Ahmed Ghailani, the al-Qaeda terrorist who participated in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, will be sentenced this month, perhaps to life imprisonment, but perhaps to as little as 20 years.

Ghailani was transported from Guantanamo Bay to New York City to await trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in June 2009. When the case came to trial, the judge disallowed the testimony of a key witness. On November 17, 2010, a jury found him guilty of one count of conspiracy, but acquitted him of 284 other charges including all murder counts. Critics of the Obama administration said the verdict proves civilian courts cannot be trusted to prosecute terrorists because it shows a jury might acquit such a defendant entirely. Supporters of the trial have said that the conviction and the stiff sentencing prove that the federal justice system works.

Not if he gets only 20 years.

Last month the House banned funding to bring Guantanamo prisoners to the US to be tried as criminals in federal courts.

Predictably, this elicited howls of protest from those who hold the strange opinion that prisoners of war should be tried individually like civilian citizens; the pro-Islam sentimentalists (such as President Obama and Attorney-General Eric Holder) who want “Gitmo” closed, pretending that it’s a tough penal institution rather than the holiday-camp safety-pen it actually is.

Prisoners of war should be kept until the war is over. If trials must be held, they should be conducted by military tribunals, and death sentences should be carried out promptly with guns.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the planner of 9/11, Richard Reid the shoe-bomber, Nidal Malik Hasan the Fort Hood mass-murderer, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the underwear-bomber, Faisal Shahzad the Times Square car-bomber, and all Muslim terrorists waging jihad against the non-Muslim world should be brought before military tribunals.

This is not what is happening. But if jihadists apprehended on American soil are to be tried as criminals, their sentences should be as harsh as the law allows.

Richard Reid was tried as a criminal and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Judge William Young made a most eloquent case for trying terrorists individually as criminals. He declared in his ruling, delivered January 30, 2003:

You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier, gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist … And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice. ..

It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see, that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely. It is for freedom’s sake that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their representation of you before other judges.

We are about it. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties. Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bare any burden, pay any price, to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom. Mark it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here. Day after tomorrow, it will be forgotten, but this, however, will long endure. Here in this courtroom and courtrooms all across America, the American people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice, not war, individual justice is in fact being done.

We agree that Reid was not a soldier, and that he is a terrorist. But he tried to blow up a civil aircraft in flight as a Muslim carrying out his duty to wage Holy War, the war that America went to fight in Afghanistan.

On that point we disagree with Judge William Young. But some words of his we think are worth recalling in opposition to those whose hearts bleed for the inmates of Guantanamo :

It seems to me you hate the one thing that is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose. Here, in this society, the very winds carry freedom. They carry it everywhere from sea to shining sea.

And long may they do so, however hard the Obama administration tries to bring them under government control.

But such winds should not fan the cheeks of Islam’s Holy Warriors.

We  believe that the Framers of the United States Constitution intended to found a secular nation, not “a Christian nation” as so many conservative pundits assert. We have looked for informed opinion about it, and found this one, given to us by Tom Hinkson, who is “a  life-long atheist”. He was, he says, “not brought up with any religion”, though both his parents “believe in a Christian deity”. He served his country in the Navy as a Nuclear Reactor Operator for seven years. In the last election cycle he joined the campaign for Marco Rubio. He is a  life member of both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).

Here is his opinion. It is his and not ours, but the information he provides confirms our own.

2011 is supposed to be the year of the Constitutional Conservative, but is it really? The Tea Party has helped  the Republican Party gain a majority in the House of Representatives, and near parity in the Senate, so things in the US have to get better – right? Not so fast! It seems that we as a nation have traded one evil for a possibly lesser evil, but another evil nonetheless. Have you noticed who is at the helm of the Tea Party? Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich … the list goes on. You might ask, “Well aren’t they better than Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Joe Biden?” The answer is yes, of course they are. But too many of the Tea Party figureheads represent that “silent majority” of biblical literalist Christians who, instead of wanting to turn the United States into a socialist utopia as Obama and the Democrats do, want to turn it into a kind of theocracy.

Since the rise of the Tea Party, there has been a movement to re-learn our American history, mainly fueled by Glenn Beck. This would be a very good thing, if he told the whole story. History is usually told with huge gaps to reinforce the tellers’ point of view. The so-called Christian conservatives bend history one way, and the Progressives would rather ignore history altogether.

If you have watched Glenn Beck for any appreciable length of time, you have seen him bring several people on to argue that we are a Christian nation, that nearly everything in the Constitution has a biblical foundation, and the proof for these claims lies in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. He and they make a compelling argument – at least to those who don’t know history.

It is true that the preamble of the Declaration of Independence refers to a divine power:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The  Constitution, however, created a very explicitly secular government, and those that would argue otherwise try to re-write history to hide the transition from a government that derives its power from a higher power to one that derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Glenn Beck and the “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence founded our nation, and that the Constitution was written with the Declaration as sort of a foundation. The question is, are they right? Let’s look at some history that they won’t tell us.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, formally declaring the independence of the 13 colonies from Great Britain, but did it create the United States of America? The answer is no, the United States of America was created by the Articles of Confederation, which created a binding agreement of government between the 13 original colonies. The Articles of Confederation were not ratified until March, 1781. Until the Articles of Confederation were ratified, the United States of America was just an idea. But wait a minute, why doesn’t anyone mention the Articles of Confederation? Probably because the Articles of Confederation created a government that failed in short order. The Constitution that we have today was originally ratified on September 17th, 1787, creating our current form of government.

The “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written virtually side-by-side; in fact they are frequently published this way. The question is why would they want to ignore the 11-year gap? The answer is that the Constitution is a secular document. But, if we can be convinced that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written side-by-side, then an argument can be made to declare the United States of America a “Christian nation”, which opens the door for a biblical lens to view the Constitution through; even though the separation of church and state is an undeniable concept that is spelled out in the Constitution, and further explained by Thomas Jefferson in his letters to two separate Baptist organizations (see here and here).

Christians will argue that the intent of the founders was to create a Christian nation because Christianity was (and still is) the major religion present in the United States. But, if that was their intent, why not spell it out? Why would the founders specifically state that there will be “no religious test for office” (Article 6, paragraph 3 of the Constitution), or that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” (1st Amendment)? The answer is obvious: the founders wanted to create a secular government. Not only did they not state that there was a federal religion, they specifically banned it! In fact they went even further than that, and banned congress from making any law that RESPECTED the establishment of a religion, meaning that not only would the government not create a religion, or declare a national religion, but that the government would not even formally recognize religions.

Of course, the secular argument has a few problems: for instance, it is traditional for congress to open with a prayer, which would seem to contradict the Constitution itself, and honestly, it does. So, how can this be explained? Hypocrisy, plain and simple. If there is one constant in the history of this nation, then hypocrisy is it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both outspoken critics of slavery, yet both owned dozens of slaves. No one today will argue in favor of slavery, even though several of the founders owned them. Yet, there are many who would argue for legislation based upon the bible or other religious texts rather than the Constitution simply because most of our founders identified themselves as Christians.

In the Declaration of Independence, there are three mentions of a higher power, they are: “Nature’s God”, “Creator”, and “Divine Providence”. None of these three terms are innately Christian, and the use of the terms is as an authority to separate from Great Britain. The United States of America is mentioned at the end of the document, but as I stated earlier, this was an idea; the United States of America was not formally established until the Articles of Confederation were ratified. Independence from Great Britain, and thus international recognition as a nation was not achieved until the end of the Revolutionary War by the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3rd, 1783.

In the Articles of Confederation, there are three references to a deity. Two of those references are “in the Year of Our Lord”, which was the common language for stating a date, not a reference to any divine inspiration for the government being created. The third reference is found in Article 13, the first sentence of the second paragraph states: “And Whereas it hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of confederation and perpetual union.” “Great Governor of the World” is an obvious allusion to a higher power, but not specifically to a Christian deity.

Nonetheless, the “Great Governor of the World” is the authority that is used to create the government under the Articles of Confederation. So if  the United States of America were still governed by the Articles of Confederation, the Christians would have some proof that we were founded as a “Christian Nation”. But as The Articles of Confederation created a very weak and very flawed government which soon failed, it can be stated that the government formed as a direct result of the Declaration of Independence was a failure. The founders of our current government knew that several changes needed to be made.

Within the Constitution, there is only one reference to any higher power, and that reference is in the date, which as stated above, was the common way of declaring a date “in the Year of Our Lord”. That reference is at the end of the Constitution, just before the signatures. There are several very important differences between the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation.

The first, and largest difference, is that the Constitution does not claim any authority from a higher power, whereas both the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation did. Instead, the Constitution boldly proclaims “We the People” as the authority to create the government and all that comes with it. This runs in direct contradiction to the “Christian Conservative” claim that our rights are not given to us by the government, but by the Christian God (which was not specifically mentioned in any founding document). This puts a large hole in the “Christian Conservative” argument, but the Constitution does not stop there.

Within the Constitution, there are three specific bans on the co-mingling of religion and government. These bans are found in Article 6, paragraph 3, and in the 1st Amendment. The Constitution clearly states that there shall be “no religious test for office”, at either the federal or state levels, and that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This suggests very strongly that one of the many lessons that the founders learned from the Articles of Confederation was that the mixing of religion and government does not work.

So while in principle I agree with “restoring America” as the Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck advocate, I say let’s restore it to a government run by the laws set forth by the Constitution. While we’re at it, let’s restore the Pledge of Allegiance to how it was before 1954, when the words “under God” were added. We can also take the words “In God We Trust” off of our currency. Those words were added first to coinage in 1864, on the two-cent coin, long after the founders died. Paper money wasn’t tainted with those words until 1957. Our national motto “In God We Trust” wasn’t adopted until 1956. All of the laws ordering these changes are unconstitutional because they all respect the establishment of religion. Let us abide by the Constitution, and restore the secular nation that the Founders intended.

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?

Michael Gerson, in an article at Townhall – a conservative website! – objects to Oklahoma’s constitutional amendment preventing the introduction of Islam’s sharia law into the state.

He claims that the measure was introduced to “to taunt a religious minority”, and dubs it “faith-baiting”, warning that other states could follow the example and introduce measures to “bait” Christians, for instance, or Hindus.

He tries to defend sharia:

Anti-Shariah activists argue that Shariah law controls every area of a Muslim’s life … and thus that Islam itself is incompatible with American democracy. Radical Islamists would nod in agreement to each of these claims…

Not surprising really, since the claims are true. But he has a different understanding:

Both are wrong. The proper interpretation of Shariah law is a subject of vigorous debate within Islam. There are some who would freeze societies in the cultural practices of seventh-century Arabia. But there are others who identify a core of Islamic teaching that is separable from the cultural assumptions of the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad. Predominantly Muslim nations take a variety of approaches to the application of Islamic law, from theocracy to official secularism. …

Wherever did he get this idea of a “vigorous debate within Islam” over sharia or anything else? Where is “Islamic teaching separable from the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad”? What taqqiya (religiously sanctioned lies) has he been swallowing? He gives no sources, no references.

Most if not all states that have a majority Muslim population and a constitution  – and we have found only one exception  – claim that the basis of their  law is sharia. The exception was Turkey, but that is changing. Turkey is now governed by a religious party. The genuinely secular state  that Kemal Ataturk created is being dismantled and the Turks are returning to Islamic darkness.

Does Gerson actually know anything about sharia law? He goes on:

So is Shariah law compatible with democracy? In the totalitarian version of the Taliban, it cannot be reconciled with pluralism. But if Shariah is interpreted as a set of transcendent principles of fairness and justice …

If it is so interpreted? It would be interesting to see how a system of law that has a woman’s testimony valued at half that of a man’s, and prescribes death for apostasy, to take just two examples, can be interpreted as “a set of transcendent principles of fairness and justice”.

He really seems not to know what he’s talking about. It is precisely this sort of deliberate blindness to what Islam is and intends that helps it towards its objective of domination.

He also seems to be unaware that sharia is creeping into Western countries and creating a great deal of justified anger and anxiety by the sort of “justice” the sharia courts are doling out. Muslim women in Britain, for instance, who had hoped for protection from sharia under British law, are now subjected to the “justice and fairness” of one or another of 85 sharia courts, whose rulings are enforced by the British state. They feel bitterly betrayed by the country in which they sought refuge from the subjugation that the law of Islam prescribes for them. (See our post Sharia in Britain, November 5, 2010.)

The state of Oklahoma, in our opinion, is foresightful and wise to bar sharia out. What is deplorable is that it has become necessary to take legislative action against it in the United States of America.

Rarely in history has any society been as supine as modern Britain in the face of a mortal threat.

So says Leo McKinstry in his column in the Daily Express.

We applaud him. We thought the day would never come when some Briton with a public platform would speak out with this degree of bitter fierceness against the Islamic invaders of his country, and upbraid his own people – those once courageous, hardy, proud, patriotic, powerful islanders – for lying down and whimpering instead of fighting them off.

Here’s more of what McKinstry has to say:

The fabric of our civilisation is now at risk from militant Islam which aims to destroy our way of life. Yet instead of showing resolve in the face of this challenge, the political establishment vacillates between collusion and denial.

His welcome outburst was occasioned by events at a Muslim woman terrorist’s trial. Roshonara Choudhry was convicted of trying to kill a Member of Parliament, Stephen Timms, by stabbing him.

Her deed, which led to a jail sentence of 15 years, was sickening enough. What was just as offensive was the enfeebled police response to the gang of Muslim demonstrators who gathered at the court to cheer Choudhry and denounce the verdict.

“British soldiers must die”, was one their poisonous slogans. “Stephen Timms – go to hell” was another. But the police, standing nearby, took no action … paralysed by fashionable multi-cultural dogma which holds that ethnic minorities always have to be treated as victims. …

Perhaps the most nauseating feature of this Islamic demonstration is the fact that the British taxpayer was forced to subsidise it.

For nearly all the protestors are benefit claimants sponging off the rest of us. They are hypocrites as well as parasites, since they are happy to grab cash from a society they claim to despise. … It is the height of lunacy that we should be compelled, through our taxes, to provide comfortable lifestyles to our sworn enemies.

Effectively we are paying for our own demise. … Tragically, this is the pattern of modern Britain. It has emerged that the state is now paying for more work on the expensive west London home of the notorious Islamist hate preacher Abu Hamza, currently serving seven years in Belmarsh prison for incitement to murder and racial hatred.

Last week, in another example of the establishment’s pusillanimity, a Special Immigration Commission decided that this brute should be allowed to keep his British citizenship. Abu Hamza is already estimated to have cost the taxpayer an incredible £3.5million through welfare payouts, home improvements, prison and legal bills.

Only a sick political system would think it right to lavish millions on the family of a monster whose entire existence is predicated on our obliteration … This is the hallmark of Britain’s relationship with Islam, where fear is dressed up as tolerance. …

We are dealing with a dangerous, aggressive ideology, not some minor fringe problem. “Islam will dominate the world” read one of the placards at last week’s democracy. Unless we wake up, this will become a terrifying reality.

Read it all here.

(This post, like the one immediately below, Europe’s doom, takes up a point made in the comments on the video Getting nowhere. )

Sharia has been accepted in Britain as a parallel legal system. Here is a report from the Times (London) which seems adequately to establish the fact:

Islamic law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

It has now emerged that sharia courts with these powers have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester with the network’s headquarters in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Britain has cruelly betrayed Muslim women and children by allowing sharia rulings to be enforced. Here are extracts from an article by Maryam Namazie in the (left leaning) Guardian, explaining some of the ways women are unjustly treated in sharia courts, and pleading for a single system of secular law.

A report, Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights, reveals the adverse effect of sharia courts on family law. Under sharia’s civil code, a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s. A man can divorce his wife by repudiation, whereas a woman must give justifications, some of which are difficult to prove. Child custody reverts to the father at a preset age; women who remarry lose custody of their children even before then; and sons inherit twice the share of daughters.

There has been much controversy about Muslim arbitration tribunals, which have attracted attention because they operate as tribunals under the Arbitration Act, making their rulings binding in UK law. …

An example of the kind of decision that is contrary to UK law and public policy is the custody of children. Under British law, the child’s best interest is the court’s paramount consideration. In a sharia court the custody of children reverts to the father at a preset age regardless of the circumstances. In divorce proceedings, too, civil law takes into account the merits of the case and divides assets based on the needs and intentions of both parties. Under sharia law, only men have the right to unilateral divorce. If a woman manages to obtain a divorce without her husband’s consent, she will lose the sum of money (or dowry) that was agreed to at the time of marriage.

There is an assumption that those who attend sharia courts do so voluntarily and that unfair decisions can be challenged. Since much of sharia law is contrary to British law and public policy, in theory they would be unlikely to be upheld in a British court. In reality, women are often pressured by their families into going to these courts and adhering to unfair decisions and may lack knowledge of their rights under British law. Moreover, refusal to settle a dispute in a sharia court could lead to to threats, intimidation or isolation. …

Rights, justice, inclusion, equality and respect are for people, not for beliefs and parallel legal systems. To safeguard the rights and freedoms of all those living in Britain, there must be one secular law for all and no religious courts.

Read here and here about sharia spreading in Europe , Canada and the United States..

Finally, listen to Pat Condell, eloquent and just, deploring the Archbishop of Canterbury’s pronouncement that the acceptance of sharia is “unavoidable”:

(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.

Has there ever been a religious idea that did more good than harm?

Most religious ideas – that is to say, ideas about gods and how mortals should relate to them – have not been beneficial. For the greater part of history, religions required the sacrifice of human life. Deities were conceived of as cruel and destructive unless propitiated with human blood.

Exceptional and utterly different was the Mosaic idea of God-sanctioned Law that required people to deal justly with each other: the idea that a god of justice, a single abstract omnipotent god, commanded them to obey the Law.

The historical importance of the idea does not lie in its notion of a god who holds the scales of justice and can punish or reward, but in the setting of law above human authority and power; the keeping of it out of the hands of chieftains, kings, and tyrants, safe from whim, passion, folly, impulse and madness.

The doctrine that the Law was handed down by a single abstract just and omnipotent God, made it awful in the original sense of the word. Justice itself was sanctified. To obey the Law was to fear God. To obey the Law was all that God required of His people.

It was the Law itself that mattered, because justice mattered above everything. God mattered because justice mattered, not the other way about. To ensure justice was what He was for. The worship of God was the worship of justice.

By bestowing equal obligations on everyone to deal justly – or “righteously” – each with the other, the Law, eternal and unalterable, could be an impregnable house in which everyone could safely dwell. In the certainty of its protection, everyone was free to pursue his chosen path, to go about his personal affairs without fear.

It’s not important who wrote the laws. It’s irrelevant whether or not the idea was in actuality conceived by a man named Moses. But we can conjecture about its provenance. Perhaps the idea of the single, abstract, just, omnipotent God, which tradition associates with a man or a tribe called Abraham, really did arise as legend has it long before the laws were written. This God, uniquely, did not require human sacrifice: a lesson enshrined in the story that He ordered “Abraham” not to sacrifice his son to Him. But nobody knows when the story was first told. It may have been about the same time as the laws were inscribed, and nobody knows when that was either.

If a man called Moses did give some laws to a people who believed in such a God, he certainly did not write all the laws attributed to him. They were manifestly the work of many minds over a length of time.

Who might Moses have been? Probably, as Sigmund Freud speculates in Moses and Monotheism, he was a prince of Egypt.  (The legend of his having been sent floating on a stream by a Hebrew mother and fished out by a royal princess who then adopted him was transparently invented in retrospect to make him a true son of the people whose leader he became.)

So perhaps Egypt was the source of the great religious idea. But it remained the property of the Hebrews alone for centuries.

Other nations have held law itself to be above the ruling power – as did the Greeks in their city-states, and the English in the Middle Ages when Magna Carta affirmed the same principle. But it is the core and substance of only one religion.

When the nation whose religion it was became a part of Alexander’s vast empire, the idea spread, as ideas do when frontiers open and people travel and settle in foreign lands. But as ideas do when they disperse, it was reinterpreted, misunderstood, adjusted, complicated, simplified, emptied, augmented, adapted to satisfy changing political expedients. The new religion of Christianity, though it adopted the scriptures of the Jews (after some hesitation), dethroned Justice and set Love in its place. The unique and abstract God of Justice was superseded by a triune godhead of which one hypostasis was incarnated in human form in historical time. And the belief that deity required human sacrifice was revived. The great idea was despised, and even, by some heterodox Christian sects, abominated. Christianity was not a development of Judaism but a revolution against it.

Yet the idea lay in the baggage of Christianity wherever it traveled.

It was brought out into the light of day by the Founders of the United States, who expressed it in The Declaration of Independence when they wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …”; and it was perceptibly in their minds when they composed the Constitution which, though it does not mention God, was meant to provide the shelter of law for lasting liberty.

It is not necessary now to believe in the existence of a divine power presiding over human affairs, to understand and appreciate the idea. (And it is certainly not necessary to find every individual Mosaic law admirable. Indeed, to modern minds many of them are ridiculous. The actual 613 laws of Judaism, and all its ritual requirements, can be disregarded without the idea itself being in the least devalued.)

We do not now need a transcendent authority to keep us obeying the law and behaving towards each other with moral decency. We can choose to do so for sound reasons.

But the idea that an essential framework of law, informed by moral principles, should be conserved beyond the reach of transient governing powers, remains good: so good that it will not spoil if some uphold it in the name of God.

*

Postscript: This essay should not be taken as an argument in vindication of Judaism. The Jewish God is also a Creator God, believed to have brought the material universe into existence ex nihilo. (The ancient Greeks did not entertain that absurdity: they believed that matter had always existed, and was shaped into the form it has by divine craftsmanship.) Such a god, answering a need for explanation in ages past, is no longer useful.

But viewed historically, the idea of an abstract God put to use as a transcendent authority for law and justice, can be seen as a foreshadowing of the anthropocentric, as opposed to deocentric, evaluation of human worth that the Renaissance proposed and the Enlightenment realized: an intellectual stepping-stone by which mankind advanced from superstitious dread of divine wrath to a rational, secular, appreciation of law-protected liberty.

Jillian Becker    November 1, 2010

Trying to make a living? You’ll need a permit.

You’ll need a pile of permits.

Socialist governments, aspiring to  control everybody’s life from cradle to grave, start by regulating everything you do. Regulation starts with licensing.

Mark Steyn tells this story and comments on it:

With its uncanny ability to prioritize, California, land of Golden Statism for unionized bureaucrats, is cracking down on complimentary coffee. From The Ventura County Star:

Ty Brann likes the neighborly feel of his local hardware store. The fourth-generation Ventura County resident and small business owner has been going to the B & B Do It Center on Mobile Avenue in Camarillo for many years. … So when he learned the county had told B & B it could no longer put out its usual box of doughnuts and coffee pot for the morning customers, Brann was taken aback.

Dunno why. He lives in California. He surely knows by now everything you enjoy is either illegal or regulated up the wazoo. The Collins family had been putting a coffee pot on the counter for 15 years, as the previous owners of the store had done, too, and yea, back through all the generations. But in California that’s an illegal act. The permit mullahs told Randy Collins that he needed to install stainless steel sinks with hot and cold water and a prep kitchen to handle the doughnuts. “What some establishments do is hire a mobile food preparation services or in some cases a coffee service,” explained Elizabeth Huff, “Manager of Community Services” (yeah, right). “Those establishments have permits and can operate in front of or even inside of the stores.”

Even inside? Gee, that’s big of you. “Those establishments have permits”? In California, what doesn’t? Commissar Huff added that there are a range of permits of varying costs. No doubt a plain instant coffee permit would be relatively simple, but if you wished to offer a decaf caramel macchiato with complimentary biscotti additional licenses may be required.

“We’re certainly working with the health department,” said Mr Collins. “We want to be in compliance with the law.”

Why?

When the law says that it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in non-compliance. What the hell did you guys bother holding a revolution for? George III didn’t care what complimentary liquid refreshments a village blacksmith shared with his clientele. Say what you like about the Boston Tea Party, but nobody attempted to prosecute them for unlicensed handling of beverage items in a public place.

This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favorable business environment and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services – all for the privilege of taking home less and less money.

And from the Heritage Foundation comes a video about this economy-depressing form of tyranny:

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!