The following guest-essay by Werner Reichel was posted at Andreas Unterberger’s website. Many thanks to JLH for the translation:
The Non-Islamization of Europe
by Werner Reichel
December 19, 2014Most recently, there were about 15,000 people on the street in Dresden. Leading politicians and journalists described them as rats, Nazis, a gaggle, rabble-rousers, xenophobes, dimwits or nuts. To no avail. Despite this contemptuous abuse, more and more citizens, Monday after Monday, are protesting the “Islamization of the West.” This makes the politically correct elite in ministries, editorial offices and party centrals visibly nervous.
It is alarming how quickly and facilely such misanthropic, indeed dehumanizing phrases pass the lips of those who believe themselves to be on the side of the right and the moral and whose hands are on the levers of power. At any rate, their hitherto smoothly functional arsenal is used up: slander, rabble-rousing, headlines and reports almost devoid of factual occurrences, “broad” alliances of anarchists, with leftist parties, with NGOs and counter-demonstrations accompanied by violence-prone Antifa mobs. And all of that because PEGIDA demonstrators, as in the Grimm fairy tale, are shouting “The emperor has no clothes.”
The emperor and his court are not amused. They are bringing up the big guns. They have long since passed the boundaries of the rule of law. Despite that, there are more and more people, and the more nervous the politically correct elite become, the shriller and more perfidious are their slanders. The MSM is only able to offer its dwindling audience a comically distorted picture of brain-dead, protesting Nazi zombies versus the far-seeing, enlightened citizen.
Until now, it has been possible to suppress, channel and guide the discomfort in great parts of the public with these distorted reports, half-truths and a comprehensive indoctrination from elementary school to publicly administered television for seniors. It is growing noticeably more difficult.
What next? What are the parties and their accomplices prepared to do to preserve their power? The more demonstrators there are — and therefore the more people who will not be mollified or intimidated — the greater the panic in the political-juridical-journalistic power complex.
But why this fear of a few thousand people who are doing what should be natural in a democracy and what citizens have been taught to do, namely, to be critical, to question things, to think independently? That is what the demonstrators are doing. They are expressing their opinion, they are protesting the policy of middle-left parties and against the “Islamization of the West,” which, according to their critics does not exist, and therefore is a fantasy. The government television channel ZDF reported : “Tomorrow in Dresden, thousands will go to the streets again, to demonstrate against this alleged danger of an Islamization. There is no evidence of such a thing in Germany, certainly not in Saxony.” The growing percentage of Muslims in the population and Islam as a new, large and steadily growing religious community, therefore, exert no proven influence on society, politics and the lives of all of us. And “not proven” on top of that! Astonishing. And anyone who does not believe that is not taken seriously because he is mentally ill, or he is beaten with the “Nazi club” until he is back to believing the version of reality regurgitated by ZDF, CDU, the Greens and the Spiegel.
The paradox here is that the reactions of politicians and media are so nervous and panicky precisely because of the greater significance of Islam in our society — the greater influence of Muslims and their political and religious representatives in parties, governments and organizations.
Members of this establishment fear that it will actually come to friction, to conflicts, to battles for redistribution (not between poor and rich, but between ethnic and/or religious groups), or to terrorist attacks, even to conditions similar to civil war. So the motto is: soft-pedal it and be nice.
The fear of the Islamization of Europe in increasingly greater portions of the native population (recent polling shows that over one-third of Germans agree with the opinions of PEGIDA) is portrayed as the phobia of nitwits and people who have lost out to modernization, even though this process is fully underway and playing out before our eyes.
There is no generally valid and authoritative definition of the concept, “Islamization.” Wikipedia separates the scientific definition from the “political catchphrase.” Scientifically, according to the online lexicon, Islamization means: “…the introduction of Islam as the dominant religion in previously majority non-Islamic regions or countries. It occurred predominantly through Islamic expansion in the Middle and Near East, as well as on the Iberian peninsula from the 7th to the 10th century.”
“Islamization” is used here only in a historical context. The recent developments in Europe, Black Africa and parts of Asia are apparently not included. Those are different processes, consciously misinterpreted and used by the “evil right populists.” A few years go, it was quite different.
In 2003, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation wrote of events in Nigeria: “The goal of immigration by the Muslim Hausa and Fulani from the north into the south of the country is not only to take possession of land for the purposes of colonization, but is also the political domination of this area, as well as the forceful introduction of Islam into the mostly Christian minority.”
In virtually all the countries where Muslims are the majority, Islam is the dominant religion. It sounds logical, and it is logical. Wikipedia also explains for us why we cannot speak of Islamization in Europe: “Data for prediction are not sufficient, since only in a few European countries are there recent and confirmed numbers about the percentage of Muslims in the population as a whole.”
How convenient. No reasonable statements can be made or prognoses given, because the responsible politicians and officials simply have not had the figures collected. And this is in Europe, where everything and anything is recorded with statistical precision. Why?
Out of similar motives, the self-censoring mainstream press neglects to give origin or first name of perpetrators of all sorts of crimes. That’s not something the citizens need to know. The politically correct elite will decide what information is relevant for the public. But this transparent strategy is fraying when it comes into contact with everyday reality. When daily experience and observation are incompatible with reality as delivered by the media and political establishment, even the most beautiful, mocked-up scenery of the multi-culti Potemkin village is not enough.
In November of this year alone, according to a study from London’s King’s College, over 5,000 people in 114 countries died in Islamic attacks. So it looks ever more ridiculous when an army of politicians, journalists, Muslim representatives and academics — on the occasion of every bloodbath carried out in the name of the Prophet — announce loudly and in chorus: That has nothing to do with Islam!
These are supposedly just isolated incidents, crazy people who have misinterpreted the Koran and Islam. Of course, no other religion is misinterpreted so often or with such significant consequences. Hearing about these isolated incidents several times a day does not make it any more believable. Even the most starry-eyed do-gooder cannot deny that the number of Muslims in past years has risen enormously across Europe, and will rise even more, thanks to European immigration policy, and the differential fertility rates of indigenous versus Muslim women. That is not paranoia. That is empiricism and mathematics. Demographic developments, after all, do not run linearly, but exponentially.
And there is no evidence as yet for the favorite argument, that the birth rate of Muslim women is adjusting to that of indigenous women.
At any rate, we are not talking about future scenarios. Islam is playing a large role right now in all areas of society, shaping and determining everyday life for all Europeans, whether it is a pork-free kindergarten, a new mosque being built around the corner, or Salafists passing out Korans in the pedestrian zone.
No matter our feelings about them, we can be fully impartial in designating these changes as Islamization. It is ridiculous that the politically correct elite deny this concept, and with it the process. It shows that they themselves do not believe that these social changes can take place without conflict.
One reason for this is the leftist world view. For socialists, there are no religious or ethnic conflicts. All the problems of the world have social causes. Even the atrocities committed by the ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq are — according to this ideology — only a desperate reaction to Western imperialism and dehumanizing capitalism.
The present problems and conflicts in Europe caused by the great number of immigrants, which even the politicians and mainstream media cannot completely deny, can — according to this way of thinking — be solved simply with even more benefits and better training. Neither empirical data nor historical insights are any help against this delusion. It is a kind of westernized love-peace-harmony cocktail. It is an academic invention — a construct, one that has never been put into practice. The Islamic movements are substantially more successful.
As always. Islam gains significance in Europe from one year to the next. You can criticize it, protest it, think it is super and enriching. What you should not do is deny it. Our politicians’ and the media’s denial of these facts is reminiscent of the famous Monty Python sketch in a pet shop, where the salesman denies that a stuffed parrot fastened to a post is dead. Each of us can imagine how Europe will develop in the next years and decades. Europe is not the first region where the proportion of Muslims has continued to increase. And there are many, many examples from both the past and the present. It does not mean that things have to happen that way in Europe. But it also cannot be discounted.
Werner Reichel is a Viennese journalist and author. Recent books are The Enemies of Freedom, and The Phenomenon of Conchita Wurst: A Hype and its Political Dimensions.
What a lucid article. I cannot agree more.
And all of that because PEGIDA demonstrators, as in the Grimm fairy tale, are shouting “The emperor has no clothes.”
That is from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, not the Grimm brothers book of fairy-tales.
When he was a child, little James Watt was fascinated with the steam from a kettle on the fire. He wondered what would be the result if the spout were stopped up–kinda like the European “leadership” is trying to do with the protesters and protests.
His experiment was very successful, and he found out.
James Watt bore the scars on his face to his grave.
Dresden bubbles…and bubbles……and bubbles……………..
The fact that this is based in the former GDR is key. This is the one chunk of what is now ‘western’ Europe that never experienced mass immigration or the multiracial brainwashing needed to foist it on the people. It has few Turks or Slav guest workers, and few left-Fascists, watermelons or other useful idiots in positions of power. And, most importantly, it has much less of the putrid self-hatred and fear of being called a Nazi that characterizes the ‘Wessis,’ the old west Germans, who, over decades of indoctrination by the state and their craven MSM, have learnt to place their own national interest last or actively work against it. Self-confident on the surface, modern Wessis are a mentally sick people underneath, crippled by their apology complex and fear of historical discussion, terrified about what other Europeans really think of them, prepared to make almost any concession to become ‘normal Europeans’ again. I like the Germans, but in darker moments, I think they deserve the contempt in which they are still sometimes held. Nobody respects grovellers.
But East Germans are not like that. They were taught at school to distinguish between Nazis and Germans, and they grew up without the guilt complex. (They had a whole load of different garbage stuffed into their heads, but it did not sink deep.) In short, they are us, as we (ethnic Europeans) were forty years ago. That is to say, they already are normal, with a normal, healthy people’s attitudes to identity, with a normal regard for their own culture, race and heritage. They know utopian fanatics when they see them—they don’t fall for the crxp about destroying ethnic homogeneity and the nation state for the sake of ‘peace.’ And they also know how dangerous utopian fanatics can be when they are thwarted. They deserve our support.
I couldn’t agree more with the protestors. This message needs to be spread far and wide until the line between politically correct governments and the common sense populace is clearly drawn for all to see. I think it is coming to that.