Islam, nothing but Islam!

It’s Islam, Stupid! — Redux (thanks to PI: Commenter Fabio Barbieri replies to my entry It’s Islam, Stupid!)

• Related: Muhammad’s Marriage to Zainab

Islamo Agit prop Badawi

On the same day as you published this (Sunday 25 July) I saw a long (half-hour) BBC interview with Eileen Gittins, the founder of the print-to-order company Blurb. (Print-to-order companies are internet-based businesses that allow anyone to publish a book and make as many or as few copies as they can sell or pay for. The best-known is Lulu.) The interviewer was Zeinab Bedawi, a Muslim of the same kind as Aygül Özkan, dressed in subdued chic, gracefully made up and coiffured, and with not the shadow of a veil in sight. From the beginning, Ms.Bedawi was visibly hostile, and her questioning was clearly aimed at showing, either that there was something unethical – as in the case of old-fashioned vanity publishers – about print-to-order, or that it would lower the level of communication.

For the first ten minutes or so of the interview, I felt that this was the caste arrogance of the professional journo coming out – we cannot allow all that blogger rabble to pollute the sanctuary of mass communication with their muddy boots and vile manners. But then, at first from behind a tangle of words and claims, and then more and more clearly, another agenda showed itself. Suppose someone published something that was offensive. Well, answered Ms.Gittins, we have mechanisms in place – we don’t vet everything ourselves, but we encourage the public to make complaints. Ah, said Ms.Bedawi, but what about things offensive to particular groups? Like, say, the Danish cartoons? She started really hammering at this point, which is when I switched the TV off – though I must say that Ms.Gittins was being admirably stout and refusing to privilege a group’s claims over freedom of expression.

This made me think. It seems evident to me that what Ms.Bedawi instinctively opposed was the thought of thousands, maybe millions of people, each publishing freely – what is already happening with the internet, but in the more permanent and respected medium of paper. Where the surface of caste prejudice and the inner reality of religious threat meet, was in hating the idea of mass action – mob action – in the print media. Now Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims, certainly do not dislike mob action as such: it is their main way to be felt – yelling crowds of bearded youths pouring from mosques on hot Friday afternoons. On the other hand, the appeal clearly made by Bedawi to non-Muslims in general is clearly coded in a language of snobbery, intended to reach the elites and those who regard themselves as elite. It says: “Don’t allow this banausic mob of Sunday scribblers to take control of the media from you – you who are educated, professional and enlightened. See what risks you run when you allow Uncle Tom Cobbley and all to say what they think about things they know nothing of – such as Islam?” In other words, there is an inherent attempt to co-opt the non-Muslim societal leaderships into the job of Muslim repression, by flattering their intellectual and social presumptions. You can hear it in the constant but never justified claim that anyone who criticizes or opposes Islam does so because he is ignorant: this is frequently repeated by establishment supporters of Islam – and you can see that the assumption involved helps them accept the claim, by flattering their own self-image. Hey, you don’t understand Islam – because we do! Who else but us, the educated, the enlightened? So a religion that lives on the unleashing of its own mobs – and in which sometimes the mobs even devour some of the elites, and always threaten them – also advances by flattering the natural snobbish and repressive instincts of the elites of opposite groups; and not just by threatening them. That is not necessary when you can just arouse their own contempt – laced by unspoken fear – for the mobs in their own world. Of course, fears remaining a useful unadmitted motivation, but there is no need to ever mention it: to the contrary, you may act for all the world like the most quivering of cowed dhimmis and still see in the mirror the face of a paragon, a hero of enlightened vision and principle.

Astute observations like that always spur my interest, so I did a quick Google search on Zeinab Bedawi (or Badawi). Here is an excerpt from herWikipedia entry. She …

… was born in Sudan and has lived in Britain since the age of one. Badawi was educated at Hornsey High School for Girls in North London, followed by the University of Oxford (St Hilda’s College) in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) with a post-graduate degree on the Middle East from the School of Oriental and African Studies, awarded with a distinction. At Oxford she was a member of the Oxford University Broadcasting Society.

Journalism career

Badawi was a researcher and broadcast journalist for Yorkshire TV from 1982 to 1986. After a spell at BBC Manchester she joined Channel 4 News in 1988, and co-presented the programme from 1989 until leaving for the BBC in 1998.

At the BBC Badawi worked at Westminster on live political programmes for five years, and also worked on BBC radio, regularly presenting The World Tonight on Radio 4 and BBC World Service’s Newshour. In 2005, Badawi became the new presenter of The World on BBC Four, the UK’s first daily news bulletin devoted principally to international news. In May 2007 the programme was rebranded as World News Today.

In November 2009, Badawi was named “international TV personality of the year” in the annual AIBs, the international media excellence awards organised by the Association for International Broadcasting.

From 2010, in addition to her presenting role on BBC World News, Badawi has presented on the BBC News Channel.

Public positions

Badawi has been an adviser to the Foreign Policy Centre and a Council Member of the Overseas Development Institute. She is a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery (since 2004) and the British Council.

So here we have a woman, an immigrant to Britain, who owes everything she is to the culture in which she was raised. She was showered with honours and important positions where she had considerable influence on the opinion making process within the culture that raised and made her. And as I don’t know the circumstances, I am not even saying that this remarkable career was, all or partly, a matter of affirmative action, white guilt, Western self-loathing or whatever. Let’s assume she was, and is, truly deserving of all that. And yes, there is no veil in sight and let’s, too, reflect for a precious moment what would have happened to her had she remained in Sudan.

And when all is said and done, where do her loyalties lie? It’s Islam, stupid!

Daniel Pipes , THE JERUSALEM POST

Agit-props for  Islamic causes: pseudo-scholar Tariq Ramadan and congressman Keith Ellison, seen here swearing allegiance on Thomas Jefferson’s Koran….

Lion’s Den: Islamism 2.0 – an even greater threat

To borrow a computer term, if Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Nidal Hasan represent Islamism 1.0, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (the prime minister of Turkey), Tariq Ramadan (a Swiss intellectual), and Keith Ellison (a US congressman) represent Islamism 2.0. The former kill more people but the latter pose a greater threat to Western civilization.

• That’s what we call the Stealth Jihad

The 1.0 version attacks those perceived as obstructing its goal of a society ruled by a global caliphate and totally regulated by Shari’a (Islamic law). Islamism’s original tactics, from totalitarian rule to mega-terrorism, encompass unlimited brutality. Three thousand dead in one attack? Bin Laden’s search for atomic weaponry suggests the murderous toll could be a hundred or even a thousand times larger.

Islamic Infiltration of key departments, wherever you look:

Department of the Defenseless

By Joe Kaufman/ Muslims against sharia

However, a review of the past three decades, since Islamism became a significant political force, finds that violence alone rarely works. Survivors of terrorism rarely capitulate to radical Islam – not after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt in 1981, nor the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bombings of 2002, the Madrid bombing of 2004, the Amman bombing of 2005, or the terrorist campaigns in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Terrorism does physical damage and kills and intimidates but it rarely overturns the existing order. Imagine Islamists had caused the devastation of Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 tsunami – what could these have lastingly achieved?

NON-TERRORIST violence aimed at applying Shari’a does hardly better. Revolution (meaning, a wide-scale social revolt) took Islamists to power in just one place at one time – Iran in 1978-79. Likewise, a coup d’état (a military overthrow) carried them to power just once – Sudan in 1989. Same for civil war – Afghanistan in 1996.

If the violence of Islamism 1.0 rarely succeeds in forwarding the Shari’a, the Islamism 2.0 strategy of working through the system does better. Islamists, adept at winning public opinion, represent the main opposition force in Muslim-majority countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, and Kuwait. Islamists have enjoyed electoral success in Algeria in 1992, Bangladesh in 2001, Turkey in 2002, and Iraq in 2005.

Once in power, they can move the country toward Shari’a. As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faces the wrath of Iranian street demonstrators and bin Laden cowers in a cave, Erdogan basks in public approval, remakes the Republic of Turkey, and offers an enticing model for Islamists worldwide.

Recognizing this pattern, al-Qaida’s once-leading theorist has publicly repudiated terrorism and adopted political means. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (b. 1950, also known by the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl) was accused of helping assassinate Sadat. In 1988, he published a book that argued for perpetual, violent jihad against the West. With time, however, Sharif observed the inutility of violent attacks and instead advocated a strategy of infiltrating the state and influencing society.

In a recent book, he condemned the use of force against Muslims (“Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers”) and even against non-Muslims (9/11 was counterproductive, for “what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy’s buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?”).

Sharif’s evolution from theorist of terrorism to advocate of lawful transformation echoes a much broader shift; accordingly, as author Lawrence Wright notes, his defection poses a “terrible threat” to al-Qaida. Other once-violent Islamist organizations in Algeria, Egypt, and Syria have recognized the potential of lawful Islamism and largely renounced violence. One also sees a parallel shift in Western countries; Ramadan and Ellison represent a burgeoning trend.

(What one might call Islamism 1.5 – a combination of hard and soft means, of external and internal approaches – also works. It involves lawful Islamists softening up the enemy, then violent elements seizing power. The Hamas takeover of Gaza proved that such a combination can work: win elections in 2006, then stage a violent insurrection in 2007. Similar processes are possibly underway in Pakistan. The United Kingdom might be undergoing the opposite process, whereby violence creates a political opening.)

In conclusion, only Islamists, not fascists or communists, have gone well beyond crude force to win public support and develop a 2.0 version. Because this aspect of Islamism undermines traditional values and destroys freedoms, it may threaten civilized life even more than does 1.0′s brutality.

The writer (DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

by Jeffrey Imm/Anti-Jihad League of America

In the “stealth Jihad” war of ideas over the past year, one American institution after another has signaled its willingness to surrender to the advocates of Islamic supremacism — our homeland security, our military, and ourlaw enforcement. Islamic supremacist groups have “guided” such American government organizations to create a“terror lexicon” that excludes “Jihad,” to promote “progress” over “liberty,” to blackball those who would confront the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic supremacists, to “train” our law enforcement, and to openly promote engagement with Islamic supremacist organizations as part of counterterrorism tactics.

Read it all

WaPo: KABUL – A suicide bomber struck a US convoy in southern Afghanistan yesterday, killing two American soldiers, and military officials announced the deaths of two other international troopers – one American and one Briton – the day before. Obama yesterday summoned his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for a 25-minute meeting aboard Air Force One in Copenhagen. (In three months, the  Obamessiah has 25 minutes for his top general, how generous…/ed)

• 19 Reasons To Win In Afghanistan
• Iranian Dissidents Tell of Rape in Captivity…
• My Allah is better than yours: Saudi ‘Extremists’ Burn Down Venue to Block Poetry
• Cookies for Peace/there is no cure for the cooks of this Obama regime…

Infiltration Watch: Georgetown Prof John Esposito still whoring for Allah

The Georgetown professor cozies up to terror supporters, even while telling the rest of us that we have nothing to fear from Islam. H/T Counter Jihad

All the Islamo-propaganda Arab money can buy…

“Esposito’s academic standing provides him an opportunity to defend radical Islam and promote its ideology – including defending terrorist organizations and those who support them, advocating for Islamist regimes, praising radical Islamists and their apologists, and downplaying the threat of Islamist violence and involvement with Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in the U.S.,” the report declares.

Read it all

DownUnder Jihad News from Militant Islam Monitor:

Victoria’s Chief Commissioner of Police, Simon Overland, cookie of the month:

Our Dhimwit hero distinguished himself after the recent terrorism raids in Melbourne by rushing to reassure the victims (who thanks to his sensitivity training, he identified as the Islamic community) and making a plea for Australians to be more understanding: Read it all>>

• MORE than 600 asylum seekers have been granted refugee visas in the past 10 months, more than the number of illegal arrivals recorded in the previous six years.

• More than 60 Indonesians who arrived by boat in Australian waters have been returned home after failing to meet criteria for refugee status.

• A SISTER of the Ibrahim brothers has been arrested by police who found $3 million in cash, stashed in the ceiling of a house in northwest Sydney.

No, Muslims did not “Discover America Before Columbus” and America is not “the largest Muslim country in the world” just because the fraudulent impostor Hussein Obama says so. But the Arabs, who have put him through university and bought him the presidency, have bigger plans: preparing the ground to make America Islamic.

US Textbooks: “Muslims Discovered America”

Infiltration Watch: the Saudis are perverting the teaching of fundamental facts in US schools. This is not only a sly attempt at rewriting  history, this is preparing the ground for an Islamic takeover.

This is Stealth Jihad

Saudi-Influenced Textbooks in American Schools

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6bARRmEpH8[/youtube]

• Shock Horror! Muslim parents ‘unaware of hardline teaching’ at some Islamic schools!
• CBN Discovers the Saudi Funded Schoolbook Jihad
• “Jesus was a Pali Arab,” Claims U.S. History Text
• Obambi’s Intel Pick peddled Saudi funded book to U.S. public schools that falsely claims Muslims inhabited North America long before Europeans

The Islamic Guardian sees the Islamization of Europe through rose colored glasses:

Five years ago bombings and riots fuelled anxiety that Europe’s Muslims were on the verge of mass radicalisation. Those predictions have not been borne out.

• Jason Burke  in Paris and  Ian Traynor in Brussels
•   Sunday 26 July 2009

Strange. Just a few days ago we had a completly different report from Fox News:

 “Yet Molenbeek remains disconcerting. Belgian police assigned three plainclothes officers to watch over a FOX News team shooting street scenes one morning in Molenbeek. When FOX News returned in the afternoon as more people were out and about, the police said it would be safer not to get out of the car. It wasn’t even dark yet.”

Muslim Colonization of Europe

You can read the whole thing on the bottom of this page…

  

Muslim women go shopping in Marseille. Photograph: Michel Gangne/AFP/Getty Images

A district of derelict warehouses, red-brick terraces, and vibrant street life on the canals near the centre of Brussels, Molenbeek was once known as Belgium’s “Little Manchester”. These days it is better known as “Little Morocco” since the population is overwhelmingly Muslim and of North African origin.

By day, the scene is one of children kicking balls on busy streets, of very fast, very small cars with very large sound systems. By night, the cafes and tea houses are no strangers to drug-dealers and mafia from the Maghreb.

For the politically active extreme right, and the anti-Islamic bloggers, Molenbeek is the nightmare shape of things to come: an incubator of tension and terrorism in Europe’s capital, part of a wave of “Islamisation” supposedly sweeping Europe, from the great North Sea cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam to Marseille and the Mediterranean.

The dire predictions of religious and identity-based mayhem reached their peak between 2004 and 2006, when bombs exploded in Madrid and London, a controversial film director was shot and stabbed to death in Amsterdam, and angry demonstrators marched against publication of satirical cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad.

For Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept, the continent’s future was to “tamely resign itself to a gradual transition to absolute sharia law”. By the end of the century, warned Bernard Lewis, the famous American historian of Islam, “Europe will be Islamic”. The Daily Telegraph asked: “Is France on the way to becoming an Islamic state?” The Daily Mail described the riots that shook the nation in the autumn of 2005 as a “Muslim intifada”.

Yet a few years on, though a steady drumbeat of apocalyptic forecasts continues, such fears are beginning to look misplaced. The warnings focus on three elements: the terrorist threat posed by radical Muslim European populations; a cultural “invasion” due to a failure of integration; and demographic “swamping” by Muslim communities with high fertility rates.

A new poll by Gallup, one of the most comprehensive to date, shows that the feared mass radicalisation of the EU’s 20-odd million Muslims has not taken place. Asked if violent attacks on civilians could be justified, 82% of French Muslims and 91% of German Muslims said no. The number who said violence could be used in a “noble cause” was broadly in line with the general population. Crucially, responses were not determined by religious practice – with no difference between devout worshippers and those for whom “religion [was] not important”.

“The numbers have been pretty steady over a number of years,” said Gallup’s Magali Rheault. “It is important to separate the mainstream views from the actions of the fringe groups, who often receive disproportionate attention. Mainstream Muslims do not appear to exhibit extremist behaviour.”

Polls always vary, and other surveys can be cited to point to higher degrees of extremism. There is also the point, made repeatedly by experts, that “it only takes half a dozen for a bomb attack”. There has also been a major surge in antisemitic attacks by young men from Muslim communities, especially in France. But there is nonetheless a sense, even among Europe’s counterterror strategists, that the tide of radicalisation of young Muslim men may be ebbing.

“We estimate about 10% of our Islamic population are in a dynamic of rejection of the west and Europe, 10% are more European than the Europeans, and about 80% are in the middle, just trying to get by,” said Alain Bauer, a criminologist and security adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy. “The concern is less home-grown or imported terrorists, but states such as Iran,” he said.

Last week the UK security threat was downgraded from “severe” (an attack is highly likely) to “substantial” (an attack is a strong possibility) – its lowest level since 9/11. Officials say the shift, although relative, recognises the combined effects of the efforts of security services, and a backlash against violent extremism among Muslims in the UK.

In the Netherlands, tension between the majority and the Muslim minority has redefined national politics in the past five years. The threat level last year was raised to the second highest level – in part because of the impact on Muslim communities of the success of the anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders. Yet even here security services say they see “the activities of homegrown [militant] cells being stable or diminishing because of a lack of leadership, and internal quarrelling”. This is the view of Judith Sluiter, of the National Co-ordinator for Counterterrorism agency, who adds: “The appeal of the radicals is declining. In the Moroccan community there is growing resistance to Islamic rejection [of Dutch society].”

The Dutch AIVD intelligence service recently reported that among the country’s other main Muslim immigrant community, from Turkey, “resistance to radical Islamic ideologies remains strong … In the short and medium term, there is no danger these [extreme] religious ideas will find many receptive ears in the Dutch Turkish community”.

In the Molenbeek district of Brussels, Sebastiano Guzzone has also seen a change. In eight years of advising locals of their rights, the Italian lawyer has come across mass murderers from Rwanda; Belgian Moroccans believed to have arrived from terrorist training camps in the Afghan-Pakistan border zone; and a North African who disappeared to Iraq to die as a suicide bomber. That was then.

“I haven’t seen anyone like that for a few years now,” said Guzzone. “The last Muslim fundamentalists I dealt with was in 2006. There’s fewer and fewer of them. The problem is exaggerated.”

For Kamel Bechik, who runs a Muslim Scout organisation in France’s south-west where youngsters proudly salute the national flag every morning and evening – while fasting if they want to during the holy month of Ramadan – recent history speaks for itself. “There are six million Muslims,” said Bechik, 35. “If the community had really become radicalised, it would have been pretty obvious.” However, there are other issues that go well beyond counterterrorism.

Christopher Caldwell, columnist at a conservative American review, the Weekly Standard, and author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, argues Europe is failing to face up to genuine and deep demographic and cultural change: “It is too simple to talk about the Islamisation of Europe. This is about the transformation of European society,” he told the Observer last week. Comparing immigration in Europe with the major waves of immigration in America of the late 19th and early 20th century, Caldwell said: “There is no real reflection on where this is taking us.”

In Europe, many reject the criticism. “We pose questions and we find answers,” said Bauer. “And the answer is saucisson, croissants and the French way of life.”

Others say the terms of the debate are still undefined. “Who is a European Muslim? Does a French second-generation immigrant shopkeeper of Moroccan Berber stock have much in common with an Iranian Shia female doctor living in Denmark, or a British Pakistani student or a German Turkish nightclub singer?” asked a Dutch city councillor. “We haven’t decided yet.”

Levels of religious observance also vary wildly. A government survey of German Muslims found only 10% of immigrants from south-east Europe pray every day, compared with more than half of those from North Africa.

In France, a similar disparity of views led to a row within the Muslim community when the government announced it would ban the burka.

Finally, there is a question of what integration means. The recent Gallup poll found European Muslim immigrants tend to stress social and economic questions – housing, jobs, access to education – as markers of integration, whereas the so-called “host communities” tend to stress morals and customs, such as attitudes to homosexuality, sex before marriage or pornography.

Despite frequent and heavily publicised rows, surveys have found that only a minority of European Muslim women are veiled, and the numbers are probably dropping. The German data suggests that, whereas a quarter of first-generation immigrant women wear a headscarf, only 18% of their daughters do.

Such processes are uneven. Caldwell cites figures that show “only 8% of Turkish men who grow up in Germany marry German women and only 3% of Turkish women who grow up in Germany marry German men”.

But there are also more subtle ways that integration can work. Polls, for example, have found that Muslim communities are profoundly influenced by their countries of residence. So in France, where 45% of people said in a survey that adultery is morally acceptable, so did a high proportion of local Muslims. In Germany, where 73% of the population is opposed to capital punishment, the view was shared by exactly the same percentage of local Muslims. In Britain, where there is greater popular hostility to pornography, this is mirrored in the British Muslim community.

“National differences are very evident. French Muslims have absorbed the values of France, and are more secular than their German counterparts, for example,” said Rheault. Over time, this trend deepens. The Dutch Statistics Bureau’s last report on integration reported that in terms of norms, opinions and behaviour … second-generation [Dutch migrants] are much more orientated towards Dutch society than their parents.

One of the toughest questions is demographic. Many countries do not have clear statistics on ethnicity and race: the French Muslim population is thought to be between four and seven million, the Dutch around one million, the German between four and six million. No one doubts that Muslim populations have grown rapidly in recent decades. Some recent statistics in the UK point to a 20% increase in the past five years.

But although demographers say Europe’s youthful Muslim communities will continue to grow, they predict fertility rates will decline – as they have done among almost all other populations that experience higher levels of wealth, healthcare access and literacy. Carl Haub, senior demographer at the respected Population Reference Bureau, Washington, points to fertility rates in Muslim-majority countries such as Tunisia, Turkey, Algeria and Morocco that are only slightly higher than those in the UK and France.

“There is no reason why immigrants in Europe are going to have more kids than in their countries of origin,” Haub told the Observer. One Dutch study has shown that birthrates among Turkish and Moroccan-born women in the Netherlands dropped from 3.2 children per mother to 1.9, and from 4.9 to 2.9 respectively between 1990 and 2005. More radical predictions, such as the claim there will be a Muslim majority in the EU in the next half century, are just “plain silly”, said Haub, as they depend on “physically impossible” rates of natural growth or “politically impossible” levels of mass immigration.

For more than 40 years, locals in the 12th arrondissement of Paris have bought fruit and vegetables from immigrant vendors at the Marché d’Aligre.

Amos was 16 when he first started working at the market, running errands for his Tunisian-born parents. “Integration? Politics? Religion? None of that here,” he said yesterday. “We’re just trying to earn a living. The only people who get involved in religion are the ones with something on their conscience.” Amos points out his two employees – one from Algeria, the other from Morocco. One is married to a French Catholic, the other to “a black girl”. At a nearby meat shop is a poster telling clients to order a ready-slaughtered sheep for Ramadan.

Anis Bouabsa, a baker who supplies the presidential palace with breakfast patisserie, said he will be fasting for Ramadan while he makes bread for his clients. “It’s my roots, my culture, that’s how I grew up,” he said. “But I’ll still be in the bakery 12 hours a day.”

However, if integration is more successful than the stereotype in matters of values and culture, it may be failing in social and economic terms. Unemployment and poverty are high for immigrant groups across the EU. Across Paris, in the poorer quarter around Ménilmontant market, there is no saucisson, no croissants and a lot of cheap cutlery, clothes and couscous. “We are always told things will get better, but they never do,” said Awadif, 33. “Life’s tough. You get by with some luck and some faith.”

What is certain is that, even if the dark predictions are proved wrong, a different Europe is emerging, “It is not about foreigners taking over. It may be good, it may be bad, but there is going to be change,” said Caldwell.

Islam and Europe

Cooking history, with 17 secret herbs and spices:

Muslim relations with and within Europe have been complex. Periods of peaceful coexistence have alternated with war, commercial and intellectual exchange with expulsion and competition. The Muslim population within what came to be known as “Europe” has grown steadily.

• In the eighth century the Umayyad empire expanded along the northern Mediterranean shore into what is now southern Spain. The Muslim kingdoms of Andalucía survived until Granada finally fell in 1492.

• Between the 11th and 13th centuries European crusaders such as Richard the Lionheart fought their way across the Holy Land. Yet trading contacts thrived despite the hostilities. The famous spice and silk routes meant a flow of words, ideas and practices from the Islamic world into Europe.

• In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, sparking a new period of Islamic expansion. By 1529 the Turks were outside Vienna. This did not stop France’s monarch, Francis I, allying with the Muslim Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent to fight against Charles V of Spain. After many campaigns, the Ottoman Turks were beaten outside Vienna in 1683.

• By the 18th century, as European powers began carving up their empire, the Turks were no longer seen as a threat. Immigration to Europe grew steadily, especially towards the end of the 19th century as nations began to industrialise.

• After the second world war, Muslim colonies became a source of cheap labour for reconstruction. Later, restrictions were imposed on entry.

Terror and tension

11 September 2001
Hijackers who met and were radicalised in Hamburg, Germany, hijack four US jets and kill some 3,000 people in total.

February 2003
Millions of people across the world protest at the US invasion of Iraq by staging demonstrations. The anti-war march in London attracts around one million protesters.

February 2004
France provokes a storm of controversy by passing a law that prohibits wearing the Islamic hijab in state schools.

11 March 2004
Bombs by Islamist extremists are set off on trains in Madrid killing 202.

2 November 2004
Theo van Gogh who had made a film about Islamic violence towards women, is murdered in Amsterdam by a young Dutch Muslim.

7 July 2005
Four suicide bombers set off three bombs on the London underground and one on a bus killing themselves and 52 others.

October-November 2005
Riots in poor neighbourhoods in Paris and other French cities, which saw clashes with police and cars set alight, are blamed on Muslims.

October 2006
The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten publishes cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, prompting Muslim anger and global protests.

January 2009
Anger over an Israeli offensive in Gaza – in which more than 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed – leads to a rise in antisemitic incidents in Britain.

June 2009
Right-wing parties across Europe enjoy new support in the EU elections. In Britain, the far-right BNP wins two seats in the European Parliament.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Not only in Europe:

Wal-Mart to “Accommodate Muslim Worker’s Prayers”

Muslims “act like the United States owes them”

 Swift Beef Co. installs footbaths and bidets for …

Dead Culture: Muslim Colonization Of Europe Should Frighten USA

                        Islamic females loitering  in front of an old Bussels church

* Church occupation by Mohammedan “asylum seekers” is common…

Excerpt from Atlas Shrugs:

Fox News has carried a televised report, Politicians Fret as Muslim Population Swells in Europe Amid Little Integration[March 24, 2009].

 

 “Although there are no official statistics on how many Muslims live in Brussels, it is believed they make up about 25 percent of the city’s 1 million urban residents. [Filip] Dewinter, who opposes immigration and has called Islamophobia a “duty,” claims three of the 19 sections of Brussels, each with its own mayor, now have Muslim majorities.

 “‘In those neighborhoods it’s not our government that’s in power,’ he said, ‘but the Muslim authorities — the mosques, the imams — who are in charge.’

“FOX News visited one of those neighborhoods, called Molenbeek, which looks more like North Africa than the heart of Europe… (similar to  parts of Paris where you wouldn’t dare to stop and  and get  out of your car/ed)

 “Yet Molenbeek remains disconcerting. Belgian police assigned three plainclothes officers to watch over a FOX News team shooting street scenes one morning in Molenbeek. When FOX News returned in the afternoon as more people were out and about, the police said it would be safer not to get out of the car. It wasn’t even dark yet.”

 Notice this level of danger exists in Brussels—the supposed capital of the Europe Union!

Read it all.

Joseph Farah recommends reading Robert Spencer’s new book as matter of national security

By Joseph Farah/World Net Daily

>>>>>> Click here to view the Presentation <<<<<<

It would have been impossible to imagine in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks that they would actually stir sympathy for Islam – even radical Islam.

Yet there is no question, eight years later, that is exactly what happened.

Though accurate statistics are elusive, Islam is growing in America – both through immigration and conversion.

Islam has more effective lobbying groups in America than ever before.

There are efforts to be more “inclusive” of Islam in government, schools, academia and business.

There is more “sensitivity” to Islam in entertainment.

And there is an almost suicidal eagerness to assume the best about Islam, its adherents and its intentions.

 

Try to imagine what might have happened if (and, admittedly, this is very difficult to imagine) a group of Orthodox Jews crashed two planes into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania, killing about 3,000 Americans.

Would you expect such a development to make Americans more sympathetic toward Orthodox Jews? Would you expect it to generate a boon to conversions? Would you expect to see more Orthodox Jewish lobby groups form and see more of their spokespeople on TV? Would you expect to see the government and cultural institutions reaching out to be more inclusive of Orthodox Jewish viewpoints? Would you expect to see so-called “civil rights” groups defending Orthodox Jews spring up and attract more media attention than they ever received before?

Somehow, that’s not the reaction I would expect toward Orthodox Jews in the unlikely and improbably scenario I have hypothesized.

Yet, that is what happened with Islam after 9/11. Even radical Islamic clerics and groups and mosques have benefited directly by this trend after the worst attack on American soil.

Why?

Is it a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in which Americans come to sympathize with their attackers?

Or did it occur because there has been an orchestrated plot to make it happen to further what author Robert Spencer calls the “Stealth Jihad”?

I’ve been studying radical Islam since 1979. I’ve been writing about it since the early 1980s. I’m considered an authoritative expert on the subject by many. I’ve lectured all over the world on the topic in the last 10 years.

Yet, I have to tell you, Spencer’s new book has been an eye-opener even for me.

When I first saw the title, “Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs,” I thought: “I’m not sure people are going to be as concerned by the stealth jihadists as they are about those with the guns and bombs.”

But after reading this amazing book, I realize the bigger threat to America comes from the subtle, sophisticated stealth jihadists who are, in fact, winning over the hearts and minds of Americans at a most unlikely time in history – when jihadists have openly declared war on America and shown they mean it.

Spencer reveals the interlocking connections of the most important stealth jihadist groups and individuals actively subverting our country and Western Civilization. He shows how they are winning the day – despite a record of arrests, indictments, trials and convictions for their own covert support of violent jihadists.

Worse yet, he exposes the foreign money trail that supports these groups and individuals – a money trail that starts right back in countries supporting the violent jihadists in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority.

It is the power and presence of these stealth jihadists that have provided cover to those clerics and mosques inside America that have become a breeding and training ground for violent jihadists now being exported from America to places like Somalia.

I urge you to read Robert Spencer’s new book.

I urge you to do this today as a vital matter of national security.

 

I urge you to embrace its truths.

                            *******

 

ATLAS EXCLUSIVE: FJORDMAN REVIEWS SPENCER’S STEALTH JIHAD

Just for knowing, Stealth Jihad should be required reading in every one of our nation’s public schools.Here, Fjordman reviews Spencer’s groundbreaking work.

Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs 
Fjordman

I have just read Robert Spencer’s book Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs. For the sake of honesty I should mention that Spencer runs the website Jihad Watch where I occasionally publish essays, but I would have read his books anyway since he’s one of the best anti-Jihad writers there is. I’d also like to recommendDefending the West by Ibn Warraq and Understanding Muhammad by Ali Sina, both former Muslims, as well as Andrew G. Bostom’s The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and Spencer’s previous book Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, all ofwhich I have reviewed before.

Muslims sometimes try to calm non-Muslims by saying that they “misunderstand” the term Jihad, which doesn’t necessarily mean armed struggle. This is technically speaking true, but in a way this makes matters worse, not better. Jihad includes ideological, cultural, demographic, diplomatic, psychological and economic warfare, and above all disinformation to confuse infidels about the threat they face. Just because there is a (temporary) absence of violence does not mean that there is an absence of Jihad. Robert Spencer understand this very well, and explains how Islamic organizations aiming to undermine the American political system are now quietly infiltrating society at all levels, posing as “civil rights groups” or “anti-racism activists,” a powerful tool in a country with an already bloated anti-discrimination industry. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, which has a clear and stated agenda of destroying Western civilization, is often treated as a “moderate” group, which only goes to prove how meaningless the term “moderate Islam” really is. Stealth Jihad, page 29-30:

“Legal endeavors, civil rights initiatives, media campaigns – all these and more are the weapons of the stealth jihadists, chosen precisely because without other pieces of the puzzle, they don’t appear to be weapons at all, or part of any cumulative effort. The bottom line is this: there is a concerted effort in America today by Islamic organizations to further a series of initiatives that are outwardly quite different in their stated purposes, and are being advanced by different groups of people. However, they are all geared toward the same set of goals: to encourage Americans to downplay anti-terror initiatives, accommodate Muslim practices, and make special exceptions for Islamic law – while being cowed by cries of ‘bigotry’ into dropping all resistance to these phenomena. The result, if things continue in this vein, would be an America completely subjugated under Islamic law – just the way the Brotherhood memorandum envisions it. An America in which non-Muslims must humble themselves before Muslims, not daring to say or do anything that they find offensive. This stealth jihad is advancing steadily and quietly, and most Americans have no idea it is happening at all.” Spencer goes on to explain how Islamic law conflicts with American concepts of liberty in every sense of the word. Page 48-49:

“[S]haria entails the negation of freedom, for the only freedom that sharia recognizes is the freedom to obey Islamic law, a ‘freedom’ enforced by the power of the state. And many Muslims today are working to advance that notion of ‘freedom’ in America, though not by means of terrorism. As the September 11 attacks retreat farther and farther into memory, and politicians and public officials increasingly revert to what is now known as a September 10 mentality, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic groups in service of the stealth jihad remain active across the country. As we shall see, many of them are furthering various initiatives for ‘Muslim accommodation,’ often under the guise of civil rights, that are in fact far removed from the spirit of American constitutionalism and the U.S. civil rights movement that they disingenuously invoke as inspiration. In reality, they are part of this ‘grand jihad’ aimed at destroying U.S. constitutional government and establishing an Islamic autocracy in this country. Distracted by foreign wars and the prospect of domestic terror attacks, Americans pay little heed to the true agents of intolerance in their midst. The stealth jihad advances largely unopposed because it is largely unrecognized.”

As Raphael Israeli, Professor of Islamic, Middle Eastern and Chinese history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, explains in his book The Islamic Challenge in Europe, , the policy of exporting democracy to the Islamic world is not likely to achieve positive results if the “fundamentalists” gain power. Page 221:

“Democracy, in spite of all its drawbacks, was found to be best fitted for Western culture, but no one can determine what is adequate for others. Any civilization ultimately gets the regime it deserves, for tyranny has been more of a norm in Muslim countries than otherwise. If this is their domestic choice, or as long as they do not rise against it, it should not concern outsiders. Where the West should be concerned is the outward conduct of the regimes in Muslim countries. When they adopt policies that threaten their neighbors, intimidate them or harm their interests, and those interests coincide with the West’s, then the latter has the right, indeed the obligation, to retaliate in order to check Muslim expansionism, remove its threats and secure its own and its allies’ interests.”

As I have demonstrated in my essay The Importance of Cicero in Western Thought, Roman secular law never had much influence in the Islamic world. Muslims turned down Greek political texts which included descriptions of systems in which men ruled themselves according to man-made laws. This was considered blasphemous by Muslims, as laws are made by Allah and rule belongs to his representatives.

There was no institution similar to the English Parliament in the Islamic world, nor was there ever developed a concept similar to Montesquieu’s (1689-1755 AD) separation of powers, and the political writings of Aristotle, Cicero and others were aggressively rejected. All of the elements underlying the American political system were rejected by Muslims before the USA had even been created. If Americans had remembered that, they might have been less eager to export their political system to Muslim countries. They might also have remembered that the idea that “democracy” is 100% good and the only valid political system is naive. It is a development of the period after the French Revolution and was not shared by serious thinkers prior to this, including the American Founding Fathers. Americans should study closely what is happening with Muslim immigration in Europe. Stealth Jihad, page 270:

“On October 13, 1999, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Izmir, Turkey, Giuseppe Germano Bernardini, warned the Synod of European Bishops about a ‘clear program’ among Muslims for the ‘re-conquest’ of Europe. ‘During an official meeting on Islamic-Christian dialogue,’ he wrote, ‘an authoritative Muslim person, speaking to the Christians participating, at one point said very calmly and assuredly: ‘Thanks to your democratic laws we will invade you; thanks to our religious laws we will dominate you.’ This domination, he continued, has already begun – ‘with the ‘petro-dollars,’ used not to create work in the poor North African or Middle Eastern countries, but to build mosques and cultural centers in Christian countries with Islamic immigration, including Rome, the center of Christianity. How can we ignore in all of this a clear program of expansion and re-conquest?’ Bernardini also recorded one Muslim’s piquant expression of Islamic supremacism: ‘During another Islamic-Christian meeting, always organized by Christians, a Christian participant publicly asked the Muslims present why they did not organize at least once a meeting of this kind. The Muslim authority present answered the following words: ‘Why should we? You have nothing to teach us and we have nothing to learn.’”

As Robert Spencer warns (same page), “Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have tried but failed to do for over a millennium: conquer Europe.”

I usually refrain from criticizing the USA because very often European politicians are even worse, but frankly, if the United States should be legitimately criticized for anything, it should be for its pro-Islamic policies, not for its non-existent anti-Islamic policies. The American political elites of both parties support continued Islamization at home and abroad. The Saudis have American leaders in their pockets.

What most Americans don’t understand is that they are not hated because they are perceived as being aggressive; they are despised because Muslims perceive them as being weak. As Machiavelli indicated in The Prince, you can live with having enemies as long as they respect you. Muslims always have been and – unless you are willing to convert to Islam – always will be enemies. Even after conversion they would probably attack those who are Muslims in the “wrong” way. Muslims are currently not equally aggressive against China, despite the fact that Chinese men are pig-eating infidels and Chinese women are unveiled whores. This is because Muslims respect them more than they respect Westerners, and we give them no reason to change that view.

As Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch asks:: “What would the rich Arabs do if the Western world decided to seize their property in the West as the assets of enemy aliens, just as was done to the property owned not only by the German government, but by individual Germans, during World War II? And what would they do if they were to be permanently deprived of easy access to Western medical care?”

 

In my own book Defeating Eurabia, my general policy recommendation is to advocate containment. The crucial point is to stress that Islam cannot be reformed nor reconciled with our way of life. There is no moderate Islam. There can be moderate Muslims, but they can turn into Jihadists tomorrow or can lie to deceive the infidels, which is widely practiced in Islam. There is no way for us to know. Those who want to understand this can read my online essay about “moderate Islam” as well as the essay “Why We Cannot Rely on Moderate Muslims Islam isn’t merely incompatible with Western civilization; Islam is incompatible with any civilization worthy of the name, Eastern or Western.

There are undoubtedly those who would dismiss my statement that there is no moderate Islam as ignorance and extremism. To them, I would like to say the following: The real extremists are those who, despite 1400 years of evidence to the contrary from Thailand to Canada, still cling on to the idea that Islam can coexist peacefully and on equal terms with everybody else. Jared Diamond in his bestselling book Guns, Germs, and Steel has some valid points, but his greatest flaw is his inability to explain how the Greater Middle East went from being a global center of civilization, which it was in ancient times, to a global center of anti-civilization. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes. It was caused by Islam. And the destruction continues. Lebanon was a civilized country only because it had a Christian majority, but is now rapidly descending into the Islamic abyss. While Beirut was once known as the Paris of the Middle East, perhaps Paris will soon be known as the Beirut of Europe.

Islam has been in India for a millennium, has wiped out Buddhism in much of the continent and caused the death of tens of millions of Hindus. After a thousand years, despite the fact that Muslims enjoy more political liberty in the Republic of India than in the Muslim neighboring countries, they still blow bombs. Indians have waited a thousand years for a moderate Islam, and they are still being killed. Is that enough? What about the Serbs? In the fourteenth century, Lazar of Serbia fought bravely and perished in the Battle of Kosovo against the Turks, yet now Muslims in Kosovo are desecrating churches and being awarded a state by NATO for their efforts. What about the Copts in Egypt and the other Christians in the Middle East and North Africa? They have waited for fourteen centuries. Is that enough? What is next? A nuclear bomb going off in Tel Aviv, London, Rome, New York or Washington D.C.? How many more people have to die, and how many more countries have to be destroyed before we can face the fact that the problem is Islam itself, not a few extremists?

Frankly, the burden of proof is on those who claim that there is a moderate Islam. How come nobody has seen it over the past 1400 years, and where is it today? Can they even describe how this supposedly “moderate Islam” is supposed to look like, and outline the ideas of serious and influential thinkers who advocate a viable reform path? I have read the works of many of the so-called reformists, and I’m not impressed. I have long criticized the policies of President George W. Bush in exporting “democracy” to Islamic countries, an idea which makes no sense whatsoever and will be remembered in the future as a glaring example of ideological overstretch. Rarely has more money, lives and effort been wasted on a completely meaningless project. Meanwhile, Muslim immigration continues unabated throughout the Western world. The very minimum that should have been done after the attacks of September 11 2001 was to halt Muslim immigration, to treat Islam as a political ideology at odds with the American Constitution, to give no quarters to organizations such as CAIR and to view the Muslim Brotherhood as mortal enemies. Until Muslim immigration has been permanently ended, those who were murdered in 2001 died in vain. Nothing less will do.

On page 278, Spencer includes policy recommendations for the United States: Enforce existing laws against organizations deliberately attempting to undermine American liberties and the US Constitution, which is of course already illegal. Reclassify Muslim organizations that do not explicitly renounce, in word as well as in deed, any intention of replacing the American Constitution with sharia at some point in the future. If they refuse, close them down or reclassify them as political organizations and treat them accordingly. Mosques and Islamic schools should be monitored and closed when needed. Americans should also “End Muslim immigration into the United States. This is a simple matter of national security.”

Last, but not least, Westerners should take pride in our own culture and re-learn our history. Frankly, there are those who would claim that even Jihad, dangerous as it is, is a secondary infection which has only managed to threaten us because the body of our civilization had already been weakened beforehand. Nowhere is this clearer than in Western media and academia, which have since the Western Cultural Revolution of the 1960s been turned into vehicles for attacking their own civilization. It will be extremely difficult to fight Islamization in an efficient manner until this situation is ended, as most people will find it difficult to properly identify the threat.

Spencer concludes his book with these words of warning, page 281-282:

“…if Americans, Westerners, and all people who are threatened by the global jihad and Islamic supremacism are not willing to stand up and fight for this cause, then all is lost. Because the jihadists are willing to go all the way – to give up their very lives – in their quest to control ours. For them, no price is too high. If fighting against jihad is too high a price for a free people, then ultimately we will have to pay a different price: the jizya – the tax specified by Qur’an 9:29 for certain non-Muslims, particularly Jews and Christians, subjugated as inferiors under the rule of Islamic sharia law. What ever happened to ‘Give me liberty, or give me death?’ Or ‘with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor’? Will the price that the children and beneficiaries of those heroic sacrifices are willing to pay prove too high? The answer will become clear sooner than most people think.”

One of the many great things about Spencer is that he is always understandable. This is far from self-evident. Even among anti-Jihadists whom I greatly admire as scholars there are those who write books that are difficult to read. Robert Spencer has that rare gift of combining impeccable scholarship – which he does have, regardless of what the professional “Islamophobia-accusers” might say – with a unique talent for explaining his subject matter to a non-specialist audience, which he does every single day at his website. I can think of very few people who are his equal in this. Stealth Jihad is heartily recommended for those who would like to understand the greatest threat we face today. I would especially recommend that you give a copy of the book to someone who still doesn’t fully “get it,” and believe that this is all about a few extremists.

 

Muslim Fifth Column seeks to ‘advance the seditious program they call Sharia’