Posted tagged ‘Islamic culture’

Geert Wilders on New Year’s Eve Sexual Assaults in Cologne Germany by Arab and North African men

January 6, 2016

Geert Wilders on New Year’s Eve Sexual Assaults in Cologne Germany by Arab and North African men, New English Review, January 6, 2016

Protest Sign in Cologne Germany APProtest Signs in Cologne Germany on New Year’s Eve Sexual Assaults Source: AP

Reports of sexual assaults and robberies of women gathered for celebrations in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve have created a firestorm of concern in Germany, but also in neighboring Holland.  Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party (PVV) raised questions in the Hague Parliament of the ruling coalition cabinet members on January 5th.  Today, Wilders sent a letter to Prime Minister Rutte leader of the VVD party ruling coalition requesting preventive actions to foil such possible attacks by migrants and refugees in Dutch reception centers and communities.

Reports of 90 incidents by women victims in Cologne of such sexual attacks and robberies indicated that the perpetrators were “Arabic or North Africa looking” males.  It heightened concerns in this most culturally and ethnically diverse German city and among opposition political leaders who have questioned the wisdom of allowing in more than 1 million predominately Muslim  migrants and refugees from  the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. That prompted  Chancellor Merkel ,who has welcomed the mass immigration wave of Muslims, as a means of dealing with Germany’s acute labor shortage to have the ruling CD government Justice Minister  investigate these  charges and determine if any arrests can be made by local law enforcement. However, reports of riots at reception centers by migrants and refugees have aroused protests in a number of German communities.

CNN updated these developments  arising from the Cologne New Year’s  Eve sexual attacks , “Reports of New Year’s Eve sex assaults in Cologne fuel German migrant debate:”

A spate of alleged sexual assaults and robberies at New Year’s Eve festivities in the German city of Cologne has fueled a political firestorm over immigration in Germany.

Ninety criminal incidents, a quarter of which were sexual assaults, were reported following New Year’s Eve celebrations in the city, Cologne police told CNN.

Police said victims described the perpetrators as gangs of Arab or North African men. Many of the assaults were likely intended to distract, allowing attackers to steal mobile phones and other devices, police said.

Authorities said the crimes, including a rape, occurred around the train station, next to the western German city’s landmark cathedral.

Video footage of the celebrations in the area show riotous scenes, with revelers shooting fireworks into crowds.

In a phone call with Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed outrage over the attacks, labeling them “disgusting” and calling for the culprits to be identified and punished as soon as possible, CNN affiliate ARD reported.

Cologne police Chief Wolfgang Albers said at a press conference Monday that the incidents were “intolerable,” describing them as “crimes of a totally new dimension.”

The episode raised questions about the viability of Cologne’s famous Carnival next month when hundreds of thousands are expected to join celebrations on city streets, he said.

A smaller number of similar assaults also were reported in the German city of Hamburg on New Year’s Eve, Hamburg police told CNN.

The women involved in the Cologne sexual attacks gave evidence of what occurred:

One of the Cologne victims said she was too scared to go out alone following the ordeal.

“The men surrounded us and started to grab our behinds and touch our crotches,” she said.

“They touched us everywhere. I wanted to take my friend and leave. I turned around and in that moment someone grabbed my bag.”

She said she feared she could be killed or raped by the attackers.

“Nobody noticed and nobody helped us. I just wanted to get out.”

Another victim said she had unsuccessfully tried to fight off her assailant.

“But there were so many people around me that there was no control. There was no way out. There was no way to protect yourself,” she said.

“We ran to the police. But we saw the police were so understaffed. They couldn’t take care of us and we as women suffered the price.”

Watch this UK Telegraph video of protests in Cologne against these sexual attacks and robberies of young women allegedly by Arab/North African young men:

(Video at the link — DM)

download (1)

 

Geert Wilders in Hague Parliament

In view of these attacks by  Arab attackers in several German cities lead by Cologne,  Geert Wilders and fellow PVV MP Sietse Fritsma,  presented the  Dutch Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Security and Justice in the Hague parliament on January 5, 2016 the following questions:

1.) Are you aware of reports that on New Year’s Eve groups of mostly Arab men assaulted, robbed and raped dozens of young women in several German cities?

2.) Are you also aware also of the statements by female victims who said “They surrounded us and began to grope us? Their hands were everywhere. I had fingers in every bodily orifice”?

3.) Do you agree with Wolfgang Albers, the Cologne Police Chief that we are dealing here with “a whole new dimension of violence”? If not, why not?

4.)Do you agree with us that this new dimension of violence is the result of the import of migrants with a violent, Islamic culture that often regards women and young girls as inferior? If not, why not?

5.)Are you still of the opinion that the word testosterone bomb is a terrible word, as you told the first signatory of these questions during the parliamentary debate on September 17th last year, or do you now finally realize that allowing tens of thousands of Arab men in Netherlands jeopardizes the safety of our citizens?

6.)Do you remember the parliamentary debate on asylum seekers of October 14th, 2015, during which the first signatory of these questions read several reports of women who had been harassed by asylum seekers in the Netherlands? If so, why do you continue to endanger Dutch women by allowing the massive admission of asylum seekers?

7.) Do you realize that, if you continue to leave our borders wide open, it is only a matter of time before mass robberies and assaults such as those in Germany, will also happen on the same large scale in the Netherlands? Do you want to have this on your conscience or are you finally ready to close the Dutch borders to Islamic testosterone bombs?

In a Dutch newspaper, The Post, on-line article by Wilders, “Cologne Assaults May Soon Happen on Large Scale in Netherlands Too,” he wrote:

If we continue to allow asylum-seekers and immigrants from Islamic countries to settle in our country en masse, then what has happened on New Year’s Eve in Germany will soon happen on the same large scale in the Netherlands, too. The first signs are already there.

During the parliamentary debate on October 14, 2015, I quoted from emails of ordinary Dutch citizens suffering from the behavior of asylum seekers and immigrants. These mails referred to young girls being “immorally touched”, daughters being “harassed,” women who are told “I want to f___k you.”

The events in Cologne are the signs of a future which lies before us if the government and the majority of the parliamentarians refuse to face the truth.

Cologne is nearby. Our wives and daughters must be protected. The government needs to wake up. Mark Rutte must do his duty. Our borders must be closed. We must de-Islamize the Netherlands.

Today, Wilders issued a follow up letter to Dutch PM Rutte saying:

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

Yesterday and today, I received hundreds of emails. Hundreds of emails full of fear and indignation. About the horrific events on New Year’s Eve in Cologne.

I have not heard you about those events. I find that very strange. After Paris last November, we now have Cologne. After the Islamic terror, the sexual jihad. But we do not hear you. Hello, Mr. Prime Minister? Are you still there?

What happened in Cologne is repulsive. Fear reigns in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. Don’t you notice it? Thousands of Dutch women worry about their safety. Thousands of Dutch men fear for the safety of their wives. And thousands of Dutch parents are afraid of what might happen to their daughters.

All these people realize that it will not be long before large group attacks on women will also take place in the Netherlands. Testosterone bombs I have called them, but it is far worse. This is sexual terrorism, this is sexual jihad.

On a smaller scale, it is already happening in the Netherlands today. Ever more women are being harassed. Yesterday, the media reported about a girl in the province of Zeeland which had been assaulted by an Arab man. For years already, there is a plague of assault rapes by non-Western men in Sweden and Norway. It is coming our way.

You do not like to hear this, Mr. Rutte. And that is undoubtedly the reason why you are so quiet now. But you are responsible for this situation. Because, despite all the warnings, you have opened our country’s borders to tens of thousands of people – mostly young men – from an Islamic culture.

I hope that your eyes will finally open and that you will close our borders at once and start to de-Islamize the Netherlands. So that our country may once again be the safe country the Dutch people are entitled to.

Geert Wilders

Geert Wilders MP is leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands

The plague of sexual assaults, robberies  and rapes  of young women by  Muslim migrant young men in Sweden has made it what some allege has become  the rape capital of Europe. Then we have the sexual grooming practices of young British girls by South Asia Muslim émigrés in the UK. With a million Muslim refugees and migrants who broke the borderless Schengen system, they are seeking more than sanctuary and possible economic employment, opportunities.  Rather it may result in establishing virtual no go areas emboldened by sexual terrorism ruled under Sharia Islamic law condoned by EU countries under the guise of myopic politically correct multi-culturalism policies. What they do not comprehend to their undoing is that the great wave of Muslim immigration is a furtherance of the Dar al Hijrah immigration strategy to spread Islamization to Europe and the West.  That is what concerns Wilders and others in the broken borders of the EU with thousands of refugees arriving daily from conflicts in the Muslim Ummah exemplified by the Jihad of the self-declared Caliphate, the Islamic State.

 

Islam in our schools

January 6, 2016

Islam in our schools, American ThinkerCarol Brown, January 6, 2016

Creeping sharia infiltrates every nook and cranny of America. Including our classrooms. Among other things, the Muslim Brotherhood (as well as the Saudis) wields enormous influence over curriculum that threatens not only public schools, but private and parochial schools as well.

After reporting on Islamic supremacy in our schools a year ago, I thought it worthwhile to see how things have progressed since then, for better or for worse. (Guess which it is.) When last we left off, here’s where things stood. In most cases, information only came to light because parents stumbled upon homework assignments or their child told them something of concern.

Students learned to recite allegiance to Allah along with Muslim prayers and chants. Students were also taught the Five Pillars of Islam, that Muslims pray to the same God as Christians and Jews, that Mohammed was a man with strong moral values, that terrorists are “freedom fighters,” that Muslims treat those they conquer better than America does, along with the taqiyya version of CAIR’s mission. Sharia law was promoted, Qurans were introduced into classrooms, students studied Arabic, female students wore burqas as part of a lesson on Islam, and special courses on Islam prohibited students from wearing a cross or saying the name “Jesus.”

Homework assignments required students to promote the “Golden Age of Islam” while students also had to write about what it would be like to travel to Mecca. All the while, Muslim students were given special privileges that Christian and Jewish students were not afforded, including time off during the day to pray.

Textbooks whitewashed Islam while diminishing Christians and Jews, videos framed non-Muslims as bigots and validated enforcement of blasphemy laws, a Muslim author gave a lecture that stretched over four days about her Islamic-themed book, and field trips to mosques (including the one the Tsarnaev brothers attended) involved non-Muslim students praying to Allah, with non-Muslim boys joined adult Muslims in prayer while girls were told Islam is pro-woman.

Teachers who spoke out were punished. An elementary school teacher was forced to resign after making critical comments about Islam on a talk radio program, CAIR attempted to smear another teacher by accusing her of being a “racist” after she drew an analogy between the Taliban and Hamas during a lesson on bullying, and Christian teachers were harassed by Muslims in the school hierarchy.

(See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

So where do things stand today? Sadly, we have more of the same. Much more of it, as Islamic supremacy continues to gain ground in our schools. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

A workbook for a three-week course on Islam told students that for the duration of the course they will “become Muslim” by selecting Muslim names and wearing them on ID tags around their necks, dressing up as Muslims and acting the part in order to receive a good grade, being told jihad is a struggle against oppression, playing a dice game called Jihad that pits one group of students against another, reading the opening chapter of the Quran and analyzing various other verses, and memorizing the Shahada (the prayer for conversion to Islam).

Students across various school districts were told that Islam had nothing to do with the 9/11 terror attacks, were taught an Islamic fight song that implied that Allah is the only God, completed a project that involved making pro-ISIS propaganda posters, and a Palestinian activist gave a presentation to third graders that urged them to become “freedom fighters for Palestine.”

Homework assignments included analyzing statements by bin Laden, material from an ISIS blog featuring a female recruiter, and statements from Obama’s Cairo speech that demonized the West and framed Muslims as victims. Students also had to write the Shahada (including the oath “There is no God by Allah”) and sing “Allahu Akbar” in an Arabic song. And a Muslim cleric who was a public school teacher peddled sharia and routinely left school early to conduct prayer services at his mosque. (He’s since been fired.)

Meanwhile Muslims continued to press for special accommodations, such as school closures for Muslim holidays. Mind you, federal law allows students of minority religions to take off from school on their religious holidays without any penalty. But this is not good enough for many Muslims who offer all manner of rationales for why they need more. Some cite relatively high (emphasis on relatively) percentages of Muslims who live in certain districts. But even when their numbers are scant the same pressure is applied, as in Baltimore where no tests are scheduled on Muslim holidays, despite the fact that Muslim students comprise a mere two-to-three percent of the student body.

In one case, a Muslim community leader argued that Muslim students don’t want to miss class even if the absence is excused because it would place an undue burden on them to catch up for the day they missed. So he wants school policy to prohibit tests on Muslim holidays and the day after so Muslim students won’t have any pressure to study during their observance. He admits the ultimate goal is for the school district to close schools completely on those days because: “We want our sons and daughters to feel as American as anyone else and to be on equal footing as everyone else.” (Nice try. How about Muslim students cope just like Jewish students and Hindu students and students from other religious minorities who have been faring just fine? Deal with it!)

Another example of we-are-a-tiny-minority-but-you-owe-us rationale can be found in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where Muslims comprise less than two percent of the population. No matter. Sporting events are banned the night prior to Muslim holidays and no tests are administered on the holidays themselves.

Then there’s this rationale offered up in Burlington, Vermont, where it is being recommended that schools close for Muslim holidays because most Muslim students are recently arrived refugees who don’t speak much English and missing school will have a negative effect on their learning. But as often happens in these cases a domino effect kicks in, and now the small Hindu community in Burlington wants school closures on their holidays. However no accommodations will be made for Hindus.

Here’s another scenario. In Irvington, N.J., where the superintendent had no idea how many Muslim students were in the school system, schools are closed on Muslim holidays based on “inclusion” rather than necessity. Riiiiiiiiight. And what “necessity” could one ever argue in any of these cases?

But who needs “necessity” when you can stand on the soap box of “rights,” as Kaity Assaf, a Muslim teenager in New Jersey did when she claimed it comes to down having the “right” to have the two most important Muslim holidays acknowledged publicly by closing all schools in her district.

Then there are those who claim victimhood and make loud demands, as happened a couple of months ago in Jersey City, NJ, when the school board made a “difficult and gut-wrenching” decision and refused to close schools for Muslim holidays after Muslims in the community requested this accommodation on six days notice. One Muslim in attendance screamed, “My child should be able to celebrate the holiday!” (as if anyone was stopping that from happening) while another stated “We feel alienated!” (what’s new?). Still another stepped up to the microphone and smirked: “We’re no longer the minority. That’s clear from tonight. We’re going to be the majority soon.”

Arrogance, demands, victimhood, threats, and above all, being above all.

Hat tips: Fox News, Counterjihad Report, Breitbart, Jihad Watch, The Clarion Project, Atlas Shrugs, The Right Scoop, Legal Insurrection, Front Page Magazine

 

Industrial Scale Sexual Assault in Germany

January 6, 2016

Industrial Scale Sexual Assault in Germany, Power LineJohn Hinderaker, January 5, 2016

(“Nothing to do with Islam.” I think I may have heard that song before. — DM)

Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister, warned on Tuesday against linking the assaults to the influx of refugees, saying that the ethnicity of the perpetrators was irrelevant.

**********************

From the New York Times:

German authorities said on Tuesday that coordinated attacks in which young women were sexually harassed and robbed by hundreds of young men on New Year’s Eve in the western city of Cologne were unprecedented in scale and nature.

The assault, which went largely unreported for days….

In Germany, as in the U.S., the liberal media consider themselves gatekeepers whose primary role is to suppress stories that might cause people to draw the wrong conclusions.

…set off a national outcry after the Cologne police described the attackers as young men “who appeared to have a North African or Arabic” background, based on testimony from victims and witnesses. More than 90 people have filed legal complaints, the police said on Tuesday.

The police in Hamburg also said that 10 women had reported being sexually assaulted and robbed in a similar fashion on the same night, and they urged witnesses to come forward.

The attackers were killing two birds with one stone:

The Cologne police say they believe several hundred men, ages 15 to 35, were involved in the violence that began in the early hours of the New Year….

The men appeared to have broken into smaller groups, the police said, with each one encircling a woman; while some would grope the victim, others would steal her wallet or cellphone.

One victim reported that she had been raped, the police said.

The mass assaults are being chalked up to a cultural misunderstanding:

Germany took in more than one million migrants last year, and with the country struggling to deal with the political, social and wider consequences of the influx, the delayed public response has led to concerns that the authorities were playing down the seriousness of the assault to prevent it from becoming a point of contention in the broader debate.

In an effort to prevent further violence, Ms. Reker said that city officials would begin working on measures to help young women protect themselves and toexplain the city’s attitudes and norms to its many newcomers.

“We will explain our Carnival much better to people who come from other cultures,” she said, “so there won’t be any confusion about what constitutes celebratory behavior in Cologne, which has nothing to do with a sexual frankness.”

Apparently a considerable number of “newcomers” need to be told that sexual assault and robbery are frowned upon in Germany. This does not bode well.

The euphoria that accompanied the first wave of arrivals in Germany this summer has since given way to growing unease about the difficulty of integrating hundreds of thousands of people of a different religion and who were raised in a different culture.

Who could have seen that coming? The BBC has more, including this:

A policeman who was outside Cologne station during the New Year’s Eve trouble told the city’s Express news website that he had detained eight suspects. “They were all asylum seekers, carrying copies of their residence certificates,” he said.

Despite news stories like this one, public officials persist in their cluelessness:

Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister, warned on Tuesday against linking the assaults to the influx of refugees, saying that the ethnicity of the perpetrators was irrelevant.

“The rule of the law does not look at where someone comes from but what they did,” Mr. Maas told reporters in Berlin.

Of course. But immigration law does “look at where someone comes from.” The influx of one million immigrants is a political choice, not a natural event.

The real danger

January 5, 2016

The real danger, Israel Hayom, Dr. Ephraim Herrera, January 5, 2016

(Please see also, CAIR’s Lawyer Claims Pro-Israel Charities are Terrorists. CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate. — DM)

British Prime Minister David Cameron recently wrote that “aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and activities … run counter to British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, equality and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.”

He described the movement as fertile ground for growing violence and, based on research he commissioned, determined that membership in the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered a possible indicator of extremism.

Among the assertions raised by Cameron, his staunch opposition to Muslim Brotherhood members who support Palestinian sister group Hamas sticks out. This is a very important point that stands to benefit Israel: A Western leader views support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s violence against Israel as evidence of the group’s extremism.

The research upon which Cameron based his statements mentions the goal of some of the movement’s members to turn Britain into an Islamic state. But it does not manage to prove that this is an official goal of the group as a whole. Really? As early as 2007, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi declared: “The conquest of Rome — the conquest of Italy, and Europe — means that Islam will return to Europe once again. Must this conquest necessarily be through war? No. There is such a thing as peaceful conquest [through proselytizing].”

In an interview with a Norwegian journalist in 2011, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt until 2010, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, said, “The Muslim Brotherhood’s dream is to form a total Islamic state.” Pressed for more details on this goal, he responded, “We Muslims are currently scattered all over. There is still a long way to go before we are able to take control in Europe.”

Ahmed Jaballah, head of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, which has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and is also recognized by local authorities, has said that the union “is a two-stage rocket. The first stage is democratic; the second will put an Islamic society into orbit.”

The hidden danger for Europe is less the terrorist attacks, which do not significantly alter the foundations of a society, and more this Muslim Brotherhood plan — which, for now, does not include violence or explicit threats. This plan for the occupation of Europe will succeed via the fertility rate among Muslim women, which is much higher than that of European women; through record-breaking immigration; and through calls to join Islam.

In addition to this, there is the orthodox Islamic education of the young generation, which is more religious than previous ones and is, for the most part, unwilling to accept the values of its host societies. There is also the issue of Islamic law creeping into society’s daily life: Popular French fast-food chain Quick has recently decided to serve only halal meat at all its locations.

In both Israel and Europe, the only way to stop the vision of Islamic political takeover of the world from coming to be is to address the root of the problem and to outlaw Muslim education that preaches Islamic conquest — not just that which preaches Islamic violence.

Islamic Reformation and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

January 2, 2016

Islamic Reformation and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dan Miller’s Blog, January 2, 2016

(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

In Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes her execrable life as a devout Muslim girl in Somalia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia. She explains why she became an Infidel after experiencing freedom in the Netherlands. In Heretic, she seeks a reformation of Islam, with a focus on women’s rights but including tolerance and freedom of thought and speech for all. That will not happen soon, even though there are other current and former Muslims who want it and others who claim to want it. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

From the first page of Heretic:

On ______, a group of ______ heavily armed, black-clad men burst into a ______ in ______, opening fire and killing a total of ______ people. The attackers were filmed shouting “Allahu akbar!”

Speaking at a press conference, President ______ said: “We condemn this criminal act by extremists. Their attempt to justify their violent acts in the name of a religion of peace will not, however, succeed. We also condemn with equal force those who would use this atrocity as a pretext for Islamophobic hate crimes.”

. . . .

Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms: Islam is not a religion of peace. For expressing the idea that Islamic violence is rooted not in social, economic, or political conditions— or even in theological error— but rather in the foundational texts of Islam itself, I have been denounced as a bigot and an “Islamophobe.” I have been silenced, shunned, and shamed. In effect, I have been deemed to be a heretic, not just by Muslims— for whom I am already an apostate— but by some Western liberals as well, whose multicultural sensibilities are offended by such “insensitive” pronouncements. [Emphasis added.]

_______________________

Heretic explores differences between political Islam and Islam as a religion. Hirsi Ali tells of some horrors of Islam as currently practiced in Islamic states, officially pursuant to Sharia law but also unofficially and with little or no intervention by those states to prevent or ameliorate it. Here is an example of the latter type of political Islam:

Political Islam is rooted in and, I think, inseparable from, religious Islam as commanded by the Qu’ran, the Hadith and Sharia law. An article titled The Lure of Fantasy Islam disparages hopeful reformers such as Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a self-described “devout Muslim,” as promoting “fantasy Islam” by obscuring the nature of Islam as it has developed over the centuries and as it now is.

Dr. Jasser advocates the separation of mosque and state. He

is the Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and is the author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith (Simon & Schuster, June 2012). On March 20, 2012, Dr. Jasser was appointed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) where he currently serves as a Commissioner.

That’s very good; but how can a “devout Muslim” call for the separation of mosque and state? He also appears to pretend that Islam today is something it is not: a peaceful, tolerant religion. Obama and organizations He supports do the same. He and they do not seek Islamic reformation but instead oppose it. Obama apparently believes that Islam is fine as it is. He is not stupid and must know what Islam is now and has long been.

Hirsi Ali does not pretend that today’s Islam is what it is not: she recognizes today’s Islam as a violent, intolerant and otherwise evil religion that seeks civilizational domination. She is the executive producer of, and appeared in, this Clarion Project Honor Diaries Video as well as others:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbTATkLntBU

For producing the Honor Diaries videos, Hirsi Ali is deemed an “Islamophobe.” Although the suffix “phobia” in “Islamophobia” still invokes the notion of irrationality, that seems to have disappeared in current usage. Now, Islamophobia “(or anti-Muslim sentiment) is the prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of the religion of Islam or Muslims” — regardless of the rationality of such prejudice, hatred or fear.

Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Azeezah Kanji — the featured speaker in the above video — has been very active in disparaging 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEpMfYDUahA

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the CAIR, condemned Ayaan Hirsi Ali as “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide.”

Please see also my article titled Islam: Hate, Honor, Women’s Rights and Congress. Obama’s “Champion for Change” would most likely agree with the proponents of House Resolution 569 that “Islamophobia” is a hate crime.

What can we do to promote an Islamic reformation?

To a great extent, it’s up to the Muslims. However, Hirsi Ali suggests the following in Heretic:

There is probably no realistic chance that Muslims in countries such as Pakistan will agree to dispense with sharia. However, we in the West must insist that Muslims living in our societies abide by our rule of law. We must demand that Muslim citizens abjure sharia practices and punishments that conflict with fundamental human rights and Western legal codes. Moreover, under no circumstances should Western countries allow Muslims to form self-governing enclaves in which women and other supposedly second-class citizens can be treated in ways that belong in the seventh century. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

It is no longer plausible to argue that organizations such as Boko Haram— or, for that matter, Islamic State— have nothing to do with Islam. It is no longer credible to define “extremism” as some disembodied threat, meting out death without any ideological foundation, a problem to be dealt with by purely military methods, preferably drone strikes. We need to tackle the root problem of the violence that is plaguing our world today, and that must be the doctrine of Islam itself. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

[The]  phenomenon of Christophobia (as opposed to the far more widely discussed “Islamophobia”) receives remarkably little coverage in the Western media. Part of this reticence may be due to fear of provoking additional violence. But part is clearly a result of the very effective efforts by lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading journalists and editors in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a deep-rooted Islamophobia. [Emphasis added.]

What does Islam need to reform?

Islam . . . . needs a Voltaire. But I have come to believe it is in dire need of a John Locke as well. It was, after all, Locke who gave us the notion of a “natural right” to the fundamentals of “life, liberty, and property.” But less well known is Locke’s powerful case for religious toleration. And religious toleration, however long it took to be established in practice, is one of the greatest achievements of the Western world.

. . . .

Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans, would much rather ignore the fundamental conflict between Islam and their own worldview. This is partly because they generally assume that “religion,” however defined, is a force for good and that any set of religious beliefs should be considered acceptable in a tolerant society. . . . [Emphasis added.]

But that does not mean we should be blind to the potential consequences of accommodating beliefs that are openly hostile to Western laws, traditions, and values. For it is not simply a religion we have to deal with. It is a political religion many of whose fundamental tenets are irreconcilably inimical to our way of life. We need to insist that it is not we in the West who must accommodate ourselves to Muslim sensitivities; it is Muslims who must accommodate themselves to Western liberal ideals. [Emphasis added.]

Unfortunately, not everyone gets this.

In the fall of 2014, Bill Maher, host of the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, held a discussion about Islam that featured the best-selling author Sam Harris, the actor Ben Affleck, and the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Harris and Maher raised the question of whether or not Western liberals were abandoning their principles by not confronting Islam about its treatment of women, promotion of jihad, and sharia-based punishments of stoning and death to apostates. To Affleck, this smacked of Islamophobia and he responded with an outburst of moralistic indignation. To applause from the audience, he heatedly accused Harris and Maher of being “gross” and “racist” and saying things no different from “saying ‘you’re a shifty Jew.’ ” Siding with Affleck, Kristof interjected that brave Muslims were risking their lives to promote human rights in the Muslim world. [Emphasis added.]

After the show, during a discussion in the greenroom, Sam Harris asked both Ben Affleck and Nick Kristof, “What do you think would happen if we had burned a copy of the Qur’an on tonight’s show?” Sam then answered his own question, “There would be riots in scores of countries. Embassies would fall. In response to our mistreating a book, millions of Muslims would take to the streets, and we would spend the rest of our lives fending off credible threats of murder. But when IS crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands— all in the name of Islam— the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag [# NotInOurName].” [Emphasis added.]

Islam is apartheid and should be recognized as such.

Too often, when it comes to women’s rights (and human rights more generally) in the Muslim world, leading thinkers and opinion makers have, at best, gone dark. [Emphasis added.]

I cannot help contrasting this silence with the campaign to end apartheid, which united whites and blacks alike all over the world beginning in the 1960s. When the West finally stood up to the horrors of South African apartheid, it did so across a broad front. The campaign against apartheid reached down into classrooms and even sports stadiums; churches and synagogues stood united against it across the religious spectrum. South African sports teams were shunned, economic sanctions were imposed, and intense international pressure was brought to bear on the country to change its social and political system. American university students erected shantytowns on their campuses to symbolize their solidarity with those black South Africans confined to a life of degradation and impoverishment inside townships. [Emphasis added,]

Today, with radical Islam, we have a new and even more violent system of apartheid, where people are targeted not for their skin color but for their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, or, among Muslims, the form of their personal faith. [Emphasis added.]

. . . . As I have repeatedly said, the connection between violence and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to Muslims when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect. We need to ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Should it be blasphemy— punishable by death— to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Why, when I have made these arguments, have I received so little support and so much opprobrium from the very people in the West who call themselves feminists, who call themselves liberals? [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

A Unique Role for the West

Whenever I make the case for reform in the Muslim world, someone invariably says: “That is not our project— it is for Muslims only. We should stay out of it.” But I am not talking about the kind of military intervention that has got the West into so much trouble over the years. 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.]

Are you listening, President Obama? Not at all likely.

Why the Tide Is Turning

Three factors are combining today to enable real religious reform:

• The impact of new information technology in creating an unprecedented communication network across the Muslim world.

• The fundamental inability of Islamists to deliver when they come to power and the impact of Western norms on Muslim immigrants are creating a new and growing constituency for a Muslim Reformation.

• The emergence of a political constituency for religious reform emerging in key Middle Eastern states.

Together, I believe these three things will ultimately turn the tide against the Islamists, whose goal is, after all, a return to the time of the Prophet— a venture as foredoomed to failure as all attempts to reverse the direction of time’s arrow.

. . . .

In November 2014, an Egyptian doctor coined an Arabic hashtag that translates as “why we reject implementing sharia”; it was used five thousand times in the space of twenty-four hours, mostly by Saudis and Egyptians. In language that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, a young Moroccan named Brother Rachid last year called out President Obama on YouTube for claiming that Islamic State was “not Islamic.”[Emphasis added.]

Here is the referenced video: Please listen. It’s powerful and compelling, albeit “Islamophobic.”

. . . .

I agree with Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize– winning Pakistani schoolgirl whom the Taliban tried to kill:

The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. That is why they are blasting schools every day— because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring to our society. They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school.

Here, surely, is the authentic voice of a Muslim Reformation.

Conclusions

Islamic reformation will take a long time. Until there is an Islamic reformation, those who cry “Islamophobe!” — a made-up word intended to box people to keep them “politically correct” — will have won. So will those who despise our freedoms and want to “fundamentally transform” America.

Until we, and our “leaders,” stop damning “Islamophobes” and helping such organizations as CAIR, there will be no significant reformation. If and when we and our “leaders” also begin to take the other steps Hirsi Ali suggests, there may eventually be a reformation that will benefit us as well as Muslims.

 

It is time for Muslims to begin a deep self-examination

December 31, 2015

It is time for Muslims to begin a deep self-examination, Washington Post, Yasmine Bahrani, December 30, 2015

(Few Muslims speak favorably about an Islamic Reformation and many speak unfavorably about it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in Heretic, urges that there be a reformation and points to the voices for and against. I just finished Heretic and plan to write a review. — DM)

In the wake of the Paris bloodbath, the attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and Bamako, Mali, and murders elsewhere before and since, people desperately want to understand the root cause of all this violence. That’s true not only in the West, where many blame Islam itself. It’s true in the Middle East, too, where we are struggling to come to grips with the carnage and the region’s role in it.

Many of the usual suspects were singled out in the reaction here to the most recent attacks. Various Arab and Muslim writers blame Iran and Israel; others point to the West’s policies in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Of course, some media voices repeat the well-worn view that we Arabs are the victims of hidden conspiracies. But more self-critical voices have arisen as well.

Though their influence might still be minimal, a few journalists are speaking out. In the Arabic newspaper Al-Mada, Iraqi writer Adnan Hussein offered a suggestion: We must overhaul the educational system. In a piece published just two days after the Paris attacks on Nov. 13, he said that from elementary school through university, our young people are taught — sometimes with a stick — that Islam is not only great, but also better than other religions, and that those who are not like us belong in hell. What has emerged, he wrote, is a “savage faith that stirs up decapitation, spills blood, instigates plunder and rape.” As for the real Islam, he lamented: “It has no place in our lives, or in the best of cases, it has a barely audible voice that almost nobody hears.”

On the same day, celebrated Lebanese writer and editor of the Al-Hayat newspaper Ghassan Charbel wrote that to rescue itself, the Arab and Muslim world must participate in the struggle against Islamism. Charbel called for shutting down platforms of hate and said the Middle East needs to undertake “a deep re-examination” of its society. He called for “universities, schools, mosques, TV and electronic sites to reclaim their platforms from that handful” of destructive ideologues who control them. “What threatens the Arab and Islamic world today,” he said, “is no less dangerous than the threat that Nazism posed to Europe.”

Such writers are asking Middle Easterners to examine their institutions and society more broadly for their share of the responsibility for the violence. But this view is not limited to elite journalists; it is one that many of my own students at American University in Dubai share.

Recently, I asked my students what they thought about commentary that appeared in the Guardian newspaper in November suggesting that France and Britain had failed their immigrants through clumsy — and ultimately alienating — efforts to promote multiculturalism (in Britain’s case) and assimilation (in France’s). In this way, author Kenan Malik said, French and British policies gave Islamism an entrée into isolated Muslim communities.

Nearly all my students rejected the premise, arguing that immigrants were responsible for their own actions whether they were isolated or not. Of course, many of these students come from families who fled countries terrorized by Muslim extremists and have no sympathy for them. But they don’t blame Western multiculturalism for the rise of home-grown Islamism. “That’s silly,” shrugged one Syrian girl.

Why, then, I asked them, don’t Muslims march in the streets of London, Paris and New York loudly condemning the Islamic State? Because, they answered, mainstream Muslims are too scared that the extremists would come after them. The class brainstormed about what could be done instead. Most concluded that they, too, would be afraid to call attention to themselves.

When I asked another class what responsibility we have to explain to others that terrorists don’t represent all Muslims, the response was mixed. One Saudi student said it was not at all our responsibility. “If a (Western) person wants to learn about Islam, he should Google it,” she said. Another, an Egyptian, was angered by the question: “If I hear one more time that Muslims have not done enough to condemn terrorists. . . .” Many Muslims are weary of such criticism.

But others emphasize the work that needs to be done, whether it is in coming to terms with their own cultures’ problems, as Hussein and Charbel urge, or through advancing the acculturation of Muslim communities into Western societies. The Jordanian journalist Mousa Barhouma has written about such challenges for years, advising Muslims living in the West to integrate. If you are a Muslim who moves to Holland, he told me, “Don’t act shocked if they serve beer at the local restaurants.”

In a recent piece in Al-Hayat, Barhouma wondered whether anyone was struck by the fact that the carnage at Paris’s Bataclan theater took place on Boulevard Voltaire. Perhaps they were, and perhaps it was in response to this assault against not only life but also against reason itself, that more voices demanding responsibility are beginning to be heard.

 

The Killing of Farkhunda Video NYTimes com

December 29, 2015

The Killing of Farkhunda Video NYTimes com via You Tube, December 26, 2015

 

British Universities have Gone Crazy too

December 27, 2015

British Universities have Gone Crazy too. Why? Power Line, John Hinderaker, December 27, 2015

Italian journalist Giulio Menotti documents the madness that has overtaken British universities–a madness that is eerily familiar:

“Rhodes Must Fall” cry the students and professors outside Oxford, many of whom are themselves part of the Rhodes Scholarship group, the program built by the “racist” tycoon to allow foreign students to study at Oxford.

It’s exactly like students at Amherst and Harvard denouncing Jeffrey Amherst and Isaac Royall.

Meanwhile, across the UK, a general air of hostility is spreading against opinions that could cause even only a hint of distress in students, forcing theFinancial Times to publish an editorial: “It is in the interest of universities to maintain a free and fertile academic environment.”

Ditto in the U.S.

Iranian dissident Maryam Lamaze … was attacked and prevented from speaking at many UK colleges, like Goldsmiths and Warwick. Her hymn against religion and for Western free speech “offended” British students of Islamic faith.

At University College in London, a former student, Macer Gifford, was prevented from telling his experience in the ranks of Kurdish fighters committed to battle against the Islamic State. The reason? “In every conflict there are two sides and our college does not want to take sides.”

Should we be anti-ISIS? That’s too close a question for universities in Britain, as in the U.S., to call.

The University of East Anglia has just banned the use of the sombrero, because it is considered hateful towards Hispanic students.

Just like the recent fiasco at Yale. It’s odd, though. Doesn’t every kind of hat originate with one culture or another, and mustn’t all hats therefore be banned? And why stop with hats?

Oxford has canceled a debate on abortion, because women’s organizations had complained about the presence, among the speakers, of “a person without a uterus.” Don’t laugh, it is really happening at the university founded in 1096.

Don’t laugh, because feminists don’t have a sense of humor, either here or in the U.K.

The University of Cardiff has tried to remove the feminist Germaine Greer, “guilty” of not considering women and transsexuals as equals.

Transsexuals, slightly more common than unicorns, have opened up whole new horizons of insanity.

Meanwhile, these British “safe spaces” are used by apologists for Islamist cutthroats who gather support and are affiliated with these universities (“Jihadi John”, the late Isis executioner, was a brilliant student of Westminster).

I hadn’t realized that. Apparently “brilliant” students aren’t what they used to be.

Some days ago, the Telegraph published an article entitled: “The ideology of the ISIS dominates British universities.”

Why are so many students and professors attracted to evil? It was true in the 1930s, too, when German students and professors were among the most enthusiastic supporters of National Socialism, and when Nazis were weirdly popular–as it seems today–on many American campuses.

The same universities that are uncomfortable accommodating heterodox feminists and Islamic dissidents, such as the Queen Mary University of London, allow events under the banner of Islam where women sit separated from men, in accordance with the Sharia or Islamic law, as if they were in Riyadh or Tehran.

Because that’s diversity.

Muslim activist for women’s rights, Maryam Namazie, has been driven away by fanatic Islamists with the approval of the stupid gay militants. In British colleges it was Namazie who needed a “safe space” to deliver her speech, protected by bodyguards….

Much like the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Michelle Malkin here in the United States. And finally:

Meanwhile, British professors, writers, musicians, intellectuals and professionals are busy promoting initiatives to boycott the Jewish State and its professors.

All of this is nauseatingly familiar. My question is: why? Why have British universities gone off the rails in precisely the same ways as American universities? Steve has referred to the “spreading virus” of madness on American campuses, but the virus has apparently replicated itself in England. Why?

I mean the question seriously. Have British students and professors taken inspiration from their American cousins? Or vice versa? Is it because Leftism is an international movement? Do left-wing British professors and students, like their American counterparts, hate the society that sustains them, and does their hatred produce eerily similar symptoms? I don’t know the answer to these questions. But a contagion is loose that transcends, apparently, international boundaries.

Jihad: “All the Fault of the West!”

December 26, 2015

Jihad: “All the Fault of the West!” Gatestone InstituteLars Hedegaard. December 26, 2015

♦ 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.

1340 (1)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.

Rape Culture: The Real Thing

December 22, 2015

Rape Culture: The Real Thing, Power LineJohn Hinderaker, December 22, 2015

The first question to be asked about any proposed group of immigrants is, why do we need them? It would seem that, given our hypersensitivity to “rape culture,” those who require training to understand that “women have value” and that a smile does not represent consent to rape should receive low priority.

******************

We hear a lot about “rape culture” at American universities, but no one actually believes it. If we did, we wouldn’t send our daughters off to college. It appears there is such a thing, however; American liberals have just been looking in the wrong place. The New York Times headlines: “Norway Offers Migrants a Lesson in How to Treat Women.” We aren’t talking about etiquette lessons here:

Fearful of stigmatizing migrants as potential rapists and playing into the hands of anti-immigrant politicians, most European countries have avoided addressing the question of whether men arriving from more conservative societies might get the wrong idea once they move to places where it can seem as if anything goes.

But, with more than a million asylum seekers arriving in Europe this year, an increasing number of politicians and also some migrant activists now favor offering coaching in European sexual norms and social codes.

Norway has mandated anti-rape training for immigrants from “more conservative societies.”

The goal is that participants will “at least know the difference between right and wrong,” said Nina Machibya, the Sandnes center’s manager.

A course manual sets out a simple rule that all asylum seekers need to learn and follow: “To force someone into sex is not permitted in Norway, even when you are married to that person.”

Denmark and Germany are considering similar measures. The concern appears to be well-founded:

The first such program to teach immigrants about local norms and how to avoid misreading social signals was initiated in Stavanger, the center of Norway’s oil industry and a magnet for migrants, after a series of rapes from 2009 to 2011.

Henry Ove Berg, who was Stavanger’s police chief during the spike in rape cases, said he supported providing migrants sex education because “people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa.” When they get to Norway, he added, “something happens in their heads.”

He said, “there was a link but not a very clear link” between the rape cases and the city’s immigrant community. According to the state broadcaster, NRK, which reviewed court documents, only three of 20 men found guilty in those cases were native Norwegians, the rest immigrants.

In Europe, as in the United States, candor with regard to such issues is hard to come by:

Hanne Kristin Rohde, a former head of the violent crime section of the Oslo Police Department, said she ran into a wall of hostility when, in 2011 while still in the police force, she blamed sexual violence by foreign men on cultural factors and went public with data suggesting that immigrants committed a hugely disproportionate number of rapes.

“This was a big problem but it was difficult to talk about it,” Ms. Rohde said recently, asserting that there was “a clear statistical connection” between sexual violence and male migrants from countries where “women have no value of their own.” …

“There are lots of men who haven’t learned that women have value,” said Ms. Rohde, who wants mandatory sexual conduct classes for all new male migrants. “This is the biggest problem, and it is a cultural problem.”

The migrants themselves acknowledge that Western mores present a culture shock:

Mr. Kelifa, the African asylum seeker, said he still had a hard time accepting that a wife could accuse her husband of sexual assault. But he added that he had learned how to read previously baffling signals from women who wear short skirts, smile or simply walk alone at night without an escort.

“Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control,” Mr. Kelifa said, explaining that in his own country, Eritrea, “if someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished,” at least not by the police.

Norway, he said, treats women differently.

The first question to be asked about any proposed group of immigrants is, why do we need them? It would seem that, given our hypersensitivity to “rape culture,” those who require training to understand that “women have value” and that a smile does not represent consent to rape should receive low priority.