On what seems like a daily basis, Minnesotans are lectured against the evils of “Islamophobia.” In October, Gov. Mark Dayton weirdly instructed “white, B-plus, Minnesota-born citizens” to suppress their qualms about immigrant resettlement in Minnesota, according to the St. Cloud Times. If they can’t, they should “find another state,” he added.
Andrew Luger, the United States Attorney for Minnesota is a paragon of political correctness who has inveighed against “the current wave of Islamophobia” and has stayed on the attack. Yesterday Luger and others gathered at the prestigious Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney to decry Islamophobia. Walter Mondale is of counsel at the firm and was a featured speaker at the event. The Star Tribune reports on the proceedings in “Minneapolis legal community, Somali-Americans latest to unite to confront Islamophobia.”
The Twin Cities have received more than 100,000 Somali Muslims in the past 20 years or so. Their presence is notable, yet signs of bigotry against them are virtually nil.
The star victim on display at the Dorsey & Whitney conference yesterday was Asma Jama (middle name Mohamed, by the way). Jama was assaulted by a patron at a local Applebee’s who “flew into a rage because she spoke a foreign language.” Jama speaks Swahili.
The perpetrator of the assault on Jama was one Jodie Burchard-Risch. Burchard-Risch is a nut who has probably had to push 1 for English one too many times. The Star Tribune provides no evidence for deeming her an anti-Muslim bigot. (MPR has a good account of the assault here, with photos.) So far as I can tell, “Islamphobia” had nothing to do with the assault. Indeed, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess wildly that alcohol was a substantial contributing factor to the incident. And when it comes to “Islamophobia,” this was the best they could do, so to speak.
“Islamophobia” is a concept fervently promoted since 2000 by the Organization of the Islamic Conference. It seeks to stigmatize expressions of disapproval of Islam as irrational manifestations of fear and prejudice. Implicitly, it raises the question of whether any fear of Islam is necessarily crazy. It also raises the question of whether some fear of Islam might be rational, but it instructs us to keep any unapproved answer to ourselves. It seeks to make us afraid to talk about perfectly reasonable fears. Andrew McCarthy has more on the provenance and uses of “Islamophobia” here.
Since the early 1990s, Minnesota has been flooded by waves of Somali Muslim refugees and immigrants. The number remains in doubt; official sources place it at something like 35,000. Unofficial estimates put it at well over 100,000. Whatever the number, it is large and growing.
Politicians like Dayton have proved highly effective in inhibiting public discussion of legitimate concerns about Minnesota’s Somali community. When I sat down to interview Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek in his office this past November, he bristled in response to my question about security issues related to the Somali community. Why was I focusing on that community? I referred to the congressional task force report recognizing Minnesota’s responsibility for 26 percent of the American fighters joining or seeking to join the ISIS. “I just came from an FBI briefing this morning,” Stanek told me at the time. “They told me we’re 20 percent.”
OK, but that still leaves Minnesota at No. 1 in a ranking where we would like to be No. 50.
Ten Minnesota Somalis have now been charged by Luger’s office with seeking to join or support ISIS. Four have pleaded guilty. The charges represent the culmination of a 10-month FBI investigation.
Reading the criminal complaints and underlying FBI affidavits supporting the charges in these cases is an alarming experience. The young men who have responded to the call of ISIL are full of hate for Americans and for the U.S. If they choose to act it out somewhere closer to home than Syria, we will have a major problem on our hands. After the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., you’d think it might be time to talk about it.
The 10 men present something of a case study that belies the clichés around the subject of “radicalization.” These men were “connected” to schools and jobs. Their cases demonstrate plenty of opportunity for advancement and financial support. One of the men even maxed out his federal student loan account with a $5,000 withdrawal before seeking to depart Minneapolis for Syria.
Unnamed local mosques figure prominently in the cases. Islam is, of course, a common denominator. The 10 men are all Muslims seeking to join the jihad waged by ISIL.
Hillary Clinton actually had a useful observation buried in her Minneapolis speech this past fall on the subject of terrorism. She quoted Deqa Hussen, the mother of one of the 10 Somali men charged with supporting ISIS. Addressing other parents, Hussen said: “We have to stop the denial. … We have to talk to our kids and work with the FBI.” Clinton herself added: “That’s a message we need to hear from leaders within Muslim-American communities across our country.”
Which raises a question or two: Why don’t we hear that message more often from leaders within the Somali community? For that matter, why don’t we hear more expressions of gratitude from within the Somali community for their rescue from Third World disorder by the U.S. or for opportunities afforded to them in Minnesota?
Kyle Loven is the Minneapolis FBI’s chief division counsel and media coordinator. Speaking about Somali-related law enforcement issues to the National Security Society in Richfield in October, he conceded that the community gave rise to special challenges for law enforcement. “We walk a tightrope” with this community, Loven observed. “Every time we have to indict somebody, you should see the remarks we get. … Every time we have to make an arrest, it is a setback [in our relations with the Somali community].”
Luger is nominally responsible for a pilot program to prevent “radicalization” of Somali-Minnesotans. The program goes under the name “Building Community Resilience,” a classic euphemism of the Obama era. The program is to funnel as much as $1 million to support Minnesota’s Somali community. The memorandum of understanding between Luger and Minnesota Somali leaders reflects the wariness of Somali-Minnesotans. It stipulates that the program will not be used for surveillance purposes by any law enforcement agency or by any person working for or on behalf of any law enforcement agency.
You can see why the authorities might want to shut down discussion of reasonable concerns raised by Minnesota’s Somali community. They really would prefer not to talk about them. They would prefer to sweep them under a well-worn rug.
Teachers working in the predominantly Muslim districts of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek in Brussels have reported that “90 percent of their students, 17, 18 years old” called the Islamist terrorists who attacked Paris and Brussels “heroes”.
The revelation came in an article in the New York Times, wherein Steven Erlanger spoke to a Belgian policymaker who relayed the information from Belgium.
The piece, entitled “Blaming Policy, Not Islam, for Belgium’s Radicalised Youth”, interviewed Yves Goldstein, chief of staff for the minister-president of the Brussels Capital Region and a Schaerbeek councilman. Schaerbeek and Molenbeek are now infamous as the areas in which for months Islamists lived, hid, manufactured weapons and made preparations for the Paris and Belgium attacks.
Reflecting that “our cities are facing a huge problem, maybe the largest since World War II,” Goldstein poses the question, “How is it that people who were born here in Brussels, in Paris, can call heroes the people who commit violence and terror?”
Dismissing the idea of Islam having played any role in the Paris attack and the bombing of Brussels airport and a subway station claiming that “religion for them is a pretext” and that they “believe in nothing,” the politician the boldly claims that the problem is a lack of exposure to diversity and modern art:
“We have neighborhoods where people only see the same people, go to school with the same people. What connection do they have with the whole society, what connection do they have with real diversity? It’s the establishment of the ghetto,” he says, “and it’s the thing in our urban development that we have to tackle.”
“These young people will never go to museums until 18 or 20 — they never saw Chagall, they never saw Dalí, they never saw Warhol, they don’t know what it is to dream.”
Erlinger reports that “Jews have left Schaerbeek, and the last two synagogues are being sold. Instead, there is a kind of suffocating, insular, ethnic uniformity” and describes Belgium’s system of integration as “somewhere between the French model, which put new immigrants in suburban ghettos, and the British and American one, which created communities like Chinatown or Little Italy.”
The article neglects to ask basic questions like why – if Islamic extremism is the fault of Belgian urban planning – is it happening globally? Why Jewish communities might have left Schaerbeek? Or why Chinese diaspora, living in Chinatown-like communities and taking no interest in modern art, seem to be at no risk of committing terrorist attacks?
(So soon ve get oldt and so late ve get schmart. — DM)
Bradford, United Kingdom – Gett
The former head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips, has admitted he “got almost everything wrong” on Muslim immigration in a damning new report on integration, segregation, and how the followers of Islam are creating “nations within nations” in the West.
Phillips, a former elected member of the Labour Party who served as the Chairman of the EHRC from 2003-2012 will present “What British Muslims Really Think” on Channel 4 on Wednesday. An ICM poll released to the Times ahead of the broadcast reveals:
One in five Muslims in Britain never enter a non-Muslim house;
39 per cent of Muslims, male and female, say a woman should always obey her husband;
31 per cent of British Muslims support the right of a man to have more than one wife;
52 per cent of Muslims did not believe that homosexuality should be legal;
23 per cent of Muslims support the introduction of Sharia law rather than the laws laid down by parliament.
Writing in the Times on the issue, Phillips admits: “Liberal opinion in Britain has, for more than two decades, maintained that most Muslims are just like everyone else… Britain desperately wants to think of its Muslims as versions of the Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain, or the cheeky-chappie athlete Mo Farah. But thanks to the most detailed and comprehensive survey of British Muslim opinion yet conducted, we now know that just isn’t how it is.”
Phillips commissioned “the Runnymede report” into Britain and Islamophobia in 1997 which, according to both Phillips himself and academics across the country, popularised the phrase which has now become synonymous with any criticism – legitimate or not – of Islam or Muslims.
Durham University’s Anthropology Journal noted in 2007: “It has been a decade since the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia was established, a Commission that through its 1997 report, “Islamophobia: a challenge for us all” (“the Runnymede report”) not only raised an awareness of the growing reality of anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic hostility in Britain, but also marked the onset of what might be described as ‘the first decade of Islamophobia’. In doing so, the Runnymede report propelled the word ‘Islamophobia’ into the everyday common parlance and discourses of both the public and political spaces.”
Phillips says his new data shows “a chasm” opening between Muslims and non-Muslims on fundamental issues such as marriage, relations between men and women, schooling, freedom of expression and even the validity of violence in defence of religion. He notes – echoing an article on Breitbart London just two weeks ago which reveals a growing disparity between older and younger Muslims in Britain – that “the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim youngsters are nearly as large as those between their elders”.
And while he is cautious to note that many Muslims in Britain are grateful to be here, and do identify with role models such as Hussain and Farah, there is a widening gap in society with many Muslims segregating themselves.
“It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs,” he admits.
“Twenty years ago… I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims. Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong.”
His comments will come as a blow to those who continue to attack elements in British society who are concerned about Muslim immigration and integration, and in fact may even go some way to shoring up comments made by U.S. Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) seeking to slow down or pause the rate of Muslim immigration into the West.
“We estimated that the Muslim population of the UK would be approaching 2 [million] by 2020. We underestimated by nearly a million. We predicted that the most lethal threat to Muslims would come from racial attacks and social exclusion. We completely failed to foresee the urban conflicts of 2001 that ravaged our northern cities. And of course we didn’t dream of 9/11 and the atrocities in Madrid, Paris, Istanbul, Brussels and London.”
“For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.”
And Mr. Phillips even acknowledges that the mass sexual grooming and rape scandals that are plaguing heavily Muslim populated towns across Britain are because of Muslim – not ‘Asian’ – men. He writes: “The contempt for white girls among some Muslim men has been highlighted by the recent scandals in Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale and other towns. But this merely reflects a deeply ingrained sexism that runs through Britain’s Muslim communities” – in a nod to those who have long protested this to be the case in the face of political, media, and even police cover ups.
Even left wing columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown told him: “[W]e [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed — in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”
Phillips comments: “Some of my journalist friends imagine that, with time, the Muslims will grow out of it. They won’t.”
And indeed he lays the blame at the feet of the liberal, metropolitan elite, media classes: “Oddly, the biggest obstacles we now face in addressing the growth of this nation-within-a-nation are not created by British Muslims themselves. Many of our (distinctly un-diverse) elite political and media classes simply refuse to acknowledge the truth. Any undesirable behaviours are attributed to poverty and alienation. Backing for violent extremism must be the fault of the Americans. Oppression of women is a cultural trait that will fade with time, nothing to do with the true face of Islam.”
“Even when confronted with the growing pile of evidence to the contrary, and the angst of the liberal minority of British Muslims, clever, important people still cling to the patronising certainty that British Muslims will, over time, come to see that “our” ways are better.”
In terms of solutions, Mr. Phillips opines on “halting the growth of sharia courts and placing them under regulation” ensuring that school governance never falls into the hands of a single-minority group, “ensuring mosques that receive a steady flow of funds from foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia, however disguised, are forced to reduce their dependency on Wahhabi patronage” and an end to the “silence-for-votes understanding between local politicians and Muslim leaders — the sort of Pontius Pilate deal that had such catastrophic outcomes in Rotherham and Rochdale”.
Mr. Phillips’s comments echo those of the Czech president, and research from across Europe that revealed attitudes amongst Muslims on the continent have hardened. The younger the Muslim, the more likely they are to hold hard-line views, one recent study found.
(Compare and contrast the views of this Saudi TV hostess on Islam and terror with what seems to be the emerging European view. — DM)
[T]he overarching message is that Europe has slowly let this happen year by year, decade by decade, like a frog in a pot slowly brought to a boil. Post-colonial guilt and shame have stopped Europeans from openly loving and defending their own culture. The state of things in Europe today is the natural conclusion of that neglect. We in America are on the same road.
***********************
Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine whose offices Islamists attacked in 2015, published an editorial recently titled “How Did We Get Here?” that has raised some eyebrows. In it, they ask how Europe has become where European-born Muslims have attacked the hearts of Paris and Brussels. Their answer has proved distasteful to many on the Left.
The editorial has been harshly criticized and the magazine accused of racism and xenophobia. The Washington Post says Charlie Hebdo blames extremism on individual Muslims—the veiled woman on the street, the man selling kebabs. There’s some truth to this accusation, and to the extent that there is, Charlie Hebdo is wrong. But this, and other critiques, miss the larger point of the article, which is to demonstrate the gradual and quotidian way in which criticizing Islam has been silenced.
It’s worth quoting Charlie Hebdo at length:
In reality, the attacks are merely the visible part of a very large iceberg indeed. They are the last phase of a process of cowing and silencing long in motion and on the widest possible scale. Our noses are endlessly rubbed in the rubble of Brussels airport and in the flickering candles amongst the bouquets of flowers on the pavements. All the while, no one notices what’s going on in Saint-German-en-Laye. Last week, Sciences-Po* welcomed Tariq Ramadan. He’s a teacher, so it’s not inappropriate. He came to speak of his specialist subject, Islam, which is also his religion…
No matter, Tariq Ramadan has done nothing wrong. He will never do anything wrong. He lectures about Islam, he writes about Islam, he broadcasts about Islam. He puts himself forward as a man of dialogue, someone open to a debate. A debate about secularism which, according to him, needs to adapt itself to the new place taken by religion in Western democracy. A secularism and a democracy which must also accept those traditions imported by minority communities. Nothing bad in that. Tariq Ramadan is never going to grab a Kalashnikov with which to shoot journalists at an editorial meeting. Nor will he ever cook up a bomb to be used in an airport concourse. Others will be doing all that kind of stuff. It will not be his role. His task, under cover of debate, is to dissuade people from criticising his religion in any way. The political science students who listened to him last week will, once they have become journalists or local officials, not even dare to write nor say anything negative about Islam. The little dent in their secularism made that day will bear fruit in a fear of criticising lest they appear Islamophobic. That is Tariq Ramadan’s task.
The Charlie Hebdo editorial correctly points out that in Europe the dominant liberal culture has pounded into us that we must adapt to Muslims who come to our country, and never ask them to adapt to any of our ways. Doing so would be colonialist and wrong. It’s a double standard, of course. As the welcoming countries, Europeans must suppress their own culture and ideals for those of the Islamic immigrant population. But when they go abroad to non-Western countries, either to live or to visit, it’s considered offensive not to adapt to their ways of life.
Learning a Culture Should Work Both WaysNo one who found the Charlie Hebdo op-ed so offensive would ever suggest Morocco ought to welcome McDonalds or Wal-Mart with open arms. They would say the country is being ruined with Western culture. They want non-Western countries to remain exactly as they are—preserved and frozen in time-while the West must endlessly adapt to anyone who makes it their home.
The article highlights the important fact that Europe has failed to ask its Muslim immigrant population to assimilate. This fact was demonstrated recently when police discovered that the only surviving terrorist from the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, was able to travel from Paris to Brussels and conceal himself there until a few days before the Brussels attacks. He was aided by a large community of French and Muslim Belgians whose loyalties clearly lie with their own community, not with Belgium, or Europe at large. What’s more, a 2013 study shows the shocking degree to which European Muslims hate the West.
Asking immigrants to assimilate doesn’t mean white-washing their culture and religion, asking them not to wear the hijab, or demanding that they eat pork. But it does mean asking them to accept, to some degree, the culture of the country to which they have willingly moved. These are things like women’s rights, tolerance, free speech, or criticism of religion. It also means not having to apologize for having a culture of one’s own. This is the point that Michel Houellebecq made in his recent novel, “Submission.”
Slow-Boiling Our BrainsEuropeans have been lulled into accepting that it’s wrong to criticize Islam or scrutinize it in any way. The Charlie Hebdo editorial points out that it’s a slow process, an insidious wearing away of what is and isn’t acceptable to say or think. The process must be slow, because few people would accept a proposal dictating what topics they’re not allowed to discuss. So, you gradually shame them into it.
This establishes a pre-conditioned mindset so the line of acceptability can be moved further and further until the problem of global jihad can no longer be effectively explored because we aren’t even allowed to ask fundamental questions. This is Charlie Hebdo’s point about Tariq Ramadan, whose grandfather founded the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and whose father was an active member of the group. Through the guise of intellectualism and purported adherence to moderate Islam, he instructs his audience ever so gently that the problem has nothing to do with Islam, and that suggesting so is ugly and base.
We acquiesce, because, as Charlie Hebdo points out, we fear being seen as Islamaphobic or racist. We are made to feel guilty if the thought flashes through our head that we wish that the new sandwich shop run by a Muslim sold bacon, or that a woman wearing a hijab makes us a little uncomfortable. That fear that we feel when we entertain those thoughts, the op-ed argues, saps our willingness to scrutinize, analyze, debate, or reject anything about Islam. And this is dangerous.
Fierce Reactions Aim to Condition Us Into Fear
Although Europe is further along in this process, there is a clear relevance to the United States. We are already being instructed on college campuses and by our own president that Muslims are a sort of protected class regarding criticism. President Obama even went so far as to censor French President François Hollande when he used the forbidden phrase “Islamist terrorism.”
The latest incident of shaming those who do push back is happening in Kansas, where the Islamic Society of Wichita invited Sheik Monzer Talib to speak at a fundraising event on Good Friday. Talib is a known fundraiser for Hamas, the militant Islamist Palestinian group that the United States classifies as a terrorist organization. He even has sung a song called “I am from Hamas.” U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo dared to put out a press release objecting to the speech out of concern that it would harm the Muslim community, particularly in the wake of the Brussels terrorist attack.
In response, the mosque claimed Pompeo stoked prejudice and Islamaphobia and that they had to cancel the event because of protest announcements and because some individuals on Facebook made some offhand comments about guns. Cue a local media frenzy, letters to the editor accusing Pompeo of government overreach, and the predictable arrival of two CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) representatives to skewer Pompeo.
This is just one example of how criticizing or questioning the actions of a Muslim community—even one that is supporting a Hamas fundraiser—has become anathema. The line of acceptability has been moved so now it’s Islamaphobic to object to someone with links to Islamist groups being invited to a U.S. mosque while we’re in the midst of a global battle against Islamist terrorism. People don’t even want to discuss it. The conversation is over. Just as Charlie Hebdo asks, so should we ask ourselves, “How did we get here?”
Although the particulars of the Charlie Hebdo editorial may go too far, and I do not endorse everything the article says, the overarching message is that Europe has slowly let this happen year by year, decade by decade, like a frog in a pot slowly brought to a boil. Post-colonial guilt and shame have stopped Europeans from openly loving and defending their own culture. The state of things in Europe today is the natural conclusion of that neglect. We in America are on the same road.
Police in Berlin have raided ten apartments because residents may have posted “anti-migrant” views online.
Berlin Police completed a large scale raid on internet users Wednesday. The officers ransacked ten separate apartments in the German capital in the suburbs of Spandau, Tempelhof, Marzahn, Hellersdorf and Pankow.
The force confiscated mobile phones, narcotics and weapons. Nine suspects were arrested, aged 22-58, and are accused of posting messages critical of migrants, migrant helpers and some anti-semitic slogans on social networks like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter, reportsBerliner Morgenpost.
The Berlin police have told media that they already knew of the suspects and said that many of them have what they consider a “right-extremist” background. Police spokesman Stefan Redlich said that while many of the men shared anti-migrant views, “the men do not know each other according to previous findings,” and there was no evidence of any planned conspiracy to commit crime among them.
In some of the homes searched police were forced to admit they hadn’t found anything at all, but Redlich justified the raids saying they were maybe, “people who just once expressed their hate-opinion.”
One of the raids in particular was prompted by a Facebook comment to an article regarding an Afghani migrant who was shot dead at the Bulgarian border. The incident took place in October and according to Bulgarian officials it was an accident as a bullet was meant to be a warning shot but ricochet and hit him.
The post responded to the article saying that it was unfortunate too few migrants met with a similar fate, as it might scare the rest of them from coming.
Police announced that the raids show Germans that they are not as safe online as they might think. They say that anyone who says something xenophobic, spreads hate toward migrants, or shares what they consider to be xenophobic music, may be next on the list of apartments to be raided in the future.
58 police were involved in the raids and some illegal items were found in a few of the apartments. Police found one revolver handgun, though it was not mentioned if it had any ammunition or whether or not is was deactivated. They also found an air soft gun, which requires a license to own in Germany and a stun gun that appeared to be camouflaged as a flashlight.
Spokesmen Redlich also mentioned that they had found several unconstitutional symbols but did not divulge specifics. Banned symbols in Germany include Nazi era symbols like the swastika and various Nordic runes used by the Nazis during the era.
Berlin has seen a rapid increase in prosecutions for speech on the internet. In 2014 there were 196 investigations into anti-migrant and xenophobic posts, while 2015 saw 289 cases. In the last six months there have been three raids prior to this one, but so far this has been the largest in scale. Investigators have set up a special task force who work with the organization Network Against Nazis (NAN), headed by ex-stasi agent Anetta Kahani, to monitor internet postings across Germany.
Google and Facebook have been criticized for helping the German government crack down on speech that is critical of migrants and of the policies of German chancellor Angela Merkel. The policy led to the deletion of the Facebook account of a young girl who spoke out about the migrant crisis and how she no longer felt safe walking the streets of her town.
Redlich says that the team is constantly searching YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp and especially Facebook where most cases are pursued because users are forced to use their real names. He said the message of the raids is clear, “the internet is not above the law.”
The raids come just days after British police issued an apparently menacing tweet, warning them not to get into trouble on-line. As reported by Breitbart London, the Greater Glasgow Police offered internet users this helpful advice: “Think before you post or you may receive a visit from us this weekend. Use the internet safely. #thinkbeforeyoupost”.
(But Obama, the smartest person in any room, knows all and sees all. How dare he be questioned?– DM)
Back in January, at a press conference with David Cameron, Barack Obama delivered himself of some thoughts on how Europe should deal with its Muslim problem. He claimed that the United States had had “more success” than others in “integrating minorities,” and that “our biggest advantage, major, is that our Muslim populations feel themselves to be Americans and there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition.” This was neither the first nor the last time Obama has claimed that “we are doing things right” with integrating Muslims and the Europeans need to learn from us.
Obama’s optimistic certainty is a thing of wonder. For how does he know that “our Muslim populations feel themselves to be Americans”? Does a Pew poll suffice? Do we have reason to believe that Muslims, eager to dampen the suspicions of non-Muslims, and well-versed in taqiyya, might actually answer such a poll by providing the soothing answers they know are desired, and speak not what they feel, but what they think they ought to say? And does Obama think that the definition of “feeling oneself to be an American” is self-evident? Does someone’s merely living within a given geographic area, and attaining the citizenship associated with that geographic area – living in the United States, say, and acquiring American citizenship through naturalization or birth– mean that that someone feels himself “to be an American”? What does it mean to “be an American”? Would it not mean, in the most important and irreducible sense, that you subscribe to the Constitution, that document at the heart of our civil religion, which means to subscribe to a shared set of beliefs? And these beliefs would include the individual’s right to the freedom of speech and to the freedom of religion, and a belief that the legitimacy of any government depends on its reflecting, however imperfectly through elections, the will expressed by the people. Islam, on the other hand, insists on limiting the freedom of speech (if, for example, such speech is held to blaspheme Muhammad or otherwise call aspects of Islam into question) and the freedom of religion (punishing apostates even with death), and ascribing legitimacy to a government or ruler insofar as that government or ruler reflects the will expressed by Allah in the Qur’an, rather than—as in the American system — the will expressed by the people through elections.
Obama has yet to be asked, by some intrepid interviewer, to tell us exactly what his cavalier assertion that “our Muslim populations feel themselves to be Americans” means to him. Nor has he been asked, either, if he has read the Qur’an and familiarized himself with the Hadith, and if he detects any contradictions between those canonical texts and the Constitution of the United States. As far as I know, not once in all of the hundreds of interviews Obama has granted over the past seven years has anyone asked him that most important question: what do you know about Islamic doctrine, and how do you know it? Jeffrey Goldberg practically filled most of the latest issue of The Atlantic with his Obama interview, and there were plenty of questions about terrorism and ISIS and the Middle East, but he did not take the opportunity to ask Obama about his knowledge of Islam. He’s President; therefore he surely must know what he’s talking about; he’s got a small army of wonderful experts, led by the likes of Ben Rhodes and John Brennan, to fill him in by providing bullet-ridden executive summaries for every occasion; Islam and Obama go all the way back to the dreams of his father, and the melodious sound of the muezzin’s wail in Indonesia, so he must have a grasp of the subject; don’t dare to cross-question him; when it comes to Islam, it’s ipse-dixit all the way.
Obama officiously lectures the Europeans, telling them that we Americans do something right and they should learn from us about the “integration” of their Muslim population. But surely the most important difference is a matter of math — that the percentage of the population in this country that is Muslim is far smaller than in Europe. In the United States it is about 1%, while in Europe the percentage of the population that is Muslim ranges from 5% to 10%. Isn’t it worth finding out what, historically, has happened in Western countries as the percentage of the population that is Muslim increases? Might we end up concluding that “integration” becomes harder pari passu with the increase in the Muslim population, and that the putative American success in integrating Muslims has mostly to do with numbers?
Obama mentions the greater “success” in integrating Muslims in this country. Is he not referring to economic success? Aren’t the Muslim immigrants to the United States, in general, better educated and better off to begin with than those Muslims who manage to settle in Europe? It’s a lot harder, and much more expensive, to find one’s way from North Africa and the Middle East to the United States, than to be smuggled across the Mediterranean by boat into Europe. But economic success is not the same thing as ideological integration. There have been more than a few cases of very successful Muslims, seemingly completely assimilated, who “reverted” to the real Islam. Some may recall Mike Hawash, an Intel engineer earning $300,000 a year, who was as “assimilated” as all get out. And then one fine day he started to become more devout, grew a beard, and ended up trying to get to Afghanistan to give aid and comfort to the Taliban. And how successful is this supposed “integration” when more than half of the Muslim terrorist attacks in this country since 9/11/2001 have been committed by people born and raised in this country, such as Syed Rizwan Farook and Nidal Hasan?
Instead of lecturing the Europeans, one would wish for a President who is sympathetic to their plight, and keenly aware that were Europe to become irreversibly Islamized (here and there there are signs of a growing willingness to fight back – Belgian leaders sound different today from the way they sounded a month ago — but is it enough?), America could not go it, culturally and spiritually, alone. And Europeans, now possibly coming to their senses about the terrible situation they have brought upon themselves, do not need lectures from Obama on what they are doing wrong, and how they must do more to make their societies even more welcoming to Muslims.
Obama’s certainty about Muslim integration in this country mirrors his certainty about policies toward Muslims abroad. He had no doubts about what needed to be done in Syria, an extraordinarily complicated country; in 2011 he declared that “Assad would have to go,” and he repeated that mantra right up to the end of 2015. He declared that there were “red lines” that, if crossed by the Assad regime, would lead to automatic American intervention; those lines were continually crossed, and nothing happened. Assad is still in Damascus, and by now there are many who agree that his remaining in power offers the best hope for containing ISIS and protecting minorities, especially Christians. But the complexity of Syria’s situation was always beyond Obama’s certainties.
In Egypt, Obama was adamant that as part of the “Arab Spring” Mubarak should resign, and eventually he did, making way for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Obama was certain that our ally Mubarak was a superannuated despot, who deserved to be abandoned, while Morsi brought with him the possibility of a brave new democracy to Egypt, and Obama has never been one to worry overmuch about the Ikhwan. And when General Al-Sisi managed to replace Morsi, and go after the Brotherhood, it was despite, not in concert with, the disapproving Obama administration, that never seemed to quite understand what the Muslim Brotherhood was all about.
In Libya, Obama was also certain of how things would turn out — that once Qaddafi had been removed, Libya would emerge as a unified and democratic polity. Never mind that Libya had never been a democracy, and that the country itself was soon to dissolve, fissiparousness prevailing as power devolved to a myriad of militias, some defined geographically (Zintan, Misrata, Benghazi), others ideologically, including the forces of Ansar al-Sharia and, most recently, of the Islamic State, now dug in in Sirte. (Apparently no one in the Middle East has gotten Obama’s repeated message that the Islamic State is finished.)
Obama’s policy on Muslim matters — at home and abroad — has been a blend of certainty and sanctimony. One hopes that his replacement will at least forego those lectures that, with unhappy regularity, Obama keeps inflicting on our European allies. And possibly, just possibly, that next president will become a sudden scholar of Islam, and read a relevant book or two that Obama overlooked. You know the ones I have in mind.
(But if we simply close our minds and ignore the problem, won’t it go away? — DM)
Are U.S. presidents charged with protecting American lives or protecting American vanity—especially when the two clash? Put differently, what’s more important: our security or our ability to “feel good” about ourselves?
Consider the two leading presidential candidates’ positions on Muslim immigration after the Brussels terror attack.
Donald Trump continues “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Conversely, Hillary Clinton continues to offer fine platitudes without practical solutions: “I know that Americans have every reason to be frightened by what they see, we’ve got to work this through, consistent with our values,” she said after Brussels.
Clinton is correct that it’s an American value not to discriminate by religion. However, a troubling implication arises when this value is scrutinized in the context of Islam: Even if most Muslim migrants will not engage in jihadi terrorism and other subversive acts, some most certainly will. This is an established fact, one that Clinton knows: ISIS operatives are passing for refugees and “non-ISIS” refugees are committing acts of violence and rape across Western nations. And both ISIS and its millions of likeminded supportersare motivated by Islamic teachings.
Nor does it matter if only a teeny tiny percentage of Muslim migrants harbor such animus. If only 1% of a beverage is poisoned and you ingest it, will it matter that 99% of it was clean? No, you will still suffer. The only sure way to preserve your health is not to put it into your body in the first place.
Of course, the liberal elite will never take such logic into account. After all, they are the ones most shielded from the consequences of their own starry-eyed ideals. Instead, no name, no face Americans—statistics, like the 14 killed in San Bernardino in part by a Muslim refugee—will continue paying the price for politicians, celebrities, and other media talking heads to grandstand about “our values.”
What of Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering America “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on?” While antithetical to the lofty and utopic platitudes offered by most politicians, it would actually work. A “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” would prevent Muslim wolves in refugee clothing from entering into America.
Put differently, the only sure way of not dying from Russian Roulette is—don’t play Russian Roulette.
Does this mean that America has no obligation towards true refugees? No. It means that there are far superior alternatives, for all concerned. Remember, this refugee crisis was supposedly precipitated by the Islamic State. Rather than passively accepting what ISIS sends to America—some of which is tainted and will be harmful to its body—the U.S. should annihilate the genocidal terror state. Instead of playing ISIS’ game, the U.S. should end the game, quickly and decisively.
Then, instead of having to start anew in some foreign land, true, displaced refugees would happily return to their homes and families, in peace and safety. Such would be a win-win for all—except for the savages who deserve no mercy.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
One clash involves those who would make America more corrupt, more violent, more drug addicted and poorer. The other involves those who would make Islam dominant, bringing us Sharia law along with the violence and social unrest now seen in Europe.
Illegal immigration from South of the Border
Is she right or wrong?
Corruption in the United States mainly (but not exclusively) enriches the political class. In the Latin Amerian countries my wife and I explored during our seven years of sailing in the Caribbean, we saw corruption in most countries. However, rather than being mainly at the top, it was accepted and relied upon by all levels of society. Venezuela under Chavez was the worst. The more illegal immigrants from Latin America who enter America, the more corruption we will have at all levels.
Our southern border is not a sieve; it is wide open to all who can get to it, with no significant efforts to restrict entry or to deport the many who get across illegally.
Perhaps that’s among the reasons why the U.S. Border Patrol agents’ union broke with its policy of endorsing no presidential candidate to support Donald Trump.
“We need a person in the White House who doesn’t fear the media, who doesn’t embrace political correctness, who doesn’t need the money, who is familiar with success, who won’t bow to foreign dictators, who is pro-military and values law enforcement, and who is angry for America and NOT subservient to the interests of other nations. Donald Trump is such a man,” the union said.
Trump had scheduled a tour of the border with agents from a local chapter of the union, but that tour was canceled due to pressure from the group’s national headquarters. Yet the endorsement, which Trump’s campaign touted Wednesday, came from the national union.
The results of our open border are felt well beyond border states. In St. Louis, Missouri for example, a substantial spike in violent crime has been traced to cheap heroin and Mexican cartels. Ditto Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.
“The gangs have to have a lot of customers because the heroin is so cheap,” said Gary Tuggle, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief in Philadelphia, who observed the same phenomenon while overseeing the agency’s Baltimore office. ”What we are seeing is these crews becoming more violent as they look to expand their turf.”
To attract customers, the cartels — usually through a local surrogate — instruct gangs to sell the drug at prices as low as $5 for each button (about one-tenth of a gram of powdered heroin, which could last a novice user an entire day). At times, the gangs distribute free samples, according to agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Drugs are one part of the illegal immigration problem, but far from the only part. On March 16th, an article by Victor Davis Hanson was posted at PJ Media. It was titled The Weirdness of Illegal Immigration. Hanson’s basic thesis is that illegal immigration begets disregard for the law and hence additional lawlessness.
[C]ontemplate what happens in a social, cultural, and economic context when several million immigrants arrive from one of the poorest areas in the world (e.g., Oaxaca) to one of the most affluent (e.g., California). For guidance, think not of Jorge Ramos, but of the premodern/postmodern collision that is occurring in Germany, Austria, and Denmark.
The first casualty is the law. I am not referring to the collapse of federal immigration enforcement, but rather the ripples that must follow from it. When someone ignores a federal statute, then it is naturally easy to flout more. In Los Angeles, half the traffic accidents are hit-and-run collisions. I can attest first-hand that running from an accident or abandoning a wrecked vehicle is certainly a common occurrence in rural California. Last night on a rural road, a driver behind me (intoxicated? Malicious? Crazy?) apparently tried to rear-end me, then turned off his lights, sped up, and at the next stop sign pulled over swearing out the window in Spanish. In this age and in these environs, why would one call a sheriff for a minor everyday occurrence like that? The point is simply that when there is no federal law, no one has any idea how several million arrive in the U.S., much less what exactly they were doing before their illegal arrival. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
Out here almost all laws concerning the licensing and vaccination of dogs seem to have simply disappeared. No one can walk or ride a bicycle along these rural roads without being attacked by hounds that are unlicensed and not vaccinated—and that have no ID or indeed owners that step forward to claim ownership once the victim is bleeding. The Bloomberg Rule reigns (i.e., if you can’t keep snow off the street, deplore global warming or cosmic war): we talk of dreamers because we have not a clue how to ensure that hundreds of thousands of pets are registered and given rabies shots. No one suggests that once one breaks the law of his adopted home, and continues to do so through false affidavits, aliases, and fraudulent documents, then the law itself become an abstraction, useful as a shelter, expendable if an inconvenience. Again, one assumes that if a citizen were to do that, he would face a felony indictment.
. . . .
An indigent Oaxacan immigrant is reminded more often by his host that his poverty is not the result of his own wild gamble to leave his home and enter illegally an entirely foreign universe, but due to the racism, nativism, and xenophobia of his clueless host—pathologies that can be ameliorated by plenty of advocates whose own careers are predicated on open borders and slow if any assimilation.
Yesterday, I saw this story of a walkout from a local high school, five miles away: Among the many racialized complaints was a strange one that that were not enough Latino school board members (that might apparently ensure interpreters at board meeting). “We feel oppressed and underrepresented. When we try to speak up, they don’t listen,” said student Monica Velazquez. “When the majority of the school board is white and male, I don’t see us being represented. And [Laton High School] is just a small piece of that problem.” In our world of victimology, being oppressed and underrepresented are quirky assertions (e.g., ethnic chauvinism mean that coveted spots must reflect ethnic percentages of the population, while ethnic disproportion in unmentionable activities is left unsaid).
Where does all this lead? I suggest we open our eyes and watch it in progress. Mass flight either out of state, or to coastal enclaves, where liberalism and abstract progressive utopianism can be indulged safety without worries over the concrete ramifications that follow from one’s own idealism. If deeds trump words, then the real racists or exclusionists are those in the mostly affluent coastal enclaves who suddenly want no part of the California that they have helped to create.
The final tragedy? If the border were to be closed, if immigration laws were enforced, if there were some reduction in legal immigration, if entry were to be meritocratic, if we reverted to the melting-pot ideal of assimilation, if we cut –studies courses and jettisoned therapy and ideology for hard science, math, and English language, in just two decades one’s particular ancestry would become irrelevant — the image of Oaxaca would be analogous to having a grandfather from Palermo or cousin from the Azores. In other words, things would work out fine.
Please read the entire article. It’s one of VDH’s best.
While there are no actual “No Go Zones” in the United States, there are neighborhoods scattered around the United States, where the concentration of ethnic immigrant minorities is so great that police find themselves unable to make the sort of inroads that they should be able to make in order to effectively police these communities. Adding to the high density of these aliens in these communities is the issue of foreign languages often being the prevalent language in such “ghettos.” This gives new meaning to the term “Language Barrier.”
. . . .
Not unlike the “No Go Zones” of European countries, these communities in the Unites States also tend to shield foreign nationals who may be fugitives from justice both inside the United States and in other countries. Terrorists and their supporters are able to go about their daily lives- undetected by law enforcement agencies.
Implementation of sanctuary policies in such cities greatly exacerbates the threats posed to national security and public safety- turning those cities into magnets that attract still more radicals and fugitives and terrorists who need to “fly under the radar.”
Any community that provides safe haven for illegal aliens willfully endangers the lives of it residents.
Even as concerns about increased threats of terror attacks are the topic of a succession of Congressional hearings, so-called “Sanctuary Cities” continue to flourish- with the tacit approval of the administration even though they are clearly operating in violation of federal law.
Islamic immigration, legal and illegal
Europe
Much of Europe has been overrun with Islamic “immigrants” and “refugees.” In consequence, Sweden, Germany and other nations are faring poorly. It is virtually impossible to determine who they are (use of forged passports and other identity documents is rampant), where they come from or whether they are seeking refuge from violence in their home countries or ways to bring it to Europe on behalf of Allah “the all merciful.” Perhaps national suicide is a “merciful” way to go. Unfortunately, few in Europe’s political class acknowledge the nature of the predicament their constituents face.
Despite the series of horrific attacks perpetrated by Muslim terrorists in the name of their religion, Europe is not taking the appropriate steps to suppress the phenomenon. Very few mosques in which clerics preach for war against the infidels have been closed down; public order has not been restored to the lawless suburbs in large cities; there is no real oversight of textbooks used in Muslim schools and mosques; very few radical imams have been deported; no significant countermeasures have been taken against Muslims expressing extremist views; and the burka ban has not been implemented.
These are just several of the signs pointing to Europe’s lack of comprehension that some of the Muslims living among them want the continent to fall under Muslim sovereignty, whether by way of the Islamic State approach of violent jihad or by the Muslim Brotherhood approach of population growth and Islamic preaching.
There are many excuses: Misconceptions that violent Muslims are that way simply because they are poor and unloved, a misperceived need to expand the workforce by importing those unwilling and/or unable to participate in that workforce are parts of the problem. So is Europe’s “original sin” of colonialism, for which all of Europe must atone. Another is a fear that if they are not appeased Muslims will become more violent.
Rooting out militant Islam will require taking police action in Muslim-controlled areas. We have already seen the humiliating footage of police officers fleeing under a hail of rocks and Molotov cocktails, hurled at them by crowds of incensed Muslims. Another contributing factor is the dependency of political leaders, primarily from the Left, on the Muslim vote (French President Francois Hollande owes his election victory to the Muslims).
Turkish Muslims living in Germany are on the move. Are they “refugees” (from where) or economic “immigrants” just seeking a better life?
Turkish Muslims living in Germany threaten Germany Shouting “With Allah’s (and Merkel’s?) help, we shall conquer you,” Turkish Muslims take to the streets of Germany, carrying Turkish flags and using the ‘Grey Wolves’ salute, the Turkish equivalent of a National Socialist (NAZI) salute. Just think, Angela Merkel has just signed an agreement to allow Turkish Muslims into Germany without having to get a visa.
Don’t they seem grateful for their new opportunities to prosper? Oh well. Swedish women and girls gotta “love” them, like it or not.
Some “ordinary” Europeans are getting fed with up mass immigration and support anti-immigrant politicians. The left objects.
The message was delivered in a video featuring a multi-ethnic crowd of disabled, gay and transgender people, as well as a Muslim woman wearing a face veil and a man wearing traditional Saudi headgear, all telling a crowd of Germans that they are “not Germany”.
The video opens with a crowd of angry-looking white Germans hitting against the windows of a bus to intimidate a frightened Arab child and his father, a policeman dragging the child out and hurling him to the ground. Led by the German comedian and television presenter’Jan Böhmermann, brightly dressed people rise from graves, forming a crowd to combat the beige-clad Germans who are wielding Donald Trump placards and signs reading “Refugees not welcome.”
Condemning the German crowd as “authoritarian nationalist dorks” and telling them “you are not the people, you are the past,” Böhmermann cautions that “true Germans are coming for you, you’d better run fast.”
Warning the beige-clad Germans that “10 million bicycle helmets are in sight” Böhmermann describes the lifestyle of “true Germans” to be one of cycling, recycling and eating kebab and muesli. In what is perhaps a jab at protests from senior members of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union against pork being “quietly removed from menus” of public canteens, Böhmermann also declares that the “true Germans” eat vegan sausages.
In 2005, more people from Islamic countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than there had been in any other year in the previous two decades.[13][14] In 2009, more than 115,000 Muslims became legal residents of the United States.[15]
That’s just those who are legally present. Those present illegally? The powers-that-be haven’t a clue as to who they are, where they are, how they got here, where they came from or what they want. We experienced the gifts bestowed upon us by some legally present in Obama’s America during the Boston marathon as well as in Fort Hood, San Bernardino and elsewhere.
President Barack Obama has been quietly pushing new plans to bring thousands of additional Syrian refugees into the country, despite the concerns of state and county officials and the outrages committed by welfare-dependent migrants in Europe.
Obama’s special assistant to the president for immigration policy, Felicia Escobar, recently announced plans to increase America’s intake of migrants, according to the Washington Examiner.
“We want to make sure that we can increase our numbers of refugees that are able to settle here,” Escobar said. “The need globally is so, so, so massive right now, given all the displacement and conflict around the world, but we also know that we have to do it in a way that’s smart.”
Federal law already allows the administration to bring in 10,000 Syrian refugees a year, but many states and local county administrations have complained that once the Obama administration places refugees among them, few resources are available to deal with them.
The influx is very unpopular, according to polls. Also, nearly all immigrants from the Middle East are dependent on welfare. Some migrant and some second-generation Muslim Americans also embrace jihad.
During his March 2016 visit to a mosque, Obama praised Muslims living in America.
In rebuke to politicians like Donald Trump, Obama presented Islam as an essential part of the nation’s heritage, going back to Muslim slaves brought to the British colonies and running through Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom up to Fazlur Rahman Khan, who designed two of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers. And he spoke emotionally about mail he received from Muslim American children and parents who felt persecuted and unsafe.
“We’re one American family. And when any part of our family starts to feel separate or second-class or targeted, it tears at the very fabric of our nation,” he said.
. . . .
On Wednesday he responded to critics—especially Republican contenders to replace him in the White House—who complain that he won’t label Islamic terrorism as such, saying demands to label by religion only play into extremist propaganda.
“I often hear it said that we need moral clarity in this fight. And the suggestion is somehow that if I would simply say, ‘These are all Islamic terrorists,’ then we would actually have solved the problem by now, apparently,” he said. “Let’s have some moral clarity: Groups like ISIS are desperate for legitimacy…. We must never give them that legitimacy. They’re not defending Islam. They’re not defending Muslims.”
Implicitly responding to tiresome calls for the “moderate Muslims” to speak out against terrorism, Obama said that they are speaking—but not enough people are listening. He vowed to work to amplify their voices. [Emphasis added.|
There are, in fact, Muslims who want to reform Islam; Obama pays them scant attention. Instead, He consorts with CAIR and it’s co-conspirators to keep Islam just the way it is. Here’s a video of some reform-minded Muslims. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, produced and directed it as well as others in the Honor Diaries series.
And here’s a video of some who think Islam is just fine the way it is.
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.
In Heretic, Hirsi Ali argued,
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.]
Yet there are Islamic enclaves in America where Sharia is practiced. According to The Clarion Project, there are at least twenty-two.
Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani militant group that has rebranded itself as Muslims of the Americas, says it has 22 “Islamic villages” in the U.S. Its “Islamberg” headquarters in New York is the most well-known.
Fuqra’s 1994 book, Target Islam: Exposing the Malicious Conspiracy of the Zionists Against the World of Islam and Prominent Muslim Leaders,explains that its establishment of “villages” in the U.S. since 1980 is part of a jihad against a Satanic-Jewish-Communist conspiracy that puppeteers the U.S. government.
They have a cultish devotion to their extremist leader in Pakistan, Sheikh Gilani, who they believe is in constant contact with Allah and the Prophet Mohammed and a miracle worker chosen by Allah to lead Islam to victory.
. . . .
“The Jammatul Fuqra has been able to establish justice according to Islamic Law, not only in the United States, but wherever Muslims are living under un-Islamic laws. According to the Holy Q’uran, a Muslim is not allowed to follow laws other than the law of the Holy Qu’ran…This so-called ‘freedom’ is actually enslavement by the kufaar [non-Muslims] and Shaitan [Satan]…”
It continues:
“On these sites where Islamic Law is enforced as much as possible, anyone who commits a crime against the Law of Allah is punished according to Ta’azerat….Here you see one person receiving twenty lashes in one [Sharia] court in South America. He was found guilty of violating the honor of a Muslim lady, a crime for which he received a hard punishment with patience and faith.”
The article says that the hudud punishments, such as execution and severing of hands and feet, cannot be enforced in kuffar (infidel) lands like the U.S. Notice that this isn’t a stand against sharia‘s brutal hudud punishments; just that they aren’t implementable at this time.
With freedoms of speech and religion lacking in Islamic countries, America could become the birthplace of Islamic reform. With Obama in office? Not a chance.
Conclusions
People from some foreign cultures have integrated and become productive American citizens. Many who have come illegally have not and live on welfare payments and other government subsidies. Since the current administration welcomes them and seeks more, we get (some) cheap labor, plentiful cheap heroin and substantial welfare costs. We also get drug gang-related violence, lawlessness metastasizing into areas beyond immigration itself and corruption.
Our Islamic “refugees” and “immigrants” bring us some similar and some different bounties, just a bit less thus far. They bring us the gift of jihad and Sharia law while enjoying welfare-based lives and complaining that anyone who complains is racist and “Islamophobic.”
There is little that any of us, individually, can do to halt or even slow the Haspanification and Islamification of America. We need to vote for leaders who will undertake — seriously and not merely with pleasing slogans — the legislative and legitimate executive steps needed for that purpose.
Despite the series of horrific attacks perpetrated by Muslim terrorists in the name of their religion, Europe is not taking the appropriate steps to suppress the phenomenon. Very few mosques in which clerics preach for war against the infidels have been closed down; public order has not been restored to the lawless suburbs in large cities; there is no real oversight of textbooks used in Muslim schools and mosques; very few radical imams have been deported; no significant countermeasures have been taken against Muslims expressing extremist views; and the burka ban has not been implemented.
These are just several of the signs pointing to Europe’s lack of comprehension that some of the Muslims living among them want the continent to fall under Muslim sovereignty, whether by way of the Islamic State approach of violent jihad or by the Muslim Brotherhood approach of population growth and Islamic preaching.
The first reason behind this European complacency is that most Islamic researchers in the West attribute the current situation to the dire economic status of many Muslims, social alienation, an inclination toward radicalization and the Israeli “occupation,” rather than attributing it to the implementation of orthodox Islam.
The second reason is Western economic interests. As early as 1969, the king of Belgium gave the Saudis an enormous building in the country’s capital, which subsequently became the “Islamic and Cultural Center of Belgium” and a headquarters for the Muslim World League, which aims to propagate the strict brand of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. The frenzied rush of European states to close business deals with Iran following the July 2015 nuclear accord is further evidence of this.
The third reason is the fear of uprisings. Rooting out militant Islam will require taking police action in Muslim-controlled areas. We have already seen the humiliating footage of police officers fleeing under a hail of rocks and Molotov cocktails, hurled at them by crowds of incensed Muslims. Another contributing factor is the dependency of political leaders, primarily from the Left, on the Muslim vote (French President Francois Hollande owes his election victory to the Muslims).
Additionally, feelings of guilt over Europe’s original sin of colonialism — a sin that serves to validate the yearning for revenge harbored by immigrants from countries once conquered by the West — also play a role in Europe’s stupor in the face of Islam. Thus we receive the paradigm widely accepted among mainly leftist circles that the impoverished individual is always justified, regardless of his actions.
The Europeans, apart from the Russians, have no desire to fight or put themselves in harm’s way. The fact that Western states have refused to deploy ground forces to fight Islamic State, which is responsible for the majority of the terrorist attacks in Europe, is proof of this. Another reason is the conviction that the current wave of immigration is necessary, due to the extremely low birth rates in Europe, along with the belief that Europe will be able to “Westernize” the Muslims, just as previous waves of immigrants have been “Westernized.”
Finally are the feelings of guilt over the atrocities committed by these Western states during the Holocaust, which the radical right is gradually shedding. Europe is shutting its eyes. The Islamization of Europe is a real possibility, precisely as Professor Bernard Lewis, the greatest researcher of Islam, predicted.
There is a famous photo of Anjem Choudary, the head of multiple banned organizations calling for imposing Sharia law on the UK whose follower was responsible for the Lee Rigby beheading, getting drunk as a young law student. Friends recall“Andy” smoking pot and taking LSD, sleeping around and partying all the time. Andy was really well integrated, but he still turned back into Anjem.
While the proliferation of segregated Muslim areas, no-go zones in which English, French or Dutch is the foreign language, is a major problem, it is a mistake to think that “integration” solves Islamic terrorism.
It doesn’t.
The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings seemed integrated. Nobody noticed anything wrong with Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino shooter, or Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber. They weren’t lurking in a no-go zone. They had American friends, an education and career options if they wanted them. They didn’t want them. And that’s the point.
Bilal Abdullah was a British-born doctor who tried to carry out a terrorist attack at Glasgow International Airport. He wasn’t marginalized, jobless or desperate. He had a cause.
Quite a few converts have become Muslim terrorists. If integration were the issue, white converts to Islam wouldn’t be running off to join ISIS or plotting terrorist attacks like Don Stewart-Whyte, who converted to Islam and planned to blow up planes headed from the UK to the US. Along with his friend Oliver Savant, the son of a secular Iranian father and British mother, they are the reason why you can’t carry liquids onto a plane.
Muslim terrorism is not caused by failed integration, but by a conscious disintegration. What is often described as “radicalization” is really a choice by “integrated” Muslims to become religious and to act on their beliefs. Muslim men who formerly dressed casually begin growing beards and wearing Salafist garb. They consciously reject what Western society has to offer because they have chosen Islam instead.
Islamic terrorists have not been alienated by our rejection. They champion an alien creed that rejects us.
The debate over Islamic terrorism is bogged down by a refusal to name it and understand what it is. ISIS is not a form of “nihilism” that European Muslims resort to after being alienated by racism and driven to despair by joblessness. It’s an alternative system that draws on over a thousand years of Islamic religion and culture. It’s not a negative choice, but a positive one. It’s not an act of despair, but of hope.
Social, linguistic and cultural integration won’t stop Islamic terrorism. They may prevent it in some cases and accelerate it in others. But it’s not the primary factor. Religion is. Cultural integration won’t make much of a difference in the face of religious disintegration.
This is the type of integration that is the real problem. Some of the worst Jihadists are culturally integrated and religiously disintegrated. They speak the native language fluently. They are intimately familiar with popular culture. They move easily among the native population. It’s their belief system that is fundamentally disintegrated and whose demands cannot be integrated without a civil war.
Their choices are not a referendum on our society. What we do in response to their terrorism is.
The issue is not economic. It is not linguistic. It is not about alienation or racism. It is about religion. And Europe is not comfortable with religion. It assumes that the religious is political, but in Islam, the political is instead religious. Europe has given no thought to how Islam can be integrated as a religion. Instead it has relied on the assumption that all religions are basically alike and that the aims and ideas of Islam are therefore interchangeable with those of Catholics, Lutherans, Jews and anyone else.
Every Islamic terrorist attack sends the message that its ideas and aims are not interchangeable.
Europe does face challenges of cultural integration. But cultural disintegration isn’t blowing up airports or subways. Religious disintegration is. Cultural disintegration accounts for crime, riots and unemployment. It occasionally feeds into Islamic terrorism, but ideological violence is aspirational. It’s generally practiced by members of the middle class with money, leisure time and lots of self-esteem.
Like left-wing terror, Islamic terrorism is based on realizing a set of ideas about what the world should be like. These ideas are already embedded in the worldview of every Muslim to some degree. This is not a clash of civilizations or even cultures. It is a collision between the political and the religious.
The EU’s Federica Mogherini states, “Islam belongs in Europe…. I am not afraid to say that political Islam should be part of the picture.” Mogherini thinks of political Islam as a social welfare organization with a steeple, like the rest of the political religions of Europe. But political Islam is theocracy. And Europe was never able to integrate theocracy. Instead it overshadowed it with nationalism and then Socialism.
Secular Europe has forgotten what religion is. Religion is passion, conviction and redemption. It is not something that you occasionally live on the weekends. It transforms your life and your worldview.
How do you integrate that? Do you do it with language lessons, job training and a pat on the back?
Islamic terrorism is what happens when Muslims “get” religion. Not of the occasional casual variety, but of the fundamentally transformative kind. Integration assumes that once Mohammed is at university and drinking beer that he won’t suddenly decide to Jihad his way across Europe. But there are plenty of examples that show what a poor and fitful defense this is against the rebirth of a religious conviction.
Cultural integration is an issue, but the real issue is philosophical integration. The real challenge is not in linguistic integration, but in the integration of ideas. And it is impossible to do that without addressing what Islam actually is and what it believes. Islam is not Lutheranism with more Arabic. Political Islam is not a soup kitchen and a used clothes bin. It is a conviction that the world is locked in a titanic struggle between Islam and the infidels, the forces of light and darkness, which must be won at any cost.
How do you integrate an ideology that is convinced that non-Muslim political systems are evil into Europe? What explanatory videos will you use to admonish Ahmed from Syria that he shouldn’t set off bombs at the railway station even though his religion commands him to fight the infidels? Which job will you use to induce Abdul to abandon his fervent belief that everyone must live under Islamic law?
Sanctimony and denial won’t untangle this Gordian knot. No amount of NGOs will turn Islam into something else. Cultural integration won’t transform Muslims into non-Muslims. All it does is make them conflicted and insecure. And that is why it is those second-generation culturally integrated Muslims who go to bars, call themselves Andy or Mo, sell drugs, go to university, who take a detour into Syria and come back with bomb plans and big plans for transforming Europe into an Islamic state.
Cultural integration builds up a conflict with Islam. Some Muslims respond to it by abandoning Islam, others by embracing it. If we fail to recognize this, then integration becomes a ticking time bomb.
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