Although Muslims are still far from a majority in Europe, they already have formidable, ominous, and in some circumstances decisive political power.

This is from Right Side News, by Soeren Kern:

An analysis of the voting patterns that barrelled François Hollande to victory on May 6 as the first Socialist president of France since 1995 shows that this overthrow was due in large measure to Muslims, who voted for him in overwhelming numbers. The French vote marks the first time that Muslims have determined the outcome of a presidential election in a major western European country; it is a preview of things to come.

As the politically active Muslim population in France continues to swell, and as most Muslims vote for Socialist and leftwing parties, conservative parties will find it increasingly difficult to win future elections in France.

According to a survey of 10,000 French voters conducted by the polling firm OpinionWay for the Paris-based newspaper Le Figaro, an extaordinary 93% of French Muslims voted for Hollande on May 6. By contrast, the poll shows that only 7% of French Muslims voted for the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy.

An estimated 2 million Muslims participated in the 2012 election, meaning that roughly 1.7 million Muslim votes went to Hollande rather than to Sarkozy. In the election as a whole, however, Hollande won over Sarkozy by only 1.1 million votes. This figure implies that Muslims cast the deciding votes that thrust Hollande into the Élysée Palace.

France, home to between five and six million Muslims, already has the largest Muslim population in the European Union, and those numbers are expected to increase exponentially in coming years. According to conservative estimates, the Muslim population is projected to exceed 10% of the overall French population within the next decade-and-a-half.

During the campaign, Hollande offered an amnesty to all of the estimated 400,000 illegal Muslim immigrants currently in France. He also pledged to change French electoral laws so that Muslim residents without French citizenship would be allowed to vote in municipal elections as of 2014. These measures, if implemented, would enable the Socialist Party tighten its grip on political power, both at the regional and national levels. …

In the ideological sphere … most Muslims wholeheartedly support Socialist multicultural dogma, which they are leveraging to promote the Islamization of Europe. …

So the French have voted for economic ruin and Islamization.

Est-ce un désir ardent pour la mort?

If it is a longing for death, it is not only the French who are in the grip of it.

France is not the only country in which Muslims are changing the political dynamic. …

In Britain… during the 2010 elections, Muslim voters were the deciding factor in 82 constituencies. In the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Muslim voters elected the Bangladeshi-born Lutfur Rahmanas their mayor. He is linked to the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), an Islamist group dedicated to changing the “very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed … from ignorance to Islam.” Since taking office, Rahman has stocked the public libraries in Tower Hamlets with books and DVDs containing the extremist sermons of banned Islamist preachers. … Labour Party MP Jim Fitzpatrick recently warned that his party has been infiltrated by radical Muslims who want to create an “Islamic social and political order” there. Muslims, he said, are “placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level.” …

So there is at least one Socialist in Britain who can see that Islam is not an ideology in harmony with his own.

In Belgium, Muslims now make up one-quarter of the population of Brussels. …

Brussels is the capital city of the EU.

In practical terms, Islam mobilizes more people in Brussels than does the Roman Catholic Church, and demographers expect that Muslims will comprise the majority of the population of Brussels by 2030. …

In Spain, the Socialist Party recently attempted to pass a law in parliament that would have enabled more than 500,000 Moroccans residing in Spain to vote in Spanish municipal elections. If enacted, the measure would have ensured permanent Socialist control over all Spanish towns and cities with significant Muslim minorities. The measure was derailed in November 2011, when, in the general election, the Socialists were ousted from power.

But it would not have been “permanent”, that Socialist control. Because the indigenous populations of the European nation-states are dwindling away and the Muslim populations are growing, it would have lasted only until a Muslim majority took over, and that would be “permanent” (which is to say long-lasting, since permanence is improbable in political affairs).

Can anything prevent the Islamization of Europe before this century is out?

Yes, wait – there is a flaw in the  scenario.

Bankruptcy could do it. A drying up of welfare would make Europe much less attractive to Muslims. If they were to get no free education, no free health care, no social security, they would very likely leave in large numbers. And as bankruptcy – already threatening – will happen all the quicker where Socialist parties are in power, the Muslims only confound themselves by voting for them.

Did the French voters see this? Is François Hollande their secret weapon against jihad-by-stealth? We don’t imagine so for a moment. But the prospect of the European Left’s misalliance with Islam ending quite soon in a bitter divorce is invigorating.

The still-comparatively-free-world has almost everything it needs to defeat its most belligerent enemy, Islam. It has superior military, technological, economic, political and intellectual  power. All it lacks is the will.

Daniel Greenfield, writing at Canada Free Press, explains that by not acting against the enemy, by not even naming the enemy as Islam, we are conniving at our own defeat:

The formula for fighting a War on Terror without defining a vector for that terror has led to a state of terror, in which everyone is either terrified or terrorized. The official word is that anyone and everyone can be a terrorist, and even though they all seem to be Muslim, the official position is that this is a complete coincidence, a misunderstanding of the religion of peace or a result of our foreign policy. …

Muslims term their lands the Dar-al-Islam and our lands, the Dar-al-Harb, the realm of the sword. But the irony is that it is Islamic lands which are the true realm of the sword, forever in conflict, Muslim fighting Muslim, while repressing and enslaving Jews, Christians, Hindus and any other minorities under Muslim rule.

The sword has given way to the bomb, though it is still used occasionally on hostages, and by importing Islam we have imported the way of the sword and the rule of the bomb. When the followers of the sword take the plane, then sooner or later they will bomb the plane or use the plane as a guided missile. There is no avoiding that.

Rather than terrorizing the terrorists, our governments terrorize us. They make us into the prisoners of an endless terror while they appease the terrorists. By [their failure] to define a clear enemy, we have all been made into the enemy.

The raid is as indigenous to Arabia as its sand. As Islam has become indigenous to America and Europe, the raid is becoming indigenous to Western nations as well, and no game of ‘three monkeys’ will change that. Islam spread by sword and terror, it survived by sword and terror, and it thrives by sword and terror.

The body count of those slain by Muslim terrorists has translated directly into a quantum increase in Muslim political influence. The Mohammedan religion, once obscure, is now at the helm of foreign and domestic policy. …

The latest conquests of Islam may take a century to complete, but if the demographic trends continue, then they will cover the territory from the warm coasts of Spain to the frozen depths of Russia. The raids will soften up the lands of the sword, cut away their people, intimidate their governments into making concessions and use brute numbers to swarm them and become the majority. It has happened for over a thousand years, long before American foreign policy was anything more than a dream, and it is happening now. All around us.

The demographic bomb is the most explosive of all the devices and it doesn’t show up on even the most intrusive airport scanners. Arafat called the womb of the Arab woman his strongest weapon. The House of Saud liked to say that they had built their nation with a sword of steel and a sword of flesh. These two quotes explain the miserable state of the Muslim woman and the quiet ticking of the demographic clock, the bomb whose components are veiled women, trundling in groups behind a single man, the girls exploited by Muslim ‘Asian’ sex gangs and the rising number of female converts. …

When the number of Muslims proliferate, so does the number of bombs .. the kind that blow up right away and the kind that tick slowly away from generation to generation, embedding themselves into a society, undermining it, chipping away at its roots, until it is time for them to go off. But whatever kind of bombs they are, when they go off they destroy our lives and our freedoms.

We must go on to the attack.

We could make a good start by bombing the kaaba, a black stone enshrined in Mecca that Muslims hold sacred.

Here is part of a Washington Times article by Geert Wilders, leader and hero of the contemporary Dutch Resistance against Islam and its craven apologists:

As I write these lines, there are police bodyguards at the door. No visitor can enter my office without passing through several security checks and metal detectors. I have been marked for death. I am forced to live in a heavily protected safe house. Every morning, I am driven to my office in the Dutch Parliament building in an armored car with sirens and flashing blue lights. When I go out, I am surrounded, as I have been for the past seven years, by plainclothes police officers. When I speak in public, I wear a bulletproof jacket.

Who am I? I am neither a king nor a president, nor even a government minister; I am just a simple politician in the Netherlands. But because I speak out against expanding Islamic influence in Europe, I have been marked for death. If you criticize Islam, this is the risk you run. That is why so few politicians dare to tell the truth about the greatest threat to our liberties today. The Islamic threat to the West is worse than the communist threat ever was. Think of it this way: Politicians who warned against the Soviet threat weren’t forced into hiding, as we who speak out against Islam are.

I received my first death threats in September 2003 after I asked the Dutch government to investigate a radical mosque. When the death threats became more frequent, the Dutch authorities assigned me a team of police bodyguards. In November 2004, after a Muslim fanatic murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for making a movie about the abuse of women under Islam, policemen armed with machine guns came to my house, pushed me into an armored car, and drove me off into the night. That was the last time I was in my house. Since then, I have lived in an army barracks, a prison cell and now a government-owned safe house.

I have grown accustomed to this situation. After more than seven years, the security detail has become part of my daily routine, but in a free society, no politician should have to fear for his life because he addresses issues voters care about.

Nor should special-interest groups be allowed to trump our Western rights of free speech, as Islamic and leftist organizations tried to do by dragging me to court on accusations of “hate speech.” After an almost three-year legal ordeal, I was acquitted of all charges.

I used to travel widely and frequently in the Islamic world, but now it’s no longer safe. I have read the Koran and studied the life of Muhammad. It made me realize that Islam is primarily a totalitarian ideology rather than a religion. I feel sorry for the Arab, Persian, Indian and Indonesian peoples who have to live under the yoke of Islam. … Without freedom, there can be no prosperity and no pursuit of happiness. More Islam means less life, less liberty and less happiness.

That is why I consider it my duty to sound the alarm about the relentless expansion of Islam. … Islam [wages] jihad – holy war – against the West … from within our borders.

Fifty-seven percent of the Dutch people say that mass immigration was the biggest single mistake in Dutch history. Many politicians, however, downplay the most dramatic sociological change of their lifetime. They ignore the worries of the people out of political correctness and cultural relativism, which insist that all cultures are equal; hence, immigrants do not need to assimilate: Islamic values are just as good as Dutch, British or American values.

If we do not oppose Islamization, we will lose everything: our freedom, our identity, our democracy, our rule of law. To preserve Western civilization, we must do four things: Defend freedom of speech, reject cultural relativism, counter Islamization, and cherish our Western national identities  …

Of all our liberties, freedom of speech is the most important. Free speech is the cornerstone of a free society. So long as we are free to speak, we can make people realize what is at stake. In Western democracies, we do not settle our disagreements with violence, but through spoken and written arguments. In the search for the truth, we allow everyone to express his or her honestly held views. That is how we outgrew barbarism and became a free and prosperous society. We must pass it on to our children.

I have written a book in defense of liberty and freedom of expression, titled “Marked for Death”. It explains the many ways in which Islam has marked for death not only me, but all of Western civilization. The book warns Americans about the danger of turning a blind eye to the true nature of Islam.

That Geert Wilders lives in fear of being murdered in his own country, while those who threaten him are protected by stupid laws against “hate speech”, should be intolerable to the conscience of all Europeans. Instead, European courts continue to prosecute those who defend freedom against the onslaught of intolerant Islam.

The Muslims who pursue him do not seem to realize that they are doing more to condemn Islam in Western eyes than anything Geert Wilders has said.  But if no one will say so, the lesson will be lost.

Islam should be marked by the West for extinction. Instead it is protected by two shields gifted to it by the West. Two shibboleths.

The shield of religion. Islam calls itself a religion, and the West upholds religious tolerance. But Islam needs to be recognized as the totalitarian ideology that it is. In any case, religious ideas should not be immune from criticism. On the contrary – being irrational, they deserve to be accorded less, not more, respect; and criticized all the more relentlessly.

The shield of (faux) victimhood. Islam is an ideology of backward peoples, and backward peoples are needed by the Left as its cause and pretext, since its first choice, the Western proletariat, disappeared into the middle class.

Neither shield is impregnable. Islam must be fought on all fronts, and words are the most powerful weapons against it.

Let’s use words against Islam in America. Let’s criticize it, ridicule it, rage against it. Doing so is forbidden in Europe, and that makes it even more vital for us to do it here. 

This video is an overview of an excellent course in 10 parts. It teaches how the Muslim Brotherhood is pursuing its agenda in the US, which is to infiltrate the institutions of American democracy and penetrate the highest echelons of government, in order to spread totalitarian sharia law, and advance towards the establishment of a caliphate as a dominating global power.

It shows that even the Republican Party is being subverted by Muslim Brotherhood agents, most notably Grover Norquist, whose tax-cutting ideas are good, but whose affiliation to America’s worst enemy is evil and needs to be exposed.

It shows how “useful idiots” in the military and security services are helping the Muslim Brotherhood achieve its aims.

Learn more about it, or take the whole course free of charge, here.

Recent events and disclosures at the highest levels of our government demonstrate that our own rulers … have through folly and dishonesty exposed themselves as “useful idiots” or worse, liars and functionaries whose loyalties may well be to other than the United States.

This is from an article by David Meir-Levi at Front Page:

On April 10, Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, stated that “religion is not driving extremist violence” in Nigeria. This pronouncement was made one day after Boko Haram, the uber-violent Muslim jihadist Nigerian terrorists, bombed a church killing 39 Christians.

Carson told us an unconscionable and transparent lie …  given the Boko Haram’s overt and unabashed self-definition as a brutally violent Muslim terrorist organization which condemns all things non-Muslim as “Haram” (prohibited) …

What impelled Mr. Carson to lie such that anyone anywhere who does not live under a rock can see that he is lying? …

The Saudi royal family has over the past decades insinuated itself into our State Department by promising State Department officials serving in the Arab world generous sinecures when they have retired from their official duties, as long as they represent Saudi interests to the US government while serving in the State Department. These Saudi long-range bribes render our officials servants of the Saudi government, representing Saudi interests to our government instead of the other way around.

How many Americans ostensibly serving US interests, and paid by American tax-payers to serve US interests, are in fact working for the Saudis? Who could know, since each traitor must try to keep his secret?  It is bad that any are, it is appalling that many probably are.

One thing is apparent, since Johnnie Carson is able openly to tell his blatant lie: the head of the State Department is allowing it to happen.

But the problem runs deeper than one State Department functionary whose integrity may have been compromised by Muslim forces that want him to lie on behalf of Islamic jihadist terrorists. His boss is Madame Secretary Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State. She has been silent regarding his transparent lie. Is Saudi penetration so deep that even the Secretary of State cannot publicly correct the errors of a State Department employee; and is it only the Saudis?

Both deeper and higher the rot reaches:

Very distressingly, it may be more than the State Department alone that is in question here. President Obama and the State Department have been unwilling to rule out aid to Hamas despite the fact that that very same State Department has classified Hamas as a terrorist organization, and American law prohibits US financial aid to terrorist organizations.

As Trudy Rubin observed last year in a Washington Post article: “The most ominous interpretation of the mush coming from the State Department (regarding aid to Hamas) is that the administration is so rudderless, unprincipled and desperate to avoid a clear defeat in its efforts to foist a “peace agreement” on the parties that it would go so far as to continue to do business with the PA, despite (the PA’s) taking on a partner that has killed Americans, seeks Israel’s destruction and, from behind the skirts of women and the cribs of children, has conducted a missile bombardment of Israel.”

The State Department’s rudderless, unprincipled pronouncements contradict its own policy denying aid to any terrorist organization. …

Obama and Hillary Clinton plainly do not recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization. It’s writ large in their record of the past three years that their sympathies lie strongly with Hamas and strongly  against Israel.

Significant percentages of Gazan Arabs … really want Hamas and other terror groups to just keep on bombing Israel, just keep on killing Jews. Yet the State Department and our President are unclear as to whether or not it is a good idea for the USA to continue to provide Hamas with hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars …

Then there is Madame Secretary’s comments on TV to a young and activist Tunisian audience on April 17. When asked why American Presidential candidates on both sides support Israel and Zionism, she said:

“Well, first, let me say you will learn as your democracy develops that a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention. There are comments made that certainly don’t reflect the United States, don’t reflect our foreign policy, don’t reflect who we are as a people.”

In plainer words: “We  lie a lot, but the truth is we do not support Israel.” 

Our Secretary of State told her Tunisian audience, in front of international TV, that our Presidential candidates lie to get votes, and they are lying about their support for Israel. Then she went on to say:

“…watch what President Obama says and does. He’s our President. He represents all of the United States, and he will be reelected President, so I think that that will be a very clear signal to the entire world as to what our values are and what our President believes.”

Yes, watch him. He does make clear his aggression towards Israel. He bows to the Saudis. He wants money to go to Hamas. In this, if only in this, Hillary Clinton is right. The whole world should read the clear signals of his beliefs.

In other words, the President is really on your side, Tunisian youth, and Obama’s pro-Israel statements in the previous campaign and during his current tenure are lies, as is the pro-Israel rhetoric of the Republican candidates.

There is no reason at present to doubt that Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s “rhetoric” about being pro-Israel is merely a convenient lie. The left habitually ascribes its own faults and evil plots to its opponents.

Secretary Clinton subordinated U.S. interests to partisan considerations and told her Muslim audience what she figured they wanted to hear, namely that the USA does not really support Israel, that’s just mendacious campaign rhetoric. In addition to calling her own President and most Republican candidates liars, she also unabashedly contradicted 65 years of the Israel-USA relationship. …

And Obama himself, Mr. “knife in Israel’s back,” has pandered to the Persians, curtseyed to the Caliph (king Abdullah of Saudi Arabia), flip-flopped in representing himself on the Arab-Israel issue, and tried his best during the three years of his presidency, to make a shambles of the traditional US-Israel relationship. …

Our leaders at the highest levels … have revealed to us their naked dishonesty. They are not honest stewards of American society, nor honest brokers in the Israel-Arab conflict, nor even stalwart defenders of our own country, their own country, in Western Civilization’s defensive war against Islamofascist, triumphalist, totalitarian, terrorist jihad. They have been compromised by forces at least one of which is Saudi oil money.

– To which forces they have been not just open but positively welcoming, because their prejudices are in favor of Islam and the Arabs, and profoundly against American exceptionalism and the ideal of individual liberty. 

What will it take before we can end the lies, stop the posturing, and call the complicity of our President and his Department of State with Muslim jihadist terrorism what it really is?

Bashar al-Assad continues to slaughter his own people — nearly 10,000 over the past year — and the Muslim Brotherhood leaders of the Syrian opposition undoubtedly would slaughter Assad’s Alawite coreligionists were they to take power. There are at least 2,000 dead and 22,000 injured in little Yemen during the past two years. All of this pales next to what is likely to come in Egypt, as the military and the Islamists fight for power.

These are quotations from an enlightening article on the “Arab Spring”  by David Goldman, aka Spengler. Read all of it here.

The Muslim Brotherhood is in the position of the Bolsheviks in October 1917, taking power at street level by creating popular committees to “combat speculators,” that is, ration food and fuel. No one should underestimate the Muslim Brotherhood. It withstood sixty years of persecution by successive military regimes. And it understands Egypt’s predicament far better than the Western conservatives who saw the Arab Spring as the harbinger of democracy in the region. The Brotherhood, on the contrary, knows that Islam is fragile, that the Muslim world is fighting a desperate rearguard battle for its existence against the encroachment of Western culture and economic globalization, and that time is running out.

An extremely interesting and important point. We too have observed that Islam is fighting for its survival in a world that long since outstripped its Dark Age ideology, but we had not thought of it as fragile.

He substantiates his assertions, and marks how Obama fails to understand the nature of what he’s supporting with his pro-Islam policies:

Why am I so sure of this? Apart from the fact that its leaders have been saying so since Sayyid Qutb in the 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website has posted two of my essays on the topic, one on the impending demographic and economic collapse of Muslim countries, and another on the Obama administration’s stupidity, concluding (in June 2009): “For his trouble, Obama will get more bloodshed in Pakistan, more megalomania from Iran, more triumphalism from the Palestinians, and less control over Iraq and Afghanistan. Of all the available bad choices, Obama has taken the worst. It is hard to imagine any consequence except a steep diminution of American influence.” You can read my work on the Brothers’ website (but not at the Weekly Standard, Commentary, or Fox News, where promoting Muslim democracy remains the mantra). From this I conclude that the Muslim Brotherhood is better informed than the Weekly Standard, et. al.

The most miserable people in the world, though, are the liberals.

He means, surely, the most misery-causing; liberals are all too pleased with themselves.

Liberalism boils down to the assertion that clever governments can save people from themselves. Palestine was supposed to have been the test case, where enlightened liberals would save people from their proclivity towards tribal hatred. Not only has it turned out badly for the Palestinians as such, but for the Arab world that has collapsed around them.

Then he declares what US policy towards the Arab world should be, and his idea gives us that frisson of pleasure which comes with hearing a statement that is entirely unexpected but instantly recognizable as right:

What should the United States do about it? The answer is: Make things worse.

If the Brothers are taking power in Egypt because the military can’t rule, we should undertake to make it impossible for the Brothers to rule. The human cost of such a policy will be horrific, and I use the word advisedly. It was a catastrophic mistake to help overthrow Mubarak. The consequences of that mistake are that no Egyptian officer will stand up against the Islamists for very long, because the U.S. cannot be trusted as an ally. That applies elsewhere. Two years ago, America might have thrown its weight behind pro-democracy forces in Iran. Now it is simply too dangerous to bet on regime change. The most prudent course of action is to disable the regime, even though the human consequences for the Iranians will be horrific.

We are not particularly good at this kind of stance. It does not square with the inherent benevolence and naivete of our national character. But we are being pushed into this kind of policy, like it or not, just as the Muslim Brotherhood is being pushed into a Leninist dual power exercise by the collapse of the Egyptian economy. The consequences will be tragic, to be sure; our job is to make sure that the tragedy happens to somebody else.

Shocking? Maybe – but that is the way leaders of free nations ought to think.

What may be virtues  in individuals – generosity, compassion, charitableness, self-denial – are, unequivocally, vices in a government. A government that is generous and charitable with the money that is not its own is cheating the people who’ve made it. A government cannot feel compassion, it has no conscience. A government has no “self” to deny. The government of a free people is an agency trusted by the people to protect their liberty, not to protect other peoples from their own rotten governments.

Again Pat Condell speaks for us. Inter alia, he faults atheists who cloud their clarity of thought with leftist political correctness.

Although this video is not new (it dates from August 2010), its message is still very much to the point: for freedom, against religion –  especially Islam.

Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, accused of racism for saying that Muslims maltreat their women, was found guilty of “hate speech” on May 3, 2011.

He said at that time:

My crime is to have called attention to the horrific conditions of Muslim women and for my audacity the court has now enabled my detractors to label me a racist.

Muslims can say whatever they want with impunity. Just a few weeks ago Denmark opened its gates to the hate-spewing preacher Bilal Philips, known for his advocacy of wife-beating and the killing of homosexuals. He was provided a platform in Copenhagen and nobody thought of dragging him into court.

Our authorities and their allies among the pc elites have chosen sides in the struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of darkness and so opted for the oppressors of their own people and against those deserving of their protection.

The real victims of this despicable case are freedom of speech and the tens of thousands of girls and women – Muslim as well as non-Muslim – whose plight may no longer be mentioned in my country for fear of legal prosecution and public denigration.

We cannot permit this outcome to stand. I have therefore decided to appeal my conviction to the Supreme Court and – if that is denied – to the European Court of Human Rights.

This is a fight for liberty against tyranny. It will be long and hard but losing is no option.

On Friday, April 13, 2012, his appeal against his conviction was heard by the Danish Supreme Court.

This is what he said (translation taken from FrontPage):

Honourable Supreme Court,

My attorney has presented juridical arguments to the effect that I must be acquitted and I shall refrain from elaborating.

However, allow me to express my quiet bafflement that somebody can claim that it has been my intention to accuse every last Muslim father in the world of abusing his children – particularly in light of the fact that I have carefully explained that it was never my intention to disseminate such an absurd contention.

For precisely that reason, I would have welcomed an opportunity to review the statements I now stand accused of having uttered before they were placed on the Internet. If the interviewer had fulfilled this basic journalistic obligation, I would have demanded that my remarks be corrected so as to reflect my true opinions and the prosecutor could have saved the trouble of dragging me through the courts.

I am even more baffled at one of the claims about my person that has been circulated in connection with this case, namely that I am a racist. I have never been, I am not now and I shall never be a racist. On the contrary, all my life I have opposed racist attitudes, by which I mean hatred towards and denigrating speech about people due their descent, skin color or other so-called racial characteristics – in other words, antipathy against or ill treatment of people due to circumstances over which they have no control.

Islam is not a race and therefore criticism of Islam cannot be racism.

Islam, which lurks behind this entire case, has been described from a variety of viewpoints. Some say that it is a religion, others that is an all-encompassing ideology that contains a religion, still others emphasize its cultural norms, its culturally transmitted customs and practices. Some even maintain that Islam is so multifaceted that it is impossible to describe it.

But regardless of one’s approach, it must be clear that Islam is not a hereditary human attribute.

If our Western freedom means anything at all, we must insist that every grown-up person is responsible for his or her beliefs, opinions, culture, habits and actions.

We enjoy political freedom and we enjoy freedom of religion. This implies a largely unlimited right to disseminate one’s political persuasion and religious beliefs. That is as it should be. But the price we all have to pay for this freedom is that others have a right to criticise our politics, our religion and our culture.

Islamic spokesmen have the freedom to advocate their concept of society, which implies the introduction of a theocracy governed by god-given laws, i.e. sharia, the abolition of man-made laws and by implication freedom of expression and democracy. They are free to think that women are inferior to men as concerns their rights and their pursuit of happiness. They are even entitled to disseminate such opinions.

I cannot recall a single instance in this country where an Islamic spokesman has been prosecuted for saying that sharia will become the law of the land once the demographic and political realities make it possible. This despite the fact that we have several examples of imams who have openly declared that the imposition of theocracy is a religious duty incumbent on all believers.

In return, these theocrats and sharia-advocates must accept the right of those who believe in democracy, free institutions and human equality to criticism Islam and to oppose its dissemination and the atavistic cultural norms practiced by some Muslims.

It is this right – I would even say duty – to describe, criticise and oppose a totalitarian ideology that I have tried to exercise to the best of my ability.

My speech and my writings have had no other purpose than to alert my fellow citizens to the danger inherent in the Islamic concept of the state and the law.

I have made no secret of the fact that I consider this fight for our liberties to be the most important political struggle of our time.

I would not be able to live with my guilty conscience if – out of fear of public condemnation and ridicule – I refrained from telling the truth as I see it.

And regardless of the outcome of this trial, I intend to continue my struggle for free speech and against totalitarian concepts of any stripe.

If the court rules against Lars Hedegaard, it will be a ruling against freedom – tantamount to a death sentence on Western civilization.

*

Update April 23, 2012:

From the Gatestone Institute:

Lars Hedegaard, the president of the Danish Free Press Society, has been acquitted by the Danish Supreme Court on charges of “hate speech” for critical comments he made about Islam.

The verdict, however represents only a partial victory for free speech in a Europe that is being stifled by politically correct restrictions on free speech, particularly on issues related to Islam.

Although Hedegaard was acquitted, it was on a legal technicality; in its ruling, the Supreme Court stressed that the substance of the charges against Hedegaard — public criticism of Islam, — is still a crime punishable by imprisonment.

Under daily observation from thousands of surveillance cameras mounted everywhere from street corners to taxicabs to public parks, Britons rank among the most-watched people on earth. But a new government plan is poised to take the gaze of this nation’s security services dramatically deeper: letting them examine the text messages, phone calls, e-mails and Web browsing habits of every person in the country.

According to the Washington Post report that we are quoting –

Britain generates more than 2 million e-mails a minute, and observers say the government may face technical challenges in capturing and storing such vast amounts of data. Currently, firms are required to store some communications data, such as phone calls, for one year. But the proposed law could compel them to store far more varied forms — such as Skype calls or online video game data — for at least twice as long.

Even with massive electronic help in selecting words and phrases to reduce the millions of messages, how  many people working how many hours would be needed to investigate the (surely still enormous) residue? And if they do come upon evidence of crime being plotted or committed, what will they do about it?

It’s not as if the police are really working to reduce crime (except maybe drug related crimes). For years now in Britain, if a crime is reported the police routinely issue the victim with a number but seldom investigate it. If the police investigate a crime, they seldom make an arrest; if they make an arrest, the case seldom comes to court;  if it comes to court the accused is seldom found guilty;  if the accused is found guilty, he is seldom convicted; if he is convicted he is seldom sentenced; if he is sentenced he seldom goes to prison; if he goes to prison he is seldom – no, he is never kept there even for the inadequately punitive time he is sentenced to serve.

Terrorists? If they are Muslim – and are there any terrorists other than Muslims now? – they are unlikely to be charged; if charged they are unlikely to be tried; if tried they are unlikely to be convicted; if convicted they are unlikely to be punished. Instead they are likely to be luxuriously housed and granted lavish incomes at tax-payers’ expense. (See our posts The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite January 18, 2012, and A model citizen December 17, 2010.)

So what would the watching and listening really be for?

The only plausible answer is: for government power and control. But what is the feeble feckless government doing with its power? What is it controlling and to what end? Britain aims for nothing, has no vision of its future, and is unlikely to become an Iran-like or Afghanistan-like totalitarian state until Islam comes to power. Of course that won’t take long now, and Islam knows exactly what it will compel everyone to do. It will be nice for the Islamic Enforcers to find efficient means of surveillance already in place for them.

Let’s read on.

The “snooping” proposal set to be presented in Parliament later this year is sparking an uproar over privacy in Britain, fueling a debate over the lengths to which intelligence agencies should go in monitoring citizens — a debate that has resonance on both sides of the Atlantic.

Government officials say the new powers are critical to countering terrorism and other threats in an era of fast-changing social media, with criminals using even seemingly innocent venues such as Facebook and online games as means of communication. But furious citizen groups and some members of Parliament see the push as a part of Britain’s evolution into a “surveillance society” in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the 2005 London bombings.

Although the plan is yet to be fully outlined by the Conservative-led government, observers say parts of it may go beyond even the ability of officials in the United States to quickly access private data. Critics say the sheer breadth and scope of the plan also could put Britain out in front of other European countries such as Germany, where the government acts to block some Web sites deemed objectionable, and Sweden, where a law passed in 2008 allows the government to intercept international communications conducted via phones or the Internet.

“I’m afraid that if this program gets introduced, the U.K. will be leapfrogging Iran in the business of surveilling its citizens,” said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International. “This program is so broad that no other country has even yet to try it, and I am dumbfounded they are even considering it here.”

The plan may authorize the national surveillance agency — which is known as GCHQ and whose Web site describes its mission as keeping “our society safe and successful in the Internet age” — to order the installation of thousands of devices linked to the networks of Internet service providers, giving agents broader access to everyday communications. The examination of the contents of those exchanges — such as the text or images contained in an e-mail — would still require special warrants. But for the first time, intelligence agencies might, for instance, access information such as the times, destinations and frequencies of phone calls, texts and e-mails without a warrant…

The measure reportedly would compel communications companies to grant intelligence agents instant access to real-time information in certain circumstances, such as data that could be used to target the location of a user’s mobile phone or computer if authorities suspected a crime was in progress. It remained unclear whether British authorities would need judicial or other authority before accessing such data.

“It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” Britain’s Home Office — a rough equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — said in a statement.

Privacy advocates reacted swiftly Monday, saying the move would intrude so deeply into the lives of British citizens that it would rival or exceed measures used by totalitarian governments. They say it marks another of many steps that have curtailed privacy rights here in the post-Sept. 11 world, with one study by British police officials, for instance, indicating that a person strolling around London is captured on film by at least 68 cameras on any given day …

As it stands, key aspects of the proposal may go beyond the kind of surveillance now authorized in the United States, where privacy advocates were quick to raise concerns about the plan — especially given the heavy traffic of transatlantic communication. …

How does America do its watching?

Access in the United States to “metadata” — such as the time, who e-mailed whom and how often — depends on the kind of data and type of case. For example, authorities have to obtain court orders before accessing real-time data in both criminal and national security cases.

In criminal cases, authorities need a subpoena to get stored metadata on phone numbers dialed but a court order for e-mail information. In contrast, federal agents seeking stored e-mail header information in national security cases have contended that they may use a national security letter, which is an administrative subpoena that can be issued by an FBI field office. But some providers have refused access to such data without a court order.

Only some? And should that make us less worried?

Is it possible that sheer overreach could render government impotent? That freedom will be recovered because government has too big a body for its tiny brain, like dinosaurs, and will perish by taking on far more than it can ever accomplish, losing sight of what it means to accomplish and why?

Or would anarchy result? And would that make it easier or harder for Islam to take over?

(Hat tip to our reader True Freethinker for the link to the video)