Some forty years ago, Europe made the decision that it would open its gates and let in the conquering hordes of Islam. In our post, Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010, we trace (using the research of the great authority, Bat Ye’or) how step by step Islam advanced into Europe with the keen help of Europeans. Who were these Europeans? Many of them were officials in the foreign ministries. But we do not know their names. We hope that in time historians will discover and reveal who they were. It is a huge and terrible drama: la trahison des clercs on a scale unmatched in history; the betrayal of an entire continent to a dark and primitive force by those whose high calling it was to protect their countries. The traitors should be named and blamed at last, but are slippery enough to slither into obscurity and evade personal accusation forever.

In addition to those who actively worked for Islamic infiltration and occupation – for reasons so obscure that perhaps no historian will ever fathom them – there is always a predominance of those dumb sort of politicians who somehow manage not to notice what is happening to their countries. They have welcomed immigration from anywhere as an augmentation of the work force; they have prided themselves on being more tolerant than the next oaf, and have chosen to accept Islam as just another religion – “Oh yes, sir, one of the great monotheistic moral religions, you know” – and could see no reason why they should inform themselves about  the actual beliefs and practices of the immigrants.

But reality goes on accruing its consequences no matter how persistently it is overlooked or falsely discerned. And eventually reality hits the blindest self-deluding know-nothing in the face.

Now even the BBC, which has become a mouthpiece of Islamic propaganda in Britain and wherever else it is heard, has had to notice a flaw or two in its conviction that Islamic immigration is a great blessing to the kingdom.

The shock to “Auntie” (as Brits call the BBC) came when Jack Straw, former Shadow Deputy Prime Minister, remarked recently that “Pakistani heritage” men targeted white girls for sexual abuse.

“Auntie” set out to prove that Straw was wrong, and to her consternation and distress found that he was right.

From the Telegraph:

Are young men of Pakistani origin really fizzing with testosterone, and do they target young white women for sex because they see them as easy meat, as Jack Straw claimed last week? The Today programme went to Bradford this morning to find out, and you got the distinct impression that no one was more shocked than the BBC to find young Asian men, by and large, confirming what Mr Straw said.

A minority of interviewees sounded a note of caution, said everyone was equal and there was no such thing as an “easy target”. A more typical response, however, was: “It’s the way the white women dress, innit. Miniskirts. Encourages them, innit, to go jack ‘em and that, d’you get me?” (That’s an exact quote, by the way.)

Interpretation: “Innit” is barbarian-speak for “Isn’t it so?”

Or: “A lot of Asian women wouldn’t actually have their body showing, whereas white women you would find them like that.” Or: “White women drink, so when they [are] under the influence of alcohol the Pakistani men probably – the ones from Pakistan that have recently come – probably think they can take advantage, innit.”

It is true, by the way, that a lot of British girls get drunk in public, and dress and behave sluttishly. But none of that is usually accepted as an excuse for their being raped or pressed into prostitution.

Zubeida Malik [the BBC reporter] introduced her report by saying: “Given the huge controversy that Jack Straw’s comments raised, you might be surprised by what you hear.” But were listeners really shocked by what they heard? Over at the BBC they might have been surprised, but no one else the programme interviewed sounded as though the comments were news to them. …

Then Nihal from the Asian Network came on and I can only imagine the hand-wringing among BBC multiculturalists when they heard what he had to say: “We did this story back in November and we asked the question whether there is something in the Pakistani culture that led men to do this. Many people called in my phone-in show and said: ‘Yes we know that this is happening. Our men have this attitude towards white girls.’ [On Monday] a caller said: ‘White girls are easy. Fact.’ That’s what he said and he was unapologetic about that. I told him it wasn’t fact it was an opinion. …

“Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, on my show this week said that he had never heard anybody say this, that white women were easy or promiscuous. … ” …

Today the BBC took a good look at multicultural Britain – and they didn’t like what they saw.

Interpretation: “Oops! What have we done? They gave out they were good guys, these Muslim immigrants.”

So one small spark of illumination has forced itself under the eyelids of the BBC and the home affairs select committee.

At least for the moment they reluctantly notice one tiny aspect of the vast tragedy of what Britain has become. The harlots have always been there, of course. And men who will exploit them have always been there. But the killing infection of Islam began only some forty years ago.

Here, from the excellent British journal Standpoint, is part of a story, told by the unnamed wife of a Christian clergyman, that illustrates how fatally the infection is working:

I have just returned to London, where I have lived since I was 11. I have been away for four years, living as an ethnic minority in a monocultural part of the world, amassing a host of stories to tell to disbelieving friends. On the whole, I am glad to return. I shan’t miss some locals’ assumptions that, being a white woman, if I was outside after dark, as I occasionally was, usually to walk the few metres between my house and the church, I must be a prostitute eager to give them a blow job. I shan’t miss the abuse my priest husband received: the daubing of “Dirty white dogs” in red paint on the church door, the barrage of stones thrown at him by children shouting “Satan”. He was called a “f***ing white bastard” more than once … I will also not miss the way our garden acted as the local rubbish dump, with items ranging from duvets and TV sets, to rats (dead or twitching) glued to cardboard strips, a popular local method of vermin control to stem the large numbers of them which scuttled between the rubbish piled in gardens and on pavements. Yes, I am very glad to have left Britain’s second city.

For four years, we lived in inner-city Birmingham, in what has been a police no-go area for 20 years. … When we arrived, the population was predominantly Pakistani. Now Somalis are there in equal number. Most of the run-down Irish pubs were turned into mosques during our time. …

One day [my husband] was chatting to a man with a passing resemblance to Lawrence of Arabia, who had just arrived from Antwerp — one of an increasing number of Muslims who are arriving here with EU passports. He asked him why he had come to Birmingham. He was surprised at the question: “Everybody know. Birmingham — best place in Europe to be pure Muslim.” Well, there must be many places in Europe where Muslims are entirely free to practise their faith, but I suspect there are few places in which they can have so little contact with the civic and legal structure of a Western state if they choose. It seems to be particularly easy to “disappear” if that is their intention. A parishioner once described a lorry pulling up outside his house, the side opening to reveal stacked mattresses full of sleepy, and presumably illegal, immigrants, who staggered out into broad Brummie daylight. …

When I recently told a friend how a large Taliban flag fluttered gaily on a house near St Andrew’s football stadium for some months, her cry of “Can’t you tell the police?” made me reflect how far many of our inner cities have been abandoned by our key workers: our doctors and nurses drive in from afar, the police, as mentioned before, have shut down their stations and never venture in unless in extremis — they and ambulance crews have been known to be attacked …

We get stabbings that never make the news, dog- and cock-fighting rings, cars torched as pranks and cars used for peddling heroin. (One of the more amusing moments of our time came when a local lad provided one reason people often gave us stares when we drove past such deals: “Two white people wearing seatbelts — you’ve got to be cops.”) …

If current demographic trends continue over the next few decades [they will – JB], the West Midlands, as well as other parts of the country [actually the entire country – JB], will become a predominantly Muslim area.

Unless …? Even this thoroughly awakened witness prescribes an ineffective cure:

Much more needs to be done to integrate the communities among whom I lived, and we need to be much less negligent of our own values too.

What values would those be, we wonder.

We have commented on the trials of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria, both of whom are being prosecuted for telling the truth about Islam. (See our post, Civilization on trial, October 10, 2010.)

Throughout Europe it has become a crime to say anything about Muslims and Islam that Muslims do not like. It makes no difference if what is said is provably true. This means that not only is speaking the truth in this regard a crime, but free speech itself is a heresy.

We wrote that what is really on trial is our civilization. The Western world owes its greatness to the Enlightenment. Now the values with which the Enlightenment endowed us, chief among them freedom and truth – the freedom to search for truth and declare openly what we find –  are under threat. If we are to be returned to the darkness that prevailed in Europe before that dawn of the intellect, to the time when this church or that decided what people were permitted to know and say, and would punish in the cruelest imaginable ways any thinker who challenged the prevailing dogma, our civilization is as surely doomed as was Rome by Christianity.

The darkness is visibly spreading. In Denmark, Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, and Jesper Langballe, Member of Parliament, have been charged with committing the same “crime” as Geert Wilders and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

With her usual moral clarity, Melanie Phillips writes about this travesty of justice:

A Danish MP, Jesper Langballe, was convicted of hate speech last month for endorsing Hedegaard’s comments about ‘honour’ violence and sexual abuse within Muslim families. In his statement in court … Langballe wrote about the Orwellian Danish legal rules which effectively convicted him in advance of his trial, causing him to choose to ‘confess’ rather than participate in such a totalitarian ‘circus’.

Now Lars Hedegaard faces a similar circus. Later this month, he is to stand trial for ‘racism’ after he stated about Muslim ‘honour’ violence within families: “They rape their own children.”

In vain did Hedegaard explain the following day that obviously he had not meant by this that all Muslims engage in such practices, any more than saying ‘Americans make good films’ means that all Americans make good films; in vain did he adduce copious evidence of concern — including from Muslim victims themselves — about the amount of sexual and ‘honour’ violence, including rape and incest, within Muslim families. None of this made any difference. Hedegaard is about to be burned at the Danish legal stake for his heresy. …

As far as I can see, these developments in Denmark have been totally ignored in the English-speaking media. So much for the liberals’ fetish of free speech — so noisily defended whenever Christianity [MP’s one blind spot, in our view, is her defense of religion- JB], America, Israel or the west are being demonised and libelled; so much for the feminists’ professed concern for the rights of women and the obscenity of rape and sexual abuse. Two men who actually stand up for these principles are being persecuted for doing so, while the so-called progressive world is either helping pile up the faggots for their fire or looking the other way.

It’s not just Hedegaard or Langballe who are being consumed by these flames, however, but Europe’s own freedom.

One of our readers, Frank, points out in a comment on our end-of-year post, A picture for history, that flying terrorists could easily disguise themselves as nuns to avoid (actually non-existent) profiling, and he reminds us of the “Jihad Janes” – two American women who tried (though not in nuns’ habits) to join the Islamic jihad, but were arrested before they could carry out their planned acts of violence.

We re-read the story as told by the Sunday Times on March 14, last year.

Colleen LaRose, a divorced woman of 46, living in Pennsburg, PA, who called herself “Jihad Jane”, flew to Europe with the intention of killing a Swedish man she had never met and who had done her no harm whatsoever.

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, also a divorced woman, aged 31, living in Leadville, CO, chose to play a part in the same plan. Off she flew to help murder the hapless Swede.

LaRose’s only reported motive was to alleviate her own boredom. She “used her  Twitter social networking account to raise funds for Pakistani militants”, and after her arrest, a message was found on her laptop  announcing, “I’m so bored, I want to scream.”

Paulin-Ramirez was in a similar desperate pickle:

“She never liked who she was,” Christine Holcomb-Mott, her mother, told The Wall Street Journal. “She was always looking for something.”

So she converted to Islam for novelty and excitement, which was greatly enhanced by the opening it gave her to join the jihad. She “communicated [on the internet] with Islamic radicals around the globe.”

[She] changed her Facebook photograph to one depicting her in a hijab with only her eyes showing and told her astounded family she had converted to Islam. …

She began posting messages on Facebook forums with headings such as “Stop calling Muslims terrorists!” and communicating with Islamic radicals around the globe.

The stranger targeted by the two bored women was Lars Vilks, the cartoonist made famous by furious global Muslim protest against his drawings of a dog with “the head of Muhammad”, published in a Swedish newspaper in 2007.

When LaRose reached Europe, she “declared online: ‘Only death will stop me now I am so close to the target.’” But a month later she flew back home, mission unaccomplished, and was arrested on landing and charged with terrorism. Her testimony led to the arrest of Paulin-Ramirez.

There is nothing new, so there should be nothing surprising, about self-indulgent bored women seeking distraction, excitement, and a sense of exceptional virtue and importance in dedicating themselves to someone else’s cause. (See our post, When innocence is vice, September 23, 2010.) Still there is something strikingly low about this pair: their blithe insouciance, their thick-headed ignorance. They’re as silly as they’re vicious.

In Britain now there is no law but Human Rights law, and Justice is its victim.

Here’s an illustration of the fact from the MailOnline:

Aso Mohammed Ibrahim knocked down [12-year- old] Amy Houston and left her to ‘die like a dog’ under the wheels of his car. He was driving while disqualified and after the little girl’s death he committed a string of further offences. …

The child lay screaming in pain and terror while her Muslim murderer ran away from the scene.

But yesterday Ibrahim … won his lengthy fight to stay in Britain.

His lawyers argued that “sending him back to Iraq would breach Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which guarantees his right to a private and family life with his children.

Immigration judges ruled that sending him home would breach his right to a ‘private and family life’ as he has now fathered two children in the UK.

So why not pack the whole family off to what is referred to as his “home” – namely Iraq, for the liberation of which much British blood has been shed?

Because they’re protected by the Human Rights Act, a sentimental abomination proceeding from the undemocratic EU, whose laws take precedence over the laws of its constituent nation-states. The Act “guarantees his right to a private and family life with his children”.

Okay, but why in Britain?

Last night Amy’s father said …  ‘This decision shows the Human Rights Act to be nothing more than a charter for thieves, killers, terrorists and illegal immigrants.” …

Mr Houston … said he was ‘absolutely devastated’ by the decision to allow Ibrahim to stay in the country indefinitely.

‘How can he say he’s deprived of his right to a family life? The only person deprived of a family life is me. Amy was my family.’

Amy was Mr Houston’s only child and for medical reasons he is unable to have any more children. …

Ibrahim, now 33, arrived in Britain hidden in the back of a lorry in January 2001. His application for asylum was refused and a subsequent appeal in November 2002 failed, but he was never sent home.

In 2003, while serving a nine-month driving ban for not having insurance or a licence, he ploughed into Amy near her mother’s home in Blackburn.

He ran away, leaving her conscious and trapped beneath the wheels of his black Rover. Six hours later her father had to take the heartbreaking decision to turn off her life-support system.

But despite leaving Amy to die, Ibrahim was jailed for just four months after admitting driving while disqualified and failing to stop after an accident.

Since his release from prison he has accrued a string of further convictions, including more driving offences, harassment and cautions for burglary and theft.

His lawyers did their best to paint him as a good guy, a desirable citizen, by pleading that “he had became a father figure to [his putative wife’s] two children from a previous relationship and was even helping them with their homework.

This account was dismissed as ‘clearly not credible’ after Ibrahim admitted he could barely speak English.

The judge accepted that Ibrahim’s behaviour was ‘abhorrent’ and branded his evidence ‘contradictory and unsatisfactory’. However –

having a big heart, and because he could use the Human Rights Act to justify his using that organ to think with rather than his head –

–  he ruled that [Ibrahim] had developed a ‘significant and substantial’ relationship with the children and was acting as their father.

Yet, according to the UK Border Agency, “there was little evidence that he was living at the same address as his own [and presumably the other two] children.”

Still, the judges remained staunchly deaf to all arguments and blind to justice, because there is no law but human rights law.

So an illegal immigrant with a long criminal record, who has murdered a child by running over her while driving without a licence, must be allowed to stay in the country because he has fathered a couple of children, and because he’s a father figure to other children, none of whom he lives with. It is his human right.

Why are decent Britons not rising in rebellion against the judges, the law-makers, the entire political establishment that is wrecking their civilization? Tens of thousands are demonstrating in the streets against a rise in University fees, but not against the ruination of their country by the policy of multiculturalism – more specifically, Muslim immigration – and the imposition of despotic EU law.

Is it because multicultural Britain no longer gives a damn about justice?

It seems that the chance of Israel’s survival is about to be considerably diminished.

For some time it has been all too predictable that a small beleaguered democratic Jewish state in the midst of hostile Arab tyrannies would be existentially threatened when Europe became dominated by its Muslim populations in the middle of this century. It will be a tiny strip of dry land in a rising Islamic ocean covering a large part of Asia, north Africa, and all Europe.

Now it seems that its doom is much nearer, as European foreign ministers have declared that their countries are willing to recognize a self-declared State of Palestine. The information comes hot on the heels of announcements by Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay that that’s what they intend to do.

What this means in effect is that Europe will be joining in the war of annihilation the Arabs have been waging against Israel ever since it was legally established in 1948.

Israel can win a war against the Arabs, and probably against a nuclear armed Iran, but not against Europe, and especially not when America is under the leadership of an anti-Israel, pro-Islam president.

Melanie Phillips writes about this in the Spectator. Even she, to our mind, does not seem fully to comprehend the significance of what this EU policy – if it becomes policy, which it probably will – would be. Her analysis, however, is spot on:

Europe’s foreign ministers have threatened to recognise an independent Palestinian state to punish Israeli refusal to halt ‘illegal’ Jewish settlements. …

So let’s get our heads round this.

Israel, the victim of six decades of Arab aggression, is to be punished for frustrating ‘peace’ talks with its aggressors in which it is prepared to take part, on the grounds that it refuses to halt building homes which are said to be illegal but are not; while no punishment is to be meted out to the Arab aggressors who refused to take part in negotiations during the ten months that Israel did halt building these homes — within territories which during these past nine decades it has been entitled to settle under international law – even though these Arabs are the belligerents in the Middle East conflict and continue repeatedly to assert that they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state and who accordingly teach their children to grow up to hate and kill Israelis in order to achieve their never-renounced aim of destroying Israel; nevertheless these genocidal belligerents who have repeatedly turned down a state of their own ever since this was first offered to them more than seven decades ago because they wanted to wipe out Israel instead are to be rewarded by the EU while their victim is to be punished; and all to realise the creation of a state of Palestine which will surely turn in short measure into part of greater Iran, to the terrible cost of the Arabs living in such a state of Palestine and placing the free world in even more danger.

Question: are these morally bankrupt European politicians evil, or just very, very stupid?

Our answer is that they are evil, of course, since their intention is so intensely unjust as to be nothing less than evil – though we don’t rule out the high probability that they’re stupid too.

We see no suggestion that Europe will demand any concessions from Palestine on Israel’s security – or even that Palestine recognize Israel – in exchange for European recognition of Palestinian statehood. We can see no suggestion that in exchange for recognition of another Arab state within designated borders, the Europeans will demand that Arabs forfeit the “inalienable” right of over 1million of their number to reside in Israel (whatever its borders). Understandably. In making those demands, Europe would be putting itself in Israel’s place negotiating “peace” on the same terms. And will get nowhere, just as every Israeli government has got nowhere.

So, Europe, by recognizing Palestine, will also be tacitly supporting the ongoing war of Palestine against Israel. There is nothing to suggest that Palestine – led by the PA or by Hamas – will stay happily behind any borders. The “right of return” will still fuel resistance, as will Islamic fundamentalism. Israel will not cede Jerusalem, even if chunks of Judea and Samaria are handed over to a Palestine. The fighting will continue.

Will Europe put its money where its mouth is? Will it boycott and sanction Israel economically? Will it, in fact, implement the Arab boycott – which is part of the 60-year-old Arab war against Israel?

In other words, will Europe’s tacit support of Palestine by recognizing it as a de jure state become an active war alliance against Israel – economically and militarily? Does Europe propose to field an army at the Palestine borders – through the UN or under its own colors? Will the Europeans fight a border contest on behalf of Arabs? Will they fight the Israelis’ self-defense on behalf of Arabs? Will they, in effect, continue their unfinished business against Jews, in alliance (again) with Arabs?

Unless Europe is prepared to impose sanctions and fight Israel when Israel takes action against Palestinian rocket-launchers and terrorist acts, we cannot see how the European recognition of Palestine along stated borders (1948 armistice lines?!) will change the situation at all, except in one very important respect: peace will have been decoupled from statehood. The dangerous delusion that peace and Palestinian statehood can simultaneously be reached after negotiations – direct, indirect, Likud or Labor, mediated by quartets, or soloists – will be shattered, finally and forever. The Europeans will awaken to the fact that national self-determination for Palestine is defined as war with Israel (whether the nation has real or imaginary borders), for as long as Israel exists within any borders at all.

With the land-for-peace delusion gone, and Europe actively siding with the Arabs against Israel, it may be harder for Europe to pretend – even to itself – that it is motivated by compassion for a select group of Arabs, or justice, or the wish for peace, or even, as we hear so often, the best interests of Israel and Jews. The only mighty international law principles Europe will vindicate is that mighty principals make international law. Sadly, it will be the Jews who will (again) pay the price for the revelation of this banal truth.

What Israel should urgently do – in anticipation of any declaration of Palestinian statehood – is declare and secure the borders it is prepared to defend. That would at least put an end to the negotiability of that territory under the futile “land for peace” formula and place it firmly under the protection of the “war for war ” formula. If Israel defends its borders in war, she keeps them. Peace, should it ever come, will be for peace, and only for peace.

Which Israel might at last enjoy for a few remaining decades.

C. Gee   December 15, 2010

With a little bit of luck, the undemocratic European Union will soon fall apart. One Euro-zone member state after another is collapsing for the simple reason that socialist economics – the sort Obama wants to force on the US – do not work.

Here is Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independent Party (UKIP) which has been doing grand work trying to undo the EU for years, makes a short speech saying bluntly what needs to be said about the whole rotten enterprise of European economic and political unity:

(This post arises out of an interesting and important argument in the comments on the video Getting nowhere, posted below.)

Are there areas in Europe where Muslims have established small “states within a state”? And if so, are they “no-go areas” into which police forces fear to enter and enforce the law of the land?

Daniel Pipes has given much well-informed thought to the subject of Islam in Europe. On the “no-go areas” he wrote in November 2006:

They go by the euphemistic term Zones Urbaines Sensibles, or Sensitive Urban Zones, with the even more antiseptic acronym ZUS, and there are 751 of them as of last count. They are convienently listed on one long webpage, complete with street demarcations and map delineations.

What are they? Those places in France that the French state does not control. They range from two zones in the medieval town of Carcassone to twelve in the heavily Muslim town of Marseilles, with hardly a town in France lacking in its ZUS. The ZUS came into existence in late 1996 and according to a 2004 estimate, nearly 5 million people live in them.

In a series of updates he subsequently cited examples of such problematic “no-go areas” in France, Britain, and Germany.

Muslim enclaves exist, and Muslim populations are increasing, and Muslim power is growing in Europe.

So is Europe becoming an Islamic continent? Will the Europeans allow this to happen? If they’d rather not, what will and what can they do to prevent it?

In 2007 Daniel Pipes wrote that Europe faces “stark options” in dealing with the immense problem that the Muslim presence gives rise to.

Europe’s long-term relations with its burgeoning Muslim minority, the continent’s most critical issue, will follow one of three paths: harmonious integration, the expulsion of Muslims, or an Islamic takeover. Which of these scenarios will most likely play out?

He takes his third scenario, “Muslims Rule”,  first, sets out the case that has been made for it, and sums it up in these words:

This first argument holds that Europe will be Islamized, quietly submitting to the dhimmi status or converting to Islam, because the yin of Europe and yang of Muslims fit so well: low and high religiosity, low and high fertility, low and high cultural confidence. Europe is an open door through which Muslims are walking.

His second scenario is “Muslims Rejected” :

This scenario has indigenous Europeans – who do still constitute 95 percent of the continent’s population – waking up one day and asserting themselves. “Basta!” they will say, and reclaim their historic order. …

For years, Muslims have worried about just such incarceration and brutalization, followed by expulsion or even massacres. Already in the late 1980s, the late Kalim Siddiqui, director of London’s Muslim Institute, raised the specter of “Hitler-style gas chambers for Muslims.” Shabbir Akhtar warned in his 1989 book, Be Careful With Muhammad that “the next time there are gas chambers in Europe, there is no doubt concerning who’ll be inside them,” meaning Muslims. A character in Hanif Kureishi’s 1991 novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, prepares the guerilla war that he expects will follow after “the whites finally turned on the blacks and Asians and tried to force us into gas chambers.”

But it is more likely that European efforts at reclamation will be initiated peaceably and legally, with Muslims – in keeping with recent patterns of intimidation and terrorism – being the ones to initiate violence. Multiple polls confirm that about 5 percent of British Muslims endorse the 7/7 bombings, suggesting a general readiness to resort to force.

However it happens, a European reassertion cannot be assumed to take place cooperatively.

Thirdly he considers “Muslims Integrated”:

In the happiest scenario, autochthonous Europeans and Muslim immigrants find a modus vivendi and live together harmoniously. Perhaps the classic statement of this optimistic expectation was a 1991 study, La France, une chance pour l’Islam (“France, an Opportunity for Islam”) by Jeanne-Hélène and Pierre Patrick Kaltenbach. “For the first time in history,” they wrote, “Islam is offered the chance to waken in a democratic, rich, laic, and peaceable country.” That hopefulness lives on. An Economist leader from mid-2006 asserts that “for the moment at least, the prospect of Eurabia looks like scaremongering.” Also at that time, Jocelyne Cesari, associate professor of Islamic studies at the Harvard Divinity School, claimed a balance exists: just as “Islam is changing Europe,” she said, “Europe is changing Islam.” She finds that “Muslims in Europe do not want to change the nature of European states” and expects them to adapt themselves into the European context.

Such optimism, unfortunately, has little foundation. … Those polls of British Muslims for example, find that a majority of them perceive a conflict between their British and Muslim identities and want Islamic law instituted.

The possibility of Muslims accepting the confines of historic Europe and smoothly integrating within it can virtually be dismissed from consideration.

Having dismissed Muslim integration as unlikely, he is left with the alternative of Muslims rejected or ruling. Which it will be, he cannot predict:

As the American columnist Dennis Prager sums them up, “It is difficult to imagine any other future scenario for Western Europe than its becoming Islamicized or having a civil war.” Indeed, these two deeply unattractive alternative paths appear to define Europe’s choices, with powerful forces pulling in the contrary directions of Muslims taking over or Muslims rejected, Europe an extension of North Africa or in a state of quasi-civil war.

Which will it be? The decisive events that will resolve this question have yet to take place, so one cannot yet make the call. Decision-time is fast approaching, however. Within the next decade or so, today’s flux will end, the Europe-Islam equation will harden, and the continent’s future course should become apparent.

Correctly anticipating that course is the more difficult for being historically unprecedented. No large territory has ever shifted from one civilization to another by virtue of a collapsed population, faith, and identity [Rome? – JB]; nor has a people risen on so grand a scale to reclaim its patrimony. The novelty and magnitude of Europe’s predicament make it difficult to understand, tempting to overlook, and nearly impossible to predict. Europe marches us all into terra incognita.

In 2009 he considered another possible development:

A reader, Chris Slater of Upper Hutt, New Zealand, writes me to predict a fourth outcome as most likely: “larger existing Muslim areas will re-create themselves into independent national entities” and “by the middle of the twenty-first century nearly all western European countries will be riven by the creation of Islamic city states within their borders. For the sake of brevity they will be referred to as ‘microstates,’ that is, autonomous conurbations defined by the Islamic beliefs of their citizens.”

Slater foresees boundaries being formed “around existing Muslim centres of population, initially in France, Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, followed rapidly by Britain, Norway, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Spain. Dates for eastern European states, particularly Orthodox, may be more difficult to predict, although Russia, with 15 percent of its 143 million people professing Islam, may well lead many western European countries in having an independent Islamic state. By the end of this century this process will affect every non-Islamic state throughout the world.”

These microstates will enjoy a “monopoly on legitimate violence,” impose their own autonomous legal order, and form alliances among themselves. They will feature such Shar’i customs as polygyny, no-interest finance, huddud punishments, Islamic ways of dress, family “honor” codes, bans on criticism of Islam, and so on. Arabic and the dominant immigrant vernacular will enjoy more currency than the host country’s language. Street names will be changed, statues removed, churches and synagogues converted to mosques.

Slater sees this outcome this as “the only way to avoid the destruction of both the national cultures and, indeed, European civilization from total domination by the cultures of Muslim immigrants.”

But this scenario Pipes considered to be as unlikely as integration.

We think that Muslim rule is the most likely scenario; and that microstates, forming now as “no-go” areas, will be an intermediate phase on the way to complete Islamic domination.

There are new political parties in Europe which understand, as the old established parties do not, the threat of Islamization. (A new one has just come into existence in Germany, called Die Freiheit.) But what can they do at this late stage? Limit immigration? It’s too late for that to make a significant difference. Expel Muslims? Where to? Many, after all, have been born in Europe, and there are thousands of European converts. Resort to massacre? Most unlikely: the Holocaust, even though it does not inhibit persecution of the Jews or hostility to the State of Israel, does stand as too recent an act of shame to allow Europeans to commit cold-blooded murder on such a scale again in this century.

The low fertility rate of the Europeans cannot be reversed in time to prevent their nations dwindling, while that of the Muslims amongst them means there’ll be a Muslim majority within 50 years, barring some casus fortuitus to prevent it.

There remains the possibility of civil war.

George Soros works to destroy the free market liberalism which allowed him to make the colossal fortune he uses to work for its destruction. He does it through a string of organizations, chiefly his Open Society Institute, whose name is Orwellian: it aims to close the open society and establish totalitarian state control.

He has done, and continues to do, much harm in and to America.

He has also done, and continues to do, much harm in and to Europe.

His ambition stretches further yet.

“His goal is a new global imperium … that will be truly totalitarian,”  Srdja Trifkovic said in an address he gave to the H. L. Mencken Club in Baltimore on October 23, 2010.

Trifkovic deplored Soros’s lavish funding for campaigns to legalize cannabis, promote euthanasia, further abortion rights, impose gun control, and abolish the death penalty; and his support for radical feminism, gay activism, and same-sex marriage.

We agree with Trifkovic that Soros has had “an enormous and hideously destructive impact” on the societies he has targeted.

But we strongly disagree with him on how Western civilization could and should be defended.

Trifkovic said:

Soros’s vision is hostile even to the most benign understanding of national or ethnic coherence. … His hatred of religion is the key. He promotes an education system that will neutralize any lingering spiritual yearnings of the young, and promote the loss of a sense of place and history already experienced by millions of Westerners, whether they are aware of that loss or not. Estranged from their parents, ignorant of their culture, ashamed of their history, millions of Westerners are already on the path of alienation that demands every imaginable form of self-indulgence, or else leads to drugs, or suicide, or conversion to Islam or some other cult.

To understand Soros it is necessary to understand globalization as a revolutionary, radical project. In the triumph of liberal capitalism, the enemies of civilization such as Soros have found the seeds of future victory for their paradigm that seeks to eradicate all traditional structures capable of resistance. The revolutionary character of the Open Society project is revealed in its relentless adherence to the mantra of Race, Gender and Sexuality. …

Religion itself is no longer, if it ever was, a “traditional structure capable of resistance” to the post-national totalitarian nightmare envisioned by Soros and the left. The left despises Western religion but promotes Islam in its human-and-civil-rights guise because it helps undermine Western freedoms born of free market liberalism. If Trifkovic believes traditional religion can defend civilization, he is wrong.

Christianity or Judaism offer nothing to counter the zeitgeist of ever-loosening social constraints. “Spirituality” is a commodity marketed variously even within the traditional religions. The last bastion of civilization – of voluntary collective polities, democracies of free people in pursuit of happiness under law – is the nation-state, constitutionally protecting the individual, regardless of his identity with any race, gender, or sexuality, against being subsumed by collective (“human”) rights and privileges.

It might be that: the legalization of pot means greater numbers of children and adults will be stuck on stupid more often than they currently are; the legalization of homosexual marriage means greater numbers have (non-procreative) sex; the legalization of abortion may result in many more dead babies, but fewer dead women. All that may disgust the very traditionally faithful, but restoring the social stigma attached to it, let alone the legal proscription, is not going to happen.

All those are individual decisions. They do not jeopardize civilization. What will bring civilization down are the post-national leftist choice architects, the people who decide carbon dioxide is a pollutant, that you must have government health care, but forfeit it if you’re fat, that international human rights preempt justice and self-defense, that governments own everything and must distribute proportionally to collectives’ demands.

The globalization of welfare government – that is the dream of the left and Soros. Insofar as traditional religions preserve the ideas of the morality of institutionalized compassion and the compulsion of individual conduct they are easily coopted by the forces of darkness. In the coming Universal State, Muslims will be allowed to continue honor-killings as a collective right, but the right of an individual – to kill in self-defense, to expect justice, to start and mind his own business, to allocate his resources as he pleases, to provide for himself and his family, to have children and to raise them, and to say what he likes to whomever he wishes – will be regulated out of existence. “Civilization” will have been redefined as “acceptable choices”. Enlightened self-interest will be knowing the difference between private (cholesterol levels) and public (carbon usage) virtue. Religion can do nothing whatsoever to stop this, only a resurgence of belief in individual liberty and the free market can. Good luck with that.

C. Gee  October 28, 2010

The three judges in the trial of Geert Wilders have been dismissed.

(See our posts Civilization on trial, October 11, 2010; A stink of Fox, March 12, 2010; Freedom versus Islam, January 20, 2010; The West on trial, December 16, 2009.)

A new trial will have to be called – unless the case against Wilders is abandoned, as it should be.

From a report by Leon de Winter at PajamasMedia:

Wilders’ lawyer Abraham Moszkowicz today asked for dismissal of the three judges, and his request was approved by the dismissal commission of the court. …

Moszkowicz asked for a dismissal after the three judges refused to allow Dr. Hans Jansen to testify regarding a discussion he had with one of the judges of a higher court that ordered the prosecution of Wilders.

Dr. Hans Jansen is “one of the foremost Islam experts in the Netherlands”. He had given testimony in a closed session of the Wilders case.

As in the US, judges in a case are not allowed to discuss it outside the courtroom.

In May, Dr. Jansen was invited to attend a dinner party together with one of the higher court judges. This judge started discussing the Wilders trial, and his order to prosecute, with Dr. Jansen. Jansen revealed this on his personal blog last Wednesday. Moszkowicz wanted the judges to hear, in court, Dr. Jansen’s impression of this discussion. …

The court refused Moszkowicz’ request to hear Dr. Jansen. Moszkowicz subsequently asked for dismissal of this court, and after a short session the dismissal commission agreed with him.

Of great interest to us is a statement made by the host of the dinner party, Bertus Hendriks, “a well-known pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist journalist and activist in the Netherlands”.

On his blog published Wednesday, October 20, Dr. Jansen writes about Hendriks: “Bertus once explained to me that he didn’t care that much for the Palestinian problem. It was more … that the Palestinian fate could expose the global structures of exploitation.”

We have seldom if ever come across so bald a confession of why the Left exploits the Palestinian cause; of the comrades’ actual indifference to people for whom they claim their hearts bleed. It’s an honest confession of hypocrisy.

Mouthing their meaningless socialist platitudes – such as “global structures of exploitation” – they blindly ally themselves with forces inimical to the civilization that sustains them: blood-soaked tyrannies in the recent past, and now Islam. Uncountable millions of corpses strew their chosen path, but on they go. And all in the name of bettering the lot of humanity!

What high-minded Western intellectuals like to call “Islamism”  and  we call the waging of violent jihad in accordance with the commandments of the Prophet Muhammad,  is growing in the Balkans.

A report at Deutsche Welle gives some detail, naming Bosnia as a region where Saudi Wahhabism is increasing “tension” between Muslims and Serbs.

Some Bosnian Wahhabis, estimated to number 3,000, are former foreign fighters who married Bosnian women and stayed in the country after the Bosnian war that ended in 1995.

The 1990s wars in the Balkans, in which NATO became involved, are hardly ever mentioned now. Under Commander-in-Chief Bill Clinton, America fought its most unnecessary military engagement ever. Absolutely no American interests were involved. American lives were sacrificed to Muslim interests, including the protection of Muslim terrorists in Kosovo.

In early September, Bosnian police uncovered a cache of weapons and detained a third suspect as part of their inquiry into a June bomb attack that killed one policeman and injured six others. The attack on a police station in the town of Bugojno was one of the most serious security incidents in Bosnia. Police arrested the suspected mastermind and an aide shortly after the blast.

Prosecutors [are] investigating several people from Bugojno and Gornja Maoca on suspicion of Wahhabi ties, terrorism and human trafficking.

The report contains some picturesque details:

In February, Bosnian and EU police raided Gornja Maoca and arrested seven men described as Wahhabis because of their beards and shortened trousers. Police said they were detained for suspected illegal possession of arms and threatening the country’s “territorial integrity, constitutional order and provoking inter-ethnic and religious hatred.”

We will quote some more of the report, on both Bosnia and Macedonia, partly because we like the curious names:

Gornja Maoca was home to some 30 families who lived by strict Shariah laws … Nusret Imamovic [a name that encapsulates Slavic Islam – JB], the town’s self-proclaimed Wahhabi leader, endorsed suicide attacks on the group’s Bosnian language website, saying they should be launched only in “exceptional circumstances.” The site features statements by al-Qaeda and Islamic groups fighting in the Caucasus and celebrates suicide bombers as joyful Muslims.

Serbian officials say 12 alleged Wahhabis convicted last year to prison terms of up to 13 years for planning terrorist attacks, including on the US Embassy in Belgrade, had close ties to their brethren in Gornja Maoca. One of the convicted, Adnan Hot, said during the trial that Imamovic was one of only three Muslim leaders that he followed. Four other Wahhabis were sentenced in a separate case to jail terms of up to eight years on charges of planning to bomb a football stadium in the southern Serbian town of Novi Pazar.

In Macedonia, Suleyman Rexhepim Rexhepi, head of the official Islamic Religious Community (IVZ), recently called on the government and the international community to crack down on increasingly influential Wahabbi groups. Rexhepi is locked into a bitter battle with Ramadan Ramadani, the imam of the Isa Beg mosque in Skopje, that has caused a rift in the country’s Muslim community.

*

The history of Bosnia’s Muslim population is interesting.

It is a chapter in the story of Gnosticism, which spread westward through southern Europe from the 8th to the 14th centuries.

The Bugomils (or Bogomils) were a Gnostic sect established in  the Land of Hum, now known as Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Their name Bugomil means “Beloved of God”.  (The Slavic word for “God” is “Bug” or “Bog”. “Mil” means “dear”.)

Their creed was a variation of the Paulicians’, a sect which became numerous in the 8th century Byzantine Empire, their beliefs deriving from Manicheism (see our post Mani and Manicheism, May 9, 2010) and possibly also from the church of Marcion (see our post How a rich ship owner affected Christianity, January 2, 2010). It spread from Bulgaria into the Balkans, where its followers were also known as Patarenes.

In brief, the Bugomils believed:

There are two gods, one good and one evil. The good god is knowable only by the Elect. The evil god is the God of the Jews, who created this material world. As it is his creation, everything in it is evil, every flower, every rock and grain of sand, every drop of water, every living thing of land and air and sea, excepting only the Elect.

Jesus was sent to earth by the remote good god to cure all ills. Although Mary “gave birth” to him, he was not her son but entered her through an ear and “emerged by the same door”. No reverence was due to Mary, who was only an incubator for the Christ, and was the mother of many other children fathered by Joseph.

They taught that this evil world must be renounced as much as possible in this life, so they forbade the drinking of wine and the eating of meat, and discouraged marriage. Reproduction was disapproved of but not totally eschewed – so the sect did not die out. To keep procreation down, sex was practiced in ways that would avoid it.

It is from the Bugomils’ normal practice of anal sex that the words “bugger” and “buggery” are derived.

Some teachers, such as one Theodosius, favored nudism. His followers celebrated “holy orgies” of sexual excess.

They had no icons, no feast days, no sacraments except baptism, which was performed by words only, water being an evil material substance. The ritual consisted of placing the Gospel of John on the head of the candidate, invoking the Holy Ghost, and reciting the Lord’s prayer. The candidate thus became one of the Elect.

They had no consecrated churches, only meeting-houses for communal praying. They repeated the Lord’s prayer 10 times over, 7 times daily and 5 times nightly.

They disobeyed their Orthodox overlords as a religious duty, passively resisting their authority.

After centuries of holding out against attempts at their conversion by both the Orthodox and Catholic churches, they greeted the Turkish invaders of the late 15th century as liberators, and many of them became Muslim. How many is not known; nor how many contemporary Bosnian Muslims are descended from the Bugomils; but some certainly are, and possibly most of them.

Jillian Becker    October 14, 2010