A highly representative speech 14

What are European leaders thinking when they fanatically destroy European civilization by importing millions of devotees of that supremacist totalitarian ideology, Islam?

We are afforded a revelation of the thoughts of Federica Mogherini, a Red from her youth who bears the grandiose title of “High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”, in a speech she made at the “Call to Europe V: Islam in Europe” conference, June 24th, 2015.

The idea of a clash between Islam and “the West” – a word in which everything is put together and confused – has misled our policies and our narratives. Islam holds a place in our Western societies. Islam belongs in Europe. It holds a place in Europe’s history, in our culture, in our food and – what matters most – in Europe’s present and future. Like it or not, this is the reality.

Her vocabulary constantly reveals her Leftism. “Narrative” is one of the buzzwords of the Left. We’ll come upon more of them. “Narrative” means their spin; their attempt to substitute a preferred account of events for what actually happened. It does not work, of course. But failure does not deter the Left. They ignore it.

Islam has a long history of invading Europe and sometimes succeeding in conquering parts of it. It is a history of fierce onslaughts, cruel subjugation, and desperate counter-attacks – because Islam most definitely did not belong in Europe. (Remember Lepanto, Poitiers, the Gates of Vienna …) Only in that sense, “Islam holds a place in Europe’s history”. But it is not a place to celebrate. Europe learnt bitter lessons from Muslim invasions, but some Europeans are choosing to forget them. Either the High Representative does not know the history – which seems unlikely – or she is deliberately distorting the nature of the Islamic effect on Europe, making it sound nicely integrated and enriching and delicious by putting it into the context of “our culture” and even “our food”. Why? Because she and her elite comrades want to destroy the existing order and build their fantasy world, their utopia, their paradise-on-earth in its stead. And they have some confused ideas of how to go about it, including the flooding of Europe with Muslims from the Third World.

Certainly Islam has a place in Europe’s present – but as a threat, a terror, a horror, a dread; of which the High Representative and her like-minded colleagues are pertinaciously doing all they can to ensure a continuance well into the future.

As Europeans, we should be proud of our diversity. The fear of diversity comes from weakness, not from a strong culture.

“Diversity” is the top favorite buzzword.

I shall be even more clear on that: the very idea of a clash of civilizations is at odds with the most basic values of our European Union – let alone with reality.

She means that the European Union was supposed to prevent war between European states. The original concept did not involve Muslim immigrants.

Throughout our European history, many have tried to unify our continent by imposing their own power, their own ideology, their own identity against the identity of someone else. With the European project, after World War II, not only we accepted diversity: we expressed a desire for diversity to be a core feature of our Union. We defined our civilization through openness and plurality: a mind-set based on blocs does not belong to us.

“Blocs”? The European Union is a “bloc”. Nation-states are what the Left hates. They like forming blocs  such as the European Union – with a view to eventual world (socialist) government.

Some people are now trying to convince us that a Muslim cannot be a good European citizen, that more Muslims in Europe will be the end of Europe. These people are not just mistaken about Muslims: these people are mistaken about Europe – that is my core message – they have no clue what Europe and the European identity are.

“They” have no clue what Europe and the European identity are? It is typical of the Left to accuse their opponents of the very thing they are guilty of themselves. Again the High Representative, with her false account of European history, chooses to overlook the fact that the indigenous European populations are dying out; that the immigrant Muslim populations are increasing rapidly; that the inevitable result must be Muslim majorities throughout Europe. And above all she chooses not to notice that however much the Europeans want to mingle the Muslims in with them in an enriched and delicious new European culture, the Muslims themselves desire no such thing. Their aim is to impose their law, their culture (and their halal food) on Europe. That means the enslavement of women, the execution of homosexuals, the abolition of the wine industry, the tearing down of paintings from the walls of the art galleries, the end of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of the press – to name but a few of the effects of Islamic rule.

The High Representative, who joined the Communist Youth early in life and has remained steadily on the Left, is of course a feminist, and is all for gay marriage. She cannot admit even to herself that there is a contradiction between those ideals and the doctrines of Islam. It is to be doubted that she would ever bring herself to read the Koran and the hadith. The Islam she wants to welcome into Europe is simply colorful, cooks exotic meals, worships quietly in its mosques – and why should not Europe tolerate that, enjoy the meals, admire the turbans, the fezzes, the burkhas? It’s a travel-brochure picture of Islam that sits in her pretty little head. And the less pretty heads of almost all the leaders of Europe.

This is our common fight: to make this concept accepted both in Europe and beyond Europe.

Make it accepted “beyond Europe”. Where can she mean? Could she be intending to exert her efforts at imposing huge quantities of colorful and delicious Islam on  – America?

For Europe and Islam face some common challenges in today’s world. The so-called Islamic State is putting forward an unprecedented attempt to pervert Islam for justifying a wicked political and strategic project.

Ah! She has noticed that the Islamic State is not colorful and delicious. Therefore, in her perfect logic, it cannot be Islam. Real Islam faces the Islamic State as a “challenge”, just as the non-islamic world does. She says nothing about the age-old conflict between Sunni and Shia. She pays no attention to the diversity within Islam – accompanied by passionate hatred, total intolerance.

Now she switches to the Arabic word for the Islamic State, the word its Muslim opponents use for it: “Da’esh” – in hope of reinforcing her claim that it is not truly Islamic.

Talking about Da’esh, the king of Jordan told the European Parliament a few months ago: “The motive is not faith, it is power; power pursued by ripping countries and communities apart in sectarian conflicts, and inflicting suffering across the world”

Western media like to refer to Daʼesh with the word “medieval”. This does not help much to understand the real nature of the threat we are facing. Daʼesh is something completely new. This is a modern movement, reinterpreting religion in an innovative and radical way. It is a movement that, rather than preserving Islam, wants us to trash centuries of Islamic culture in the name of their atrocities.

Islam does not derive from medieval times. Worse – it arose in the Dark Ages.

There is nothing new about it. It is not “interpreting religion” – by which she means “interpreting Islam”  – in “an innovative and radical way”. It is doing what Muhammad commanded Muslims to do.

Da’esh is not a State, and it is not a State for Islam. The Grand Imam of al Azhar, Ahmed el Tayeb, argued: “There is no Islamic State, but a number of Islamic countries that the terrorists are trying to destroy.” This is the reality we face and we don’t say this often, but we should do so to dismantle their narrative. Sometimes, by describing the atrocities of Da’esh, we do them a favor: atrocities are part of their propaganda. The more we describe them as evil, the happier they are. Daʼesh is Islam’s worst enemy in today’s world. Its victims are first and foremost Muslim people. Islam is a victim itself.

This is not to say that we should overlook the ideology of Daʼesh. If we want to fight it, we need first of all to know it and to understand it. We need to know where it comes from, and how it got to be what it is.

Really? Know and understand it? No. She doesn’t mean that. She already KNOWS what it is all about. It is about Muslims being poor and jobless and not getting enough help and understanding and welfare and love from us Europeans. If they don’t get enough of all that, they might rape hundreds of German women, run a truck over crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, disembowel and castrate people watching a show in Paris, and gouge their eyes out. And it would all be our fault.

See? They went and did all those things, didn’t they? All because we weren’t nice enough to them.

First of all, I believe the Daʼesh propaganda fills a void, a vacuum. The terrorists are recruiting people who feel they do not hold a place in their own communities, that they do not belong in their own societies.

I was very much impressed, when I was visiting Tunis … Tunisia is a modern country and still is one of the countries with the highest number of foreign fighters in Da’esh. I asked a young girl, very engaged with civil society, why she believed so many people her age were joining Daʼesh. She told me something I will never forget: “You know, people my age in Tunisia feel they have no place in the organigram.

She said that? “The organigram”? According to our dashboard dictionary, an “organigram” is an organizational chart. So what organizational chart do young people in Tunisia feel they have no place in? Who drew the chart? Why? What the hell was she – what the hell is the “High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy” – talking about?

They are looking for their own box, for a role, for defining who they are. They ask: where is my place? What is my role? This is the real challenge not only in the Arab world, but here in Europe.

Later she deplores the idea of people being in”boxes”. But consistency is the last thing to look for here.

That is why I believe the best way to prevent radicalization in Europe and in our region is not only education, but also employment. We have so many well educated and frustrated young people, with a lot of energy, a lot of willingness to find their place in their society and their community. And they have lost hope that they will be able to do so.

This does not justify the choice to turn to terrorism. People are responsible for their own actions and their own crimes. Still, if we look at ways to prevent radicalization we need jobs and good jobs. Not just a place in the “organigram”, but a good place.

Da’esh longs for people who have lost their place in society, their role, their sense of belonging and hope. We need inclusive societies. So many times we have heard a narrative opposing security and open societies. It is a false dilemma. We should start saying more clearly that a society can be stable and safe only when it is democratic.

Of course I know each country has a specific history, and needs to follow its own path towards democracy. Not so long ago, and still today, there are people in “the West” arguing democracy can be exported militarily. We have all realized – in this room for sure – how bad this idea was. This does not mean we are not ready to support democracy and democratic processes: quite the contrary. But we need to consider the specificity of each process.

While she would like to “make Islam accepted beyond Europe”, she would only export democracy to Islam by extremely sensitive means – sensitive to the point of inaction. In fact, if other countries are not democratic, we must “humbly respect” whatever they are for the sake of diversity.

We need to show some humble respect for diversity. Diversity is the core feature of our European history, and it is our strength.

It is so manifestly a disaster imposed on Europe by weak thinking, that this claim of hers is simply ludicrous. If she said that European culture was eclectic – that it traditionally chooses the best of everything from everywhere and absorbs it and uses it for its own purposes – she would be right. But she is referring to multiculturalism, which in effect is Islamization, terrorism, bloodshed and suffering.

She proceeds to get into an awful muddle of self-contradiction. Read the following quickly, don’t try to make sense of it. A quick read gives you the right impression. It is confused nonsense. And so typical of EU speeches that to anyone who has heard or read a few, it comes across as self-satirizing: 

But we should also show respect for diversity when we look outside our borders. We need to understand diversity, understand complexity. This is difficult, but maybe a bit less difficult for us Europeans. We know diversity and complexity – especially here in Brussels – from our own experience. For this reason I am not afraid to say that political Islam should be part of the picture. Religion plays a role in politics – not always for good, not always for bad. Religion can be part of the process. What makes the difference is whether the process is democratic or not. That is what matters to us, the key point. We need to work for regional frameworks, in the Middle East and the Arab world, in which every one has a responsibility and a chance to contribute – Muslim, Christian, Jew or non-believer, Sunni or Shia, Arab, Kurd, whatever. One of the weaknesses of our policies so far has been to focus on dividing lines, as if everyone can fit in a box. People do not live in boxes. People live in communities and societies. The more open the communities and the societies are, the better it is for the democratic process. All communities should be granted with their own rights and their own responsibilities, with an opportunity to do their part for the stability and the security of their own country. This is the path we are finally trying to follow in some key Arab countries, like Iraq: we are finally understanding we need to put people together, not to tear them apart. Inclusiveness can be the key to our success – both when we talk foreign policy and when we deal with our home affairs. Sometimes we go out of our borders and preach, but then we look at ourselves and we falter. Enlargement processes involve us and our partners for years, but maybe we should also take time to brush up on the “acquis” with some Member States. We have a problem of internal coherence – when it comes to rights, to democracy, to the respect of diversity, when it comes to some of the difficult choices we make, including on migration policies. The battle for hearts and minds is not only a battle we need to fight in the Middle East, but also here inside our European Union. It is a difficult battle: this is not a popular argument, not an easy issue. After years of economic and political weakness, our societies are naturally afraid. When you are weak, the reaction is closing the door and pretending to solve issues with isolation. On the contrary, the only chance we have as Europeans is to be proud and strong of our basics: and our basics are respect and diversity. Let me say something more about migration. We have supported the “bring back our girls” campaign for Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. There is such a contradiction between our solidarity when these girls are far away, and our lack of solidarity when they are at our door. This is impossible to sustain. In the coming days and months we need to find solutions not only for the girls in Nigeria, but for their sisters and mothers and daughters who are forced to flee by the very same radicalized movements. If we do not realize this, our whole message risks to sound empty. We need to pass a cultural message, to lay the basis for our political message: any attempt to divide the peoples of Europe into “us” and “them” brings us in the wrong direction. The migrants and us. The Muslims and us. The Jews and us, as anti-Semitism has not been defeated at all. The “other” and us. We learnt from our history that we all are someone else’s “other”. The fear of the other can only lead us to new conflicts.

The “other” is another of their buzzwords. Professor Edward Said, who found excuses for Palestinian terrorism, accused Westerners of seeing Muslims as the “other”. He did not notice that Muslims see Westerners as the “other”. Or recognize the plain fact of otherness inherent in all classification.

I hope we can work together to increase our self confidence. When we say we are European, we should also remember what is the root of our European culture: our diversity. That is our strength, and we should learn to be proud of it.

Such is the intellectual prowess of the elite who govern our lives. Their speeches are shallow, vague, inconsistent, self-contradictory, platitudinous, doctrinaire, under-informed and deceitful. Worse than dangerous, such thinking is a cause of the atrocities that Muslims are inflicting on Europeans – most recently in Paris, Brussels, and Nice.  

One must bear in mind that none of the EU bureaucrats and representatives have been elected to foist their insane policies on the peoples of Europe. The members of the elite choose them – not for intelligence, plainly, but for conformity with their own “politically correct” Leftist opinions.

The sooner the European Union disintegrates, the better for Europe. The sooner the proud-to-be-humble High Representatives shut-up and go home, the better for the world.

 

(Hat-tip to Chauncey Tinker for the link to the speech))

Posted under Europe, Islam by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, July 19, 2016

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