This is the first of five installments of Fjordman’s book Defeating Eurabia
. For those who wish to republish his work, please read his conditions.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.
The Eurabia Code
This essay was originally published in several parts at the website Jihad Watch in October 2006, and then republished as one essay at the Gates of Vienna blog.
“That such an unnecessary and irrational superstate was ever embarked on will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era.” — Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” — Cicero, Roman statesman and lawyer
I decided to write this essay after a comment from a journalist, not a Leftist by my country’s standards, who dismissed Eurabia as merely a conspiracy theory, one on a par with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I do not disagree with the fact that conspiracy theories exist, nor that they can be dangerous. After all, the Protocols and the Dolchstosslegende, or “stab in the back myth” — the idea that Germany didn’t lose WW1 but was betrayed by Socialists, intellectuals and Jews — helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis before WW2.
However, what puzzles me is that it is a widely-held belief of many (not just in the Islamic world but in Europe and even in the United States) that the terror attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11th 2001 were really a controlled demolition staged by the American government and then blamed on Muslims. I have seen this thesis talked about many times in Western media. While it is frequently (though not always) dismissed and mocked, it is least mentioned.
In contrast, Eurabia — which asserts that the Islamicization of Europe didn’t happen merely by accident but with the active participation of European political leaders — is hardly ever referred to at all, despite the fact that it is easier to document. Does the notion of Eurabia hit too close to home? Perhaps it doesn’t fit with the anti-American disposition of many journalists? Curiously enough, even those left-leaning journalists who are otherwise critical of the European Union because of its free market elements never write about Eurabia.
Because of this, I am going to test whether the Eurabia thesis is correct, or at least plausible. I have called this project The Eurabia Code, alluding to author Dan Brown’s massive bestseller The Da Vinci Code. Brown’s fictional account “documents” a conspiracy by the Church to cover up the truth about Jesus. I’m not sure my work will become equally popular, but I’m pretty sure it’s closer to reality. The next time Mr. Brown wants to write about massive conspiracies in Europe, he would be well-advised to set his eyes at Brussels rather than Rome. It would be a whole lot more interesting.
What follows is a brief outline of the thesis put forward by writer Bat Ye’or in her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. My information is based on her book (which should be read in full). In addition I have drawn from some of her articles and interviews. I republish the information with her blessing, but this summary is completely my own.
In an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Bat Ye’or explained how French President Charles de Gaulle, disappointed by the loss of the French colonies in Africa and the Middle East as well as with France’s waning influence in the international arena, decided in the 1960’s to create a strategic alliance with the Arab and Muslim world to compete with the dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union.
“This is a matter of a total transformation of Europe, which is the result of an intentional policy,” said Bat Ye’or. “We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicized and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world. The European leaders have decided on an alliance with the Arab world, through which they have committed to accept the Arab and Muslim approach toward the United States and Israel. This is not only with respect to foreign policy, but also on issues engaging European society from within, such as immigration, the integration of the immigrants and the idea that Islam is part of Europe.”
“Europe is under a constant threat of terror. Terror is a way of applying pressure on the European countries to surrender constantly to the Arab representatives’ demands. They demand, for example, that Europe always speak out for the Palestinians and against Israel.”
Thus, the Eurabian project became an enlarged vision of the anti-American Gaullist policy dependent upon the formation of a Euro-Arab entity hostile to American influence. It facilitated European ambitions to maintain important spheres of influence in the former European colonies, while opening huge markets for European products in the Arab world, especially in oil-producing countries, in order to secure supplies of petroleum and natural gas to Europe. In addition, it would make the Mediterranean a Euro-Arab inland sea by favoring Muslim immigration and promoting Multiculturalism with a strong Islamic presence in Europe.
The use of the term “Eurabia” was first introduced in the mid-1970s, as the title of a journal edited by the President of the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity, Lucien Bitterlein, and published collaboratively by the Groupe d’Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), and the Middle East International (London). Their articles called for common Euro-Arab positions at every level. These concrete proposals were not the musings of isolated theorists; instead they put forth concrete policy decisions conceived in conjunction with, and actualized by, European state leaders and European Parliamentarians.
During a November 27, 1967 press conference, Charles de Gaulle stated openly that French cooperation with the Arab world had become “the fundamental basis of our foreign policy.” By January 1969, the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples, held in Cairo, in its resolution 15, decided “…to form special parliamentary groups, where they did not exist, and to use the parliamentary platform support of the Arab people and the Palestinian resistance.” Five years later in Paris, July 1974, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation was created, under the Euro-Arab Dialogue rubric.
Bat Ye’or has highlighted this shared Euro-Arab political agenda. The first step was the construction of a common foreign policy. France was the driving force in this unification, which had already been envisaged by General de Gaulle’s inner circle and Arab politicians.
The Arab states demanded from Europe access to Western science and technology, European political independence from the United States, European pressure on the United States to align with their Arab policy and demonization of Israel as a threat to world peace, as well as measures favorable to Arab immigration and dissemination of Islamic culture in Europe. This cooperation would also included recognition of the Palestinians as a distinct people and the PLO and its leader Arafat as their representative. Up to 1973 they had been known only as Arab refugees, even by other Arabs. The concept of a Palestinian “nation” simply did not exist.
During the 1973 oil crisis, the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries announced that, due to the ongoing Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors Egypt and Syria, OPEC would no longer ship petroleum to Western nations that supported Israel. The sudden increase in oil prices was had lasting effects. Not only did it create a strong influx of petrodollars to countries such as Saudi Arabia, which permitted the Saudis to fund a worldwide Islamic resurgence, but it also had an impact in the West, especially in Europe.
However, Arab leaders had to sell their oil. Their people are very dependent on European economic and technological aid. The Americans made this point during the oil embargo in 1973. According to Ye’or, although the oil factor certainly helped cement the Euro-Arab Dialogue, it was primarily a pretext to cover up a policy that emerged in France before that crisis occurred. The policy, conceived in the 1960s, had strong antecedents in the French 19th-century dream of governing an Arab empire.
This political agenda has been reinforced by the deliberate cultural transformation of Europe. Euro-Arab Dialogue Symposia conducted in Venice (1977) and Hamburg (1983) included recommendations that have been successfully implemented. These recommendations were accompanied by a deliberate, privileged influx of Arab and other Muslim immigrants into Europe in enormous numbers.
The recommendations included:
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Coordination of the efforts made by the Arab countries to spread the Arabic language and culture in Europe, |
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Creation of joint Euro-Arab Cultural Centers in European capitals, |
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The necessity of supplying European institutions and universities with Arab teachers specialized in teaching Arabic to Europeans, and |
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The necessity of cooperation between European and Arab specialists in order to present a positive picture of Arab-Islamic civilization and contemporary Arab issues to the educated public in Europe. |
These agreements could not be set forth in written documents and treaties due to their politically sensitive and fundamentally undemocratic nature. The European leaders thus carefully chose to call their ideas “dialogue.” All meetings, committees and working groups included representatives from European Community nations and the European Council along with members from Arab countries and the Arab League. Proceedings and decisions took place in closed sessions. No official minutes were recorded.
The Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) is a political, economic and cultural institution designed to ensure perfect cohesion between Europeans and Arabs. Its structure was set up at conferences in Copenhagen (15 December 1973), and Paris (31 July 1974). The principal agent of this policy is the European Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, founded in 1974. The other principal organs of The Dialogue are the MEDEA Institute and the European Institute of Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Cooperation, created in 1995 with the backing of the European Commission.
In an interview with Jamie Glazov of Frontpage Magazine, Ye’or explained how “in domestic policy, the EAD established a close cooperation between the Arab and European media television, radio, journalists, publishing houses, academia, cultural centers, school textbooks, student and youth associations, tourism. Church interfaith dialogues were determinant in the development of this policy. Eurabia is therefore this strong Euro-Arab network of associations — a comprehensive symbiosis with cooperation and partnership on policy, economy, demography and culture.”
Eurabia’s driving force, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, was created in Paris in 1974. It now has over six hundred members — from all major European political parties — active in their own national parliaments, as well as in the European parliament. France continues to be the key protagonist of this association.
A wide-ranging policy was sketched out. It entailed a symbiosis of Europe with the Muslim Arab countries that would endow Europe — and especially France, the project’s prime mover — with a weight and a prestige to rival that of the United States. This policy was undertaken quite discreetly, and well outside of official treaties, using the innocent-sounding name of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. The organization functioned under the auspices of European government ministers, working in close association with their Arab counterparts, and with the representatives of the European Commission and the Arab League. The goal was the creation of a pan-Mediterranean entity, permitting the free circulation both of men and of goods
On the cultural front there began a complete re-writing of history, which was first undertaken during the 1970s in European universities. This process was ratified by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe in September 1991, at its meeting devoted to “The Contribution of the Islamic Civilisation to European culture.” It was reaffirmed by French President Jacques Chirac in his address of April 8, 1996 in Cairo, and reinforced by Romano Prodi, president of the powerful European Commission, the EU’s “government,” and later Italian Prime Minister, through the creation of a Foundation on the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilizations. This foundation was to control everything said, written and taught about Islam in Europe.
Over the past three decades, the EEC and the EU’s political and cultural organizations have invented a fantasy Islamic civilization and history. The historical record of violations of basic human rights for all non- Muslims and women under sharia (Islamic Law) is either ignored or dismissed. In this worldview the only dangers come from the United States and Israel. The creators of Eurabia have conducted a successful propaganda campaign against these two countries in the European media. This fabrication was made easier by pre-existing currents of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in parts of Europe, although both sentiments have been greatly inflated by Eurabians and their collaborators.
On January 31, 2001, with the recrudescence of Palestinian terrorist jihad, European Foreign Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten declared to the European Parliament that Europe’s foreign policy should give special attention to its southern flank (the Arab countries, in EU jargon), adding that he was delighted by the general agreement to give greater visibility to the Mediterranean Partnership.
Bat Ye’or thinks that “Our politicians are perfectly informed of Islamic history and current policies by their embassies, agents and specialists. There is no innocence there, but tremendous inflexibility in corruption, cynicism and the perversion of values.”
In the preface to her book, she states that “This book describes Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post— Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers.”
The new European civilization in the making can correctly be termed a ‘‘civilization of dhimmitude.’’ The word dhimmitude comes from the Koranic word ‘‘dhimmi.’’ It refers to the subjugated, non-Muslim individuals who accept restrictive and humiliating subordination to Islamic power in order to avoid enslavement or death. The entire Muslim world as we know it today is a product of this 1,300 year-old jihad dynamic, whereby once thriving non-Muslim majority civilizations have been reduced to a state of dysfunction and dhimmitude. The dhimmis are inferior beings who endure humiliation and aggression in silence. This arrangement allows Muslims to enjoy an impunity that increases both their hatred and their feeling of superiority, under the protection of the law.
Eurabia is a novel new entity. It possesses political, economic, religious, cultural, and media components, which are imposed on Europe by powerful governmental lobbies. While Europeans live within Eurabia’s constraints, outside of a somewhat confused awareness, few are really conscious of them on a daily basis.
This Eurabian policy, expressed in obscure wording, is conducted at the highest political levels and coordinated over the whole of the European Union. It spreads an anti-American and anti-Semitic Euro-Arab sub-culture into the fiber of every social, media and cultural sector. Dissidents are silenced or boycotted. Sometimes they are fired from their jobs, victims of a totalitarian “correctness” imposed mainly by the academic, media and political sectors.
According to Ye’or, France and the rest of Western Europe can no longer change their policy: “It is a project that was conceived, planned and pursued consistently through immigration policy, propaganda, church support, economic associations and aid, cultural, media and academic collaboration. Generations grew up within this political framework; they were educated and conditioned to support it and go along with it.”
Are Bat Ye’or’s claims correct, or even possible?
Bernard Lewis has pointed out that, by common consent among historians, “the modern history of the Middle East begins in the year 1798, when the French Revolution arrived in Egypt in the form of a small expeditionary force led by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte—who conquered and then ruled it for a while with appalling ease.”
In an unsuccessful effort to gain the support of the Egyptian populace, Napoleon issued proclamations praising Islam. “People of Egypt,” he proclaimed upon his entry to Alexandria in 1798, “You will be told that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that more than the Mamluks, I respect God, his Prophet, and the Qur’an.”
According to an eyewitness, Napoleon ended his proclamation with the phrase, “God is great and Muhammad is his prophet.” To Muslim ears, this sounded like the shahada — the declaration of belief in the oneness of Allah and in Prophet Muhammad as his last messenger. Recitation of the shahadah, the first of the five pillars of Islam, is considered to mark one’s conversion to Islam. Muslims could thus conclude that Napoleon had converted to Islam. In fact, one of his generals, Jacques Ménou, did convert to Islam.
The French were later defeated and forced to leave Egypt by the English admiral Lord Nelson. Although the French expedition to Egypt lasted only three years, it demonstrated that the West was now so superior to the Islamic world that Westerners could enter the Arab heartland, then still a part of the Ottoman Empire, at will. Only another Western power could force them to leave. The shock of this realization triggered the first attempts to reform Islam in the 19th century.
A positive result of Western conquest was the influx of French scientists into Egypt and the foundation of modern Egyptology. Most importantly, it led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was later used by French philologist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, the encounter also left a lasting impact in Europe, and above all in France.
The French invasion of Algeria in 1830 marked another chapter in this tale. Later, the French ruled Tunisia and Morocco. Finally, after the First World War, the French gained mandates over the former Turkish territories of the Ottoman Empire that make up what is now Syria and Lebanon. After the Second World War, French troops gradually left Arab lands, culminating with war and Algerian independence in 1962. However, their long relationship with Arabs resulted in France’s belief that she had a special relationship with and an understanding of Arabs and Muslims. Along with French leadership in continental Europe, this would now provide the basis of a new foreign policy.
President de Gaulle pushed for a France and a Europe independent of the two superpowers. In a speech, he stated that “Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the destiny of the world.” In 1966, he withdrew France from the common NATO military command, but remained within the organization.
Following the Six Days War in 1967, de Gaulle’s condemnation of the Israelis for their occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip marked a significant change in French foreign policy. Previously, France — as well as the rest of Western Europe — had been strongly pro-Israel, even going to war together with Israel as late as 1956 against Nasser’s Egypt. From 1967 on, however, France embarked on a decidedly pro-Arab course.
It has been said that English foreign policy has remained the same since the 16th century. Its goal was to prevent any country, whether Spain, France, or later Germany, from dominating continental Europe to the extent that it represents a threat to England. On the other hand, one could argue that French foreign policy has also remained the same for several centuries; its goal is to champion French leadership over Europe and the Mediterranean region in order to contain Anglo-Saxon (and later Anglo-American) dominance. This picture was complicated by the unification of Germany in the late 19th century, but its outlines remain to this day.
Napoleon is the great hero of French PM de Villepin. Several prominent French leaders stated quite openly in 2005 that the proposed EU Constitution was basically an enlarged France. Justice Minister Dominique Perben said: “We have finally obtained this ‘Europe à la française’ that we have awaited for so long. This constitutional treaty is an enlarged France. It is a Europe written in French.”
From its inception, European integration has been a French-led enterprise. The fact that the French political elite have never renounced the maintenance of their leadership over Europe was amply demonstrated during the Iraq war. President Chirac famously said in 2003 after Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic backed the US position “They missed a good opportunity to shut up,” adding “These countries have been not very well behaved and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too rapidly with the American position.”
Jean Monnet, French economist never elected to public office, is regarded by many as the architect of European integration. Monnet was a well-connected pragmatist who worked behind the scenes towards the gradual creation of European unity.
Richard North, publisher of the blog EU Referendum and co-author (with Christopher Booker) of The Great Deception: Can The European Union Survive, relates that for years — at least from the 1920s — Jean Monnet had dreamed of building a “United States of Europe.” Although what Monnet really had in mind was the creation of a European entity with all the attributes of a state, an “anodyne phrasing was deliberately chosen with a view to making it difficult to dilute by converting it into just another intergovernmental body. It was also couched in this fashion so that it would not scare off national governments by emphasising that its purpose was to override their sovereignty.”
In their analysis of the EU’s history, the authors claim that the EU was not born out of WW2, as many people seem to think. It had been planned at least a generation before that.
The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in “Europe Day,” contains phrases which state that it is “a first step in the federation of Europe”, and that “this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation.” However, as critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people are unaware of their existence.
A federation is, of course, a State and “yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. The EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws.”
The EU founders “were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.”
Booker and North call the European Union “a slow-motion coup d’état: the most spectacular coup d’état in history,” designed to gradually and carefully sideline the democratic process and subdue the older nation states of Europe without saying so publicly.
The irony is that France is now held hostage by the very forces she herself set in motion. The Jihad riots by Muslim immigrants in France in 2005 demonstrated that Eurabia is no longer a matter of French foreign policy, it is now French domestic policy. France will burn unless she continues to appease Arabs and agree to their agenda.
The growth of the Islamic population is explosive. According to some, one out of three babies born in France is a Muslim. Hundreds of Muslim ghettos already de facto follow sharia, not French law. Some believe France will quietly become a Muslim country, while others predict a civil war in the near future.
Maybe there is some poetic justice in the fact that the country that initiated and has led the formation of Eurabia will now be destroyed by its own Frankenstein monster. However, gloating over France’s dilemma won’t help. The impending downfall of France is bad news for the rest of the West. What will happen to French financial resources? Above all, who will inherit hundreds of nuclear warheads? Will these weapons fall into the hands of Jihadist Muslims, too?
MEDEA (the European Institute for Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Cooperation), supported by the European Commission, is one of the key components of the Euro-Arab dialogue. On its own webpage, it states that:
“The Euro-Arab Dialogue as a forum shared by the European Community and the League of Arab States arose out of a French initiative and was launched at the European Council in Copenhagen in December 1973, shortly after the “October War” and the oil embargo. As the Europeans saw it, it was to be a forum to discuss economic affairs, whereas the Arab side saw it rather as one to discuss political affairs.
MEDEA Institute wishes to be a resource and a reference point for people wanting to engage in the Euro-Mediterranean dialogue. Via its meetings and talks the Institute seeks to create exchanges between political, economic, and diplomatic players, experts, journalists, academics and others.”
As Bat Ye’or points out, while most of the workings of Eurabia are hidden from the public view, sometimes we can catch glimpses of it if we know what to look for. If you search the archives of the MEDEA website and other sources and read the documents carefully, the information is there. Even more material exists on paper, both in French and in English. I argue, as does Bat Ye’or, that there are sufficient amounts of information available to validate the thesis of Eurabia.
One of the documents Bat Ye’or was kind enough to send me (which she mentions in the French version of her book about Eurabia but not in the English version) is the Common Strategy of the European Council — Vision of the EU for the Mediterranean Region, from June 19th 2000.
It includes many recommendations, such as:
“to elaborate partnership-building measures, notably by promoting regular consultations and exchanges of information with its Mediterranean partners, support the interconnection of infrastructure between Mediterranean partners, and between them and the EU, take all necessary measures to facilitate and encourage the involvement of civil society as well as the further development of human exchanges between the EU and the Mediterranean partners. NGOs will be encouraged to participate in cooperation at bilateral and regional levels. Particular attention will be paid to the media and universities [my emphasis].”
It also includes the goal of assisting the Arab partners with “the process of achieving free trade with the EU.” This may be less innocent than it sounds, as I will come back to later.
The Strategy also wants to “pursue, in order to fight intolerance, racism and xenophobia, the dialogue between cultures and civilisations.” Notice that this statement preceded both the start of the second Palestinian intifada as well as the terror attacks of September 11th 2001. It was thus part of an ongoing process, rather than a response to any particular international incident.
One point in the document is particularly interesting. The EU wanted to “promote the identification of correspondences between legal systems of different inspirations in order to resolve civil law problems relating to individuals: laws of succession and family law, including divorce.”
In plain English, it is difficult to see this bureaucratic obfuscation as anything other than an indicator that the EU countries will be lenient, adjusting their secular legislation to the sharia requirements of Muslim immigrants in family matters.
In another document from December 2003, which is available online, Javier Solana, the Secretary General of the Council of the European Union, Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission and Chris Patten, member of the European Commission, have signed a plan for “Strengthening the EU’s Partnership with the Arab World.”
This includes the creation of a free trade area, but also plans to “invigorate cultural/religious/civilisation and media dialogue using existing or planned instruments, including the planned Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilisations.
Arab immigrants make a substantial contribution to the development of Europe. The EU is firmly committed to fight all manifestations of racism and discrimination in all its forms. [What constitutes discrimination? Secular laws?] Full respect for the rights of immigrants in Europe is a consistent policy throughout Europe. Its implementation should be improved further and co-operation in the framework of existing agreements should be enhanced to take into account the concerns of Arab partners.”
Super-Eurocrat Romano Prodi wants more cooperation with Arab countries. He talks about a free trade zone with the Arab world, but this implies that Arab countries would enjoy access to the four freedoms of the EU’s inner market, which includes the free movement of people across national borders. This fact, the potentially massive implications of establishing an “inner market” with an Arab world with a booming population growth, is virtually NEVER debated or even mentioned in European media. Yet it could mean the end of Europe as we once knew it.
Another statement from the “Sixth Euro-Med Ministerial Conference: reinforcing and bringing the Partnership forward” in Brussels, 28 November 2003, makes the intention of this internal Euro-Mediterranean market:
“This initiative offers the EU’s neighbouring partners, in exchange for tangible political and economic reforms, gradual integration into the expanded European internal market and the possibility of ultimately reaching the EU’s four fundamental freedoms: free movement of goods, services, capital and people [my emphasis]. Ministers are also expected to back the Commission’s proposal1 to set up a Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures, a Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly.”
In June 2006, then newly elected Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi stated that:
“It’s time to look south and relaunch a new policy of cooperation for the Mediterranean.” Prodi was outlining a joint Italian-Spanish initiative which sought to provide countries facing the Mediterranean with “different” political solutions from those offered in the Euro-Mediterranean partnership. The prime minister then explained that the Barcelona Process — whose best known aspect is the creation of a free trade zone by 2010 — was no longer sufficient and a new different approach was needed. “The countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean expect that from us” he added.
Notice how Prodi, whom Bat Ye’or has identified as a particularly passionate Eurabian, referred to what the Arabs expected from European leaders. He failed to say whether or not there was great excitement among Europeans over the prospect of an even freer flow of migrants from Arab countries and Turkey, which is what will result from this “Euro-Mediterranean free trade zone.”
During the Euro-Mediterranean mid-term Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs in Dublin in May 2004, the participants declared that:
“Work is now in progress to develop an agreed view on relations with the area which extends from Mauritania to Iran — the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The [European] Union has proposed to include Mediterranean partners in the European Neighbourhood Policy.”
The EU can offer a more intensive political dialogue and greater access to EU programmes and policies, including their gradual participation in the four freedoms particularly the Single Market, as well as reinforced co-operation on justice and home affairs.”
Again, exactly what does “co-operation on justice and home affairs” with Egypt, Syria and Algeria mean? I don’t know, but I’m not sure whether I will like the answer.
The Barcelona declaration from 1995 encouraged “contacts between parliamentarians” and invited the European Parliament, with other Parliaments, to launch “the Euro-Mediterranean parliamentary dialogue.” In March 2004, this was converted into a specific institution called The Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly, EMPA (pdf). During the Euro-Mediterranean Ministerial Conference in Crete in May 2003, the Ministers included a provision which envisaged the consultative role the Parliamentary Assembly will play within the framework of the Barcelona process.
EU Commissioner Chris Patten has reiterated the European Commission’s readiness to co-operate fully with the Assembly, giving the Assembly the right to comment on any subject of interest to the Euro-Arab Dialogue.
The Assembly consists of 120 members from EU countries, both members of national parliaments and of the European Parliament, and an equal number of representatives from the Parliaments of the Mediterranean partner countries.
Like most Europeans, I hadn’t even heard about this institution before coming across it during an Internet search. However, it is apparently going to influence the future of my entire continent. This set-up leaves me with some questions. When we know that these “Mediterranean partner countries” include non-democratic Arab countries such as Syria, isn’t it disturbing that representatives from these countries should participate in a permanent institution with consultative powers over the internal affairs of the European Union? Especially when we know that our own, democratically elected national parliaments have already been reduced to the status of “consultation” with unelected federal EU lawmakers in Brussels?
The Algiers Declaration for a Shared Vision of the Future was made after a Congress held in Algeria in February 2006. The document states that: “It is essential to create a Euro-Mediterranean entity founded on Universal Values” and that “It is crucial to positively emphasise all common cultural heritage, even if marginalised or forgotten.” A Common Action Plan draws up a large number of recommendations on how to achieve this new Euro-Mediterranean entity. Among these recommendations are:
- Adapt existing organisations and the contents of media to the objectives of the North- South dialogue, and set up a Euro-Mediterranean journalism centre
- Set up a network jointly managed by the Mediterranean partners in order to develop “a harmonised education system” [A “harmonized education system” between the Arab world and Europe? What does that include? Do I want to know? Will they tell us before it is a fait accompli?]
- Facilitate the transfer of know-how between the EU countries and the Mediterranean partner nations and “encourage the circulation of individuals”
- Prepare action and arguments in support of facilitating the mobility of individuals, especially of students, intellectuals, artists, businessmen “and all conveyors of dialogue”
- Set up Ministries responsible for Mediterranean affairs in countries of the North and of the South [Europe and the Arab world, in Eurocrat newspeak], in order to benefit from a better management of Mediterranean policy;
- Train teachers and exchange students between the North and the South and set up a network of Euro-Mediterranean Youth clubs
- Establish a “civil watchdog” anti-defamation observatory (with an Internet tool and a legal help network), to cope with racist remarks and the propagation of hate towards people of different religion, nationality or ethnical background
These agreements, completely rewriting European history books to make them more Islam-friendly, and gradually silencing “Islamophobia” as racism, are being implemented even now.
Walter Schwimmer, the Austrian diplomat and Secretary General of the Council of Europe from 1999 to 2004, told foreign ministers at the Islamic conference in Istanbul (June15th 2004) that the Islamic component is an integral part of Europe’s diversity. He reaffirmed the commitment of the Council of Europe to work against Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance.
The Council was also actively involved in the co-organisation of a Conference on the Image of Arab-Islamic culture in European history textbooks, which took place in Cairo in December 2004. The event was held within the framework of the Euro-Arab Dialogue ‘‘Learning to Live together.’’ The aim of the conference was to examine negative stereotyping in the image of Arab-Islamic culture presented in existing history textbooks, and to discuss ways to overcome this stereotyping.
In the European Parliament, the German Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pöttering stated that school textbooks should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam by experts overseen by the European Union and Islamic leaders. He said textbooks should be checked to ensure they promoted European values without propagating religious stereotypes or prejudice. He also suggested that the EU could co-operate with the 56-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference to create a textbook review committee.
In June 2005 in Rabat, Morocco, a conference was held on “Fostering Dialogue among Cultures and Civilizations.” The Conference was jointly organized by UNESCO, the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO), the Danish Centre for Culture and Development (DCCD) and the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures (Alexandria, Egypt).
Notice that this was months before the Danish Muhammad cartoons created havoc. It was not a reaction to this issue; rather it was a part of a sustained, ongoing process to promote Arabic-Islamic culture in Europe.
Among the recommendations that were raised by Mr. Olaf Gerlach Hansen, Director General of the DCCD: “We are interested in new actions in the media, in culture and in education. These proposals include:
- Concrete initiatives to develop “intercultural competencies” in the training of new generations of journalists — Concrete initiatives for links and exchanges between journalists, editors, media-institutions, which encourage intercultural co-operation” — Concrete initiatives for curriculum development through new educational materials and revision of existing textbooks.
Although not stated directly, one may reasonably assume that among the “negative stereotypes” to be removed from the textbooks used to teach history to European schoolchildren are any and all references to the 1300 years of continuous Jihad warfare against Europe. These recommendations were accepted and incorporated into The Rabat Commitment.
According to Serge Trifkovic, “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.”
He points out specifically the EU Parliamentary Assembly Recommendation N° 1162 (19 September 1991) on “the contribution of the Islamic civilization to European culture.” A decade later, in its General policy recommendation n° 5: “Combating intolerance and discrimination against Muslims,” the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance emphasized “Islam’s positive contribution to the continuing development of European societies, of which it is an integral part.” It expressed strong regret “that Islam is sometimes portrayed inaccurately [as] a threat.”
The ECRI called on the EU member states to adopt measures that would effectively outlaw any serious debate about Islam and introduce pro-Muslim “affirmative action.” European countries should:
- modify curricula to prevent “distorted interpretations of religious and cultural history” and “portrayal of Islam on perceptions of hostility and menace”;
- encourage debate in the media on the image which they convey of Islam and on their responsibility to avoid perpetuating prejudice and bias.
Trifkovic says “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.”
Eurabians want to create a unity of the Mediterranean region. This desire is strikingly similar to the goals of some Islamic organizations.
The Muslim Brotherhood, regarded as the most important Islamic movement of the past century, was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, inspired by contemporary European Fascists in addition to Islamic texts.
German historian Egon Flaig quotes Banna as saying: “We want the flag of Islam to fly over those lands again who were lucky enough to be ruled by Islam for a time, and hear the call of the muezzin praise God. Then the light of Islam died out and they returned to disbelief. Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, Southern Italy and the Greek islands are all Islamic colonies which have to return to Islam’s embrace. The Mediterranean and the Red Sea have to become internal seas of Islam, as they used to be.”
Patrick Poole describes how discussion of a document called “The Project” so far has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities. Only through the work of an intrepid Swiss journalist, Sylvain Besson, has information regarding The Project finally been made public. It was found in a raid of a luxurious villa in Campione, Switzerland on November 7, 2001. The target of the raid was Youssef Nada, who has had active association with the Muslim Brotherhood for more than 50 years.
Included in the documents seized was a 14-page plan written in Arabic and dated December 1, 1982, which outlined a 12-point strategy to “establish an Islamic government on earth” — identified as The Project. According to testimony given to Swiss authorities by Nada, the unsigned document was prepared by “Islamic researchers” associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. It represents a flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the “cultural invasion” of the West.
The Project has served for more than two decades as the Muslim Brotherhood “master plan.” Some of it recommendations include:
- Using deception to mask the intended goals of Islamist actions
- Building extensive social networks of schools, hospitals and charitable organizations
- Involving ideologically committed Muslims in institutions on all levels in the West, including government, NGOs, private organizations
- Instrumentally using existing Western institutions until they can be put into service of Islam
- Instituting alliances with Western “progressive” organizations that share similar goals
Included among this group of Muslim Brotherhood intellectuals is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian-born, Qatar-based Islamist cleric. Both Sylvain Besson and Scott Burgess provide extensive comparisons between Qaradawi’s publication, Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase, published in 1990, and The Project. They note the striking similarities in the language used and the plans and methods both documents advocate.
As Patrick Poole says, “What is startling is how effectively the Islamist plan for conquest outlined in The Project has been implemented by Muslims in the West for more than two decades.”
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential clerics in Sunni Islam, has predicted that “Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor,” was an important figure during the Muhammad cartoons riots, whipping up anger against Denmark and the West.
According to Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen, “Clearly, the riots in Denmark and throughout the world were not spontaneous, but planned and organized well in advance by Islamist organizations that support the MB, and with funding mostly from Saudi Arabia.”
The current leader of the international Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammad Mahdi Akef, recently issued a new strategy calling on all its member organizations to serve its global agenda of defeating the West. Akef has called the U.S. “a Satan.” “I expect America to collapse soon,” declaring, “I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America.”
Ehrenfeld and Lappen state that the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring organizations employ the Flexibility strategy:
“This strategy calls for a minority group of Muslims to use all ‘legal’ means to infiltrate majority-dominated, non-Muslim secular and religious institutions, starting with its universities. As a result, ‘Islamized’ Muslim and non-Muslim university graduates enter the nation’s workforce, including its government and civil service sectors, where they are poised to subvert law enforcement agencies, intelligence communities, military branches, foreign services, and financial institutions.”
In the Middle East Quarterly, Lorenzo Vidino writes about “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Conquest of Europe.”
According to him, “Since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organized network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organizations.”
One of the Muslim Brotherhood’s first pioneers in Germany was Sa’id Ramadan, the personal secretary of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. The oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia has granted an influx of money to the powerful Islamic Center of Geneva, Switzerland, run by Sa’id’s son Hani Ramadan, brother of Tariq Ramadan. Hani Ramadan was made infamous by — among other things — a 2002 article in the French daily Le Monde defending the stoning of adulterers to death. Tariq Ramadan, a career “moderate Muslim,” later called for a “moratorium” on stoning.
According to Vidino, “The ultimate irony is that Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna dreamed of spreading Islamism throughout Egypt and the Muslim world. He would have never dreamed that his vision might also become a reality in Europe.”
Former Muslim Dr Patrick Sookhdeo warns that the Islamicization going on in European cities is not happening by chance. It “is the result of a careful and deliberate strategy by certain Muslim leaders which was planned in 1980 when the Islamic Council of Europe published a book called Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States.”
The instructions given in the book told Muslims to get together and organize themselves into viable Muslim communities. They should set up mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. At all costs they must avoid being assimilated by the majority, and to resist assimilation must group themselves geographically, forming areas of high Muslim concentration.
Douglas Farah writes about the largely successful efforts by Islamic groups in the West to buy large amounts of real estate, territory that effectively becomes “Muslim” land once it is in the hands of Islamist groups. Some groups are signing agreements to guarantee that they will only sell the land to other Muslims.
The Brotherhood, particularly, is active in investments in properties and businesses across Europe, laying the groundwork for the future network that will be able to react rapidly and with great flexibility in case of another attempted crackdown on the group’s financial structure. Most of the money comes from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
According to Farah, the governments of Europe and the United States continue to allow these groups to flourish and seek for the “moderate” elements that can be embraced as a counter-balance to the “radical” elements: “We do not have a plan. They do. History shows that those that plan, anticipate and have a coherent strategy usually win. We are not winning.”
In March 2006, the two-day plenary session of the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly, held in Brussels approved a resolution which “condemned the offence” caused by the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad as well “as the violence which their publication provoked.” These MEPs and national MPs from the EU and Arab countries also urged governments to “ensure respect for religious beliefs and to encourage the values of tolerance, freedom and multiculturalism.”
During the parliamentary assembly, Egyptian parliament speaker Ahmed Sorour insisted that the cartoons published in Denmark and other recent events showed the existence of a “cultural deficit.” Jordanian MP Hashem al-Qaisi also condemned the cartoons, claiming that it is not sufficient to deplore the cartoons as these things might occur again in another country.
And European Parliament president Josep Borrell referred to the Mediterranean as “a concentrate of all the problems facing humanity.” He said that after one year presiding over the assembly he “still did not fully understand the complexities of the Mediterranean.”
Following the cartoons affair, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana had travelled to the Middle East and made joint statements with Islamic leaders that “freedom of the press entails responsibility and discretion and should respect the beliefs and tenets of all religions.” Solana said that he had discussed means to ensure that “religious symbols can be protected.” He held talks with Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi of Al Azhar University, the highest seat of learning in Sunni Islam, and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa.
Solana also met with the leader of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. Following their discussion, Solana “expressed our sincere regret that religious feelings have been hurt”, and vowed “to reach out… to make sure that people’s hearts and minds are not hurt again.”
Only a few years earlier, Mr. Solana, then Secretary General of NATO, in a speech stated that “the root cause of conflicts in Europe and beyond can be traced directly to the absence of democracy and openness. The absence of the pressure valve of democratic discourse can lead these societies to explode into violence.” The irony that he himself is now trying to curtail the democratic discourse in Europe through the promotion of Islamic censorship apparently did not occur to him.
Meanwhile, the tentacles of the vast, inflated EU bureaucracy insinuate themselves into regulations on every conceivable subject. Some of the examples of the bureaucracy are ridiculous; some are funny. But there is a sinister side to the European bureaucracy:
- The promotion of an official, “EU federal ideology” advocating Multiculturalism;
- The denunciation as “xenophobes” of all those who want to preserve their democracy at the nation state level; and
- Calling those who would limit Third World immigration “racists.”
A report from the EU’s racism watchdog said that more must be done to combat racism and “Islamophobia.” One method of accomplishing this is the promotion of a lexicon which shuns purportedly offensive and culturally insensitive terms. This lexicon would set down guidelines for EU officials and politicians prohibiting what they may say. “Certainly ‘Islamic terrorism’ is something we will not use… we talk about ‘terrorists who abusively invoke Islam’,” an EU official said.
Early in 2006, the EU’s human rights commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles’s criticized a plan to revamp Christianity as a school subject in elementary schools in Denmark. Gil-Robles said doing so went against European values. “Religion as a school subject should be a general course that attempts to give students insight into the three monotheistic religions [my emphasis],” he said. The “three monotheistic religions” means Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
As I see it, there are several possible ways of dealing with the issue of education about religion.
| 1. |
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Teach the traditional religions within a particular country, which in Europe means Christianity and Judaism. |
| 2. |
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Teach all the major world religions. |
| 3. |
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Leave religion out of the curriculum. |
What the European Union does, however, is to treat Islam as a traditional, European religion on par with Christianity and Judaism. This is a crucial component of Eurabian thinking and practice. Notice how EU authorities in this case directly interfered to force a once-independent nation state to include more teachings of Islam in its school curriculum in order to instill their children with a proper dose of Eurabian indoctrination. Notice also that they didn’t ask for more teaching of Buddhism or Hinduism. Only Islam is being pushed.
In another case, the European Commission rebuffed a call by the Polish president for an EU-wide debate on reinstating the death penalty. “The death penalty is not compatible with European values,” a Commission spokesman said. Again, the issue here is not your opinion regarding the death penalty. The real issue is that the metasticizing EU has already defined what constitutes “European values.” Thus, major issues are simply beyond public debate. The innocent-sounding phrase “European values” cloaks a federal, Eurabian ideology enforced across the entire European Union without regard to the popular will.
Perhaps the most shameful and embarrassing aspect of the history of Eurabia is how the supposedly critical and independent European media has allowed itself to be corrupted or deceived by the Eurabians. Most of the documents about the Euro-Arab Dialogue place particular emphasis on working with the media, and the Eurabians have played the European media like a Stradivarius. Aided by a pre-existing anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, European media have been willing to demonize the United States and Israel while remaining largely silent on the topic Eurabia.
In May 2006, a big conference was held in Vienna involving media figures (journalists) from all over Europe, who met with partners from the Arab world as a part of the Euro-Arab Dialogue.
European officials responded publicly with “regret” to Israel’s ambassador to Austria Dan Ashbel’s decision to boycott the conference on racism in the media because of concern in Jerusalem that anti-Semitism was getting short shrift at the meeting. Speaking for the conference — entitled “Racism, Xenophobia and the Media: Towards Respect and Understanding of all Religions and Cultures” — an official claimed that anti-Semitism was not taken off the agenda. This official countered that the meeting was “primarily a dialogue between the media representatives of all the Euro-Med partners on the problems that beset their profession. These include xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia [my emphasis].”
Writer Bruce Bawer thinks that many Europeans recognize that Multiculturalism is leading their societies to disaster. But they’ve heard all their lives from officially approved authorities 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. 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. To shake off a lifetime of this kind of indoctrination is not easy.”
According to Bat Ye’or, fear of awakening opposition to EU policy toward the Arab Mediterranean countries led to the repression of all discussion of the economic problems and difficulties of integration caused by massive immigration. Any criticism of Muslim immigration is basically brushed off as being “just like the Jews were talked about in Nazi Germany,” a ridiculous but effective statement.
Bat Ye’or agrees with Bawer’s analysis “concerning the totalitarian web cohesion of ‘teachers, professors, the media, politicians, government agency workers, talking heads on TV, the representatives of state-funded “independent” organizations like SOS Racism’ to indoctrinate the politically correct. This perfectly expresses the political directives given by the European Commission to coordinate and control in all EU member-states the political, intellectual, religious, media, teaching and publishing apparatus since the 1970s so as to harmonize with its Mediterranean strategy based on multiculturalism.”
Professional harassment, boycott and defamation punish those who dare to openly challenge the Politically Correct discourse. According to Bat Ye’or, this has led to the development of a type of “resistance press” as if Europe were under the “occupation” of its own elected governments. This free press on the Internet and in blogs has brought some changes, including the rejection of the European Constitution in 2005. Despite overwhelming support for the Constitution by the governments in France and the Netherlands and a massive media campaign by political leaders in both countries, voters rejected it. Blogs played a significant part in achieving this.
Only a few months later, EU authorities lined up together with authoritarian regimes such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and the Chinese Communist Party in favor of “more international control with” (read: censorship of) the Internet.
According to Richard North of the EU Referendum blog, “The most dangerous form of propaganda is that which does not appear to be propaganda. And it is that form at which the BBC [the British Broadcasting Corporation] excels. Perhaps the biggest sin of all is that of omission. By simply not informing us of key issues, they go by default, unchallenged until it is too late to do anything about them.”
Vladimir Bukovsky is a former Soviet dissident, author and human rights activist who spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons. Now living in England, he warns against some of the same anti-democratic impulses in the West, especially in the EU, which he views as an heir to the Soviet Union. In 2002, he joined in on protests against the BBC’s compulsory TV licence. “The British people are being forced to pay money to a corporation which suppresses free speech — publicising views they don’t necessarily agree with.” He has blasted the BBC for their “bias and propaganda,” especially in stories related to the EU or the Middle East.
Conservative MP, Michael Gove and political commentator Mark Dooley also complain about lopsided coverage: “Take, for example, the BBC’s coverage of the late Yasser Arafat. In one profile broadcast in 2002, he was lauded as an “icon” and a “hero,” but no mention was made of his terror squads, corruption, or his brutal suppression of dissident Palestinians. Similarly, when Israel assassinated the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, one BBC reporter described him as “polite, charming and witty, a deeply religious man.” This despite the fact that under Yassin’s guidance, Hamas murdered hundreds.”
Polish writer Nina Witoszek, now living in Norway, warns that people who have lived under Communist regimes are struck by a strange feeling of dejá vu in Western Europe:
“Before formulating a sentence, you put on a censorship autopilot which asks: Who am I insulting now? Am I too pro-Israeli, or maybe anti-Feminist, or — God forbid — anti-Islamic? Am I “progressive” enough? Soon we shall all write in a decaffeinated language: We shall obediently repeat all the benign mantras such as “dialogue,” “pluralism,” “reconciliation” and “equality.” Norway has never been a totalitarian country, but many people now feel the taste of oppression and of being muzzled. I know many wise Norwegians — and even more wise foreigners — who no longer have the energy to waste time on contributing to a castrated, paranoid democracy. We prefer safety above freedom. This is the first step towards a voluntary bondage.”
She quotes follow writer from Poland Czeslaw Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980 for books such as The Captive Mind, where he explained the seductiveness of totalitarian ideology.
One essay by Milosz is titled “Ketman.” “Ketman” or “kitman” is an Islamic term brought to Milosz’s attention by Arthur Gobineau’s book Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia. He had noticed that the dissidents in Persia, long accustomed to tyranny, had evolved a style of their own. The need for survival often involved more than just keeping your mouth shut, but of actively lying in every way necessary. This strategy of dissimulation and deceit, which is especially pronounced by Shia Muslims but also used by Sunnis, is primarily used to deceive non-Muslims, but can also be used against other Muslims under duress.
According to Milosz, a very similar strategy was used in Communist countries. Similar to Islam, those practicing dissimulation felt a sense of superiority towards those who were stupid enough to state their real opinions openly. In Communist societies, dissimulation was just as much a technique of adaptation to an authoritarian regime as a conscious, theatrical form of art that became increasingly refined.
It is frightening to hear people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that they see this same totalitarian impulse at work in Western Europe now. According to them, we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism. It is frightening because I believe they are right. Have we witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe only to see an Iron Veil descend on Western Europe? An Iron Veil of EU bureaucracy and Eurabian treachery, of Political Correctness, Multicultural media censorship and the ever-present threat of Muslim violence and terrorism that is gradually extinguishing free speech. The momentum of bureaucratic treachery is accelerating.
Native Europeans and indeed some non-Muslim immigrants are quietly leaving in growing numbers, gradually turning the continent into a net exporter of refugees rather than an importer of them. When large parts of Europe are being overrun by barbarians — actively aided and abetted by our own trusted leaders — and when people are banned from opposing this onslaught, is Western Europe still a meaningful part of the Free World? Have the countries of Eastern Europe gone from one “Evil Empire” to another? Are they — and we — back in the EUSSR?
Vaclav Klaus, the conservative President of the Czech Republic, has complained that: “Every time I try to remove some piece of Soviet-era regulation, I am told that whatever it is I am trying to scrap is a requirement of the European Commission.” In an interview with Paul Belien of the Brussels Journal in February 2006, Vladimir Bukovksy warned that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fully-fledged totalitarian state.
“The ultimate purpose of the Soviet Union was to create a new historic entity, the Soviet people, all around the globe. The same is true in the EU today. They are trying to create a new people. They call this people “Europeans”, whatever that means. According to Communist doctrine as well as to many forms of Socialist thinking, the state, the national state, is supposed to wither away. In Russia, however, the opposite happened. Instead of withering away the Soviet state became a very powerful state, but the nationalities were obliterated. But when the time of the Soviet collapse came these suppressed feelings of national identity came bouncing back and they nearly destroyed the country. It was so frightening.”
Timothy Garton Ash is considered a leading expert on Europe’s future. Bruce Bawer views Garton Ash as typical of Europe’s political élite. Ash mistrusts national patriotism but adores the EU. He writes about the need for a factitious European patriotism (“flags, symbols, a European anthem we can sing”) to encourage “emotional identification with European institutions.” And just why does Europe need the EU? Garton Ash’s answer: “To prevent our falling back into the bad old ways of war and European barbarism.” Among his suggestions is that Europe encourage “the formation of an Arab Union.” He makes no mention of Arab democracy. Imagining “Europe in 2025 at its possible best,” he pictures it as a “partnership” with Arab countries and Russia that would extend “from Marrakesh, via Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Tbilisi, all the way to Vladivostok.”
The European Commission proposed the controversial idea of a singing event in all member states to celebrate the European Union’s 50th “birthday,” the 50th anniversary of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Commissioner Margot Wallstrom was lobbying for big-style birthday celebrations to “highlight the benefits that European integration has brought to its citizens.” Diplomats said the idea had sparked feelings of disgust among new, formerly Communist member states such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, which were reminded of “Stalinist times” when people were forced by the state to sing. Brussels decided on a more modest celebration, also intended to spend around €300,000 on the appointment of 50 citizen “ambassadors,” dubbed the “Faces of Europe,” who are supposed to “tell their story” throughout the year on what the EU means to them in their daily life, as well as a series of activities for school children and youngsters. Germany will go ahead with its own idea to let thousands of its bakeries bake 54 sorts of cakes with recipes from all 27 member states.
Commissioner Wallstrom in 2005 argued that politicians who resisted pooling national sovereignty risked a return to Nazi horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Her fellow commissioners also issued a joint declaration, stating that EU citizens should pay tribute to the dead of the Second World War by voting Yes to the EU Constitution. The commissioners gave the EU sole credit for ending the Cold War, making no mention of the role of NATO or the United States.
Is the EU an instrument to end wars? In October 2006, Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the French Action Police trade union, warned of a civil war in France created by Muslim immigrants: “We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails. You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their ‘comrades’ free when they are arrested.”
These Muslim immigrants were allowed in by the very same European elites who now want European citizens to celebrate their work through cakes and songs. While civil society is disintegrating in Western Europe due to Islamic pressures, EU authorities are working to increase Muslim immigration, while congratulating themselves for bringing peace to the continent. What peace? Where?
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years’ War, the last major religious war in Europe, and helped lay the foundations for modern nation states. Before nation states, we thus had a pattern of borderless religious wars and civil wars. This is what we have returned to, full circle, only this time a borderless Jihad is triggering civil wars in Europe. While the EU may help prevent wars between nation states with old grudges, such as Germany and France, it may also actively cause other kinds of wars. It accomplishes this by increasing Multicultural tensions and a dangerous sense of estrangement between citizens and those who are supposed to be their leaders.
Wars have existed for thousands of years before the advent of the modern nation state. It is far more likely that weakening nation states will end our democratic system, a system which is closely tied to the existence of sovereign nation states, than that it will end wars.
When asked whether the member countries of the EU joined the union voluntarily, and whether the resulting integration reflects the democratic will of Europeans, Vladimir Bukovksy replied, “No, they did not. Look at Denmark which voted against the Maastricht treaty twice. Look at Ireland [which voted against the Nice treaty]. Look at many other countries, they are under enormous pressure. It is almost blackmail. It is a trick for idiots. The people have to vote in referendums until the people vote the way that is wanted. Then they have to stop voting. Why stop? Let us continue voting. The European Union is what Americans would call a shotgun marriage.”
In 1992, Bukovksy had unprecedented access to Politburo and other Soviet secret documents, as described in his book Judgement in Moscow. In January 1989, during a meeting between Soviet leader Gorbachev, former Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, American banker Rockefeller and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Giscard d’Estaing supposedly stated: “Europe is going to be a federal state and you have to prepare yourself for that. You have to work out with us, and the European leaders, how you would react to that.”
This was in the 1980s, when most of the media still dismissed as scaremongering any talk of a political union that would subdue the nation states. Fifteen years later, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing became the chief drafter of the truly awful EU Constitution, an impenetrable brick of a book, hundreds of pages long, and lacking any of the checks and balances so crucial to the American Constitution. Giscard has argued that the rejection of the Constitution in the French and Dutch referenda in 2005 “was a mistake which will have to be corrected” and insisted that “In the end, the text will be adopted.”
Giscard has also said that “it was a mistake to use the referendum process” because “it is not possible for anyone to understand the full text.” Does it instill confidence among the citizens of Europe that we are supposed to be under the authority of a “Constitution” that is too complex for most non-bureaucrats to understand? According to Spain’s justice minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar “you don’t need to read the European constitution to know that it is good.”
Jean-Luc Dehaene, former Belgian Prime Minister, said that “We know that nine out of ten people will not have read the Constitution and will vote on the basis of what politicians and journalists say. More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes.”
Journalist Nidra Poller, however, is more skeptical. Commenting on the debate prior to the EU Constitution referendum in France, she noted a submissive attitude among EU leaders towards Muslim demands: “The Euro-Mediterranean ‘Dialogue’ is a masterpiece of abject surrender.” The European Union functions as an intermediate stage of an ominous project that calls for a meltdown of traditional European culture, to be replaced by a new, Eurabian cocktail. And she asks: “When subversive appeasement hides behind the veil of ‘Dialogue,’ what unspeakable ambitions might be dissembled by the noble word ‘Constitution’?”
The European Union gave the Palestinians $342.8 million in aid in 2005 — or, more accurately, $612.15 million when assistance from the 25 EU governments is included. Even the United States has repeatedly donated millions of American tax dollars to the Palestinian Authority, though not at EU levels. In July 2005, as a response to the Islamic terrorist attacks on London a few days earlier, leaders of the G8, the group of influential industrialized nations, offered the PA some $9 billion, dubbed an “alternative to the hatred.”
The West’s largesse continued despite a demographic study in 2005 which revealed that the number showing the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza had been inflated by 50% by the government.
Almost all of the new infrastructure in the Palestinian territories from the beginning of the Oslo Peace Process in the 1990s — schools, hospitals, airports — were arranged and paid for by Brussels. As Jihad was once again unleashed with the second Intifada in 2000, Israel stopped its transfer of payments to the Palestinians. So the EU stepped in with another 10 million Euros a month in direct budgetary assistance to the Palestinian Authority. EU Commissioner for External Affairs Chris Patten stated in 2002 that “there is no case for stating that EU money has financed terrorism, has financed the purchase of weapons, or any similar activities.”
However, a report by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies later found that: “There is indisputable evidence that PA money has been used to fund terrorist activities.” This was confirmed by Fuad Shubaki, who used to serve as the finance chief in the Palestinian security forces. According to him, former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat ordered millions of dollars, taken from international aid funds, tax money transferred by Israel and from Arab countries, to be used to purchase weapons and ammunition, including the 50 tons of armaments on board the ship Karine A. The transaction was coordinated between the PA, Hizballah in Lebanon and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
In May 2006, Mahmoud Abbas — President of the Palestinian Authority after Arafat’s death in November 2004 and a leading politician in Fatah — talked to the European Parliament about the peace process. At the same time, the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah, threatened to strike at US and European economic and civilian interests in response to international sanctions on the PA. Financial support evokes no gratitude in the Palestinians. However, they will threaten you with violence if aid is not forthcoming. This is plainly extortion.
This shakedown corresponds to the Muslims’ view of the jizya, the tributary tax paid by non-Muslims in exchange for not being killed. Documents from the Euro-Arab Dialogue frequently mention about “financial assistance” from the EU to Arab countries. Bat Ye’or points out that some of this jizya tax is extracted from Europeans without their awareness.
In November 2005, the EU’s official financial watchdog refused to approve the EU’s accounts for the 11th year in a row because they were so full of fraud and errors. The European Court of Auditors refused to give a statement of assurance on the EU’s $160.3 billion budget for 2004. “The vast majority of the payment budget was again materially affected by errors of legality and regularity,” it said. It specifically refused to approve the budgets for the EU’s foreign policy and aid programs, many of which are geared towards Arab countries. Half the project budgets approved by the European Commission were inadequately monitored.
The European Commission is considered the EU’s “government,” and thus the government of nearly half a billion people. But it can release accounts with massive flaws for over a decade straight because it is largely unaccountable to anybody and was intended to be that way.
Muslims use deception to advance Jihad until it is almost too late for the infidels to stop them. The EU federalists and Eurabians have taken a page out of the Islamic playbook, and have been approaching their goals by stealth for decades, buried beneath a mass of detail and technocratic newspeak all but incomprehensible to non-bureaucrats.
In a frank moment, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister, once described the EU’s “system” in this way: “We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens,” he explained. “If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”
In The Economist, columnist Charlemagne writes: “What Mr Juncker and those who think like him are trying to do is, in essence, to drown opposition to European federation in a mass of technical detail, to bore people into submission. As a strategy, it has gone a long way. [My emphasis] The greatest single transfer of sovereignty from Europe’s nations to the European Union took place, in 1985, as part of the project to create a single European market. Even [British Conservative PM] Margaret Thatcher, not usually slow to spot a trick, later claimed that she had not fully appreciated the ramifications of what she was then signing up to.”
Writer Christopher Booker has called this the EU’s “culture of deceit”:
“What in fact has been taking place has been a transfer of power…to Brussels on a scale amounting to the greatest constitutional revolution in our history. But much of this has remained buried from view because our politicians like to preserve the illusion that they are still in charge. The result is that remarkably few people now have any proper understanding of how the political system which rules our lives actually works.”
There are definitely certain elite groups in Europe who think that everything that’s wrong with Europe is because of “populism” — what others call democracy. The motive force behind the EU aims to cede national sovereignty to a new ruling class of bureaucrats. Karl Zinsmeister notes that: “The EU apparatus is exceedingly closed and secretive. Relatively few of the confederation’s important decisions are currently made by democratically accountable officials. On front after front, bureaucratic mandarins are deciding how everyday Europeans will live. … Many Europeans, in a way Americans find impossible to understand, are willing to let their elites lead them by the nose. There is a kind of peasant mentality under which their “betters” are allowed to make the important national judgments for them.”
MP Gisela Stuart was a member of the Praesidium which drafted the proposed EU Constitution. She sums up her experiences thus:
“The Convention brought together a self-selected group of the European political elite, many of whom have their eyes on a career at a European level, which is dependent on more and more integration, and who see national parliaments and governments as an obstacle… Not once in the sixteen months I spent on the Convention did representatives question whether deeper integration is what the people of Europe want, whether it serves their best interests or whether it provides the best basis for a sustainable structure for an expanding Union.”
In 2005, an unprecedented joint declaration by the leaders of all the British political groups in Brussels called for an end the “medieval” practice of European legislation being decided behind closed doors. Critics claim that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s supreme law-making body, which decides two thirds of all Britain’s laws, “is the only legislature outside the Communist dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba to pass laws in secret.”
According to British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan, this is how the EU was designed. “Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval. So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion. Indeed, the EU’s structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic.”
The European Union has been compared to the Roman Empire, but such comparisons are not very apt. Rome was the military superpower of its time, while the EU is but a military midget. However, there is one intriguing commonality: Julius Caesar was murdered because he wanted to crown himself king. This was not a popular move among the powerful elite in the Senate, who reminded Caesar that Rome had become a Republic precisely because they had rebelled against the “tyrant” kings of old.
Caesar’s successor Octavian, better known today as Caesar Augustus, is considered both the first and one of the most important Roman Emperors. He downplayed his own position by preferring the title princeps, usually translated as “first citizen”. He also preserved the outward form of the Roman Republic, paid lip service to the old elite, and veiled the changes to make them seem less upsetting to the public. He may have been a monarch, but he never called himself one.
Some might see a parallel in the present-day EU. When up to three-quarters of our national laws originate in Brussels, what is then the point of holding national elections? Just as in Octavian’s Rome, the real power has been moved elsewhere, but the old order is draped over reality as a democratic fig leaf in order not to upset the common people. The EU operates largely by stealth; its edicts are implemented through traditional parliaments, which are increasingly reduced to decorative appendages.
The funny aspect of this is that those who are against the EU are labelled xenophobes, nationalists or simply anti-democratic forces. The EU is an organization where unelected bureaucrats dismantle democracy, yet denounce their critics as anti-democratic forces.
In order to create this new entity, the old nation states must be deliberately crushed. Massive numbers of non-European immigrants are introduced, and the resulting situation is termed a “Multicultural society”. This demolition is followed by the demand that our entire society be changed accordingly.
Since Europeans feel less “European” than they experience themselves as French, Italian, Dutch, etc., national allegiances have to be broken down. At the same time, an external rival must be created. The closest model is Bismarck’s unification of Germany. The numerous German states rallied to Prussia’s side against the French in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, thus paving the way for a new, powerful German federation.
The EU federalists strive to build a united European state through a shared animosity against the USA, while constructing a Eurabian entity of Europe and the Arab world via their common hostility towards Israel. One tactic is the deliberate use of the media to whip up anger against these countries and to demonize them.
However, Bismarck’s German states were united by a common language. Even if a “new us” could be constructed from dozens of nations — which is highly questionable — melding various ethnic groups into a cohesive nation takes centuries. Without a shared identity, without a European demos, how can the EU be anything but authoritarian? Perhaps the EU elites believe that a large mass of people lacking a distinct cultural identity would be easier to control?
The problem is that the nation state itself has been declared evil or obsolete, not collectivism, anti-individualism or totalitarianism. But there is a crucial distinction between nationalism and patriotism, which George Orwell saw clearly:
“Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”
Totalitarian regimes can be national, such as Nazi Germany, but they can also be supranational, such as the Soviet Union, which sought to suppress all pre-existing national loyalties.
How was a project as big as the creation of Eurabia pulled off? I have thought a lot about this question, and come to the conclusion that it succeeded precisely because of its size. St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. “How dare you molest the sea?” asked Alexander. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.”
It’s a matter of scale. If a small group of people sideline the democratic process in one country and start imposing their own laws on the public, it’s called a coup d’état. If they do so on an entire continent, it’s called the European Union.
Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf described a propaganda technique known as “the Big Lie”. The EU has adopted this strategy, which consists of telling a lie so “colossal” that it would be impossible to believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” This has been combined with the technique, perfected by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in Nazi Germany, of repeating a point until it is taken to be the truth.
Here are some Big Lies:
- Diversity is always good;
- Multiculturalism is inevitable, as is continued EU integration;
- Those opposing it are ignorant racists standing against the tide of history;
- Muslim immigration is “good for the economy” and is necessary for funding the welfare state in the future, despite the fact that it drains away enormous resources.
The creation of Eurabia ranks as one of the greatest betrayals in the history of Western civilization. Does that mean that all EU federalists or those who participate in the various instruments of the Euro-Arab Dialogue are evil? No, reality isn’t that simple. As Hugh Fitzgerald points out, “A whole class of people has gotten rich from Arab money and bribes; lawyers, public relations men, and diplomats, journalists, university teachers and assorted officials.”
However, while ignorance, corruption and the self-serving search for personal power explains some of the behavior of the Eurabian elites, it cannot explain the behavior of ALL those thousands of people who have been involved in these networks. Some of them must have convinced themselves that what they were doing was for a just cause, if for no other reason than because human vanity demands that we justify our actions by covering them with a veneer of goodness.
In the science fiction movie Serenity, the two great superpowers, the United States and China, have merged into the Alliance, which has moved humanity to a new star system. On the little-known planet Miranda, a gas called Pax was added to the air processors. It was intended to calm the population, weed out aggression. It worked. The people stopped fighting. They also stopped doing everything else, including breeding and physical self-preservation. A small minority of the population had the opposite reaction to this pacification. Their aggression increased beyond madness, and they killed most of the others. Tens of millions of people quietly let themselves be wiped out.
Movie director Joss Whedon is careful to point out that the Alliance isn’t some evil empire, but rather a force that is largely benevolent. They meant it for the best, to create a better world, a world without sin. However, according to Whedon, “Whenever you create Utopia, you find something ugly working underneath it.”
Former Europeans who fought against Jihad fought for a number of things: Their religion, their culture and their nation. EU federalists and Eurabians are deliberately suppressing all of these instincts in their quest to create a New Man and weed out aggression. However, because they have wrongly identified the nation state as the root cause of all evil, they are suppressing not just aggressive nationalism, but defensive patriotism. And since some of the Muslims have actually become even more aggressive in response to what they perceive as our nihilism, the Eurabians have suicidally disarmed their own people, literally and metaphorically, and put them up for slaughter.
Many Communists, at least in the beginning, really believed in their ideology. The result was mass slaughter; tens of millions of people were killed in the quest for a world without oppression or exploitation. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Regardless of how good your intentions may be, you cannot use millions of people as guinea pigs in massive social experiments without causing massive harm.
Perhaps one of the reasons why this has been allowed to happen in Western Europe and the European Union is because we never fully understood or attempted to confront the reasons for the abysmal failure of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union following the Cold War. The concept of massive social experiments to create a New Man was allowed to survive. It mutated and then migrated West. Jean Monnet, who set in motion the process of European integration, reflected on how the European civil service constituted a ‘laboratory’ in which a new kind of ‘European Man’ would be born. But the New European Man, just like the New Soviet Man before him, is all but certain to fail.
Can the European Union be reformed? I doubt it. The EU is bound together by a self-serving class of bureaucrats who want to expand their budgets and their power, despite the harm they do. These functionaries will use traditional methods of deception to counteract any calls for reforms so they can retain control.
It is instructive to watch the reactions of the EU elites to the popular rejections in France and Holland of the EU Constitution in 2005. They put together a “wise” group of European politicians, led by Giuliano Amato, Italian Interior Minister in “super-Eurabian” Romano Prodi’s government, to come up with possible solutions to this impasse. Suggestions discussed included dropping the name “constitution” in favor of “treaty.”
The same Amato, who is a former Italian Prime Minister and also the Vice-President of the EU Convention which drafted the Constitution, has earlier stated that:
“In Europe one needs to act ‘as if’ — as if what was wanted was little, in order to obtain much, as if states were to remain sovereign to convince them to concede sovereignty… The Commission in Brussels, for example, should act as if it were a technical instrument, in order to be able to be treated as a government. And so on by disguise and subterfuge [my emphasis].”
That a man who has openly bragged about how EU federalist goals are advanced by “disguise and subterfuge” leads the attempts to “renew” the EU Constitution tells ordinary Europeans everything we need to know about the EU. If the EU elites have deliberately deceived us for decades to achieve their goals, why should we suddenly trust them now? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. These people have fooled us enough.
“I think that the European Union, like the Soviet Union, cannot be democratized,” says Vladimir Bukovksy. “There will be a collapse of the European Union pretty much like the Soviet Union collapsed. But do not forget that when these things collapse they leave such devastation that it takes a generation to recover…Look to the huge number of immigrants from Third World countries now living in Europe. This was promoted by the European Union. What will happen with them if there is an economic collapse? We will probably have, like in the Soviet Union at the end, so much ethnic strife that the mind boggles.”
In their book about the EU, Richard North and Christopher Booker conclude: “The project Monnet had set on its way was a vast, ramshackle, self-deluding monster: partly suffocating in its own bureaucracy; partly a corrupt racket…The one thing above all the project could never be, because by definition it had never been intended to be, was in the remotest sense democratic.” They believe the EU is doomed and will “leave a terrible devastation behind it, a wasteland from which it would take many years for the peoples of Europe to emerge.”
I understand concerns that the destruction of the EU could cause “instability” in Europe. It will. But we will probably end up with “instability” anyway, given the number of Muslims the EUrabians have let in. The choice is between a period of painful years in which most of Europe prevails, and death, where Europe simply ceases to exist as a Western cultural entity.
Some would hope that we could keep the “positive” aspects of the EU and not “throw out the baby with the bath water.” I beg to differ.
The EU is all bath water, no baby. There never was a baby, just a truckload of overpaid babysitters.
Across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating into the countryside. This destruction of the coherence of society is triggering a return to tribalism, as people no longer trust the nation state to protect them.
The process has been explained by Ernest Baert: “Over many centuries, Western Europe has replaced the tribe or clan by the nation state.” The result was that “European citizens tend to have equal trust in all other citizens of the same nation state outside their immediate family and circle of friends.” This “high-trust society” was a necessary precondition not only for the success of a capitalist economy in Europe, but also for the rise of democracy.
A different worldview prevails in the Muslim world or in Africa. There, individuals have no choice but to fall back on their clan for protection. So what effect will the introduction of massive numbers of individuals from “low-trust societies” have on our own culture? Baert is pessimistic:
“There is little doubt that we live in the dying days of the multicultural fantasy. It will end in misery and may lead to the loss of Europe as a part of Western civilisation. Our children and grandchildren will look back to our days and wonder why so many so easily accepted what patently contradicted history and common sense.”
While ordinary Europeans live in fear of Muslim violence in their own cities and trust in their own leaders is plummeting, EU elites meet in cocktail parties and congratulate each other for bringing peace to Europe.
The European Union promised a Brave New World where wars and ethnic rivalries were a thing of the past. Will it deliver barbarism? Maybe that’s what Utopias tend to do.
The Eurabia Code — 2008 Updates
This essay was published at The Brussels Journal in October 2008.
My essay The Eurabia Code was published in 2006, inspired by Bat Ye’or’s groundbreaking book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. I have chosen to reproduce The Eurabia Code almost unchanged above, but will include some updates here. What has happened since 2006 is that European leaders are increasingly open about the idea of enlarging the EU to include the Arab world, although they do of course not present this as surrendering the continent to Islam. This hasn’t been totally secret previously — in 2002 Louis Michel, the then Belgian minister of foreign affairs and today a member of the European Commission, told the Belgian parliament that the EU will eventually encompass North Africa and the Middle East — but why go public with this now? My theory is that EU leaders consider their people to be defeated. After the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty/European Constitution, the people no longer have a say and can safely be ignored. They have held us in contempt for years and no longer care to hide this. We are sheep and constitute no threat while they must continue appeasing the Muslims.
Open plans for a “Mediterranean Union “or “Union for the Mediterranean,” which will include all EU member states, Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, was launched in mid-2008, under some concern among Arabs that such a Union might normalize their relationship with Israel. This came with plans for the creation of a “north-south co-presidency” and a permanent secretariat as well as the definition of a ‘‘short-list’’ of priority projects for the region. The European Commission proposes the creation of a co-presidency between the EU and a Mediterranean (read: Muslim) country, chosen with consensus for a two-year term. Brussels is drawing the institutional profile of what will be called “Barcelona Process — A Union for the Mediterranean.” Notice how they tie this explicitly to the Eurabian Barcelona Process described by Bat Ye’or. Despite this, even after the Mediterranean Union was launched, I heard claims that any talk of Eurabia was a “dangerous Islamophobic conspiracy theory.”
As journalist Nick Fagge stated in British newspaper the Daily Express in October 2008, more than 50 million African workers are to be invited to Europe in a far-reaching migration deal. The aim is to promote “free movement of people in Africa and the EU.”
In a letter appearing in the respected Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, former Italian President Francesco Cossiga in 2008 revealed that the government of Italy in the 1970s agreed to allow Arab terrorist groups freedom of movement in the country in exchange for immunity from attacks. The government of the late Prime Minister Aldo Moro reached a “secret non-belligerence pact between the Italian state and Palestinian resistance organizations, including terrorist groups.” According to the former president, it was Moro himself who designed the terms of the agreement with the foreign Arab terrorists. “The terms of the agreement were that the Palestinian organizations could even maintain armed bases of operation in the country, and they had freedom of entry and exit without being subject to normal police controls, because they were ‘handled’ by the secret services.” As Interior Minister, Cossiga said that he learned PLO members in Italy had diplomatic immunity as representatives of the Arab League. “The Palestinian organizations could even maintain armed bases of operation in the country.”
This was the formal birth of Eurabia, when Western European governments, giving in to pressure from Arab terrorists and oil-producing states, abandoned their traditional pro-Israeli position and gradually aligned themselves with the Arab-Islamic world. There is absolutely no reason to assume that the Italians were the only ones to make such “deals.” In addition to cultural and political cooperation, European governments have agreed to pay Arabs, Palestinians in particular, large sums in “protection money” to reduce the terrorist threat. This can only be seen as jizya, and the practice has later spread to the entire European Union, which pays the Palestinians tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of Euros annually.
The MEDA programme, the principal financial instrument for the implementation of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, between 2000-2006 spent €5,350 million on its various programs, according to the EU’s official website. During the period 1995-1999, some 86% of the resources allocated to MEDA were channelled to Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and the Palestinian Authority.
From 2007, MEDA was replaced by the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument, which over the period 2007 to 2013 is projected to spend €11 billion on, among other things, promoting cooperation between European and Arab countries in the sectors of energy and transport; in higher education and mobility of teachers, researchers and students; Multicultural dialogue through people-to-people contacts, including links with communities of immigrants living in EU countries as well as cooperation between civil societies, cultural institutions and exchanges of young people. The European Commission, the EU’s powerful government with extensive legislative powers, shall coordinate cooperation with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities, churches, religious associations and the media in matters related to this project; all according to documents available on the Internet, yet almost unknown to the general public since the mainstream media rarely mention them.
I got some critical comments to my original Eurabia Code, among them a claim that the Algiers Declaration from 2006, which is mentioned in the text, is not signed by any official EU body. However, the Anna Lind Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the dialogue between cultures, which organized this, is linked to from the official EU website as a part of the EU’s external relations programs and the Euro — Mediterranean Partnership. Some of the organizations that participate in this may technically be independent organizations, but there is no doubt that the European Commission constitutes the driving force behind these networks. Moreover, if you read these documents closely, you will find that they mention “harmonization of the education systems” between Europe and the Arab world. This requires the involvement of the authorities at the highest level, not just NGOs.
In September 2008, a brief statement in a few media outlets in Denmark (I’ve seen remarkably little mention of this far-reaching proposal in the mainstream media in most European countries) said that Muslims living in the EU will in future be able to divorce according to sharia law. This is the belief of the Commission, which recommends that a couple be able to choose which country’s law they will follow if they divorce — as long as they have some kind of connection to the country they choose. Danish People’s Party spokesman Morten Messerschmidt was greatly concerned about the proposal: “It’s a completely lamebrain idea, the possibility that the Commission will use inhumane sharia laws in the EU,” he said.
What people don’t understand is that this is a part of long-term deals that have already been agreed upon by EU leaders. Virtually all Western European leaders have already surrendered. There is no longer a question of whether or not sharia will be officially accepted as law (as it has been for Muslims living in Britain); it is only a question of how to implement this.
Meanwhile, a proposed European Arrest Warrant lists a number of crimes, including terrorism, armed robbery, rape, and racism and xenophobia, which are punishable throughout the EU. The European Arrest Warrant requires that anyone who is charged by a member state under the listed group of offenses (which could cover just about anything) may be arrested by the authorities of the issuing state within any interference of the other member state. The accused must then be transited for trial to the issuing state within ten days, without any interference, judicial or otherwise, by the executing state.
Racism includes “Islamophobia,” according to EU documents, which means that “Islamophobia” could soon be treated as a serious crime across the European continent. At the same time, EU leaders are busy enlarging the EU to include North Africa and the Middle East, thus flooding Europe with tens of millions of additional Muslims. Not far into the future, we can imagine a situation where the authorities can arrest a person in, say, Denmark or Italy, who has published a cartoon that could be considered offensive to Islam. He will then be handed over to the authorities in Algeria, Egypt or Jordan.
Remember that blasphemy against Islam carries the death penalty according to sharia. Multiculturalism in Europe is about to reach its openly totalitarian phase. Those who think this is a joke can look at the Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Neckshot who was arrested in 2008 for cartoons that “insulted” Muslims. Several documents that are publicly available (but little known to the general public because they are never referred to by the mainstream media) state that the EU should “harmonize” the education and legal systems with the Arab “partner countries” within the coming decade. This is being negotiated as we speak, behind our backs.
European Commission president José Manuel Barroso earlier expressed unease with the prospect of a second Dutch Lisbon Treaty/European Constitution referendum. “Referendums make the process of approval of European treaties much more complicated and less predictable,” he said, asking “every member state” considering a referendum to “think twice.” Mr Barroso in his previous job as Portuguese Prime Minister in 2004 backed a referendum on the EU constitution in his own country — but since then his thinking has changed. “I was in favour of a referendum as a prime minister, but it does make our lives with 27 member states in the EU more difficult. If a referendum had been held on the creation of the European Community or the introduction of the euro, do you think these would have passed?”
Let’s sum up our findings so far: The EU has accepted that the Union should be enlarged to include the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. The EU has accepted that tens of millions of immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries in northern Africa should be allowed to settle in Europe in the years ahead. This is supposedly “good for the economy.” It is planning to implement sharia laws for the millions of Muslims it is inviting to settle in Europe. It has passed stronger anti-racism laws while making it clear that “Islamophobia” constitutes a form of racism, and is cooperating with Islamic countries on rewriting school textbooks to provide a “positive” image of Islam to European children. Finally, the EU is developing an Arrest Warrant which stipulates that those charged with serious crimes, for instance racism, can be arrested without undue interference of the nation state they happen to live in. In essence, the EU is formally surrendering an entire continent to Islam while destroying established national cultures, and is prepared to harass those who disagree with this policy. This constitutes the greatest organized betrayal in Western history, yet is hailed as a victory for “tolerance.”
José Manuel Barroso, the leader of the unaccountable government for half a billion people, has stated that the EU is an empire. Maybe we think it’s ridiculous to see the EU as an empire, but his statement shows that some people in leading positions do think like this. It would make sense to remember that all empires in history have been created through war. If the EU is an empire, this means that a war is being waged against somebody. And it is: A cultural and demographic war waged by mass immigration against native Europeans. Whereas empires are normally created by waging a war against other peoples, the EU is the first empire in history created by leaders allowing other peoples to wage a war against their own.
The European Union — or the Eurabian Empire if you will — is a naked power grab by the elites in order to dismantle the nations there are supposed to serve. Instead of being mere servants of the people in smaller countries, they aspire to become members of an unaccountable elite ruling a vast empire as they see fit. This is why they continue to promote mass immigration as if nothing has happened even if people get blown up, raped, mugged and murdered in their own cities. They don’t care. They are generals on a warpath. Ordinary citizens are simply cannon fodder, pawns to be sacrificed in the conquest of their glorious, new empire. Mass immigration is used to crush all nation states simultaneously so that the natives have no real alternatives to flee to, and no countries can come to the aid of others against the advancing Islamization.
Finally, we should remember one thing: All of this started with the appeasement of Arab bullies in the 1970s, who used oil or terrorism or both as weapons. Europeans should work to get rid of the culture of betrayal, but we also need to get rid of the culture of appeasement that brought us in this mess in the first place. No money for the Palestinians; not one cent. If they need money, they can ask the Saudis. And no more appeasement of or deals with Islamic terrorists. It was “dialogue,” the Euro-Arab Dialogue, that created this situation. Dialogue is the cause of our problems, not the solution to them. No more “dialogue” with the Jihadist enemy. The only way to deal with a bully is to confront him and make him back down.
PS: As I write these words, a serious international financial crisis is evolving. It is not yet clear what kind of long-term consequences this will have. It could potentially make matters worse, by putting more of our economy up for grabs to Arab oil money, or it could lead to serious tensions that could potentially undermine Eurabia. One way or the other, it is likely that the economy will have a strong impact on the outcome of this.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Infiltration of the West
This essay was first published at the website Jihad Watch in February 2008. It is republished here with some changes.
The Muslim Brotherhood, today widely regarded as the largest Islamic movement in the world, was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. Its member groups are dedicated to the motto: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
Research analyst Lorenzo Vidino writes about The Muslim Brotherhood’s Conquest of Europe: “Since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organized network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organizations.” Their ultimate goal “may not be simply ‘to help Muslims be the best citizens they can be,’ but rather to extend Islamic law throughout Europe and the United States. With moderate rhetoric and well-spoken German, Dutch, and French, they have gained acceptance among European governments and media alike. Politicians across the political spectrum rush to engage them whenever an issue involving Muslims arises or, more parochially, when they seek the vote of the burgeoning Muslim community. But, speaking Arabic or Turkish before their fellows Muslims, they drop their facade and embrace radicalism.”
Moreover, “While the Muslim Brotherhood and their Saudi financiers have worked to cement Islamist influence over Germany’s Muslim community, they have not limited their infiltration to Germany. Thanks to generous foreign funding, meticulous organization, and the naïveté of European elites, Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations have gained prominent positions throughout Europe. In France, the extremist Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (Union of Islamic Organizations of France) has become the predominant organization in the government’s Islamic Council. In Italy, the extremist Unione delle Comunita’ ed Organizzazioni Islamiche in Italia (Union of the Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy) is the government’s prime partner in dialogue regarding Italian Islamic issues.”
The irony, according to Vidino, is that “Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna dreamed of spreading Islamism throughout Egypt and the Muslim world. He would never have dreamed that his vision might also become a reality in Europe.”
One of the Brotherhood’s first pioneers in Europe was Sa’id Ramadan. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Sa’id Ramadan, who was al-Banna’s son-in-law, joined the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth. At the age of 20, Hassan al-Banna chose Sa’id to be his personal secretary and sent him to Palestine to establish a branch of the movement there. After World War II, when Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini returned to Palestine, Sa’id Ramadan helped him to form military groups for the struggle against the Jews. Al-Husseini was an active accomplice in the Holocaust and visited leading Nazis repeatedly. Terrorist organization Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the MB today.
After Hassan al-Banna’s assassination in 1949, Sa’id Ramadan returned to Egypt and became a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1954 he went to Jerusalem with another leading Brotherhood member, Sayyid Qutb, in order to participate in the World Islamic Conference, and was elected conference secretary-general.
In the late 1950s, Sa’id Ramadan managed to persuade Saudi Prince Faisal to help him establish Islamic centers in Europe’s main capitals. In 1958, he settled in Geneva and there founded the Islamic Center, which became the headquarters of Muslim Brotherhood members expelled from Egypt. In 1964, he opened Islamic centers in London and Munich, and became the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood abroad.
The oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia has for years granted an influx of money to the powerful Islamic Center of Geneva, Switzerland, now run by Sa’id’s son Hani Ramadan. He was made infamous by a 2002 article in the French daily Le Monde defending the stoning of adulterers to death. His brother Tariq Ramadan, a career “moderate Muslim,” later called for a “moratorium” on stoning. In 2008 it was announced that Hani Ramadan would receive SFr255,000, the equivalent of two years’ salary, in damages from the canton of Geneva. He was sacked in 2004 after defending the stoning of persons guilty of adultery. An appeal commission of the education department sided with Ramadan, annulling the termination. The government also agreed to pay Ramadan’s legal fees.
It was the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a follower of Hassan al-Banna in his youth, who directed the prayer at Sa’id Ramadan’s funeral in 1995, as Tariq Ramadan proudly reports. Sa’id Ramadan had close contacts with Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb, whose writings have inspired countless Jihadists around the world, for instance terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. According to writer Paul Berman, Ramadan “not only knew Qutb; he was, at the crucial moment, Qutb’s most important supporter in the world of the Egyptian intellectuals. Said Ramadan was the editor who got Qutb started on what became his most important work.”
According to Dr. Ahmad Al-Rab’i, former Kuwaiti minister of education, “The beginnings of all of the religious terrorism that we are witnessing today were in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology of takfir [accusing other Muslims of apostasy]. Sayyid Qutb’s book Milestones was the inspiration and the guide for all of the takfir movements that came afterwards. The founders of the violent groups were raised on the Muslim Brotherhood, and those who worked with Bin Laden and Al-Qa’ida went out under the mantle of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, says decadent Europe will give way to an Islamized Europe. In the 21st century, “The West will begin its new decline, and the Arab-Islamic world its renewal” and ascent to seven centuries of world domination after seven centuries of decline. “Only Islam can achieve the synthesis between Christianity and humanism, and fill the spiritual void that afflicts the West.” All good people are implicitly Muslims “because true humanism is founded in Koranic revelations.” In a clash with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-Somali critic of Islam, Ramadan said it was wrong to say that Europe had a Judeo-Christian past. “Islam is a European religion. The Muslims came here after the first and second world wars to rebuild Europe, not to colonise.”
Danish theologian Kirsten Sarauw writes in her article A Declaration of War Against the People of Europe that in 2007 in Vienna, Austria, a conference was held about so-called Euro-Islam. Prominent Muslim delegates formulated a strategic vision of a Europe dominated by Islam. Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia, envisioned an “upcoming Islamic era.” The conference was in agreement about the first and foremost goal, namely the introduction of religious Islamic jurisprudence (sharia) in Europe, “in the beginning at least as a parallel system alongside national laws in European states.” As to the real meaning of sharia, they all agreed to avoid publicity as far as possible. According to Sarauw, Tariq Ramadan proclaimed that the real intentions of this work must be concealed from the general public.
In 2007 it was announced that Tariq Ramadan was to hold the Sultan of Oman chair of Islamology at the University of Leiden. Leiden is the oldest university in the Netherlands, founded in the sixteenth century by Prince William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch struggle for independence. Dutch Education and Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk said that he did not object to Ramadan’s appointment. Meanwhile, the Amsterdam city council, dominated by the Dutch Labor Party which receives many Muslim votes, developed teaching material warning school children against the opinions of Dutch Islam critic Geert Wilders.
The European Council for Fatwa and Research, headed by Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is working on a Muslim Constitution for Europe that will be above national legislation. According to Tina Magaard from the University of Aarhus, behind these ambitions “lies decades of work.” Islamic groups have for years aimed at establishing their control over the Muslim communities, and in some cases have won official recognition from government bodies. According to Magaard, “The Imams and Islamists consider the cooperation with the state institutions a transfer of power. Now it is they who rule.”
Former Muslim Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, author of the excellent book “Global Jihad — The future in the face of Militant Islam,” warns that the Islamization going on in European cities is not happening by chance. It “is the result of a careful and deliberate strategy by certain Muslim leaders which was planned in 1980 when the Islamic Council of Europe published a book called Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States.” The instructions told Muslims to get together into viable communities, set up mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. To resist assimilation, they must group themselves geographically in areas of high Muslim concentration. According to Sookhdeo, the ultimate goal is Islamic rule in Europe.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi is backed by Saudi money and founded the major English language website IslamOnline, which has several hundred full-time employees and serves as an international outlet for his teachings. He is also leader of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, which spreads its rulings on sharia-related matters to mosques across Europe. He is based in Qatar, home to the influential Arabic satellite TV channel Al Jazeera, where he runs the popular program “Sharia and Life.” The intellectual Dr. Khaled Shawkat warns that Al Jazeera “has been hijacked” by the MB “to the extent that three or four Muslim Brotherhood members sometimes appear on a single news program.”
According to journalist Helle Merete Brix, Muhammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, aided by Saudi Arabia, gives large amounts of petrodollar to various organizations at the forefront of the Islamization of Europe, such as the European Council for Fatwa and Research headed by Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Israeli professor Raphael Israeli in his book The Islamic Challenge in Europe describes how Saudi Arabia sponsors many Islamic organizations, the OIC, the Muslim World League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth etc. in addition to building mosques around the world:
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has supported and contributed to the establishment of many mosques and Islamic centers amongst which the Cultural Center in Brussels, Belgium, which has received a total support of SR 19 million; the Islamic Center in Geneva, Switzerland, which receives an annual support of SR 19 million, and contains a large mosque, a cultural center, a school and a lecture hall; the Islamic Center in Madrid, Spain, which has had a total support of SR 27 million, and is one of the largest in Europe. It comprises a very large mosque, a prayer hall for women, a library, a lecture hall and a medical clinic; the Islamic Center in London, England to which the Kingdom has contributed some SR 25 million; the Islamic Center in Edinburgh, Scotland, which is located in the city center, and contains a mosque, which can accommodate 1,000 worshippers, and includes a library, a lecture hall and classrooms. It costs around SR 15 million. The Islamic Center in Rome, Italy that comprises a mosque, a library and a lecture hall. King Fahd donated US$ 50 million (some 70% of the total) to cover the cost of construction.”
Former CIA director R. James Woolsey estimates that the Saudis have spent nearly $90 billion since the mid-1970s to export their ideology into Muslim and non-Muslim countries alike. That may well be a conservative estimate. Since the spike in oil prices following the embargo/financial Jihad in 1973, Arab and Muslim states have received trillions of dollars from the sale of oil and gas, probably the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. A significant portion of this money has been used to buy an army of hirelings and apologists in non-Muslim countries, as well as on financing the global Jihad.
Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, a member of the Saudi Royal Family, is an international investor ranked among the ten richest persons in the world. In 2005, Bin Talal bought 5.46% of voting shares in News Corp, the parent of Fox News. In December 2005 he boasted about his ability to change what viewers see. Covering the Jihad riots in France that fall, Fox ran a banner saying: “Muslim riots.” According to Talal, “I picked up the phone and called Murdoch… (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty. Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots.”
Harvard University and Georgetown University have received $20 million donations from Prince bin Talal to finance Islamic studies. Martin Kramer, the author of “Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America,” said: “Prince Alwaleed knows that if you want to have an impact, places like Harvard or Georgetown, which is inside the Beltway, will make a difference.”
Georgetown said it would use the gift to expand its Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. The leaders of the Center, renamed to Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, say it now will be used to put on workshops regarding Islam, addressing U.S. policy towards the Muslim world, addressing Muslim citizenship and civil liberties, and developing exchange programs for students from the Muslim world.
Georgetown professor John Esposito, founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, has, probably more than any other academic, contributed to downplaying the global Jihadist threat. Kramer states that during the 1970s, Esposito had prepared his thesis under his Muslim mentor Ismail R. Faruqi, a Palestinian theorist of the “Islamization of knowledge.” During the first part of his career, Esposito never studied or taught at a major Middle East center. In the 80s, he published a series of favorable books on Islam. In 1993, Esposito arrived at Georgetown, and has later claimed the status of “authority” in the field.
Journalist Stanley Kurtz has demonstrated how the Saudis have infiltrated the US education system and influence what American school children are taught about Islam and the Middle East, not just at the university level but also at lower levels. The USA is not unique in this.
Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke published an article in Foreign Affairs about the “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood, arguing that the group has “rejected global Jihad” and “embraces democracy.” Several US Democratic members of Congress met with the head of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, despite that fact that the Egyptian MB has spawned several terrorist movements.
In a memo, the US State Department told its embassy in Cairo to launch a dialogue with religious groups because clashes with them would incite more attacks against US interests. They advised Washington to pressure the Egyptian government into allowing the MB to play a larger role in Egypt’s political landscape. There are signs that American authorities are reaching out to the Brotherhood. Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, warns that “A lack of knowledge about the Muslim Brotherhood is evident on the part of U.S. officials who are now cozying up to the organization.”
As Youssef Ibrahim commented in the New York Sun: “For years, the Soviet Union benefited from those Vladimir Lenin is said to have dubbed ‘the useful idiots of the West’ — reporters, scholars, leftists, and assorted romantics who said the Soviet system of totalitarianism was not so bad.” He argues that the Brotherhood is now taking over this role. Ibrahim is tired of the silence from the Muslim majority: “In Islam, ‘silence is a sign of acceptance,’ as the Arabic Koranic saying goes…The question that hangs in the air so spectacularly now — particularly as England has been confronted once again by British Muslims plotting to kill hundreds — is this: What exactly are the Europeans waiting for before they round up all those Muslim warriors and their families and send them back to where they came from?”
The current leader of the MB, Mohammad Mahdi Akef, called on its members to serve its global agenda, declaring “I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America.” On its English website, the Brotherhood professes moderation and praises Multiculturalism as a way to spread Islam. However, on their Arabic website, Akef in February 2007 reassured his followers that “the Jihad will lead to smashing Western civilization and replacing it with Islam which will dominate the world.” In the event that Muslims cannot achieve this goal in the near future, “Muslims are obliged to continue the Jihad that will cause the collapse of Western civilization and the ascendance of the Muslim civilization on its ruins.”
Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 with the vision of restoring the Islamic Caliphate. There are signs that his disciple Yusuf al-Qaradawi hasn’t given up this goal. In an interview with German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Qaradawi said: “Islam is a single nation, there is only one Islamic law and we all pray to a single God. Eventually such a nation will also become political reality. But whether that will be a federation of already existing states, a monarchy or an Islamic republic remains to be seen.”
In one essay, al-Qaradawi writes that: “Secularism may be accepted in a Christian society but it can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society. Christianity is devoid of a shari’ah or a comprehensive system of life to which its adherents should be committed.” However, “as Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (’ibadah) and legislation (Shari’ah), the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of Shari’ah,” and “the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari’ah is downright riddah [apostasy].”
The adoption of secular laws and equality for Muslims and non-Muslims amounts to apostasy. Harsh words from a man who has voiced support for the traditional sharia death penalty for those leaving Islam.
According to the major website Islam Online, which is owned by Yusuf al-Qaradawi and sponsored by rich Arabs, “Islam is not a religion in the common, distorted meaning of the word, confining its scope only to the private life of man. By saying that it is a complete way of life, we mean that it caters for all the fields of human existence. In fact, Islam provides guidance for all walks of life — individual and social, material and moral, economic and political, legal and cultural, national and international.”
Famed historian Bernard Lewis in 2007 told the Jerusalem Post that Islam could soon be the dominant force in Europe. He warned that this Islamization could be assisted by “immigration and democracy.” It is a well-established fact that Muslims vote overwhelmingly for left-wing parties all over Europe.
Walid al-Kubaisi, a Norwegian of Iraqi origins and a critic of sharia supporters, believes Yusuf al-Qaradawi is more dangerous than terrorist leader Osama bin Laden: “In Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood discovered a unique opportunity: Democracy. The democratic system leaves room for freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and finances religious communities and religious organizations. This has been utilized by the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate the Muslim communities, recruit members and build the Islamist networks that have become so visible lately.” Whereas bin Laden uses bombs, al-Qaradawi exploits democracy as a Trojan horse. The Brotherhood gets their activities financed from Germany, Britain etc. They gain recognition and infiltrate the democratic system.
According to Walid al-Kubaisi, the journalist Dr.Osama Fawzi has revealed that many of al-Qaradawi’s trips to Western countries are for the purpose of receiving medical aid and treatment for impotence because he is married to a girl 60 years younger than himself. Kubaisi, who writes Arabic fluently, sent an email to Qaradawi’s website, asking whether it was legal according to Islamic law to marry a nine-year-old girl. He got a “yes” in reply.
Muhammad himself, according to Islamic sources, married his wife Aisha when she was six years old and consummated the marriage when she was eight or nine. Since he is the perfect example to emulate for Muslims for time eternity, this is still legal in Islamic law today:
Sahih Bukhari Volume 7, Book 62, Number 64
Narrated ‘Aisha: that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old, and then she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death).
Yusuf al-Qaradawi has been hailed as a “moderate Muslim” by people such as London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone, who represents the British Labour Party. Many Muslims voted for the Labour Party in previous elections, and London has a large and growing Muslim population. The cleric visited the UK in 2004, where he was welcomed by Livingstone, and chaired the annual meeting of the European Council of Fatwa and Research at London’s City Hall. In January 2008, prominent Muslims pledged to back Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London during the elections in May 2008. A statement praised Livingstone for his support of a Multicultural society and for protecting Muslim communities against Islamophobia, and said that “We pledge to continue our support for the mayor on all levels possible in order to secure his staying in office for a third term.” Among the 63 signatories was Tariq Ramadan.
In February 2008, al-Qaradawi was refused a visa to enter to the UK following pressure from British Conservatives. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said that it deplored the decision, while the British Muslim Initiative (BMI) described the decision to bar al-Qaradawi as “an unwarranted insult to British Muslims.” Yusuf al-Qaradawi has called for the death penalty for homosexuality, for the destruction of the state of Israel, has defended suicide attacks and preaches that husbands should beat disobedient wives.
Note: Boris Johnson from the Conservatives became the new Mayor of London following the 2008 elections.
The Organization of the Islamic Conference and Eurabia
This essay was first published at the website Jihad Watch in July 2008. It is republished here with a few changes.
Dr. Andrew Bostom, editor of the excellent book The Legacy of Jihad and the recent book about Islamic anti-Semitism, warns that the 57 Muslim nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference are trying to impose Islamic blasphemy law — which includes the death penalty for those who “blaspheme” the Muslim prophet Muhammad — as the universal standard across the world.
These sentiments of the OIC were reiterated more brazenly by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. During a sermon in response to the Danish Muhammad cartoons which aired February 3, 2006, Qaradawi demanded action from the United Nations in accordance with sharia-based conceptions of blasphemy: “…the governments [of the world] must be pressured to demand that the U.N. adopt a clear resolution or law that categorically prohibits affronts to prophets—to the prophets of the Lord and his Messengers, to His holy books, and to the religious holy places.”
As German journalist Henryk Broder noted back then: “Objectively speaking, the cartoon controversy was a tempest in a teacup. But subjectively it was a show of strength and, in the context of the ‘clash of civilizations,’ a dress rehearsal for the real thing. The Muslims demonstrated how quickly and effectively they can mobilize the masses, and the free West showed that it has nothing to counter the offensive — nothing but fear, cowardice and an overriding concern about the balance of trade. Now the Islamists know that they are dealing with a paper tiger whose roar is nothing but a tape recording.”
In the aftermath of the Cartoon Jihad, in Norway in June 2007 members of dozens of newspapers, TV stations and organizations participated in an international conference on how to “report diversity” in a non-offensive manner, with Arab News from Saudi Arabia as a moderator. Keynote speaker at the conference, Dr. Doudou Diène, the United Nations Special Envoy for racism, xenophobia and intolerance, urged the media to actively participate in the creation of a Multicultural society, and expressed concerns that the democratic process could lead to immigration-restrictive parties gaining influence in Western nations.
Diène said that it is a dangerous development when increasing numbers of intellectuals in the West believe that some cultures are better than others, and stated that “The media must transform diversity, which is a fact of life, into pluralism, which is a set of values.” Getting diversity accepted is the role of the education system, and acceptance is the role of the law. “Promoting and defending diversity is the task of the media.” Societies must recognize, accept and promote diversity, which always seems to mean sharia. Mr. Diène represents Senegal, an African Muslim country which is a member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest voting bloc at the United Nations, sponsored by Arab oil money.
There were already signs that large portions of the mainstream media have been working according to similar ideas long before his conference. In Britain, leading figures of the BBC have proudly announced that they actively promote Multiculturalism. In Denmark in 2008, while their country was threatened by Muslims across the world, public broadcaster Danmarks Radio, the local equivalent of the BBC and with the same left-wing bias, decided to hold a “Miss Headscarf” beauty contest for women with the only requirement being that they are over 15 and wear a headscarf or veil, the way proper Muslim women are supposed to do.
In March 2008, the United Nation’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned Dutch MP Wilder’s movie Fitna as “offensively anti-Islamic,” and said that “There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence.” Does that mean that the UN is now going to ban the Koran? Earlier in March, the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is dominated by Muslim countries, passed a resolution saying it is deeply concerned about the defamation of religions and urging governments to prohibit it. The only religion specified was Islam. The document was put forward by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
I have been saying for a long time that trying to export “democracy” to Islamic countries is pointless. Islam can be compatible with “democracy” in the limited sense of voting rights and majority rule, but this has never automatically implied individual liberty. (See my online booklet Is Islam Compatible With Democracy?)
It’s a sick joke that American soldiers are bleeding literally and American taxpayers financially to export “democracy” to Iraq while Muslims are exporting sharia to us. Freedom is free speech, that’s the simplest definition of it. Muslims are using the UN to limit criticism of Islam globally, which basically means putting the entire world under Islamic rule.
My view of the United Nations is quite clear: It is at best irrelevant. At best. Increasingly, it is turning into an outright enemy, an enemy funded by us but used to attack us. I’m tired of sponsoring enemies, at home and abroad. I’m all for boycotting the UN and making it truly irrelevant by bleeding it dry for funds and ultimately withdrawing from it.
Muslims have lots of oil and lots of babies and lots of aggression, but that’s all they have. Otherwise, they’re a spectacular failure. We need them for very little. They need us for virtually everything. We should exploit that. We should separate ourselves from the Islamic world as much as possible. They will suffer far more from this than we will. We can start by boycotting the UN, which is now little more than a tool for global sharia, and the Arab Muslims of the West Bank and Gaza, who reinvented themselves as “Palestinians” and started whining at the UN after the Israelis kicked their collective behinds in 1967.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad called upon Muslims worldwide to boycott Dutch products, following the release of the Islam-critical movie Fitna by Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Personally, I’m all for boycotts of and by Muslims. The more, the merrier. Mr. Mahathir held the notorious speech at the OIC conference in 2003 where he said that the Jews rule the world by proxy and that Muslims must unite to achieve a final victory over them. Not everybody remembers that he also boasted about the age when “Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage.”
Somebody should remind him that the so-called “golden age” of Islam was a result of a still-large non-Muslim population. As soon as that declined, due to harassment and discrimination, the Islamic world never recovered. Malaysia is sometimes portrayed as an economically successful Muslim nation, but that is because it only recently became majority Muslim and still has a large Chinese, Indian and other non-Muslim minority. Since Islam is becoming more aggressive and Muslims increase discrimination of non-Muslims, infidels will leave, and Malaysia will gradually be reduced to just another failed sharia state.
In 2008, the current Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi warned his British counterpart, PM Brown, that Muslim extremism in Britain will grow unless the government and society learn to understand Islam and allow the country’s Muslims to live under sharia law. What he didn’t say is that sharia applies to all members of society, also non-Muslims, who should have their freedoms curtailed as well.
Historian David Littman is a representative to the United Nations of the Association for World Education. He has spent years tracking the rise of Islamic influence at the UN. According to him, “In recent years, representatives of some Muslim states have demanded, and often received, special treatment at the United Nations.” As a result, “non-diplomatic terms such as ‘blasphemy’ and ‘defamation of Islam’ have seeped into the United Nations system, leading to a situation in which non-Muslim governments accept certain rules of conduct in conformity with Islamic law (the Shari’a) and acquiesce to a self-imposed silence regarding topics touching on Islam.”
In May 2007, the foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) expressed “grave concern” at the rising tide of intolerance against Muslims, especially in Europe and North America. They described “Islamophobia” as a deliberate defamation of Islam, and pointed out that whenever the issue of Islamophobia was discussed in international forums, the Western bloc, particularly some members of the European Union, tried to avoid discussing the core issue and instead diverted the attention from their region to the situation of non-Muslims and human rights in the OIC member states.
In June 2008, the OIC announced its plan for fighting Islamophobia. Here’s what Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, their Secretary General, had to say: “We are encouraged to see however, that an awareness of the dangers of Islamophobia is gradually setting in the West. The condemnation by many Western leaders and governments of Islamophobic acts such as the [Dutch movie] Fitna are positive confidence building measures that lead us to believe that all is not lost and that the gap can be closed in time. But mere condemnation or distancing from the acts of the perpetrators of Islamophobia will not resolve the issue as long as they remain free to carry on with their campaign of incitement and provocation on the plea of freedom of expression.”
Obviously, the intention of the OIC is to do everything within its power to make sure that the citizens of the Western democracies do not remain free. Mr. Ihsanoglu unveiled a ten-point program that he proposed in order to meet the OIC’s ambitious goals. The plan is all there, laid out in black and white for anyone to read. Unfortunately, not everybody understands its implications.
In Der Spiegel in June 2008, Dirk Kurbjuweit commented on the Irish popular rejection of the Lisbon Treaty/EU Constitution by concluding that “Europe’s politicians are determined to avoid asking the people their opinion. And they are right to do so.” According to him, “Again and again, they trick their populations into accepting the European Union. It’s been going on for 50 years: politicians making policy against the people. The only time anyone ever notices is when the people — one people, in this case — are asked for their opinion. It happened in Ireland recently, when the Irish made it clear that they refuse to accept the politics of scoundrels.”
Regarding German chancellor Angela Merkel, he speculates whether “she is in fact wholeheartedly behind a strengthening of the European Union, perhaps even knowingly against the wishes of German citizens.” Dirk Kurbjuweit seems to approve of this strategy of denying citizens a say in the future of their countries and their children. He concludes:
“Perhaps the EU’s secret strategy is called ‘strategic boredom’ — attract no attention and make no waves, but continue to plod along, quietly and stubbornly, ignoring the murmurs of concern from all around. The scoundrels in Brussels have sold the European people a lot of things: a single market, the euro, the lifting of many border controls and, most recently, a binding global climate policy. These have all been good things, and they have helped make Europe an eminently livable continent. Despite the many dull moments and emotions that have been negative at best, the end result has been laudable. Most of these improvements would have been held up, if not outright prevented, by referendums. Democracy doesn’t mean having unlimited confidence in citizens. Sometimes the big picture is in better hands when politicians are running it, and a big picture takes time.”
The “big picture” which is being implemented by these same political elites does not only include political integration within Europe, it also includes European cultural, political and economic integration with the Arab-Islamic world, conducted largely without the approval of European citizens. Mr. Kurbjuweit didn’t mention that part.
In March 2008, Terry Davis, a former politician for the British Labour Party and now the General Secretary of the Council of Europe, wrote a letter in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten denouncing the republishing of the Muhammad cartoons, stating that “freedom of speech should not be used as a freedom to insult.” As Jyllands-Posten wrote in a response, “Freedom of expression is exactly the freedom to insult anyone within the framework of the law.”
The Council of Europe (CoE) was founded in 1949, earlier than the European Community/European Union. It is still a separate organization but very much within the orbit of the EU’s Eurabian networks and cooperates increasingly closer on “dialogue” with Islamic countries. For instance, the North-South Centre (for cooperation between Europe and the Arab world), officially named the European Centre for Global Interdependence and Solidarity, is an EU/CoE partnership. A Memorandum of Understanding between the Council of Europe and the European Union from May 2007 outlines many areas of cooperation between the two organizations, including intercultural dialogue and cultural diversity, education and youth as well as the fight against discrimination, racism, xenophobia and intolerance (which includes “Islamophobia”).
For instance, Resolution 1605 of the Council of Europe — European Muslim communities confronted with extremism from 2008 states the following:
Council of Europe member states should continue to be vigilant in their work to prevent and combat the phenomenon of Islamophobia.
| 9. |
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In light of the above, the Assembly calls on the member states of the Council of Europe to: |
| 9.2. |
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condemn and combat Islamophobia; |
| 9.7.8. |
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removing unnecessary legal or administrative obstacles to the construction of a sufficient number of appropriate places of worship for the practice of Islam; |
| 9.7.9. |
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ensuring that school textbooks do not portray Islam as a hostile or threatening religion; |
| 11.6. |
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encourage young European Muslims to become imams; |
| 11.8. |
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encourage the promotion of fair coverage of Muslim reality and views in the media and ensure that the voice of moderate Muslims is also reported; |
| 11.9. |
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develop ethical guidelines to combat Islamophobia in the media and in favour of cultural tolerance and understanding, in co-operation with appropriate media organisations |
One of the websites linked to from the CoE’s homepage is the organization “All different, all equal.” Yes, it does sound like something out of George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. The organization champions many activities. One of them was when the Council of Europe’s Directorate of Youth and Sport and the Directorate of External Relations and Co-operation of the Islamic Organisation for Education, Science and Culture (ISESCO) in 2007 organized an “intercultural course” on Arabic language and culture in Morocco, intended for members of European youth organizations between the ages of 18 and 30. It was intended to “develop their language skills, to promote intercultural and interreligious dialogue, international understanding, and to combat prejudice and all forms of racism and xenophobia.”
There are also networks Combating Social Exclusion and Discrimination, and several youth organizations linked to by “All different, all equal” participated in a “Rainbow Paper” with recommendations for making Intercultural Dialogue happen on the ground. 2008 is the official “European Year of Intercultural Dialogue,” jointly coordinated by the Council of Europe and the European Union. This “dialogue” is an extension of the EU’s long-term plans for Euro-Arab dialogue, and focuses mainly on Islam and why Europeans should learn to love Islamic culture.
In connection with this, the Council of Europe in 2008 published a White Paper ( pdf ) on Intercultural Dialogue entitled “Living Together As Equals in Dignity.” It places particular emphasis on providing proper “Multicultural” education to European children: “Within the formal curriculum, the intercultural dimension straddles all subjects. History, language education and the teaching of religious and convictional facts are perhaps among the most relevant.” Concerted efforts should be made to “avoid prejudice,” and “In 2007, the European Ministers of Education underlined the importance of measures to improve understanding between cultural and/or religious communities through school education.”
The White Paper focuses on the young: “Youth and sport organisations, together with religious communities, are particularly well placed to advance intercultural dialogue in a non-formal education context…Educators at all levels play an essential role in fostering intercultural dialogue and in preparing future generations for dialogue…Kindergartens, schools, youth clubs and youth activities in general are key sites for intercultural learning and dialogue.” Moreover, “The workplace should not be ignored as a site for intercultural dialogue.”
Among recommendations, the paper says the following:
“Public debate has to be marked by respect for cultural diversity. Public displays of racism, xenophobia or any other form of intolerance must be rejected and condemned, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, irrespective of whether they originate with bearers of public office or in civil society. Every form of stigmatisation of persons belonging to minority and disadvantaged groups in public discourse needs to be ruled out. The media can make a positive contribution to the fight against intolerance, especially where they foster a culture of understanding between members of different ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious communities. Media professionals should reflect on the problem of intolerance in the increasingly multicultural and multi-ethnic environment of the member states and on the measures which they might take to promote tolerance, mutual understanding and respect. States should have robust legislation to outlaw ‘hate speech’ and racist, xenophobic, homophobic, antisemitic, islamophobic and antigypsy or other expressions, where this incites hatred or violence. Members of the criminal justice system should be well trained to implement and uphold such legislation. Independent national anti-discrimination bodies or similar structures should also be in place, to scrutinise the effectiveness of such legislation.”
“Islamophobia” is repeatedly singled out as one of the forms of “discrimination and racism” that needs to be ruthlessly stamped out through indoctrination as well as legal means across the entire European continent, a policy which is being implemented at an accelerating pace.
In addition to forcing the education system to teach European children to love “Islamic culture,” the media should do the same with the adults: “The Council of Europe, together with media professionals and journalism training institutions, is launching in 2008 a campaign against discrimination, bringing into focus the role of the media in a multicultural Europe. Journalism, promoted in a responsible manner through codes of ethics as advanced by the media industry itself and a culture-sensitive training of journalists, can help provide fora for intercultural dialogue.”
Finally, the White Paper lists many institutions it should cooperate with, most of them Islamic organizations or organizations geared towards appeasing Muslims, for instance the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures, which is one of the EU’s most important instruments for Eurabian cooperation:
“The Council of Europe will promote and expand co-operation with other organisations active in intercultural dialogue, including UNESCO and the ‘Alliance of Civilizations’ initiative, the OSCE, the EU and the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures, as well as other regional organisations, such as the League of Arab States and its educational, cultural and scientific organisation, ALECSO, representing a region with many ties to Europe and a distinct cultural tradition. The Council of Europe will also promote intercultural dialogue on the basis of its standards and values when cooperating in the context of specific projects with institutions such as the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) and the Research Center for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA). The regional focus of this co-operation will be the interaction between Europe and its neighbouring regions, specifically the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia.”
Notice the cooperation with institutions dedicated to “Islamic history.” Concerted efforts are underway to rewrite European school textbooks in order to promote Islam in a positive light. In the European Parliament, the German Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pöttering has stated that textbooks should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam to ensure they don’t propagate prejudice. He suggested that the EU could co-operate with the Organization of the Islamic Conference to create a textbook review committee. This is in line with the general policy of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which wants to rewrite school textbooks around the world to remove anything critical of Islam, silence mentioning of the victims of 1400 years of Islamic Jihad and glorify the achievements of “Islamic civilization.”
The CoE and the EU implement policies aimed to provide our children with a positive and non-threatening view of Islam, thus indoctrinating them to accept Islamization. They are doing this behind our backs, without consulting us, and they can do so because the EU is constructed as a top-down organization where all crucial decisions are taken behind closed doors and imposed on the general public by an unelected oligarchy, who may or may not be bought and paid for by our enemies. This is a betrayal, but we should remember that they can do this because we gave them the tools to do so, or at least didn’t object strongly enough when they took these tools, maybe because we didn’t understand the full significance of them, or because we were lazy, or both. The only way to stop this is to take away these tools from the hostile Eurabian oligarchy, which requires dissolving both the EU and the CoE.
In June 2008, the OIC stated that “We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.” As Robert Spencer commented, “That sounds like the statement of a victor in a war, dictating terms to the vanquished.” Muslims are happy with their “progress” in Europe and now concentrate their fire on North America:
“‘We have established an OIC Group in Washington D.C.,’ Ihsanoglu explained, ‘with the aim of playing a more active role in engaging American policy makers.’ This will involve agitating for laws restricting free speech: ‘And in confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film ‘Fitna,’ (which showed Muslims acting on violent passages in the Qur’an), Ihsanoglu continued, ‘we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.’ Ihsanoglu says it’s already working: ‘As we speak, the official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.’ In other words, ‘irresponsible’ speech — which is defined as speech he disagrees with — should be banned.”
In the USA, the New York Times has suggested that the US should become more like Europe and Canada, abandon the silly protections of free speech enshrined in the First Amendment and ban “racism and hate speech.” “It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”
The only “vicious attacks” today are those by Muslims against the free speech and liberty of non-Muslims around the world. The attacks by both individual Muslims and international organizations such as the OIC on criticism of Islam are part of a campaign to force the entire planet’s population to accept sharia censorship and thus de facto Islamic rule, a scenario which will permanently end human freedom in any meaningful sense of the word. There can be no compromise with such an agenda. I do not always agree with American policies vis-à-vis Islam, and the US is far from free of Political Correctness and informal censorship, but when it comes to legal protection of free speech, the American approach is correct, and the European — and Canadian — one is dead wrong. We do not need more ideological censorship. On the contrary, we need to protect and expand the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Meanwhile, Europe’s southern flank is being overrun by illegal immigration, much of it from Muslim countries. Greece received 112,000 illegal immigrants in 2007 and the number is expected to rise in 2008. Many of those immigrants come overseas from Turkey. Turkey is a conduit for illegal immigrants from central Asia and Africa because its shores lie just a few kilometres across from the islands of Samos, Mytilene and Kos, some of the easternmost points of EU territory. According to the International Herald Tribune, in 2008 the historic center of Athens has been riven by street battles involving what the police characterize as rival groups, often involved in dealing drugs, from Afghanistan, Iraq and war-torn African countries wielding swords, axes and machetes. Store owners and residents are leaving the busy central shopping and restaurant district. According to a residents’ group, dozens of people renting in the area have left their homes in the past year, and several stores have closed, chiefly small but long-established neighborhood conveniences like bakeries, hardware stores or delicatessens. “The city center has been taken hostage by gangs of illegal immigrants with knives.”
Thomas Hammarberg, human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, has criticized Greece and other EU states for “criminalizing the irregular entry and presence of migrants as part of a policy of so-called migration management. Political decision-makers should not lose the human rights perspective in migration,” Hammarberg wrote. “Migrants coming from war-torn states should be given refuge.”
To the Council of Europe, those coming from failed nations have a “right” to settle in the West. As we have seen above, the CoE also combats “Islamophobia and racism.” Another way of saying this is that “human rights” mean that everybody has the right to settle in our cities; we do not have the right to object to this. Where should our children go when the newly arrived and their failed cultures have destroyed our countries as well? The CoE doesn’t say. This is especially sensitive in Greece, a country which was for centuries under Turkish Muslim rule. Muslims have spent the better part of a thousand years destroying communities of Greek-speaking Christians in the eastern Mediterranean. Now Greeks and other Europeans are forced to import large numbers of Muslims, in the name of “human rights.”
Part 2 will appear tomorrow (October 28th, 2008).
A “right-populist” political party has backed Ahmed Aboutaleb as mayor of Rotterdam. Mr. Aboutaleb holds both Dutch and Moroccan passports, and both ends of the political spectrum are backing him.
That’s the question that Tariq Ramadan will be answering on November 11th in Vienna. The Austrian Association of Academics (
Why and when does a people that considers itself free, give in to tyranny? And if subdued, may it resist and fight itself free again? These questions seem trite, but only because they belong to the core of every political, legal or religious debate that has gone on even before the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, when, at the Blood River in Boeotia, the last Thebes and Athenian army of free hoplites, the Sacred Band, grimly fought the subjugating Macedonian phalanx of king Philip and his son, Alexander the Great until the last hoplite perished. The Philippics of Demosthenes, the Athenian critic of Philip’s and Alexander’s enslaving ambitions, echoed through Roman’s Republic and beyond. What is freedom? What is tyranny? What is freedom’s prize? Why does tyranny always win? If not foreign and brute oppression, Machiavelli wrote, what then causes tyranny, always and inevitably, to take over from within: religious terror, corruption, cowardice, lack of character and virtue, a coup d’etat, fear? Can we spot the Machiavellian Moment, strengthen virtue, and escape the proven track record of history and resist the Brits whatever it takes, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin asked their fellow American colonists, and set our future generations free?
