Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

SWEDEN - MODEL NATION SLIDING TO THIRD WORLD

  

Below is the text of Dale Hurd's CBN report.  Can the situation in Sweden be this bad?  I often wonder how multiculturalism could have become so embedded in people's minds.  In extreme forms it strikes me as the road to diminished freedom and national suicide.  My previous posts related to multiculuralism can be found here.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- When President Barack Obama visited Sweden last year, he expressed his deep admiration for the Swedish model. But that should make Americans a little nervous.

One U.N. report says Sweden will be a third-world nation in about 15 years, below Libya and Bulgaria. Sweden is a society that believes it is racing into the future, but critics warn that it is racing to the bottom.

It has been a laboratory for all kinds of social experiments: Swedish leaders are trying to build the perfect society.

The country has been compared to two nations that also tried to build perfect societies: North Korea and the Soviet Union.

In Sweden, if you don't like how utopia is being built, you won't be shot like in North Korea, but your life could become very unpleasant, very quickly.

A Perfect Society?

A YouTube video shows a journalist from one of Sweden's leading tabloids, Expressen, confronting a Swede at his home.

The man, a professor, made what he thought were anonymous negative comments on a website about immigrant problems in Sweden.

But left-wing hackers helped the newspaper track him and others like him down so they could be exposed before the whole nation as racists. Another man, a manager, was fired because of it.

Sweden's leftist establishment and media believe a cornerstone of their perfect society is multiculturalism: large scale immigration from some of the poorest, most backward nations on earth. Swedes who disagree with that plan risk being labeled racist, fascist, even Nazi.

"Immigration is the starting point and the finishing point. It's the most important point to prove you're friendly toward foreigners, you're friendly toward immigration," Danish journalist Mikael Jalving, author of the book Absolut Sweden, said.

"It's all about whether you can be said to be hostile to immigration. Once that is 'proven,' you're out of the game. Once you're 'proven' to be a racist or fascist or nationalist, which is almost as bad, you cannot have any legitimate positions or points of view," he explained.

It doesn't matter if Sweden's immigration model is failing miserably, if test scores in Swedish schools are plummeting, or if crime in some areas has skyrocketed. Immigrants burned the Stockholm suburb of Husby for over a week last year.

Many Jews now live in fear of attacks by Muslim immigrants and are leaving.

ROGER AILES ON THE U.S. AND MULTICULTURALISM TODAY

Roger Ailes is the head of Fox News.  The other night he described America this way:

“Are we losing America to the inevitable onrushing tide of history? No. But we’re in a storm, the mast is broken, the compass is off , and there’s a damn big hole in the boat. We have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by others, many of whom want to impose their culture and laws under the manufactured utopian idea that all all cultures are equal and most of them are better than America….America is a culture, it has a culture, and it must be recognized….We must not allow our collective memory to fade or morph into trendy revisionist versions of political correctness, which become a substitute for the truth.”

CHRISTMAS REPUDIATED IN EUROPE

Elizabeth Kendal of the Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin offers a summary of a longer survey:

Whilst public schools in Sweden are by law non-confessional, Advent services are part of the compulsory curriculum. This year, however, the government has ruled that, though the Advent services are still compulsory, in public schools they must be Christ-less and prayer-less, to try to balance Sweden's Christian cultural tradition with the 'new secularism'.  Last year the Scottish government promoted all Scotland's winter festivals except Christmas. This year the European Union Commission published three million secondary school diaries that detailed the feasts, festivals and holidays of all faiths except Christianity, even omitting Christmas and Easter. The West has forgotten the Lord. Revival and returning to him are urgent or else anti-Christian repression, intolerance and hostility will only escalate.  Please pray for a Christmas awakening in the West.

Me: Will we heed Kendal's admonition to pray?  We must make prayer a daily discipline that the true meaning of Christmas will be recovered in the West.  We must guard against succumbing to apathy and/or defeatism.  And that goes for our own government's hostility to Christian expression as well.  From the FRC:

For our troops in the Middle East, it's not away in a manger -- it's away goes the manger! After years of celebrating Christmas with a live nativity, the U.S. Navy is ordering military families to tear down its display on a Bahrain base. Service members were stunned. The news was most upsetting for the kids, who look forward to playing their parts all year long. "It was devastating," one officer told Fox News. "Here we are serving in the Middle East, defending our country and other people's religions... and we can't even enjoy our own."

The order came down just days after a secular group, the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, complained that the nativity somehow endangered U.S. lives. "It's unconstitutional," the group argued, "it's bad for the military, and in a Muslim country, it's dangerous."

Funny , that didn't seem to matter when our troops flew rainbow flags over camps in Afghanistan -- or hosted gay pride parties at our Baghdad embassy. Where was the concern for Muslim sensitivities then? These sailors are thousands of miles from home sacrificing their Christmases to defend the freedoms and the rights of people as misguided at MAAF. The least we can do is respect the Constitution they're defending, and give these troops the same freedom that's been afforded every American since the Supreme Court ruled on nativities in 1984.

Some people, like Newsweek's David Sessions, think the war on Christmas is over. "Christmas won," he says. That may be true in the retail world, where American Family Association points out that an overwhelming number of stores are chucking their holiday-neutrality in favor of Christmas greetings. "We've gone from 80% politically correct ads four years ago to 80% pro-Christmas messaging [today]," said AFA's Randy Sharp. Bill Donahue also senses the shift at the Catholic League, where the usual flurry of discrimination cases is at a minimum.

And while the commercial world may be catching on, the government is more hostile than ever -- not just to Christmas, but to Christians. In the last few weeks, the Left has gotten away with plenty of seasonal censorship-from Illinois water towers to a senior center's Christmas tree. Even President Obama couldn't throw a bone to Christmas on his official White House card -- and instead threw one to Bo, whose picture is featured. Inside, the dog's paw print appears, along with the message "May your home be filled with family, friends, and the joy of the holidays." Move over, Jesus -- the Portuguese water pooch is here!

Meanwhile , the war on Christmas isn't over -- it just expanded into a broader, 12-month battle over religious expression. And Christians will continue having success in it the more comfortable they are standing up -- and speaking out -- for truth.

CBN SPECIAL REPORT: "GENERATION IDENTITY" WAGES WAR ON FRANCE ISLAMIZATION

This short news report on young French men and women rising up against the Islamization of their society is a MUST SEE.  

They say they are at war with "the 68'ers," the baby boomers who run France, for wrecking their future with multicultural policies that some fear are turning France into a Muslim nation. . .

Groups like "Generation Identitaire" are symptoms of a nation that is coming unglued. They are an unintended but a predictable by-product of a failed multiculturalism that, instead of creating a melting pot, has created ethnic tribalism and dangerous "no-go zones."

 The media has been covering up the seriousness of the situation in the name of political correctness.   (Watch the video and see the text below).  Is it too late to arrest Europe's cultural suicide?  I think maybe it is, especially if the government and media remain in cover-up mode. Text of the video:

PARIS - It was a political protest with shock value, the likes of which has never been seen on French TV news: a group of young people stormed a mosque in the city of Portiers, going to the roof and unfurling a banner calling for a national referendum on Muslim immigration.

The banner included the number 732, the year Charles Martel defeated the Islamic invasion in Portiers.

The group calls itself Generation Identitaire, or Generation Identity. They say they are at war with "the 68'ers," the baby boomers who run France, for wrecking their future with multicultural policies that some fear are turning France into a Muslim nation.

They released a video called "A Declaration of War."

In the video, members say, "We are Generation Identitaire. We are the generation of ethnic fracture, the total failure of coexistence, and the forced mixing of races. We have stopped believing in a 'Global Village' and the 'Family of Man.'"

Their rhetoric sounds racist, but they say they do not believe in racial superiority or racial stereotypes. Rather, they fear losing France to Muslim immigrants from Africa.

CBN News interviewed a leader of the group, Julien Langella, in the southern French city of Toulon.

"It's not about hate of other people," Langella insisted. "It's about heritage. It's about loving our people and our land. And we fight for this."

Groups like Generation Identitaire are symptoms of a nation that is coming unglued. They are an unintended but a predictable by-product of a failed multiculturalism that, instead of creating a melting pot, has created ethnic tribalism and dangerous "no-go zones."

"Assimilation is now impossible in France," Langella said. "It was possible when immigrants came from European countries because they are like us ethnically; they are like us culturally."

The Great Replacement

The French Republic, which is supposed to be strictly secular, has actively helped Muslims build mosques and spread Sharia law. Polls show most French are alarmed about it.

Renaud Camus, one of France's leading writers, said flatly that France is being colonized by Muslim immigrants with the help of the government and the media. He calls it "The Great Replacement."

"The Great Replacement is very simple," he explained. "You have one people, and in the space of a generation, you have a different people."

Camus accused the French media of covering up the situation in the name of political correctness, essentially telling the French that the Islamization they see happening with their own eyes is not happening.

"Television is saying every day and school is saying every day that what is happening is not happening, that it is all in your head, that it is an optical illusion," Camus told CBN News.

"Practically every day Catholic Churches are attacked, and people (are stoned) in a very old Muslim tradition. And if they can't deny that this has happened, they say that this is the result of racism," he said.

Boomer's Tarnished Legacy

Generation Identitaire is also upset that their future has been looted by the baby boomers' out-of-control welfare spending.

In their video, they say, "We are the generation doubly punished: condemned to pay into a social system so generous with strangers it becomes unsustainable for our own people. Our generation is the victims of the May '68'ers, who wanted to liberate themselves from tradition, from knowledge and authority in education."

Aurélie Lamacq, a member of Generation Identitaire, said she is angry with the baby boomers for leaving a mess for her generation "because they had everything."

"They had the cool job. It was easy at the time to buy a flat or house. Their children were secure, and they have taken everything from us," Lamacq charged.

She added that she too no longer believes in cultural assimilation between Christians and Arab immigrants.

"We can't live together because we are not the same ethnically," she said. "We don't have the same religion. We don't have the same way of life, the same values. We have nothing in common. Nothing."

Some believe France is on a trajectory toward more social conflict over immigration and perhaps, someday, civil war.

"The political elite has to understand that it's a fight to the death because it's a matter of survival," Langella said.

It seems likely that groups based on ethnic identity, like Generation Identitaire, will continue to attract more and more followers in France.

- - Related Stories:

French Media Ignores Protest against Radical Islam

'Islamization' of Paris a Warning to the West

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Pakistani-born Church of England Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali responds to an article on "Islamophobia" in Britain:  (my bolding)

'Diversity cannot be mere diversity. It must be consistent with the best of British values, such as human dignity, freedom and equality, which derive from the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the Bible.

'I know from personal experience that extremism as a mind-set is spreading throughout the Muslim world. We do not want it to spread here through the teaching of hate and the radicalisation of the young.

'That is why we must distinguish between those Muslims who want to live peacefully with their non-Muslim neighbours and those who wish to introduce Shari'a into this country, restrict freedom of speech and confine women to their homes, not to speak of introducing draconian punishments such as death for blasphemy recently awarded to a poor Christian woman in Pakistan.

'If relations are to improve between Muslims and other people in the world, these are the kind of issues that must be tackled.'

MALLARD FILLMORE MAKES A POINT

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON ON AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY UNDER SIEGE BY MULTICULTURAL TRANSNATIONALISTS

John Fonte over at National Review's Corner writes:

Excellent article today by Fouad Ajami on Sam Huntington in the Wall Street Journal. Huntington argues in Who Are We? that issues such as transnationalism, globalism, dual citizenship, “racial preferences, bilingualism, multiculturalism, immigration, assimilation, national history standards, English as the official language, Eurocentrism,” and so on, are “all battles in a single war over the nature of American national identity.” Huntington’s core point is that “de-nationalized elites” are promoting the “transnational” and the “multicultural” in order to “deconstruct” America’s creed and common culture.

...  What is being contested is the nature of America’s liberal democratic regime as it has been traditionally understood. Will this regime be perpetuated and transmitted to future generations or will it be transformed into a new type of transnational-multicultural-regime? Huntington’s thesis is a tour de force that cuts to the heart of this question. Needless to say, Huntington was hysterically attacked by nervous “de-nationalized elites” on the left, who don’t want these issues discussed openly. [my emphases]

Me: All of the above represents good reason to read Ajami's article. 

INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS OF MULTICULTURALISM

British Daily Mail headline:  "Muslims' fury forces schools to shelve anti-homophobia storybooks for 5-year-olds.   (HT: Mark Steyn at the Corner)

Two primary schools have withdrawn storybooks about same-sex relationships after objections from Muslim parents.

Up to 90 gathered at the schools to complain about the books which are aimed at pupils as young as five.

One story, titled King & King, is a fairytale about a prince who turns down three princesses before marrying one of their brothers.

Another named And Tango Makes Three features two male penguins who fall in love at a New York zoo.

Bristol City Council said the two schools had been using the books to ensure they complied with gay rights laws which came into force last April.

Read the whole article.  Steyn says to expect more stories like this and I think he's right.

FREE SPEECH UNDER ASSAULT IN CANADA: THE CASE OF EZRA LEVANT

I don't have time right now to review the case of Mark Steyn, but will do so in due course.  Right now I want to post his comment on, and the link he provides to another case: the grilling that the Alberta Human Rights Commission gave to Ezra Levant, the man who published the Danish cartoons in Canada in the  Western Standard magazine.  Levant is utilizing video documentation of the interrogation to alert the world to what is happening.  Check that link!   As one news source reported:

"A secular government bureaucracy has essentially been hijacked by a radical Muslim imam," [Levant] said. "It's being used to further his fatwa against these cartoons."

Update 1/13/08 - Mark Steyn has more.

Update 1/14/08 - Stanley Kurtz notes absence of MSM coverage:

The electrifying Ezra Levant story has lit up the blogosphere. In the mainstream media it is nowhere to be seen. This is what the blogosphere is for. Will MSM even bother to show up? With how brief a story, how many days late?

(Later) - Kurtz also alerts us to Levant's opening statement to the Alberta Human Rights Commission today which he says serves as a "free speech document."

Western Feminism: Silence in the Face of Muslim Honor Killings

Robert Fulford writes  in the National Post:

On the question of honour killing, defined as the murder of women to protect men's pride, the news from Jordan has recently grown slightly worse. Although it's among the most civilized and modern of Arab countries, Jordan hasn't come close to eliminating this repellent crime, a bizarre remnant of the region's tribal past. It was only five years ago that the penal code made honour killing clearly illegal. Till then it was rarely punished.

In August, five Jordanian men were charged with the premeditated murder of a 22-year-old woman whose crime was to have a love affair with the man she later married. When the pre-marital affair came to light, her father, three uncles

Multiculturalism as an Agent of Anti-Western Ideology

Elan Journo illustrates the subverting of the curriculum against recognizing Western culture's history and achievements.  Click here

The Limits of Multiculturalism

In a Robert Spencer article discussing a German judge who invoked the Qur'an over against German law, Spencer recalls the spirit of General Sir Charles James Napier, The British commander-in-Chief in India from 1849 to 1851.

It is said that a Hindu delegation protested against the British prohibition of sati, the practice of burning a widow to death on her husband's funeral pyre, by telling Napier that it was part of their cultural custom.  Napier famously responded:

You say that it is your custom to burn widows.  Very well.  We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them.  Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.  You may follow your custom.  And then we will follow ours.

I think that a classic response!  Robert Spencer writes:

It is long past time for authorities in Europe and the United States to begin to emulate Napier in their dealings with increasingly restive and demanding Islamic communities.  Instead of issuing "religious diversity handbooks" and making special accomodations for Islamic practices, Western officials need to reassert the validity of our own laws and mores . . .

Cultural Degeneration & the Collapse of the West

Thomas Sowell's recent article carries the subtitle, "Cultural degeneration has paralyzed the West in the face of its enemies."   Those unaware of Western culture's continuing collapse will find Sowell's article sobering, and, if read carefully, alarming.   He writes,

. . .   Only after the Roman Empire began to lose its own internal cohesion, patriotism, and fighting spirit over the centuries did it begin to succumb to its external enemies and finally collapse.

That seems to be where Western civilization is heading today.

Internal cohesion? Not only does much of today's generation in Western societies have a "do your own thing" attitude, but defying rules and flouting authority are actually glorified. Balkanization through "multiculturalism" has become dogma.

Patriotism? Not only is patriotism disdained, the very basis for pride in one's country and culture is systematically undermined in our educational institutions at all levels.

QUOTES FROM MARK STEYN

I have mentioned Mark Steyn in many posts (e.g. here,  here, and here.  Michelle Malkin has a fascinating video interview with Steyn here and Part 2 of the video interview here).  Today I'd like to highlight Mona Charen's review of Steyn's book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know it.   It would be marvelous if everyone would click her review, but since that isn't likely to happen, I'll reproduce a few excerpts to wet one's appetite for Steyn's book.  (Incidentally, Steyn's website is here.)

On the fact that native Europeans are fast disappearing, Charen quotes Steyn:

“What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular boy’s name in the United Kingdom.” By mid-century, Steyn observes, if Muslims continue to

MULTICULTURALISM AND THE MAJORITY CULTURE: SORTING IT OUT

Carol Iannone offers a perspective sure to displease many.  It makes sense to me.

The reason that British Airways allows its employees to wear headscarves and turbans but not crosses if they are visible, as posted previously on our list, is that multiculturalism is not about equal representation of all cultures, but a power play of the minorities over the majority.  All cultures are equal, except the majority culture, which, by virtue of being the majority, is seen as oppressive and hateful and is plied with guilt until it becomes weak, feeble, and servile.  Melanie Phillips gives a good explanation of this in Londonistan.  That's why it doesn't pay to play by multiculti rules, simply asking for proper "representation" of the majority culture.  The only path is to insist on the legitimacy of the majority culture, which gives the society its basic form, with due acknowledgement of minorities, but as part of the whole, not as separate enclaves.

Harvard Study: Massive Distrust Exists in Communities of Great Ethnic Diversity

A news report  contains the following story:

A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University's Robert Putnam, one of the world's most influential political scientists.

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

Islam and the West: An Historical Sketch of Jihadist Imperialism

Fjordman, writing in The Brussels Journal  offers a valuable, wide-ranging article dealing with historical relationships between Islam and the West -- a history that we ignore at our peril.   His article is titled "Who Are We, Who Are Our enemies -- The Cost of Historical Amnesia."  From the Barbary Jihad piracy and before, up to the present day, Fjordman draws on the historical record of Muslim  jihadist imperialism which should sober everyone now living in freedom in the West.   That freedom is bcoming increasingly uncertain and fragile.  This article is a valuable resource.

George Will on Holland and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Geoge Will casts some verbal gems in his column today centering on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch politician who has immigrated to the United States.

- Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism

- But the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.

- Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, "the drive to innovate." But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans "have no idea what an enemy is." And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. "I can't even tell it without laughing," she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.

EUROPEAN MULTICULTURALISM: WHAT IS ITS PRESENT STATUS AND WHAT OF THE FUTURE?

Is multiculturalism in Europe now in tatters, or does it reign as strongly as ever?  A symposium of major analysts discuss the question.    Those participating include Bat Ye'or, Claire Berlinski, Bruce Bawer, Leon de Winter, Fjordman, Hege Storhaug, and Lars Hedegaard.  This important symposium needs careful reading and re-reading.   I have only excerpted a fraction of the entire proceedings.

Bruce Bawer describes the present situation this way:

Multiculturalism has become official dogma in much of  Western Europe, and the word is routinely used as if it were a synonym for equal rights or ethnic pluralism or colorblind democracy.  Of course, it isn’t. It’s a grotesque expression of cultural self-contempt and self-destructiveness.  Multiculturalism compels self-declared anti-fascists to blind themselves to the most chillingly fascist phenomena of our time.  It compels feminists to accept the subjugation and abuse of women by men who believe they have the right to rape, beat, and murder them.  It compels gay activists to embrace as allies people who, given the chance, would drop a wall on them. 

 
Multiculturalism is deeply, perversely irrational.  If you’re a multiculturalist, it’s verboten even to notice, acknowledge, and express concern about murderous hatred directed against you and yours by the officially oppressed.  For a multiculturalist, any act or statement by a member of an officially oppressed group, however morally reprehensible, is to be understood either as a legitimate reaction against “our” prejudice (or our forebears’ colonialism) or as a legitimate aspect of an alien culture that we, in our pitiful narrowness, have failed to understand and respect – which is, of course, our obligation.

 
Many Europeans recognize that multiculturalism is leading their societies to disaster.  If you can get them to loosen up and trust you, they may venture an awkward, uneasy critical word or two about the proliferation in their midst of people who long for sharia law and about the refusal of multicultural-minded political leaders to address this growing crisis responsibly.  But many such Europeans hardly know how to express their concerns, because they’ve almost never heard such concerns openly, intelligently, and responsibly articulated.  All they’ve heard all their lives from officially approved authorities – teachers, professors, the media, politicians, government agency workers, talking heads on TV, the representatives of state-funded “independent” organizations like SOS Racism – is that any concern about multiculturalism and its consequences is tantamount to racism. . . . 

There’s a widespread resignation to the fact that multiculturalists control the media, academy, state agencies, and so on.  Besides, they know what happens to those few people who do openly dissent from multicultural dogma – they’re demonized as bigots and racists.  They know very well that if you want to get ahead in European society, you don’t take on multicultural orthodoxy.

. . . The political establishment seems solidly planted, unmovable, unchangeable.  There may be a widespread rage, in short, but it’s largely an impotent rage.  Europeans today have been bred to be passive, to leave things to their leaders, whose wisdom they’ve been taught all their lives to take for granted.  Even Europeans who are highly uneasy about multiculturalism, then, tend to be incapable of effective action or organization.  They look around for somebody else to do something, or at least to say things that might help clarify the situation, help bring their own often muddled views into focus, and help make them feel justified in their vague but increasingly intense sense of alarm.

. . .They were brought up to believe that their societies’ one great overriding virtue, other than the bottomless generosity of the welfare state, is an unbounded multicultural tolerance –a limitless openness to and “understanding” of even of the most brutally intolerant foreign cultures.

 

To shake off a lifetime of this kind of indoctrination is not easy: it’s hard to quit yourself entirely of the deeply instilled notion – perverse though it is – that the ultimate act of goodness is to pour endless amounts of your own hard-earned tax money into the pockets of immigrants who hate you, hate your country, hate your form of government, and will gladly destroy it all when they’ve gained enough power to do so.  The feelings of guilt and insecurity on the part of many of those who dare to reject this orthodoxy should not be underestimated.

I wish I had time and space to excerpt more material from this symposium.  Particularly interesting (alarming?) are the various scenarios and suggestions made by the participants. --   I'll go ahead and bite the bullet and extend this post a little further.  I apologize for its length.  Fjordman says,

A Multicultural society is only temporary. Sooner or later, we will return to a new mono-cultural society. This will happen either through the division of the previously coherent territory into new, mono-cultural enclaves or through the takeover by society as a whole of the most forceful and aggressive of these competing cultures.

The tectonic plates of global power are now shifting in ways they haven't done for centuries. This is the retreat of the Western world order. Multiculturalism and the inability or unwillingness of Western nations to uphold their borders are viewed by Muslims as a signal that their ancient Western rival is weak and ripe for conquest. This is no doubt the background for the ongoing aggressive posture by the Iranian president, among others. Al-Qaeda strategists have earlier outlined a schedule for awakening the Islamic world and overthrowing the West, with a timeline stretching over the coming fifteen to twenty years. A world war of sorts with the Islamic world is already inevitable by now, no matter what we do. The only question is whether this will be a cold or a hot world war. . . .

It could be similar to the division of India after WW2, with the creation of one or several Islamic "Pakistan" enclaves.  All of Europe will not be lost, but some parts may be, and many others will be damaged by the fighting.  Many of our cultural treasures will burn. . . .  The truth is that Europe has got itself into a bad fix, again, and will have some turbulent and painful decades ahead regardless of what we do at this point.  The choice is between some pain where at least parts of Europe prevail and pain where Europe simply ceases to exist as a Western, cultural entity.

The most civilized thing we can do in order to save ourselves, but also to limit the loss of life among both Muslims and non-Muslims, is for Westerners and indeed infidels in general to implement a policy of containment of the Islamic world. This includes stopping Muslim immigration, but also by making our countries Islam-unfriendly, thus presenting the Muslims already here between the options of adapting to our societies or leaving if they desire sharia law. Even whispering about Jihad should be grounds for expulsion.

Since Islamic countries can use organizations such as the United Nations to influence Western freedom of speech and immigration policies, Westerners need to discredit and disengage from the UN as much as possible, at some point maybe withdraw from it completely. We cannot under any circumstances allow Islamic nations to influence our legislation.

Regaining our cultural confidence is a more complicated and longer term goal. It probably cannot be achieved until today's version of Western Europe has collapsed.  Western Europe is now a collection of several layers of different Utopias, Multiculturalism, welfarism and transnationalism, that will soon come crashing down. 

However,  just as Islam isn't the cause of Europe's weakness but rather a secondary infection, it is conceivable that the Islamic threat could have the unforeseen and ironic effect of saving  Europe from herself.  Europe will go through a turbulent period of painful, but necessary revival. Maybe Jihad will trigger a new Renaissance in the West.

Europe will bleed but she won't die.  It remains to be seen whether this is wishful thinking or whether it will actually happen.  In any case, it will take time to materialize.
It may sound unrealistic to talk about the collapse of the European Union or pulling out of the UN, but I believe things will rapidly get worse in the years ahead. A generation from now, things that will seem improbable or outright impossible now will have come to pass. We will see some of the largest changes in world politics since WW2, perhaps in centuries.

Berlinski disagrees with Fjordman and points to Turkey as a place of moderate Muslims and a hopeful sign.  She says, "I would direct Mr. Fjordman’s attention not only to Turkey, but to the flourishing in other Islamic countries of such groups as the Liberal Islam Network, the Progressive Muslims,  the International Forum for Islamic Dialogue, and the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy."   

Bat Ye'or responds to the idea of Muslim women being a significant force saying,

"Can Muslim women help? As much as I praise and admire Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan and so many others, I will qualify Storhaug’s optimism. The majority of Muslim women choose Islamism in Europe, Egypt, Turkey, and other countries, and a few even become suicide-bombers. Islamic culture is fourteen centuries old and it has conditioned men and women alike. In my view, it is a mistake to imagine that women’s emancipation will impact considerably on Muslim relations with the West. These are two different and unrelated domains. Traditional Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims are set in the religious, legal and historical framework of jihad, totally unknown to most Westerners and which has its own conceptual rationalization. . .

Eurabia is a European self-poisonous secretion whose functioning must be exposed in order to be neutralized. Its passion for multiculturalism emerges from its hate of Judeo-Christian culture and even more, its revulsion of Israel, and thus of the Jewish roots of Christianity.  This is the drive to European self-destruction.

Everything which happens today in the Muslim world develops within a religious and historical civilisational framework that we deliberately ignore. What I see and hear today I recognize it, as it is endlessly repeated in past chronicles. Maybe we should start to learn this history to understand what is happening to us, as a first step to find a solution, to retrieve our lost basic liberties to life and security, and our self-esteem. Because even if moderate Islam will prevail – a hazardous speculation, even for  Turkey-- it is our right to refuse Islamization and to maintain our Western secular rules and our spiritual values which differ from those of the shari'a.

EUROPE'S INSANITY

Serge Trifkovic describes accurately the insane situation Europe currently finds itself in.  We might well ask "Under what kind of stupor do the elites suffer to produce the mindset that now controls  European thinking?"   Trikovic's article, published today, should be filed away as a myth-shattering expose of elitist folly.  He begins as follows:

The present technological, cultural and financial strength of Europe is a façade that conceals a deep underlying moral and demographic weakness. The symptoms of the malaise are apparent in the unprecedented demographic collapse and in the loss of a sense of place and history that go hand-in-hand with the expansion of the European Union.

The emerging transnational hyper-state is actively indoctrinating its subject-population into believing and accepting that the demographic shift in favor of Muslim aliens is actually a blessing that enriches the Old Continent’s culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. Europe is losing the ability to define and defend itself, to the benefit of unassimilable multitudes filled with contempt for the host-society.

Many Muslims in Europe already consider themselves de facto autonomous, a community of believers opposed to the broader society of infidels. Jihadist networks now exist in every country west of the former Iron Curtain save Iceland. They are centered on mosques and Islamic centers often financed by Saudi money. Muslim population of Europe, which stands at some 20 million as of this writing, will double by 2025 and at that time it will account for a third of all live births in the “Old Europe” (the 15-nation core of the European Union).

Most Muslims in Europe live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country. Their mindset has nothing but contempt for the liberal concept of “tolerance” and “diversity,” and they possess a disdainful and hostile attitude to the host-society. Such hostility is clearly manifested in hard-core anti-Semitism – in its raw, unadulterated variety that is repugnant to most Europeans but regarded as normal, legitimate, and divinely ordained by most Muslims. But since the dictum of the multiculturalist ruling elite is that Islam is peaceful, tolerant, and as European as the Sistine Chapel, the truth must not be spoken.

There follows a discussion of endemic anti-Semitism and the strict European strictures against "Islamophobia" that render rational discussion impossible.   Trifkovic concludes his article  saying,

The result is the inherent inability of Brussels to defend Europe from the threat of a resurgent and aggressive Islam, and to prevent the resurgence of anti-Semitism within its boundaries.  Cynically defeatist, self-absorbed and unaccountable to anyone but their own corrupt class, the Eurocrats are just as bad as jihad’s fellow-travelers; they are its active abettors and facilitators.

MULTICULTURALISM VS. HISTORIC BRITISH VALUES: A PAKISTANI-BORN ANGLICAN BISHOP OFFERS OBSERVATIONS

Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester (UK) offers excellent observations and advice  in his Telegraph opinion piece, "Multiculturalism is to blame for perverting young Muslims."  Nazir-Ali, an Anglican Bishop from Pakistan, is author of several books, including his widely read Islam: A Christian Perspective and his latest, Conviction and Conflict: Islam, Christianity and World Order.  Here's a sample quote from his article.

It is clear, therefore, that the multiculturalism beloved of our political and civic bureaucracies has not only failed to deliver peace, but is the partial cause of the present alienation of so many Muslim young people from the society in which they were born, where they have been educated and where they have lived most of their lives.

IMPORTANT INTERVIEW WITH MELANIE PHILLIPS, AUTHOR OF "LONDONISTAN"

Jamie Glasov of Frontpagemag.com has a short, but powerful interview with Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan.    This interview needs to be read in its entirely.  It is not long.  The following quote does not do full justice to the interview.

The British establishment, as I have said, has a historic proclivity towards appeasement.  It takes the cynical view that there is no group in the world whom it cannot buy off one way or another.   In addition, it has an absolute blind spot about religious fanaticism.   It refuses to acknowledge the religious nature of Islamic fascism -- maybe because to do so would mean facing up to horrendous challenges, or maybe because the British elite simply cannot take seriously something that sounds to its super-sophisticated ears so absurd as the restoration of the medieval Caliphate and the Islamisation of the world. . .

Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches America says this about the book:  

In contrast to the overwhelming majority of her British compatriots, who prefer to avert their eyes from the radical Islamic horror growing in their midst, Melanie Phillips has compiled a unique record that fearlessly, brilliantly and wittily exposes this problem.  Londonistan builds on and goes beyond her prior work by showing the role of what she calls the British ‘spiral of decadence’ in permitting Islamist ideas and demands to ride roughshod over the UK’s traditional ways. Phillips rightly warns Americans of the acute dangers for them, too, from Britain’s being a source of Richard Reid–like terrorists to the ending of the two countries’ special relationship.

Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us  says this:

"Londonistan" is one of the most compelling books you will ever read on the ascendancy of Islamic fundamentalism, violence and intimidation in the West. Melanie Phillips exposes the scandalous appeasement of militant Islam by British officials, the media, even the Church of England, capturing in extraordinary detail how British society and institutions have either ignored or actively fostered the growth of extremist groups on British soil. This book will both enlighten and enrage. Although its story is focused on the United Kingdom, it could be applied to any European capital or to the United States.

BRITISM IMPERIALISM AND INDIA

In an interesting review and critique of Professor Efraim Karsh's new book, Islamic Imperialism—A History,  Andrew G. Bostom finds an occasion to quote Ibn Warraq, a secularist of Pakistani origin, who compared British imperialism in India with Islamic imperialism saying

Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy, and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of  Bombay and  Calcutta.  The British even gave back to the Indians their own past  it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India;  it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past gory.  British Imperialilsm preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples.  

Movies to see

I came across the following note I made a year ago.  I have yet to see these movies, but still want to.

Thomas Hibbs concluded his recent review of Hotel Rwanda by mentioning two other movies that sound well worth seeing: 

"With Hotel Rwanda, last summer's Osama  (a harrowing and captivating tale of a girl's attempt to secure a job to assist her family by disguising herself as a male under the ruthless Taliban regime in Afghanistan), and the just-released Moolaade (a deeply critical look at the practice of female circumcision in Africa), a number of current films about non-Western society manage to captivate, inspire, and educate.  These films also reveal the moral poverty and political impotence of certain still-trendy proclamations of multiculturalism.  Instead of railing against imperialism, these films face squarely the moral and political deficiencies inherent in a number of non-Western cultures and regimes.  Even as they provide Americans with an introduction to cultures in many ways quite alien to our own, these films appeal to and refine a moral sensibility that largely transcends the specificity of culture."