Are the Europeans unable to endure freedom?

Do they want to be enslaved by Islam?

As ever more Muslims pour into Europe as “refugees”, their charm, their success – or what is it about them? – attracts locals to emulate and join them.

From Gatestone, by Soeren Kern:

In Norway, the Police Security Service (PST) revealed that nearly a dozen refugees sent to Norway under the UN’s quota system turned out to have close links to the terror groups Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front. Police also discovered that some refugees had backgrounds in Syria’s secret police, and others were suspected of carrying out war crimes during the country’s ongoing civil war.

The newspaper Dagbladet also reported that Islamic extremists are scouting refugee reception centers in Norway in search of new recruits for terrorism. According to the paper, several people who received asylum in Norway later became central figures in the country’s radicalized Islamic community.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of Norwegians are converting to Islam, apparently because of a perceived need for stronger rules in Norway’s liberal society. “Converting to Islam is perhaps the most extreme form of youthful rebellion today,” Muslim convert and religion professor Anne Sofie Roald told the newspaper Aftenposten. She said she thinks conservative Islam represents clear limits and a new form of security in Norway’s “anything goes” society.

And this report  is from the Norwegian site NewsinEnglish, by Nina Berglund:

“In general, many converts become ‘more Catholic than the pope’,” Roald told Aftenposten. She converted to Islam in 1982 and initially used a hijab but later stopped wearing it: “The reality can be that the ideas about limits set by religion can be more appealing than the limits themselves.” Like Elgvin, though, she thinks conservative Islam represents clear limits and a new form of security in a very free and liberal society like Norway’s, which can attract those rebelling a society where “almost anything goes”. The historic student protests of the 1960s led to social freedoms that now, perhaps, a new generation is rebelling against. That’s a paradox in a country that prides itself on its own hard-won freedom and independence [? – ed], and its egalitarian society.

One 26-year-old Norwegian woman … “Elsa” … who didn’t want to be identified, told Aftenposten she’d fallen in with a “bad” group and abused both drugs and alcohol. She began to pray and then took Arabic language lessons, which gave her “a good gut feeling” about Islam. She began to read more, and said that what appealed to her most were the rules within Islam that were much stronger than in Norwegian society in general.

“I think people need that, guidelines and rules and consequences in the form of punishment or praise,” Elsa told Aftenposten. “Something to believe in.”

Morten Ibrahim Abrahamsen, now a 23-year-old man … converted after surviving the massacre of July 22, 2011 on the island of Utøya … Abrahamsen told Aftenposten he had a religious experience while he desperately tried to hide from the lone gunman Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 69 people at the Labour Party’s youth summer camp that Abrahamsen was attending.

“I met a lot of resistance, also publicly, from people who thought I was vulnerable and had all but been forced to convert,” Abrahamsen said, after he’d declared his faith to representatives of the Islamic organization Islam Net in Oslo. It’s been a target of controversy for organizing conferences featuring radical Muslim clerics, for segregating men and women who attend and for spreading the word about Islam from information stands on the street, among other things.

“But now it’s been nearly four years (since the massacre and his conversion) and I’m thriving with my religion,” Abrahamsen told Aftenposten. “I have found the sense of calm I was looking for.”  …

Representatives of Islam are keen to win new converts. Among them is … 22-year-old [health-worker] “Maria”, who declined further identification but said her conversion and subsequent decision to wear not only a hijab but also gloves and an occasional niqab that covers her face shocked colleagues. Their reaction was so negative that she found a new jobs where she now feels accepted. Her Norwegian family accepted her conversion and she says her Muslim girlfriends have become like “sisters” for her. …

Yes, freedom can be hard to bear.

Self-reliance can seem too great a burden.

And besides, it’s so nice to have someone else to blame for one’s failures, disappointments and miseries.

All you have to do, if you’re a woman, is live your life wrapped in a black tent, do nothing that your lord and master doesn’t tell you to do, endure his beatings, and bear his children that he can take away from you at any moment on a whim. “Clear limits.”

And if you’re a man, give up thinking for yourself. Get a scar on your forehead from bowing to the earth to the god of a warlord. And hate all human beings who do not do the same.

Oh – and beat your wife. Have her stoned to death if she’s raped. Deny your daughters education. Marry them in their childhood to old men. Bury them alive if they disobey you.

And raise your sons to be just like you.