The following essay by the Syrian-German Islamic reformer Bassam Tibi was originally published by Die Welt. Many thanks to Brunhilde for the translation:
Young men who bring a culture of violence with them
by Bassam Tibi
The events in Cologne were just a prelude: Many Arab migrants bring very misogynistic social values to Germany. That makes it almost impossible for them to be integrated. A guest commentary.
Is there any connection between the attacks on New Year’s Eve in Cologne and the situation in Syria? The answer is: Yes, there is a connection and the common denominator is violence against women.
Many of my German discussion partners do not seem to understand the violence that is directed against women in a oriental patriarchal culture. In the orient, a woman is not considered an entity, but an object of a man’s honour. The violation of a woman is not viewed only as a sexual act and crime against the woman herself, but more as an act of humiliation of the man to whom she belongs.
In this barbaric war in Syria, that completely erroneously is called a “civil war” (no citizens, but rather ethno-religious collectives, are fighting each other in it), the Shiite-Alawite soldiers of the Syrian army rape women of the Sunni opposition as a method of warfare.
With rape, these Alawites are seeking to dishonour the men of the Sunni opposition. The Sunni “rebels” for their part do the same with Alawite women. It is a war of all against all with women as pawns.
Cologne was not an isolated case
As a Syrian from Damascus, I am astonished at the ignorance and naïveté of the Chancellor and her defence minister, who believe that they can end the war with conferences in Geneva and Munich. But this war should be categorized as a “protracted conflict” that will be with us for many years. It is a type of war that I call “an irregular not state-run war.”
Among the war refugees, there are not only victims of violence but also many perpetrators, and even numerous Islamists. Added to that is the fact that these predominantly young men aged 14 to 20 bring with them the culture of violence, including against women, from the Near East to Germany. New Year’s Eve in Cologne is just a demonstration of that, and no isolated case as our politicians like to pretend in order to downplay the significance of the matter.
Independent of the war, the image of women in the Arabic-oriental culture is patriarchal, even comprehensively inhuman. This image of women must not be tolerated in Europe under the mantle of respect for other cultures.
And for the Arab man, the sexual violence is not just about the “sexual attraction” of the European woman but also about the European man, whose honour he wants to besmirch. And that is what happened in Cologne.
Cologne was just the beginning. If Germany brings in over a million people from the world of Islam and does not fulfil their expectations, we had better be prepared for a few things. From advertisements, all these young men think that they know that every European has a luxury apartment, a car and a “pretty blonde”; they think that they will get all that too and join in the prosperity.
But when these young men instead end up receiving emergency accommodation in school gyms or sports arenas, they feel like they have been deceived and discriminated against. So they develop a desire for revenge against the European man. The disappointed and enraged Arab men therefore took their revenge in Cologne and Hamburg against German men, represented by their women.
As a Syrian who represents an enlightened Islam and who advocates respect for women, I say: That was a culturally anchored act of revenge. What should be criticized here is not only the much lamented false tolerance, but also the ignorance about other cultures.
The conflict in Syria between Sunnis and Alawites, which has developed into a bloody war, will accompany us for many years to come. The number of the dead meanwhile amounts to about half a million Syrians, among them one hundred thousand Alawites; the rest are Sunnis. This kind of conflict is difficult to resolve. An example of this from the past is the Lebanon conflict between Christians and Muslims that lasted from 1975 to 1990, that is 15 years.
Religion belongs to Allah
In Syria the conflict has a long history. The Syrian capital Damascus is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world; from 661 to 750 it was the capital of the Omayyad kingdom, that is to say the first imperial Caliphate of Islam that stretched from Spain to western China.
In the late 19th century, Christians and Muslims adopted the European idea of the Nation, in which both had equal rights (therefore different from the Caliphate, where Christians were considered second class believers). Secular pan-Arabism arose from this. After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Syria became a mandate of France from 1920 to 1945, and after that an independent secular republic.
In this secular Syria I was born in 1944 in Damascus, an offspring of the Ashraf aristocratic family Banu al-Tibi. The orientation of our values was: Religion belongs to Allah, but the fatherland belongs to all. That’s what the Sunni majority thought, about 70%, and lived in mutual respect with a large number of religious and ethnic minorities.
Bloody feelings of vengeance
Damascus was a peaceful city with a Christian and a Kurdish quarter. That changed after 1970, when the Alawite-Shiite General Hafiz al-Assad seized power. In the years that followed, he succeeded in filling all key positions in the army and security services with Alawites.
Inspired by the Arab spring of 2011, there was an uprising of the Sunni majority against the Alawite rule from which the current war arose. A bloody line of enmity, laden with a strong desire for revenge, between Sunnis and Alawites characterizes this conflict. Alawites and Sunnis do not have a common future.
Neither regional nor international powers are able to gain control of this conflict. In the Syrian conflict, it is important to understand that Putin is not employing his Russian military power out of sympathy for Assad, but solely in an effort to force the West to recognize Russia as an equal actor. At the Munich security conference in February of 2016, it became clear that Putin had achieved this goal.
The conflict in Syria is illustrative of a continuing process of disintegration of states in the Near East. This is currently also happening in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. The consequence of this will be that in the coming years, massive demographic avalanches are in store for Europe.
Thanks to the invitation of Chancellor Merkel, Germany is the primary destination of the refugees. But the other Europeans are not playing along. The children’s squabble among all German parties about upper limits and limiting the number shows that German politicians do not understand the dimension of the problems.
Early in 2015 following the murders in Paris, Chancellor Merkel participated in a public demonstration in Berlin shoulder to shoulder with Islam functionaries who vehemently oppose a European Islam, and still she doesn’t even know what she is doing. Her Syrian and refugee policies lie along this line.
While German politicians and German Gutmenschen speak about tolerance and the misery of the refugees “in a German pathos of the absolute” (Adorno), the Islamists laugh contemptuously and call these debates “Byzantine blather.”
Far and wide no Euro-Islam
The origin of the term is revealing: In the year 1453, the Byzantine capital Constantinople was besieged by an Islamic Ottoman army. During this siege, Byzantine and Christian monks exhausted themselves in debates about magical and religious formulas, despite the seriousness of the situation.
In the same year, 1453, the Islamic Sultan Mehmed II successfully conquered Constantinople with his troops and transformed the city into an Islamic Istanbul. Since that time Islamic historians have therefore called such debates “Byzantine blather.”
As a Syrian from Damascus, I have been living in Germany since 1962, and I know: Patriarchally minded men from a misogynistic culture cannot be integrated. A European, civil Islam that the Islamic functionaries in these parts have rejected as Euro-Islam, would be the alternative. At the present time, it doesn’t have a chance. My teacher Max Horkheimer called Europe “an island of freedom in an ocean of dictatorships.” Today I see this freedom endangered.
We publish this text with the kind permission of the publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch. It is a preview of the book by Alice Schwartzer, “The Shock — New Year’s Eve in Cologne,” to be released in May.
Bassam Tibi, 72, is a Political Scientist Emeritus at the University of Göttingen. He arrived in Germany at the age of 18 from Syria.
Bassam Tibi, forget those Gibbon-esque and endarkenment disparagements of Byzantine theological reflections. Christ is the saviour you need; not a pseudo-prophet like Muhammad.
you to may be a ‘prophet’ and do not know it –
http://islamcomicbook.com/05.htm
There is no actual historical evidence that the Jesus of the Gospels even existed. There are some who believe Mohammed as presented by Islamic scriptures did not exist either. The world would be a better place if people were guided by reason along with compassion rather than rigid belief in old books in which there is little evidence of either.
No argument from me on that!
Hear, hear!
Why does everybody try to group Islam and Christianity? You could wipe every Christian off the planet and it wouldn’t stop Islam the terrorist attacks. There’s also a lot of other religions that believe in God, but you dont group them with Islam and try to be blame everything on them. Not only that, but Islam was created in a spirit of bitterness against Christianity. It is a violent enemy of Christianity and Christian nations like those of the once prosperous and peaceful west. So please stop.
Brilliant and well written analysis. This really clarifued the conflict and the danger to Eurooe.
Apart from the Sunni bias against the Alawites that is.
He missed out explaining why the Sunni population rebelled in 2011 rather than earlier. He also failed to mentioned the non-moslem population of Syria who do not seem to have had a problem with the ruling Alawites.
It strikes me that the Sunni uprising was due to a rise in Sunni fundamentalism across the region no doubt encouraged by the Saudis and had less than nothing to do with what the Assad regime was doing.
It’s nice that he states what to thinking people is blindingly obvious, that moslems from places like Syria and Pakistan are from patriarchal societies and that much of the rape going on is about damaging western society, not just a desire for sex. Will anyone in power listen, or better yet act?
…or is the future of Europe to be chaos and low grade warfare with the wealthy living protected lives behind high walls while the masses eck out a living the best they can?
Or to mention that most of the gov troops in Syria are Sunni, fighting alongside Shia, Druze & Christians. His narrative is well set and intrenched because that what the elites I the West want us to believe, just as the same as believing in ‘moderate’ islam.
This is why many of the Muslim “refugees” come from Syria to Europe. They are not Shia running from IS. They are Sunnis running from conscription into the Syrian army where they would be forced to fight other Sunnis. But they might well be quite prepared to fight the kuffar. This is never made clear in news broadcasts.
“Do not seem to have had a problem with the ruling Alawites….”
No, but if Assad is forced out, (as Obama wants) we all know how Christians (and anyone else non-moslem) would fare.
Yes, the Sunni bias against Alawites is striking.
As is the omission that the Alawite-led Assad regime from 1970 onwards was a secular one which sought to contain and minimize sectarian divisions and thus conflict; no easy task in that neck of the woods. It was for this reason that one can find some Christian Lebanese supporters of Assad (In the early 1990’s I was astonished to learn that they existed). They believe(d) that a merged Lebanon and Syria under the Alawite-dominated Damascus regime was the next best solution to a Christian-dominated Lebanon; a prospect that they recognized by the late 1970’s became demographically impossible. And thus supported the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) so that they would have the robust protection afforded to Syria’s non-Muslim minorities (Jews excluded).
For all their faults Assad senior and junior have done a very good job at keeping Syria stable for almost half a century. The Muslim Brotherhood was suppressed with exceptional and indiscriminate ferocity in its stronghold of the city of Hama in 1982 with, mostly civilian, casualties in the order of 10,000; interestingly the MB was pretty quiescent for the next three decades. Haven’t heard of the 1982 Hama massacre? You would know everything about it:books, films, scores of TV documentaries, hundreds of magazine articles and thousands of newspaper articles and TV news items; if Israel had carried out a similar operation in Lebanon or Syria in the same year. Or ever.
Only bone-headed anti-Assad Western intervention under the Obama regime in some child-like pursuit of creating democracy through the “Arab Spring” has ruined everything: cf Libya (Gaddafi) & Egypt (Mubarak). And, as both Bassam Tibi and Bill Whittle note, all that achieved, apart from plunging Syria into a multi-sided civil war, was to make Russia a regional player again for the first time since 1973. Such wise and clever diplomacy.
And, if he thinks that Sunni and Alawites do not have a future together, how can he consider that any form of Islam and Christianity can have a future together?
” the image of women in the Arabic-oriental culture is patriarchal, even comprehensively inhuman. This image of women must not be tolerated in Europe under the mantle of respect for other cultures.”
An excellent point completely avoided by the mainstream media and politicians of the left.
Euro islam issues aside, this is the concise, sober and informed analytics from an insider.
I recon there are another four issues that are in play in the big picture.
first is the involvement of islamic gulf-oil wealth and corresponding leverage, used to subjugate the West by demographics, cultural infiltration, invasion, and terror.
the second is the crisis of social philosophy (and practice) in the post-modernist, ignorant, relativistic West.
the third one, is the rise and the dynamics of neo-imperial, fascsist Russia.
the last one is the tendency of degeneration and decomposition of islam itself.
the realization grows inside islam, that neither intellectually, nor morally, nor logistically, it has nothing viable to offer.
overall picture is depressing, but I think there are 2 possible scenarios for future –
good news, neither involves victory for chaliphate 🙂
the first, which is the less likely, is the raise of strong solidarity movement in the West, forging a united resistance and the response, strategically and systematically aimed at islam’s soft spots, until it crashes.
the second is “Israeli model” – The Separation, resulting in the festival of protected zones and bunker nationalisms, each trying to solve islamic problem locally, sometimes for the expense of natural allies.
this option will involve much bigger losses, for much longer time, but it seems more realistic.
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Europeans use to live in walled cities. That could be the future for Europe. Muslims and non muslims living in completely separate towns and cities and walls to keep out the uninvited.
I think that Islam must be completely removed from the West. We have no duty to contort ourselves to accommodate Muslim objectives or desire for a comfortable life.
I concur with your second point that post-modernism has hallowed out the soul of the West and sapped its vital energy. “Explaining Postmodernism” by Steven R.C. Hicks explains this all very clearly.
However, I am far less hopeful about the future. I think that the West will continue to heap up its own funeral pyre until it becomes to large to control. I think that most of the planet will join the Ummah, and continuous devolution will be the future for mankind.
I think you’re ignoring a very important fifth factor, which is the rise of the welfare state that sucks resources from the productive people and feeds the resources to maintain non-productive people and, more important, their offspring.
The net result is that productive people have less resources to raise their offspring, who take more resources anyway. Productive people spend money on the upbringing and education of their children. Feral, non-productive people simply impregnate the women. If they can extract resources from society with more children, so much the better.
The end result is a serious deterioration in the genetic stock of people. This not only lowers the intelligence, but other desirable qualities of the population: logic, ethics, ability to look ahead. This allows government leaders like Obama to essentially buy the consent of the voters with their own money. Also, an increasing proportion of voters don’t understand the arguments against, say, Muslim immigration, and simply are too stupid and lethargic to care.
This deterioration in the population is a natural result not only of welfare, but even of advanced medicine, which ensures the survival of fetuses who, all in all, are severely damaged and ought to be allowed to die a natural death.
I suspect this dynamic accounts for the rise of civilizations, and their fall, as the increasingly easy conditions of life makes the populations lose the edge they needed for survival in a Darwinian world.
My prediction is that in the next (very) few generations, even Israel will tip over, with a high proportion of its population going over to the radical leftist view that sympathizes more with the Arabs than with their own people.
There is a bright side though, in my view. We know enough about genetics and even about survival traits that it is possible to maintain a population which is intelligent and interested in its own survival. We can even maintain the non-productive people in comfort, as long as their proclivity for numerous, neglected, offspring is controlled. I do NOT trust a government to carry out this function.
My suggestion would be to allow multiple centers of great wealth, such as Soros, Gates, or Trump (if Trump’s claim to billions turns out to be true). As production is automated, there will be great surplus wealth generated. Let each and any billionaire set up his own foundation, with its own conditions for supporting people who are unable to, or unwilling to, work. One foundation may flat-out demand a sterilization on the recipients. The potential recipients would be free to agree to those conditions, to find another foundation with less rigid requirements, or even to obtain work and support themselves independently, in which case they would be free to procreate as they wished (but with no external financial support).
I think another condition of survival is to give the warrior class much more status and wealth, rather than treat them as expendable bureaucrats.
“the rise of the welfare state” – I actually included that in “crisis of social philosophy (and practice)” without elaborating, but anyway.
yepp this is the illustration of how complicated the problem is, I’m quite agree with everything you say before “My suggestion would be..” – then you unwrap some Huxleyan phantasy.
both imperial Russia and Turkey, two fast forming nazi-style threats to Europe – bear seeds of internal conflict and decay.
as well as islam per se.
so, some combination of containment and sanctions should work.
as to dealing with overall population quality, – it looks like, in the long term, some multi-separation model is inevitable anyway.
humanity is at the splitting point, from where at least 2 new species will be born.
It would be good if it passed smoothly, with nonviolence and civility and only attractive life choices for everyone, but.. it is worth to keep in mind that alternatives are likely, and be prepared.
…
Thanks for your response, AY.
You criticize my point:
” I’m quite agree with everything you say before “My suggestion would be..” – then you unwrap some Huxleyan phantasy.”
without being detailed. I actually would like to see some critiques of my ideas. Evolution-wise, characteristics of a population that are not selected for eventually disappear due to genetic drift. A perfect example is the eyeless fish in caves. They started out with eyes, but in total darkness, the presence of eyes conferred no advantage, and when genes mutated to produce a fish without eyes, the eyeless fish was at no disadvantage.
The same will hold with populations concerning traits such as intelligence and virtue. Even the population of high-IQ Chinese, once prosperity sets in, will deteriorate, IQ-wise, in the presence of social welfare and modern medicine. In other words, mass migration of low-IQ immigrants accelerates a problem which would appear anyway.
This is why I postulated some kind of non-coercive, non-government mechanism to maintain or enhance the quality of a population, while recognizing individual rights and justice. Huxley did indeed address the problem. We have the advantage of far more knowledge and research to address the same problems.
Well, laws of evolution aren’t directly applicable to humans.
Instead of waiting for fur coats by evolution, to live in the cold (like elephants waited to become mammoths), – humans took animal skins, and used fire for heating. Couple of million years shortcut.
As our genetics and culture/technology are intertwined, it is worth thinking about science-powered evolution of social norms. Also, good old physical separation will play.
You talk about “social welfare and modern medicine” – that should include some sort of humanistic eugenics.
Here, I think IVF is culturally and morally more appropriate than sterilization.
…
You do make some good points, Ronald.
Initially I was tempted to say surely no people would want to support a sector of the population who are plain unwilling to work, but of course we’ve had welfare slackers for decades, and the problem with them only gets worse.
As an example let’s take Norway, a country where socialism really did work–and still does up to a point, but it’s breaking down now, when many young people are digging in their heels and saying: “Why should I work and pay taxes to support third world trash who are ruining my country?”
30-50 years ago Norwegians could get social assistance, but when they found a job they paid that money back; ever heard of that in the rest of Europe or North America?
*** neo-imperial, fascist Russia ***
This has not been established. It is a reckless characterization and the stuff of neocon dreams in the U.S.
The term Enlightened Islam is oxymoron and misguiding imo.
The idea of Enlightened Islam emerged from disparate encounter of western mercantilistic ambassadors with primitive Islamic societies in early 19th century. The whiter man with all those powerful armaments, refurbished legal system, and strange goods to sell was totally confusing for the residents of Islamic countries. Some of the guys belonging to the weaker side of the encounter tried to explain the situation to others. Among them “Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani” finally reached the conclusion that Muslims can duplicate such success without the need to replicate their superior beliefs. His famous quote after visiting Europe is supposed to be the beginning of Enlightened Islam era by some people: “In Europe, I spotted Islam in absence of Muslims, In [Middle]East I spotted Muslims in absence of Islam.” (I know the translation is not accurate but it should reflect the meaning).
Until now the success of the cult Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and his followers formed within that cult is dubious. They are only a tiny sect, and they only managed to duplicate those parts of western natural sciences that they were allowed to, somehow the second-rate techs that are not strategically important to westerners anymore. The serious problem arouse when they tried to imitate western social sciences that was incompatible with Islamic teachings, which is a continuation of tribal Arabs’ behaviour. Finally most of them abandoned the idea and decided to keep their social beliefs and the era of Islamization of Social Sciences was triggered in countries like Pakistan and Iran. This is the point that led me to the conclusion that Enlightened Islam is oxymoron.
Finally, what sort of benefit is expected from Enlightened Islam today? As already mentioned, this cult does not posses the mainstream Muslim heart at the moment. The number of those who practice the ancient tribal behaviours are still high enough to be afraid of possible clashes, not to mention the hostile jihadis already sworn to eradicate infidels and everything incompatible. If Enlightened Islam is incapable of eliminating sectarian wars in Syria then what’s it good for? And as I already mentioned Enlightened Islam is not into curing tribal behaviours anymore. The mainstream Enlightened Islam stands on the side of jihadis today, that’s all I see.
Look to Saudi Arabia for the instigators for the “Arab Spring” manipulating theur “Useful Idiots” in Washington.
Correction “their”. The Israel Lobby too have been naive despite the constant attacks on poor Israel. You cannot “do deals” with the Devil. The key. Break Saudi Arabia financially. That will solve much of the problems.
Hi Bishop Cardinal,
I beg to differ with you. First of all, it’s the Israeli government, and not the Israeli Lobby, which has been dealing with the Saudi government. It turns out the Saudis and the Israelis have a common interest in blocking the ambitions of Iran and the prospective nuclear capabilities of Iran. So, the rumors are, the Israelis and the Saudis have a military cooperation agreement. The Saudis also seem to be covertly engaging in economic commerce with Israel. This goes against the boycott agreements to which Saudi Arabia is a prime partner, but the Arab Muslims are nothing if not hypocritical.
The question you pose is, does any commerce or cooperation with Saudi Arabia pose a threat to the government so cooperating? After all, the Saudis are prime financiers of the co-opting of educational, communications, and political institutions in the US.
My feeling is, the Saudis can have value in alliances in which their danger is recognized. The closest parallel I can think of is the Finnish-Nazi alliance in World War II, where the Finns had a limited alliance with the Nazis. The objective of the Finns was to get back the parts of Finland the Russians had annexed in the Finnish-Russian War.
The Saudis have declared the Muslim Brotherhood, also a major infiltrator of US institutions, a terrorist organization. The Saudis have given us limited, but valuable, alerts on terror plots to blow up airplanes. In other words, if we know what we’re doing, and keep the Saudis at arms distance, they can be of use.
I don’t know if you’ve read Stephen Coughlin’s “Catastrophic Failure”, but he details the systematic actions of the US government to keep Islamic doctrine from being taught to security, military, and diplomatic personnel. With this approach, of course it’s highly dangerous to deal with Saudi Arabia…but, with this approach, we’re screwed anyway.
I prefer a diplomatic ju-jitsu, where we deal with countries when it’s our advantage to do so, and use limited, shifting alliances and partnerships to bolster our security and even our economy.
I find it unbelievable that European governements would not know what the muslim mindset is. Don’t they have researchers whose job it is to find out?
It’s different for these university students etc who are welcoming these people into Europe and who wouldn’t have a clue, but shouldn’t it be a government’s job to know?
And a European (i.e.white) woman doesn’t have to spend much time there before they understand only too well what the male mindset is. It’s the last thing we need in Europe and other western countries.
I was in Syria in 1992 and you could not ask anyone anything about politics. They would immediately begin to squirm, and then change the subject. This is because one half of the polulation was spying on the other and the fear was obvious. It could only go on like that for so long before the pressure valve blew.
Kepha, I agree with your views. If islam is wrong, and it is, then Jesus Christ is the only answer.
The ‘orientals’ in the ‘orient’ ? They must be Asians then but I fail to see any mention about Chinese and Japanese nor Thais and Vietnamese. Not forgetting too the Mongolians, Koreans, Malays, Burmese and Filipinos. Perhaps the leftist vocabulary has become so entrenched in Europe that Muslims must be referred to as ‘Orientals’ or ‘Asians’ even when most of these Caucasian Muslims are almost indistinguishable from Europeans.
When will the linguists clear up this deceitful terminology invented by the MSM ?
This is a translation, remember. The problem may be to find a better word than “oriental” to represent the German original.
There’s also a difference between British and American usages (two countries divided by a common language, and all that). In British English, “Oriental” or “Asian” is often used for what Americans would call “Middle Eastern” or “Central Asian” peoples, rather than the East Asian peoples to whom Americans have historically referred by those terms.
It’s further complicated by a subset of American translators who seem to default to British English when translating documents from Continental languages, even when they use American English in their own original writings.
Baron, the noun Orient in the German original does not look any less “odd” than “orient” in the translation above. Tibi could have chosen a number of locutions that would better serve the purpose of denoting whatever geographic / cultural / demographic grouping he had in mind (“the Arab world”, “Islamic MENA”, “cultures of the Islamic crescent”, etc.)
That he did not and instead chose Orient probably has, consciously or sub-consciously, to do with Edward Said and his infamous book Orientalism. Tibi is sticking it to the man who for years cast fear into the heart of academics working in the field of Islam studies, lest they offend the preceptor of anti-colonial political correctness. At least, that would be my guess 😉
Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day we draw closer to the beginning of the European Reconquista.
S III.
The only solution is a moratorium on Muslims entering Western nations. This will never happen b/c it would violate multiculturalism, a tenet of the Leftist catechism. So the outlook will be continued gradual Left-inspired Western decline punctuated by explosions of Islamist violence.
I would love to hear Bassam speak. Syria was once the seat of Hellenism or classical learning till the Arab Islamic invasions. Being half Greek I am sure I carry DNA in common with modern Syrians. To call me a racist for opposing Syrian Muslim refugees is pointless, many are not even Syrian anyway. Bassam provides a greater explanation about these rapes and reasons male Kafirs should not allow these so-called refugees to continue their barbaric behavior. I wish I could link this story to my Facebook, hint 😉
“the Syrian-German Islamic reformer Bassam Tibi”
No sneer quotes around reformer. So he’s really a Muslim reformer?
If I had a million dollars right now, I would bet it all on the prospect that a careful analysis of Tibi’s words would find lurking between the lines various clever forms of taqiyya indicating that his “reform” is only calculated to make him trustworthy in the eyes of the Counter-Jihad, thereby massaging our soft spot in order to reinforce our inner anxiety (for even the most robustly politically INcorrect Westerners have at least a bit of that anxiety which, if done cleverly, can be exploited in order to predispose us to feel disinclined to treat all Muslims with equal suspicion).
Sometimes it’s kind of fun to find the hidden extremism (i.e., the hidden normative Islam) in the Reformist-du-Jour; it’s sort of like playing “Where’s Waldo?” Not that it should be necessary, for a Counter-Jihad that is healthy and already operates on the basis of a rational prejudice against all Muslims no matter what sweet taqiyya they whisper in our ears…
I call him an “Islamic reformer” in the same spirit in which I refer to Tariq Ramadan as a “Swiss philosopher”.
I’ve been perfecting my deadpan for the past ten years in anticipation of the day when Loretta Lynch and her ilk get their way, and the USA finally has its equivalent of the UK’s “religiously-aggravated Section 5 public order offence”.
Our readers are intelligent folk, and may draw their own conclusions.
Good God, this tripe from Tibi isn’t even a fun game of “Where’s Waldo?” The clues are all out there in the open (e.g., his fixation on “Arab” and “oriental” culture and his studious avoidance (except once, parenthetically) of the I (Islam not “Islamist”) and M words (the latter very pointedly out of range of his ostensible focus, the problem now in Europe, rather dipping back in history (which introduces more problematic locutions, such as the oxymoronic “secular pan-Arabism”).
I hope (but wearily by now don’t expect) too many in the Counter-Jihad don’t blush and flutter their eyelids at the sweet taqiyya Tibi is whispering in their ears (and their ears alone, for that is the target of the cleverer “Better Cop” Muslim like Tibi — he’s not really interested in the Western Mainstream though he pretends to be; he’s really trying to soften us up (and succeeding, apparently) or rather, trying to make sure we remain soft in terms of our inner fear of being “bigoted” and “tarring all Muslims with one brush” …)
Hesperado,
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Regardless of whether he’s a Muslim, Bassam Tibi is saying that Islam can’t be turned into a European-oriented doctrine, and that any attempt to import and integrate Muslims into Europe will fail.
Can you show me where I misrepresented his views, or where he advocates any tolerance for bringing Muslims into Europe?
Why is it so complicated? The critical theorists are trying to deconstruct Europe to reconstruct their third way. They think they are _using_Islam?…borrowing their testosterone for awhile. Meanwhile, Islam is actually using the progressives, having had 1400 years of practice in this infiltration game.
Meanwhile it appears to the rest of the world as if the entire planet is insane.
William,
You are exactly correct.
The Ummah will use the socialist/progressive crowd until they cease to become useful. The progs will then be given the choice to convert or face liquidation. I expect that the vast majority will simply convert en masse and indoctrinate their children in turn.
This is how the Ummah will gain its final victory over the West and eliminate it from history.
“Enlightened islam?” A oxymoron for the ages!
Anyone who accepts and follows the ravings of an illiterate, murderous paedophile is hardly enlightened.
Just what I thought. An “enlightened” Muslim would surely no longer be a Muslim…he would “enlighten” himself out of it ASAP!
It seems to me this report shows how the conflict within the Muslim factions is something that has gone on for innumerable years. The really frightening reality is that today there are weapons that can be and probably will be used that are more destructive and violent than in the past. If these events and actions continue on the same path they are on now, I don’t think Europe as we know it will continue to survive. A society based on the principles and actions as described in this report could possibly destroy centuries of growth, knowlege and the growth of humanity. This is a frightening realization. Larry