Tag Archives: Islam

In Denial about Islam

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Church/State, Education, Persecution, Politics

≈ 18 Comments

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While we were having our tempest in a teapot last week, you may have missed that there was a terrorist attack in London, leaving several dead, and a fair number injured.

Our response here was to continue to argue amongst ourselves. And we wonder why Islam (and No, Mrs. Prime Minister the term is Islam, not Islamic Terrorism, certainly not all Muslims are terrorists, but multiple studies say that a large minority in Britain support Sharia law and/or terrorism) seems to be winning.

So it’s time to get our head out of the muck, look around and reassess.

This is written by William Kirkpatrick, in Crisis Magazine. He’s right, of course, about Europe, but it’s no different here, really. Perhaps Trump understands, but not many others seem to. They seemingly will continue to play the old games in the old way, until we’re all either dead or Muslim. Here are some excerpts.

Rival gangs battle in the streets and set fire to cars. Uncovered women are considered fair game. Molotov cocktails are hurled at police stations.

Syria? No, Sweden. For a long time, Sweden has been importing Middle Eastern immigrants into its small nation, and now it is experiencing many of the problems of the Middle East. The same thing is happening in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and England.

It’s often said that we in America just have to look at history to understand the fate that may be in store for us. But it’s no longer necessary to consult history books. All you have to do is look at what’s happening right now on the other side of the Atlantic.

In Germany during the first six months of 2016, migrants committed 142,000 crimes. But since the data only includes crimes that have been solved, the actual number of migrant crimes is likely far higher. In many parts of the country, police say they are unable to maintain law and order. More than 20,000 purses are snatched each year in Hamburg, and gangs of migrant youth have taken control of parts of the Jungfernsteig, a prestigious boulevard. The situation is much the same in Bremen, Berlin, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, and Stuttgart. All over Germany, migrant gangs and roving bands of migrant youth operate with near impunity. […]

Unless the French, the Germans, and the Swedes resist at some point soon, they, along with other European states, will someday be Islamic states. Europe is in the midst of a massive historical change, the significance of which rivals the fall of the Roman Empire. What we are witnessing is the gradual but inexorable substitution of one civilization for another.[…]

Of all the factors contributing to Islam’s hostile takeover of Europe, perhaps the most important is denial. If you deny the reality of Islamization, you can’t effectively resist it. The reality is that Europe is in a life and death struggle, but the denialists insist that it’s just business as usual. They assure us that terror has nothing to do with Islam (so don’t worry), that immigration is just cultural enrichment (it’s good for you), and that there are no no-go-zones (but it’s best to avoid them).

In Europe it’s not only the leaders who are in denial. The average citizen is expected to go along with the delusion. If he doesn’t, he can face arrest, prosecution, fines, and even jail time. In the Netherlands, individuals who post Facebook comments critical of Islam or immigration can expect a visit from the police. In Germany, citizens who express “xenophobic” views on social media risk having their children taken away. Meanwhile, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) has ordered the British Press not to report when terrorists are Muslims. […]

Once again, the main problem is denial. The reason that the denialists cling to their denial is that they live in the past. European denialists live mentally in the post-war years. They must prove to themselves that Europe has abandoned its anti-Semitic ways. And for some insane reason, they have decided that the way to make up for Europe’s past sins is to welcome the “new Jews” (Muslims) into their midst. In short, they have made a colossal error and since it’s not easy to admit that you rank with history’s greatest blunderers, they must continue to maintain that the disaster unfolding around them is nothing more than a rough patch on the road to the multicultural Promised Land.

via In Denial about Islam – Crisis Magazine Emphasis mine, and read the whole thing.

Yeah, all that.

Lincoln said this, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” True then, true now. But so many, especially on the left, have forgotten nothing and learned nothing, not since well before the fall of the Soviet Union.

And since we barely teach history anymore (eminent exceptions gratefully noted) they have in addition learned nothing about how our civilization has overcome these problems. In fact, this exact problem, before. When did you learn about the Battle of Viena? How about the Battle of Lepanto? Maybe the Battle of Tours? The Fall of Constantinople? How about the Islamification of Egypt, or the Middle East?

Exactly the same thing, the west, against Islam, in Europe. We won those, so now they try a different way. and so far they are winning.

Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan had it right, “The time, they are a’changing.”

But will the change favor the west or Islam? That’s for us to decide.

Crossposted from Nebraskaenergyobserver

Islam and the West

23 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by in Faith, Islam, Politics

≈ 24 Comments

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It seems as though we cannot have a few days going by without there being a fresh atrocity. There is already an established set of reactions. There are social media reports that the attacker shouted a Muslim slogan; there are tight-lipped official sources who will say nothing about the origin of the attacker. Then comes the suggested the person was acting alone, a ‘crazed gunman’, and even that he must in some way have belonged to a right-wing group. Finally comes the revelation that the perpetrator had some links to radicalised Islamists. On the one hand is an anxiety to say something bad about Islam, on the other an anxiety not to make a bad situation worse. Underlying this curious dance are two different world-views: one sees Islam as an existential threat, the other sees it as part of a multi-cultural world, and between them, it seems, there is is no middle way.

The history of the relationship between Christianity and Islam has certainly been one of considerable violence, with the latter erupting into the Eastern Roman Empire with a spasm of violence which would conquer the whole of the southern Mediterranean Coast, from which an invasion of the Iberian Peninsula would follow. It took the victory of Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732 to put an end to the prospect of Western Europe falling under Islamic rule. In the east Islam spread to the borders of India, and by 1453 the capital of the Eastern Roman empire fell under Ottoman control. It was not until John Sobieski turned the Ottoman back from the gates of Vienna in 1683 that the prospect of central Europe falling under Ottoman control faded; it would take another century before Tsarist Russia would begin a process of pushing back the Ottoman domains which would end in 1922 with the fall of the Caliphate. Historical ignorance and a concentration on the Crusades has left many with the false impression that the Western Powers were the aggressors in the relationship between Christianity and Islam when for most of the time, it was the other way round; and, of course, the Crusades failed and the Christians lost.

In short, it is easy to fashion a narrative which says that because for most of the time Islam has been the aggressor, this is true again today. That is to ignore the period from 1774 through to today when, for much of the time, it was the Christian Powers who have been the aggressors – a narrative which has left some in the Islamic world arguing that the ‘Crusaders’ are out to destroy Islam. In fact it is only a minority on both sides against whom the charge of trying to destroy the other can be made – but because these minorities are very noisy, and, on the Islamic side, violent, they occupy much of the public square on the issue.

We get cries that all Muslims should renounce extremism and denounce the extremists, as though, in some way, that would help anything and somehow prove that they were ‘loyal’ to their host country. I can remember when the same demands were made in some quarters about the Irish on the Mainland of the UK during the ‘Troubles’ – as though somehow even being a Catholic meant you were sympathetic to blowing up British soldiers and innocent civilians. It was an insulting suggestion then, and is equally so now when made of our Muslim neighbours. From the evidence we have, it seems unlikely that most members of ISIS have any great grounding in Islamic teaching and more likely that they use their imperfect understanding of it as an excuse for their homicidal impulses and their lust for sex and power. To demand that real Muslims dissociate themselves from such people would be rather like demanding that Christians dissociated themselves from the old (or new) Ku Klux Klan. It is to surrender to the narratives peddled by the extremists.

There are millions of Muslims living in the West, and they are not going to go away. Most of them, the vast majority, want simply to coexist in peace with their fellow countrymen and women, Christian, atheist, Jew, agnostic or whatever. On the whole, I have found Muslims less antipathetic to other faith groups than many secularists. However much the knee might jerk when we have atrocities like the latest one in Munich, or horrors such as what happened in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, it is not going to help anyone to allow it to do so uncontrolled. To take an unexpected line, just as it is not guns who kill people, but killers, so, too, it is not Islam that kills people, but killers. If we give any credence to the narrative from some of those killers that they are authentic representatives of Islam, they win.

None of that is to say that relations between the West and some Islamic States are not problematic, but it is interesting that we appear to have managed to cope well enough for a long time with a state like Saudi Arabia – one of the most Islamic of States. Just as secularists in the West are having to get used to the idea that religion is not going to die, so they, and Christians, need to get used to the idea that among those religions not dying is Islam. We are living together, and we are going to go on doing so. It is the height of irresponsibility to give in to the narrative peddled by extremists on either side.