traveled to join ISIS, but were twice intercepted in Turkey and sent back to Sweden. The man is the fourth resident of Örebro who has died as an ISIS terrorist. The chairman of Afrikas Horn tells the local paper Nerikes Allehanda that “the family is in mourning.”
August 28: Ali Khoddami, once an asylum seeker to Sweden, was sentenced to prison for defrauding an elderly woman. Khoddami worked in home care services and tricked Inga Lill, a 90-year-old woman suffering from dementia, out of millions of kronor. By pretending to be the woman’s friend, Khoddami was able to take over her bank accounts and move into her house, along with his family. He used her savings of two million kronor (about $240,000 USD) for luxury items, as well as several cars. Khoddami also managed to persuade Lill to sign over her house — her childhood home built by her father — to him. The house is apparently worth five million kronor ($590,000 USD). It was only after Khoddami put Lill, who has no living relatives, in a nursing home that the fraud was uncovered. The District Court sentenced Khoddami to 2.5 years in prison and fined him 7 million kronor ($830,000) plus interest and damages.
August 28: There were reports that people-smugglers have, over a short period of time, dumped 100 asylum seekers in the Gothenburg area. Pernilla Wallin, unit manager of the application unit at the Immigration Service for the Western Region, told Swedish Public Television that she never thought the situation would escalate like this and that the circumstances are “exceptional.” The Immigration Service is now desperately looking for “external contractors who want to bid on temporary housing for asylum seekers.”
President Obama is not so much complacent as an appeaser of radical Islam — an identification he refuses to employ. Yet the president condemns Christianity by reminding us at prayer breakfasts of its violent Crusader roots, or he lists false glories of the Muslim world, as in his Cairo speech. Obama’s rhetoric of the last seven years has been predicated on the false assumption that his own supposed multicultural fides and his father’s Islamic connections would make him the perfect Western emissary to defuse radical Islam. This has not come to pass, as we see from the recent Paris mass murders. Never has the Middle East been more unhinged and never has the U.S. been more disliked by it.
During the Obama administration, radical Islam finally has grasped that the way to destroy Western societies is to employ Western political correctness against them, leading eventually to their paralysis — as long as the war is waged carefully, insidiously, and over decades.
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The historian Thucydides felt that democracies were characteristically volatile and yet complacent when existential dangers loomed on the horizon. But once faced with impending doom — such as the near collapse of Athens after the disaster of the Sicilian Expedition — they usually proved the most capable of marshaling the entire population for war. Accordingly, the recent ISIS terrorist strike in Paris — a result of lax security and failure to monitor borders — even at the eleventh hour should wake up the French to the existential danger they face.
America’s wars of the 20th century seem to confirm that ancient wisdom. A complacent, naïve, and isolationist United States came late to both world wars. Nonetheless, once engaged, the United States almost immediately amassed huge armies ex nihilo and produced unprecedented quantities of arms to ensure Allied victories in both conflicts. No other power fought in so many theaters of battle to such effect and with such consideration for reducing its own casualties.
The pattern of the ensuing Cold War was hauntingly similar: initial Western-democratic naïveté about the vicious nature of the erstwhile wartime ally the Soviet Union, precipitate post-war disarmament — and finally, during the Korean War, an abrupt remaking of the American military, characterized by the development of a sophisticated deterrent strategy that kept the global, Communist Soviet Empire contained until its collapse in 1989.
Ostensibly, that same pattern of initial blinkered indifference and lack of attention ended by sudden reawakening and panicked mobilization marked the American response to radical Islam. The fall of the shah of Iran, the subsequent Khomeini revolution, and the appeasement embraced by the Carter administration between 1979 and 1980 — all in the depressed landscape of the post-Vietnam era — illustrated how the United States was initially baffled by and indifferent to the rise of radical Islam.
At first the U.S. assumed that radical Islam was primarily an aberrant Iranian and Shiite phenomenon uncharacteristic of our Sunni and Wahhabist friends in the Gulf. Some Cold War–era analysts of the time believed that the Iranians were analogous to Marxist-inspired Palestinian terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s, even though the latter were secular and were funded and often trained by Moscow and its appendages. Later, leftists sought to cite proof of American culpability — colonialism, neo-imperialism, racism, capitalist exploitations, etc. — that might in some fashion contextualize the seemingly illogical anger of the Muslim world toward the United States.
In the 20-year interval between the Tehran hostage-taking and the cataclysmic September 11 suicide attacks, radical Islamists, of both the Shiite and Sunni varieties, declared a veritable war against the West in general and in particular the United States — most notably with the Beirut Marine-barracks/U.S.-embassy bombing (1983), the first World Trade Center bombing (1993), the Khobar Towers bombing (1996), the East Africa embassy bombings (1998), and the attack on the USS Cole (2000). But in these two decades before 9/11, radical Islamists, especially those of al-Qaeda organized by Osama bin Laden, were never directly confronted by the United States in any lethal way. Islamists were explained away as either an irritant incapable of inflicting existential damage given their lack of a nation-state arsenal or a passing phenomenon in the manner of former Middle East terrorists of the sort led by Abu Nidal against Western and especially Israeli interests.
There were grounds to be baffled at first, perhaps in the fashion of bewilderment at Hitler’s fanaticism in 1936 or Stalin’s betrayal of his wartime Western allies in 1946. After all, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Islamic Middle East had been enamored of secular fascism inspired by Nazi Germany. Subsequent Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Soviet-inspired Communism, and Palestinian nationalism were likewise mostly secular in nature. And these ideologies similarly proved transient manifestations of the Middle East constant of tribalism, poverty, statism, authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and religious and cultural intolerance.
Why, then, at the end of the 20th century, had terrorist movements reverted back to seventh-century fundamentalism? Why was it that the wealthier the petroleum-rich Middle East became, the more globalized — and Western-oriented — communications, entertainment, and popular culture grew, the more knowledge that the Islamic world gained of relative global wealth and poverty, and the more the post–Cold War United States proved postmodern in its attitude about the causes and origins of war, all the more did radical Islamists despise the West? Islamists apparently were confident either that Western economic and military power was a poor deterrent against their own supposedly ancient martial courage or that such material and technological power would never fully be unleashed by confused elites uncertain about their own degree of culpability for the mess they found themselves in.
In any case, deterrence was lost. A 20-year path of appeasement of radical Islam inexorably led to 9/11. Then, as with past aroused democracies, 2001 seemingly changed everything, as the West seemed to gear up to restore its security and strategy of deterrence. Almost every aspect of American life was soon altered by just a handful of Islamist planners in Afghanistan and their suicide henchmen in hijacked planes, even as economic recession followed the 9/11 attacks. Intrusive new security standards changed forever the way we boarded airline flights, took the train, and visited public buildings. The Patriot Act accorded intrusive powers of surveillance to government agencies to monitor communications that fit particular criteria learned from prior terrorist attacks.
These Patriot Act measures and their affiliated protocols played a key role in ensuring that in the subsequent 14 years there was no attack on the United States analogous to 9/11, despite horrific but isolated killings such as the Fort Hood massacre and the Boston Marathon bombing. A cultural war erupted over the causes of Islamic violence, with both Republican and Democratic administrations seeking some magical formula that might reassure the world’s billion Muslims, in and outside the West, that the United States did not see any innate connection between Islam and Islamist terrorism. Such a profession was supposed to remind the Islamic world to police its own, on the assumption that there were no logical grounds for any Muslims to hate the U.S. The age-old antithesis — that the West did not much care what the non-West thought of it as long as it understood preemptory attacks against the West were synonymous with the aggressors’ own destruction — was apparently unpalatable to a sophisticated and leisured public that even after 9/11 did not see the Islamic threat as intruding into the life of their suburb or co-op.
How, then, is the supposed war on Islamic-inspired terror currently proceeding, especially in comparison with past U.S. efforts in World Wars I and II and the Cold War? At first glance, it appears the realists were correct that Islamism is hardly an enemy comparable to the Nazis or Soviets. First, other than the case of Iran after 1980, the terrorists still have not openly and proudly assumed the reins of a large nation-state with a formidable arsenal. Second, for all the talk of the spread of WMD, they have not staged a major nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. Third, fracking and horizontal drilling inside the United States, along with petroleum price wars among Middle Eastern exporters, crashed the price of oil, robbing terrorists of petrodollars and aiding Western economies.
That price drop — coupled with a supposed Western exhaustion with war after the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq — has fooled Westerners into thinking the Middle East is now less strategically important than it has been in the past, as if most of the world were becoming as self-sufficient in oil and gas as is the United States. Are the realists correct in reminding us that we still do not face from radical Islamic terrorists an existential threat analogous to those of the 20th century during World War II and the Cold War?
In the decade and a half after September 11, the Islamists have influenced Americans far more than we them — well aside from inflicting a level of destruction inside the United States, in New York and Washington, that neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia was ever able to achieve. Everyday life has been radically altered, from using public transportation to entering a government building for minor business. Westerners are losing the propaganda war: While al-Qaeda and ISIS have matched their blood-curdling rhetoric with equally savage snuff videos, we have been emasculated by euphemisms. “Death to America” is matched by “workplace violence,” “man-caused disasters,” and “overseas-contingency operations.” Jihad is redefined by American-government officials as a personal spiritual odyssey and the Muslim Brotherhood as a largely secular organization. After the Danish-cartoon attacks and the Charlie Hebdo killings, fearful Westerners are voluntarily self-censoring in a manner that Islamists themselves do not have to enforce by direct coercion.
President Obama is not so much complacent as an appeaser of radical Islam — an identification he refuses to employ. Yet the president condemns Christianity by reminding us at prayer breakfasts of its violent Crusader roots, or he lists false glories of the Muslim world, as in his Cairo speech. Obama’s rhetoric of the last seven years has been predicated on the false assumption that his own supposed multicultural fides and his father’s Islamic connections would make him the perfect Western emissary to defuse radical Islam. This has not come to pass, as we see from the recent Paris mass murders. Never has the Middle East been more unhinged and never has the U.S. been more disliked by it. Westerners are as likely to join ISIS as reformed terrorists are to enlist in the fight against the jihadists in their midst.
In other words, the Islamist threat is so far unquenchable because it has the West’s number: Radical Islam understands that the more pre-modern it becomes, the more postmodern is the likely Western response — a situation analogous to a deadly parasite that does not quickly kill but slowly sickens a host that in turn scratches at, but does not kill, the stealthy tormenter. Obama has described ISIS as a “JV” organization and al-Qaeda as “on the run.” On the eve of the Paris attacks, he deprecated ISIS as “contained,” while Secretary of State John Kerry warned that its “days are numbered.” A supposedly right-wing video maker, not a pre-planned al-Qaeda assault, explained our dead in Benghazi. Such euphemism is not just symptomatic of political correctness and an arrogant assumption that postmodern Westerners have transcended the Neanderthalism of war, but also rooted in a 1930s-like fear of expending some blood and treasure now to avoid expending far more later.
The first decade and a half of the current phase of the Islamic war were characterized by insidious alterations in Western life to accommodate low-level but nonetheless habitual terrorist attacks. As long as the Islamists did not take down another Western skyscraper, blow up a corner of the Pentagon, or kill thousands in one operation, Westerners were willing to put up with inconvenience and spend trillions of dollars in blood and treasure on anti-terrorism measures at home and the killing abroad of thousands of Islamists from Kabul to Baghdad.
But conflicts that do not end always transmogrify, and the war on terror of 2015 is not that of 2001, much less that of 1979.
Time for now is on the Islamists’ side. Not if but when Iran will acquire nuclear weapons is the question. Not if but when ISIS strikes a major American city is what’s in doubt. As America abdicates from its role in the Middle East, Vladimir Putin creates an Iran–Syria–Hezbollah arc of influence, reassuring the terrified Sunni Gulf states that he is a far better friend — and could be a far worse enemy — than the United States.
More important, Russia, Iraq, and Iran — and the Gulf monarchies — could act in concert under the aegis of Putin and thereby control 75 percent of the world’s daily exports of oil. It is also conceivable that ISIS could fulfill something akin to its supposedly JV notion of creating a caliphate, given that it has already carved out a rump state from Syria and Iraq. A nuclear Iran could play the berserker role with Russia of a crazy nuclear North Korea cuddling up to China. Meanwhile, our new relationship with Iran makes it hard to partner with moderate Sunni states against ISIS, given that the Iranians enjoy the bloodsport that ISIS plays among both Westerners and Sunni regimes.
In short, on four broad fronts — the emergence of terrorist nation-states, the acquisition of nuclear weapons, the global reach of terrorists, and the ability to alter global economic contours — the Islamists are making more progress than at any time in the last 35 years.
Was Thucydides, whose notions of democracy were echoed from Aristotle to Winston Churchill, correct that democracies in the eleventh hour galvanize to meet existential threats?
So far, not this time. During the Obama administration, radical Islam finally has grasped that the way to destroy Western societies is to employ Western political correctness against them, leading eventually to their paralysis — as long as the war is waged carefully, insidiously, and over decades. In their various rantings, Osama bin Laden and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri referenced the Western failure both to enact campaign-finance reform and to address global warming — topics not usually associated with the agendas of radical Islam. While ISIS mowed down Parisians, Al Gore was on the top of the Eiffel Tower doing a marathon webcast about the existential danger of climate change and prepping for a Parisian global conference that will now take place amid the detritus of a recent mass terrorist attack — all echoing President Obama’s assertion that the greatest danger to our security is carbon, not radical Islamic terrorism.
The war will be lost when listless and weak Westerners no longer realize that they are in a war but have largely become exactly what their enemies had envisioned them to be all along.
The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen “randomly.” Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.
Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam — whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics — the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.
Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.
This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today’s Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe.
Who does not love Paris? Puritans do not love Paris. Puritans hate, music, song, dance, poetry, fun and love. Today, such people are represented above all by extremist Muslim doctrinaire fundamentalists. They seem to despise women without veils; call music Satanic; regard painted images as an insult to an angry God; consider football a sin, and a restaurant serving wine as the embodiment of evil. They do not respond to a life-affirming bustle and the ideals an open, tolerant, democratic, liberal, humanitarian, egalitarian West.
When Sir Karl Popper wrote, at the end of the Second World War in 1945, his two-volume classic, The Open Society and its Enemies, he laid bare the evils of totalitarian systems, both left and right — Communism and Fascism. He would never have guessed that soon a Third World War would be taking place between radical Islam and the West.
Last week, the City of Light went dark. In January of this year, some Islamist gunmen had attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and another had gunned down shoppers in a kosher supermarket. U.S. President Barack Obama, in an interview with Matt Yglesias, commenting on the supermarket attack, glossed over the motives behind it: “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” [Emphasis added]
Two days after last week’s attacks, when reporters asked Obama if he would consider additional action against The Islamic State (IS), he declined to give a straight answer. The killings, he said, were “based on a twisted ideology.” As so many times before, Obama would not define what ideology — the belief system of radical Islam, based on violent passages from the Qur’an and Hadith, and modelled on the jihadist actions of generations of Muslims, beginning with Muhammad himself.
This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today’s Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe. At least one of last Friday’s killers in Paris appears to have travelled from Syria and entered Europe through Greece.
The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen “randomly.” Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.
Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.
Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam — whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics — the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.
The kosher supermarket attack was clearly anti-Semitic. Like the multitude of such attacks on Jewish schools, museums, synagogues, and individuals, it celebrated the rise of a new anti-Semitism in Europe, an anti-Semitism (often expressed through anti-Zionism) that has been carried out by the political left, hand-in-hand with Muslim radical groups.
Jews on European streets are the one people most intensely hated by many Muslims (again, not just radicals). The freedom French Jews have for a long time enjoyed (despite high levels of indigenous anti-Semitism) is an affront to Islam, in which Jews especially must be converted, rendered submissive, or killed. Unfortunately, many Europeans have gone out of their way to be helpful. Just the day before the Paris attacks, the EU had singled out Israel, as usual, to label goods to help anti-Semitic, racist Europeans hurt Palestinians and Israelis with an unjust, sanctimonious boycott.
A leader of a British Islamic educational institute writes that, “One should abstain from evil audacities such as listening to music.” Another graduate speaks of the “evils of music;” calls London’s Royal College of Music “satanic,” and claims that music is the way in which Jews spread “the Satanic web” to corrupt young Muslims. Is it, then, surprising that a handful of fanatics gunned down more than 80 innocent young people who had gone to enjoy a rock concert in the Bataclan Theatre?
As sports (apart from archery and horseback riding) are also activities much disliked by fundamentalist imams, three jihadis, in an apparent rebuke to such games and frivolity, went to a football stadium in Paris last Friday night and, although they could not get in, they blew themselves up outside it.[1]
The Nazis hated jazz and modern art (even as they stole it), but not even they rejected all music and all art. Hitler luxuriated in the operas of Wagner and fancied himself no mean painter, even if the art world may not have agreed with him. But today’s fascists care for nothing but their own increasingly expansionist beliefs.
As Hamas members have said more than once to Israelis, with whom the Europeans have more in common now than they would like to admit, the extremist Muslims will conquer in the end because “we love death more than you love life.” Nothing could better sum up the bitter reality of the Paris attacks.
In a television interview on BBC News at Ten on Sunday night, a singer, Maude Hacheb, expressed her response to the killings: “If they want to break the country, they have to break young people. I think for them, music is no good, fun is no good, love is no good. So I guess it was really significant they go to the Bataclan.”
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[1] Cricket has been condemned by a Pakistani imam as a sacrilegious “waste of time,” playing chess has been compared to dipping one’s hands in the blood of pigs, and ultra-conservative Muslim clerics have condemned football as a Jewish and Christian tool to undermine Islamic culture. Saudi Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Barrak has warned in a fatwa that football “played according to [accepted international rules] has caused Muslims to adopt some of the customs of the enemies of Islam, who are [preoccupied with] games and frivolity.”
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