MAINLINING THE FUTURE OF ISLAM

“Either Islam will be Europeanized, or Europe will be Islamized.” In recent years this prediction has been made by many major experts, among them the American Bernard Lewis, the Syrian-born German Bassam Tibi, and the French Gilles Kepel. This is, without question, an uncomfortable and sensitive topic, but it’s one that is very pertinent now that the Swiss have put their foot down and said that they will not accept another minaret within their borders.

In recent decades, Islam has exploded in Europe. You can see the changes with your own eyes from year to year—whether it’s the increasing presence of hijabs on the street in a city like Oslo, or the bearded men with ankle-high baggy pants, or the new and resplendent mosques that are under construction. For my part, I’ve noticed an increasing insecurity and unease among “ordinary” people who feel like aliens in their own country. People ask: what is the purpose of this project? Don’t we, as a nation, have a right to pass our own cultural legacy, our traditions and values, on to our children and grandchildren?

Should we, in the name of tolerance, give in to the demands made by “others” whose influence is growing, and whose voices are becoming louder, as their numbers increase? Or as a Norwegian Labor Party politician said to me in a private conversation: “On the day that most of the members of the city council are Muslims, what do you think will happen to the right of Oslo bars to serve alcohol?” Another leading Laborite with over a couple of decades’ experience in politics put it more bluntly when I asked him “What you think about immigration from the Muslim world?” The answer was so crisp, merciless, and genuinely felt that I gasped: “What have they contributed?” Period.

Let it be said that of course there are many Muslims in Europe who are getting along just fine and who get the same chills down their spines that other European citizens do when they think of Sharia and the lack of freedom that accompanies classical Islam. But as a rule those aren’t the Muslims who are the most prominent members of their faith among us; they aren’t the ones who enjoy power in the Muslim community, and they aren’t the ones who are best organized and who have developed exceptionally strong connections to our public officials.

No, it’s not the secularized Muslims who are leading the way—far from it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali made this clear when I and a colleague of mine from Human Rights Service in Oslo met her at the Dutch Parliament in The Hague in 2005. As she put it, there most certainly are Muslims in Europe who want a Europeanized Islam—that is to say, a private, personal Islam without political and judicial influence. But these aren’t the Muslims who are powerfully positioned in Europe’s community organizations, Europe’s corridors of power, and Europe’s universities.

Read it all in the ever-vigilant and faithful patriot rag—FrontPage. And for another strong piece on what recently happened at the voting booths in Switzerland, this article in the Jerusalem Post explores the greater context of whether the Swiss may or may not have changed a thing in Switzerland or any other place on the earth with regard to stifling the advance of the Islamic minaret.

JUST SAY NO TO COPENHAGEN

"I call it scientific fascism," said Mr. F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., Wisconsin Republican and the top GOP member on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, who has been selected for a congressional delegation attending the Copenhagen conference. "The U.N. should throw a red flag; it should call a time out. If it takes a year or two to get to the bottom of the Climategate scandal, so be it."

Read it all here.

MOHAMMED SAYS WAR IS DECEIT

More and more ordinary people in America are awakening to the snicker of the jackals and the impassioned roar of the lions set in claw upon these shores. Here is Frosty Wooldridge in his essay—Muslims In 21st Century America: Arrogant, Righteous And Determined—pointing out what many in the citizenry have already discerned. Unfortunately, our bankrupt nation is being sold out by our cowardly leadership. What will it take for the West to finally grow a pair, and stand up for our own civilization instead of importing its own destruction?

AS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS ALLOWS and emboldens Muslims to continue their onslaught into the United States, few Americans see our predicament and fewer still speak up.

While liberals and academics, living in gated communities and ivory towers, shout to the rooftops the wonders of multiculturalism—a not-so-silent war gathers beneath the surface of our seemingly peaceful society.

Today, the U.S. Congress continues importing 100,000 legal immigrants every 30 days. That equals 1.2 million mostly poor, illiterate and unskilled people from third world countries that compete for limited welfare dollars and jobs. At the same time, 14 million U.S. citizens cannot obtain a job, 13.4 million American children live below the poverty line, and finally, 35 million American citizens subsist on food stamps.

Not once will you hear of any debate on the absurdity of adding 100,000 immigrants monthly to our already overwhelmed civilization. As reported in an earlier column, the U.S. suffers 40 million people that cannot read (“America filling up with dumb people” www.newswithviews.com) and 52 million Americans that cannot read past the 4th grade level. Results of poverty and illiteracy:

Unwed mothers birth tens of thousands of babies on public welfare. Black gangs attack white citizens in Denver, Colorado where I live. Hispanic gangs in Los Angeles rule the streets; so much so, police officers do not dare enter gang turf for fear of being executed. As their crimes accelerate, our national prison population, now at 2.3 million inmates, grows commensurately. While in prison, Islam appeals to and converts more and more minorities.

Read it all.

DECONSTRUCTING THOSE ARAB REFUGEES

UNTIL THE 1967 WAR, many in Western Europe saw Israel—correctly—as a tiny and besieged state, surrounded by enemies who wished to destroy it. In this respect, they were helped along by the fact that the leader of those who would after the Six-Day War be carefully renamed as the "Palestinians," were not yet called "Palestinians" but simply "the Arabs" or "the Arab refugees." And their putative leader, Ahmed Shukairy (who was himself half-Turkish), had the habit of expressing himself as a truthful Muslim, and told the world that his goal was the destruction of Israel.

The Arab leaders said the same thing. And those Arab leaders, at the time, did not have the enormous oil wealth that the member-states of OPEC really began to acquire only in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then they enjoyed a really fantastic jump in oil revenues, and thus an equally fantastic increase in perceived power and real ability to buy all kinds of influence along with other, more tangible goods and services, only when OPEC quadrupled the price of oil in the fall of 1973.

And beginning with their defeat in the Six-Day War, the Arabs realized that they would not be able to defeat Israel militarily, at least not yet, not under the new conditions, and with Israel now in possession of "the West Bank" and Gaza and all of the Sinai (some 95% of the territory Israel won by force of arms in that war). They would have to formulate a new strategy to force Israel to disgorge what it had won, to make Israel appear not to be what in fact it still was, a tiny state subject to this unending Arab and Muslim hostility, that no concessions by Israel would ever truly assuage (at least not for the Muslims who took Islam seriously, and that meant, at least, all of the Arab Muslims). So they did several things. They decided on a campaign of diplomatic and economic warfare, accompanied by terrorist acts within Israel and against Israelis overseas, and on a campaign to weaken Israel and to force its former friends to sever ties, or at least to cease being friendly toward Israel, and ready to misunderstand its plight, and the real nature of the war—the Jihad—being waged against it.

The first to be won over, largely by bribery of African rulers, were the black African states that had enjoyed good relations with Israel and had benefited greatly from Israel's extensive, and intelligent, aid program in Black Africa, which encouraged the development of small-scale agriculture. All of these countries, or almost all, within a year or two after the Six-Day War, had been persuaded by Arab money and the promise—never fulfilled—of more money to come if they did what the Arabs wanted, cut off diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

Read it all as noted JW contributor Hugh Fitzgerald outs the liars and puts the truth back where it belongs.