"The Existential Threat to Liberal Democracies"

A searing look at the way the so-called European Court of Human Rights is bedeviling human rights in Europe.

Another on the plight of child brides in (and outside) the land of the mullahs.

And Douglas Murray on Islam's hostility to Jews, as revealed in a recent grubby incident in Britain regarding commemoration of the Holocaust.

Not inappropriately, here's long video from the Milken Institute featuring a panel discussion in London last month on mass migration into Europe, in which panellist Gemma Mortensen, who's no advocate of closed borders, nevertheless readily empathises with those of the European public who fear what she calls "the existential threat to liberal democracies" that current policies appear to pose.

The panellists who own the debate are the ever-wise Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who warns of the cultural baggage so many of the newcomers, entailing values that sit ill with European values, and which, inter alia, involve violence and misogyny), and the equally perceptive Mr Murray.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avQxaq57hjI

A Czech Voice Quotes Kedar

Dr Mordecai Kedar, of course, is a scholar of Islam, and from historical experience the Czechs know a thing or two about invasion.

(Hat tip: Vlad Tepes Blog)

Still Laid Up On The Beam Ends

Well, here I am, still laid up on my beam ends, thanks to the flu (yes, it's that time of the year Down Under.)  I'm afraid that I couldn't manage a Tuesday column this week for Elder of Ziyon, though readers who are interested in the quite remarkable degree of goodwill towards Israel that pertained during the Yom Kippur War may enjoy my last week's column.

As the column notes, even Gerald Kauffman was on Israel's side.

But then, as a commenter noted wryly, MP Gerald wasn't confronted by the reality of a significant Muslim presence in his electorate back then.

Talking of Islam, here's (hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog)  an interview with the Christian scholar Raymond Ibrahim that deserves attention.

It certainly deserves the attention of the naive teachers at this Yorkshire state school.

Another lovable crusty old fella:

 Meanwhile, among the anti-Israel Christian and Muslim forces on social media, united by their antisemitism, a new set of cartographic crapology is doing the rounds:

A Motherland Mired in Madness

Observes Douglas Murray in a recent article of characteristic insight and intellectualism that should be mandatory reading for ostriches (or should I say Oztriches?) with their heads in the sand, who look with equanimity upon the prospect of increased Islamic migration to Australia:

'.... I have ... travelled across Europe, and must admit that it can be terrifying to see the way in which the unsolved problems which Islam brings with it are dangerously simmering. Every European country is now experiencing this in the same ways. From the streets of Scandinavia to the outskirts of Paris, the northern cities of England to the East End of London, we have a set of societies in our midst about which even the use of the word "integration" must be regarded as some cosmic joke.

.... What has been created are not multicultural societies but parallel societies. Every country faces similar challenges and all are going through similar debates.

Yet .... They encourage Muslim leaders to "condemn" extremism but do little to tackle it. They praise "moderates" when they should be insisting on Muslim progressives. Lacking the resolve to change this, we all cling to an unfounded hope that the absorption of tens of millions of Muslims into Europe will change nothing very significantly....

 Britain had no significant Muslim presence until the latter part of the last century. There was a negligible Muslim presence in Britain until postwar immigration brought waves of migration predominantly from the Indian subcontinent, and Islam played no important role in our history.

By the 2001 census, there were around 1.5 million Muslims in England and Wales. By the 2011 census, that number was 2.7 million. Over a single decade the Muslim population had doubled — and that is not including the hundreds of thousands of people who are here illegally. 

If anyone in power had wanted to alter the vast increase in Muslim immigration during the post-9/11 period, to work on absorbing the people who were already here before welcoming in any more, they could have done so. But they did not and no politician looks set to do so in the near future....

Today Britain's Muslim community is growing ten times faster than the rest of the population. Half of British Muslims are under the age of 25. And among young people under 25, one in ten are now Muslim. Conversions of Britons to Islam are also at an unprecedented high. In the decade since 9/11 more than 100,000 British people converted to Islam. Three-quarters of these were women....

[I]f current trends continue, in the next 20 years or so there will be more Muslims in Britain than Christians. Some demographic studies suggest that on current trends Britain could have a Muslim majority by the middle of this century....

In the last couple of years the leaders of all three main political parties have conceded that it is not racist to have concerns about immigration. But they neither know what to do about the next step, nor can get beyond generalities about the need for "debate" or the sending around — as during this past summer — of occasional dog-whistles to pretend something is being done while the issue truly remains unaddressed....

There is a blockage of common sense or assertion of values....

Last year Mohammed was the second most popular name for newborn boys in England and Wales. In the country as a whole it was narrowly beaten to the top spot by Harry (which received a boost from the popular prince and a member of the pop group One Direction). But the figures also show that Mohammed is now easily the most popular name for baby boys in many areas of the country, including London and the West Midlands....

Tell Muslim leaders not just to "condemn" acts of violence but to stop them. Tell them that the era of ifs and buts about the extremists must end. Tell them to put the concerns of the state foremost in the minds of young Muslims, to have a picture of the Queen and say a prayer for the royal family in mosques as it is said in synagogues every Saturday. Tell them to teach their young that if they feel an urge to get involved in a struggle, they can join up for one the best armies in the world — the British army.

In particular, tell them to create swiftly and purposefully a type of British or Western Islam which not only is not in the hands of fanatics, but cannot be reclaimed by them. Lock the fanatical scholarship out as strongly as historically it has been able to be locked in. I say all this with a sense of hopelessness. There has been no sign, in a dozen years, that any Western country is willing to do anything like this....

Yes, it will be true that we will have access to a greater variety of food, languages and cultures than we had half a century ago. And we will have to get used to the downside that there will be more forced marriage, female genital mutilation and beheading than there used to be.

My suspicion, not to be too flippant, is that a lot of people, especially those in positions of power, have already made their peace with that deal. There is no plausible reason, if they have not, why so much attention is paid to muffling those voices who raise criticisms of Islam and so much help given to those often highly regressive figures who carry water for the fundamentalists.

....There may be tinkering, and lone voices speaking out against such developments, but there will be no significant force from inside or outside Islam persuading Muslims that the path of segregation and separation denoted by the veil is wrong.

Our politics will inevitably follow the same sectarian lines. Already there are stories — I know of two cases, from different political parties — where Jewish candidates have not been chosen to contest certain parliamentary seats because the proportion of local Muslims is too high. [Emphasis added; is that, incidentally, what we wish to see in Australia?]

With one in ten young Britons being Muslim, there is already a change in the pressures on politicians. What will it be like when it is two in ten? Will some of our closest political alliances survive?

The best we may be able to hope for is the right to pursue the type of British lives that our ancestors lived. You can see this, in rural and other communities in Britain where the concerns of the global battle for Islam, even when they are in a nearby town, appear to be thousands of miles away.

.... As the recent history of the English Defence League may have shown, any non-Muslim, grassroots yet non-racist resistance to Islamic extremism may well be impossible....

In any case, it certainly appears to have become the view of the British governing class that, if there is a problem within or from Islam it is beyond the control or influence of the political class, let alone any single here-today gone-tomorrow politician. The pretence is now so strong that it is assumed that Islam is like all other religions, that suspicion of Islam is as dangerous as suspicion of any other religion....'

Read the entire article here

Also worth a sobering  read is British Muslim Mehrdad Amanpour's "The Quiet Death of Moderate Islam" on Harry's Place (taster below):

'....When I was a child, my relatives would tell me that the hadud punishments of stoning, beheading and limb amputation weren’t part of modern Islam – such practices belonged to another time, in the same way that burning witches in Europe belonged to another time. I was told that the only Muslims that supported such practices were ‘backward’ and the only places that practiced them were ‘barbaric’ – in time ‘education’ would enlighten these simple folk and drag them into modernity.

Yet I’ve grown up and seen the opposite happen....

The gutless media. The unprincipled trade unions, universities and student unions that turn a blind eye to the wickedness being promoted in their midst. The hypocritical ‘anti-fascist’ organisations that enable and defend hate. Most of all, the lickspittle political class. Shame on them all.

‘Extreme’ has quietly become ‘moderate’ whilst Europeans have been too polite, too unprincipled or too cowardly to object....

During the past two decades, the Saudis have spent at least $87 billion propagating Wahhabism abroad.

At the same time, competing fundamentalist Shia and Sunni movements have been promoted aggressively throughout Europe, with massive funding from countries such as Iran and Qatar.

Moderate Islam is as good as dead. It didn’t stand a chance....'

An Informative Document

Earlier this past week BBC Radio One presented a programme entitled "Great British Islam":

"As Ramadan approaches, this documentary tells the story of three English gentlemen who embraced Islam at a time when to be a Muslim was to be seen to be a traitor to your country."

"A traitor to your country?"  Really?  Or rather, like Lord George Gordon, the famous eighteenth-century convert to Judaism, a great British eccentric?
 
Googling the topic of notable British converts to Islam, I came across a contemporary barrister who as the website of his chambers shows has written a number of  informative papers such as this one.

I also came across this

And then I saw this ... Oy!

What, No Dogs?

I don't know what to make of it, this poster seen adorning a bus stop in the Londonistan borough of Walthamstow (hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog citing Gates of Vienna).

Is it a genuine production of hegemonic Islamic forces in the district?

Or is it, as some suspect, a spoof? [Update: Guess not - see http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=35465 for what's left of a story pulled by the newspaper that carried it!]

Some of the bans reek of sound common sense, but the ban on music and concerts is all too redolent of the views of some Muslim parents in Blighty  from various benighted Third World locations who pull their children out of compulsory music lessons at school on the grounds that music and Islam don't mix.

And if all these things are banned, but there's no specific reference to dogs being so, does that mean that dog ownership and dog-walking is permitted in the borough?

Several weeks ago Al Beeb trumpeted a story about a rabbinical court in Jerusalem sentencing to death by stoning a stray dog thought to be possessed of the spirit of a dodgy secular lawyer. 

The report was nonsense, of course, but in its apparent zeal to present Israeli Jews in a bad light, and basically just to have a scoff and a laugh at religion (well, some religions, anyway), Al Beeb didn't bother to check  its sources, and since Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen and his minions seem not to know an aleph from a beit or a dalet from a gimel the Corporation was unaware that a Hebrew-language newspaper had already exposed the story as rubbish.

End result: Al Beeb doing what it doesn't do very often and taking the original report down, posting an explanation on that part of its website devoted to editors' blogs. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2011/06/story_removal.html

The article had told us towards the beginning that dogs are regarded as unclean animals in "traditional Judaism".

And just to make sure that Brits, a nation of dog lovers (I'm a cat person myself), got the message, the fact that "traditional Judaism" views dogs as unclean was repeated at the end.

Al Beeb forgot to mention that dogs are also regarded as unclean animals by Islam.

Dollars to doughnuts, if legislation is ever enacted in Britain to make dog-ownership illegal -  consequently robbing Al Beeb of the privilege of broadcasting the annual Crufts Show - it won't be owing to the disapproval of the canine species by "traditional" Jews.

Woof!

Elisabeth of Eurabia: An Austrian Rose among English Thorns?

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is clearly a woman who won’t walk on eggshells, even though she’s been prosecuted in her homeland, Austria, for “hate speech” following a report by an undercover reporter in a glossy magazine of a lecture on radical Islam that she gave. A diplomat’s daughter, who was in Tehran at the time of the 1979 Revolution, Ms Sabaditsch-Wolff has personal knowledge of life in the Middle East. She has worked as an English teacher and is the mother of a young daughter.

A self-declared feminist who fears for the future of Europe and the West if what she sees as the inexorable tide of islamification is not turned, on 7 December last year, in Tel Aviv, she addressed the conference of the Alliance of the European Freedom and National Parties in Israel, at the invitation of former MK Eliezer Cohen. More about that later.

Last Saturday, the very day, as it happened, on which David Cameron gave his address in Munich on the failure of “state multiculturalism”, an English Defence League rally took place in Luton, the birthplace of the movement. Some opponents of Cameron’s speech leapt at the chance to decry Cameron’s “insensitivity” and “bad timing” – as if the coincidence was his fault!

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff – who as far as I am aware has never been mentioned at all by the BBC, despite her prominence as “the Geert Wilders of Austria” – spoke to the assembled crowd. Whether the EDL is a gang of neo-Mosleyite bovver boys, as most if not all of the mainstream media insists it is – I know not, but Ms Sabaditsch-Wolff is an intelligent woman and a compelling speaker, who does not easily fit the “bovver boy” mould.

An Austrian rose among English thorns? You decide.

“I am very excited to be here in Israel,” she began, in her Tel Aviv speech that I mentioned above.

“The State of Israel is a modern incarnation of one of the ancient sources of today’s civilization. Our civilization — Western Civilization — traces its origins to the confluence of Judaic, Hellenic, and Roman cultures in what eventually became Christian Europe.

This civilization is now under siege, both from without, and especially from within.

I am here today to represent two defenders of our civilization, the Citizens’ Movement Pax Europa ... and ACT! for America....

Pax Europa is a European civil rights movement and a human rights organization. Our objectives are to protect not only the democratic, free, and secular rule of law in our country, but also to struggle for European culture based on the Judeo-Christian traditions and — especially — on the values of the Enlightenment. These are the values that are currently under threat throughout the nations of the West.

.... We are an independent, non-partisan movement. We clearly distance ourselves from all right-wing or left-wing extremists and all xenophobic movements. Our sole purpose is to champion the values and freedoms that form the cornerstone of our civilization. Pax Europa is the enemy of anyone who threatens those values and freedoms, and the friend of anyone who defends them.

ACT! for America is the largest national security movement in the United States.... We are committed to informed and coordinated civic action that will lead to public policies that promote America’s national security and the defense of American democratic values against the assault of radical Islam.

As an ACT! for America international chapter leader from Austria, I wanted you to know just how much a safe and secure Israel means to me and to Brigitte Gabriel, our organization’s Founder and President who was able to save her life by escaping into northern Israel from war torn Lebanon in 1982.

We value you immensely! We work and fight and pray for you. We support Israeli-made products. We are constantly promoting pro-Israel rallies in the West. We are in your corner and at your side every step of the way.

Thank G-d for Israel. Know that we will do anything in our power to love, respect and defend you. May G-d bless you!

.... Because Western Civilization has been in the ascendant for the last few centuries, there is a tendency to think that what we have built is the final state at which mankind has arrived — that we have reached, as Francis Fukuyama put it, “The End of History”.

This is hubris of the highest order, especially given all the indicators of the dangers currently faced by our civilization, both from without and from within. The signs may not always be obvious, but they are there, and they are growing in number.

The death of a civilization does not come only when sand dunes drift in over the rubble of a once-proud city. The end is not necessarily marked by an invasion of barbarian hordes, or the burning and looting of our homes and businesses.

A civilization can also die from within, when it forgets the core values that once made it great, when it stops believing in its own fundamental tenets.

The disappearance of civilizational self-confidence in Europe can perhaps be traced back to the unimaginable and pointless slaughter of the First World War, or to the Holocaust and other horrors of the Second World War, or to the ravages of seventy years of Communism, or to a societal enervation imposed on the continent by the socialist welfare state — or some combination of all of these.

Whatever the reason, European civilizational self-confidence is all but gone. This is why Multiculturalism has become the dominant ideology in Europe. This is why Europeans have imported millions of unassimilable foreigners. This is why we abase ourselves to the newcomers and accede to their every demand.

Islam is a threat to Europe because the heart of European civilization has already gone cold. If it were still beating, Islam would be of no more concern than it was a century ago, and millions of Muslim immigrants would not be among us.

Those of us who still love our civilization and what it stands for are on the front lines of a new war. People such as Geert Wilders and myself are on trial for speaking out in defense of our liberties and our democracy. Others have been silenced through intimidation, ostracism, and the threat of destitution.

The oligarchs who control the European Union are determined that there shall be no dissenting with their program of abolishing the peoples of Europe and replacing them with another.

This war is a quiet one. It does not involve guns and bombs and tanks and fighter jets. No corpses litter the battlefield.

But it is just as real, and at least as important as any previous war fought on European soil. On its success or failure depends the nature of the civilization that will reside in Europe over the next century — if, indeed, there will be any successor civilization at all.

And Israel is on the front lines of the very same war. Israel is surrounded by the barbarism and backwardness and destitution that awaits us all if we continue to surrender to the evil forces that would destroy Western Civilization. We have only to look at what has happened to Lebanon over the last fifty years to see the future that awaits a modern “multicultural” Europe.

And we only have to look a few kilometres to the south of this spot to see what Israel would be like if it were not inhabited by the Jews. A satellite photograph of the Gaza Strip reveals something telling: when you move a bit south from Ashkelon, or a bit west from Sderot, the rich and productive landscape of Israel abruptly ends and the vast wasteland of Gaza begins. This wasteland extends further south into Egypt, east into Jordan, and north into Lebanon.

Israel is an oasis of civilization in a desert of barbarism.

This is why Israel is so important to the struggle against the Great Jihad. Anyone who is committed to resisting Islamization will find in Israel a natural ally.

This is not a matter of Left and Right. Sharia has no respect for any of our political parties. It does not recognize the very foundation on which our diverse political structures rest.

Make no mistake about it: the fight against sharia is a fight to save civilization itself.

To discover the future of Europe and Israel if the door is not closed against expansionist Islam, examine what remains of Zoroastrian Persia, or Buddhist Afghanistan, or Christian Syria.

This is what awaits us if we do not act now. Our great civilization will be replaced by poverty and despotism and degradation.”

Here’s the video of that occasion:

"Dignity" and the Dhimmi

Amid all the hype about the engagement of Prince William and press preoccupation with the Wikileaks scandal, a sinister piece of European Union legislation has passed virtually unnoticed. Making “certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia”a criminal offence, it has implications that should worry everybody who values freedom of speech, what remains of the sovereignty of nations shackled together in an increasingly bizarre and bureaucratic tyranny that Stalin would envy, and who fears the creeping islamification of the European continent.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2008:328:0055:0058:EN:PDF


Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian who has been prosecuted for voicing anxieties about the rise of Islam – the indictment charges her with “hate speech” for asserting that “Sharia is a definite no-no. We want no gender apartheid, no ghettoes, no social and cultural discrimination, no polygamy, no theocracy, no hate…” – has warned eloquently about the implications of this dastardly piece of folly: http://vimeo.com/17262291
http://europenews.dk/en/node/37479

Now, I'm no lawyer, but as I understand the matter, the new legislation permits the state to be the sole arbiter of what is acceptable speech, and allows any state within the EU to prosecute those who are deemed to have run afoul of this new law. Since it institutes the principle of cross-border transfer, any EU member state may prosecute the citizen of any other for "hate speech", and the police of the accused's country would be obliged to deliver the individual to the complainant state to stand trial.

A vigilant EU-watcher remarked to me:

“It is one of the most scary documents of control imaginable. It is pretty much the complete adoption of the deepest desires of the OIC [Organisation of the Islamic Conference] into European Law. If Turkey were to ever enter the EU, this would place all of the EU's citizens under Sharia.

It is also possible, as increasing Islamisation takes place in various countries, that people will be tried and convicted in a territory with the harshest laws preventing criticism of Islam.

And ... imagine if one country in the EU issues an arrest warrant for an Israeli. Every member state would be obliged to arrest and transfer that individual.

I'm not sure that travel to any state in the EU is possible or wise for anyone who criticizes Islam regularly or has fought for Israel."

Turkey’s admission to the EU – the Islamic hordes in its hinterland notwithstanding – is certainly high on the agenda of British prime minister David Cameron. He's expressed his determination to achieve it.  And it seems that Sheik Fadlallah-loving Frances Guy (here she is, seated dhimmi-like, before the late sheik, a mastermind of terror) has taken a shine to Turkey’s Prime Minister.

In her latest blog (on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s official website) that contains her musings on the topic of “Dignity” - Britain's ambassador to Lebanon paid tribute to Erdogan’s “dignity” – just as she has to that of “The Palestinian veterans at our Remembrance service [who]carried themselves with great dignity despite all their difficulties and earned everyone's respect.” Her blog of 22 September, incidentally, expanded on the latter theme:

"There are nearly 60 Palestinian veterans in Lebanon who served with the British army during the 2nd World War. The tragic irony of their situation is heart-wringing. After loyally serving the Union Jack, in 1948 they were forced to flee their homes when the state of Israel was created.... Their quiet dignity in the midst of hardship and poverty is to be admired and respected.”

Maybe  these elderly gentlemen are more worthy of Ms Guy’s adulation than was the elderly sheikh about whom she blogged so effusively back in July (see my blog archive for two posts on that topic). But I wish she’d get it through her frequently hijabbed head that there’s no dignity in dhimmitude.

(To those to whom it is relevant, and despite the gloomy tone of the above post, I wish a Happy Chanukah!)

Out of the Mouths of Buffoons?

In 2006, in a speech aired on Arab satellite TV station Al Jazeera, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi declared: "There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe – without swords, without guns, without conquests. The 50 million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades." He noted that if Turkey joins the European Union – a cause dear to the heart of British Prime Minister David Cameron, of course – there will be a further 50 million Muslims in the heart of Europe’s counsels. "Europe is in a predicament, and so is America," he continued. "They should agree to become Islamic in the course of time .... All people must be Muslims."

In November last year, when the flamboyant colonel visited the equally flamboyant Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, his country’s former coloniser and now its best trading partner, 200 “escort girls” hired through an agency were whisked off to a Rome villa where they were lectured on Islam by Gaddafi, and each received, along with 50 euros and a volume of his bons-mots, a copy of the Koran. Last Sunday, again in Rome with Berlusconi for economic talks, Gaddafi lectured on Islam to 500 young women paid to attend his talk, urged them to marry Libyan men, and declared that Islam should “become the religion of all Europe”.

The man who hoodwinked the Scottish government over the state of health of the Lockerbie bomber – who’s just celebrated the first anniversary of his freedom despite having at his release been diagnosed with just weeks to live – also attempted some rather sophisticated blackmail, demanding that the European Union pays Libya £4.1 billion a year to stop the illegal immigration of Africans who use Libya as their gathering point for the Mediterranean crossing. “Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration, it could turn into Africa,” he said pointedly. “At the moment there is a dangerous level of immigration from Africa into Europe .... What will be the reaction of the white Christian Europeans to this mass of hungry, uneducated Africans? We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and cohesive continent or if it will be destroyed by this barbarian invasion.”

It’s ironic that back in the 1960s and 1970s the “First World” was being told by latter-day Malthusians and the vanguard of the environmental movement to restrict their families to just two children per couple – “Zero Population Growth” – and that nowadays we’re being told by some “experts” that large-scale immigration is necessary for economic growth. It might not be politically correct to say so, but mass migration from the Third World does present a real social and cultural problem for developed countries – and the colonel has tapped into that fact, using some very blunt language indeed.

There are, as we all know, many Cassandras who warn that Europe is being deliberately colonised by Muslims intent on imposing Islam on everyone  – and that in view of their relative youth and fertility patterns theirs is the demographic weapon, the weapon that Gaddafi spoke of in 2006. (In traditional Muslim societies polygamy tends to be restricted to affluent men, who can afford to have up to four wives – but, as far as I’m aware, in dear old deluded Britain welfare payments are available to surplus wives and their children, so long as the polygamous Islamic marriages have taken place overseas, in countries where polygamy is lawful.)

"What would happen if a European head of state went to Libya or another Islamic country and invited everyone to convert to Christianity?" asked one Italian daily following Sunday’s event. "We believe it would provoke very strong reactions across the Islamic world." A Vatican spokesman dismissed as “lacking seriousness” Gaddafi’s latest call for Europe to embrace Islam – although the spokesman did add that Europeans’ widespread indifference to their own faith and to matters sacred “could create a fertile ground for the eventual future penetration of Islam in all of Europe”.

Colonel Gaddafi is popularly portrayed as a preposterous figure. But then so were Mussolini and Goering. Could we be faced with a case of “out of the mouths of buffoons”?