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Optimism or Carelessness?
by Fjordman
One of the claims presented against Islam-critical writers is that they suffer from paranoia about a secret Islamic conspiracy to Islamize Europe and the Western world. This is of course not true. Nobody ever sad that it was secret, at least not entirely so. The long-term goal of Islamic theology is for Islam to be triumphant across the entire world, including Europe and the Western world. This is simply mainstream Islam, as it has existed for centuries; it is not a recent innovation by a few radicals.
Besides, the truth is that far from exaggerating, even critics of Islam can be taken by surprise at the sheer speed of events, and by how quickly many Western leaders are caving in to Islamic pressures.
In Denmark, the writers Helle Merete Brix, Torben Hansen and Lars Hedegaard in 2003 published the book I krigens hus: Islams kolonisering af Vesten (“In the House of War: Islam’s Colonization of the West”). According to them, we are now experiencing a third great wave of Jihad, yet another attempt to conquer, colonize and Islamize Europe after Arabs and Turks spent centuries trying to do so before. Predictably, these courageous authors were ridiculed for their warnings, most aggressively by individuals from the political Left.
For instance, Michael Jarlner in the left-wing newspaper Politiken in his review from 2003 dismissed the book as “spiteful.” He claimed that the “ravings” of those sounding the alarm against an ongoing Islamization of Europe were “delusions” and “prejudiced paranoia of the worst order.”
The conservative columnist Mikael Jalving some years later admitted that he didn’t take such allegations about Islamization entirely seriously at first, either. However, he later came to realize that these warnings might be on to something real after all. Many of the problems related to political violence, the burning of schools, kindergartens or cars and rising Islamic threats against free speech were problems that only a brave few warned against some years ago. These problems have now become a daily reality in a number of cities.
In fact, even some allegedly delusional pessimists have underestimated how bad things truly are. Lars Hedegaard, one of the co-authors of I krigens hus, was attacked and nearly killed in his own home in 2013. Moreover, in 2003 these authors did not foresee that because of Islam, Denmark would merely a couple of years later be involved in one if its greatest foreign policy crises since the Second World War.
The Mohammed Cartoons Crisis took place after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published some relatively innocent cartoons of Islam’s founder Mohammed on September 30, 2005. I was one of the first people outside of Denmark to write about this case in English. Already in October 2005, I was campaigning in support of the paper and free speech on my old blog.
Did I understand at this point in time that this was a significant story? Yes. Did I foresee that it would become a big international incident that would cause many deaths, planned terror attacks, assassination attempts and the burning of embassies a few months later? No. What this means is that even a notorious so-called Islamophobe like myself actually underestimated the scale of events.
A terrorist bomb attack at a marketplace in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province in China, left 31 people dead and upwards of 100 wounded. Witnesses say the attackers threw bombs from the windows of a car at elderly people gathered outside a restaurant for breakfast. Meanwhile, the Islamic Party of Turkestan claimed responsibility for an earlier bomb attack in Urumqi that killed three people.
