Posted on 02/27/2004 4:34:11 AM PST by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
After 40 years or more of blowing feckless multi culti soap bubbles, the governments of some European countries have suddenly become alive to the dangers of being too tolerant towards Islamism, an ideology that is intolerant and crusading.
Two years after the brave and flamboyant homosexual Pym Fortuyn sounded the alarm in Holland regarding the threat of fundamentalist Islam to his relaxed and liberal homeland, the Dutch establishment, that had previously condemned him as a bigot, has suddenly done an about face and adopted his agenda.
It was Fortuyn who first noted in public what the Dutch had been noting in private for several years: that Holland’s Islamic population not only refused to assimilate into the host country but, indeed displayed a bitter intolerance for Dutch laissez-faire. He was so alarmed at the rising radical threat to Holland’s tradition of tolerance that he started a new political party, The List. The List demanded an end to Islamic immigration and demanded that the immigrant children be taught in Dutch. Within three months of its formation, The List had captured something like 20 per cent of Dutch constituencies.
His opponents, Holland’s traditional politicians, were robbed of the traditional weapon of the thought police, the charge of racism. Fortuyn’s present and former amours came in a wide range of colors and he had chosen as his deputy an articulate black immigrant. Accusations of racism would have been met by the electorate with dismissive laughter. Had he lived, Fortuyn would have been prime minister of Holland today, but he was assassinated as he left a radio station after an interview two years ago. For an outpouring of a public sense of loss, his funeral was second only to Princess Diana’s, four years previously.
On the surface, Dutch politics returned to normal, but the seed had been planted, and all those hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who had intended to vote for him did not forget his agenda.
Now, after years of pandering to the multi culti ethic, the Dutch government has suddenly admitted that the immigrant Muslims top the “no” list: they have the highest incidence of unemployment, domestic violence, disability payments, truancy and crime. And, after three generations in Holland, at least 30 per cent of them return to their “home country” to marry and bring back a spouse.
Dutch patience with fundamentalists on endless state benefits and allowances has snapped. Earlier this month, they hauled up the drawbridge and declared a four year moratorium on immigration, including so-called asylum seeking, to allow for assimilation. If the immigrant population still refuses to assimilate, I suspect the moratorium will be extended indefinitely. At the same time, they are repatriating over 26,000 “asylum seekers” whose claims for asylum were rejected years ago but who failed to leave the country. These are now demanding their “human rights” to continue to be supported on the generous Dutch welfare system, in Holland.
Notoriously, south of Holland, the French government has just let it be known that their patience with the zealotry, arrogance and imperialistic streak demonstrated by its own large unassimilated Muslim population has just run out.
In a jaw dropping statement, Chirac said that the wearing of the hijab by schoolgirls was “an aggressive act against the host nation”. And he is correct. It is not the wardrobe choice of little girls, but of their fathers and brothers who impose it on them because they don’t want men and boys “looking at” their females. France has come to the end of its tether with the tournantes – gang rapes as punishment for girls – both Muslim and indigenous – who dare to venture out of their homes in the projects without wearing a Muslim hijab. In many of the projects and nearby schools, Muslims constitute 50% or more of the population.
At the end of 2002, the movie The Squaw on this subject shocked not just French theater goers, but Jacques Chirac and French education minister Jack Lang. That was the genesis of the long and winding road to the headscarf ban. The film, although intended to highlight a grave and unacknowledged social problem, at the same time struck a killer blow to the governing elite’s multicultural dreams of European countries and immigrants from their former colonies living in happy accord.
Both France and Holland had now recognized that the immigrants were not the eager middle classes who come to the United States for their educations, or to settle. These are groups with an imperialistic, intolerant, colonizing mentality of their own.
While the liberal press and political multicultural proselytizers were still expressing shock at the Dutch and the French, who had decided at last to abandon constant appeasement and take control of Islamic zealotry and aggression in their countries, the dominant party in the German state of Hesse proposed a ban on headscarves on all civil servants. This goes further than other German states, which have proposed a ban on school teachers swathed in the hijab. Despite criticisms from the usual human rights suspects, the Germans say that the veil is a political, rather than a religious, statement and is a symbol of repression.
Americans, in a nation of successful immigrants, find it hard to understand indigenous peoples who have occupied their land since time immemorial, and whose ancestors, and their ancestors before them, established their countries’ boundaries through millennia of war, whose customs became encoded in law, and whose arts have developed uniquely to that culture. There has always been movement of people between European countries, but before, there was a common agreement on religion and, broadly, social behaviour. And never on this scale. During my lifetime, 12m people from a more primitive, intolerant culture have moved into Western Europe. It is to the Europeans’ credit that they tried peacefully to accommodate such a large indigestible clump of alien matter for over 40 years. What is not so clear is, why mass immigration was forced on democratic peoples by the parties in power. And paid for out of their taxes.
Whether it was a Native American marrying into another tribe, the vast movements of peoples from Europe to America over the last two hundred years or so, or the 40,000 Jewish displaced persons Britain took in after WWII, or the 45,000 East African Indians ejected from Uganda by Idi Amin and also taken by Britain, immigrants throughout human history have set their minds to integrating and embedding themselves in their new lives.
Not so with Islamic immigrants to European countries (unlike most Muslim immigrants to the US, it must be said) who arrived with a grudge and have held themselves apart for generations preaching disapproval, divisiveness and violence against their host societies – encouraged to do so by liberal pandering special interest groups. Ever-greater concessions from the host societies are demanded, all the while preaching their destruction. They are using the tolerance of the West to try to impose their own theocracy. In Britain now, in some municipalities, Muslims have demanded that municipal swimming pools have special times for women-only swimming and men-only swimming. Such an alien notion will, in these politically correct times, be imposed on the historically tolerant British, at one more cost to their own national identity.
Yet, as British conservative columnist Melanie Phillips wrote recently, “in Britain, the corrosive idea which seethes beneath the whole immigration controversy is the belief in fashionable circles that such a national identity is somehow illegitimate and that to defend it is ‘xenophobic’.”
Heaven forefend anyone in Europe would dare, for fear of being so-labeled, tell the fundamentalists in their midst to put a sock in it.
Until now.
Chirac, who has never been known to say an unpleasant word about a North African in his life, referring to all these yards of hijabs in schools with a high percentage of Muslim students, referred to wearing the veil “an act of aggression”. And indeed, it is worn as a badge of superiority. A senior member of his party said, “You give [these people] a bit of a finger and they eat your arm all the way up to the elbow.” A Dutch minister has said the immigrants top the “no” list.
Close on the heels of the Germans, the other day, mild, laid-back Denmark announced it’s had enough of fundamentalists preaching the destruction of the West and has put a lid on them. And the Danes aren’t even splitting hairs. It’s right up front. Although the target of the legislation is “restrictions on foreign missionaries”, Peter Skaarup, spokesman for the nationalist Danish People's Party, which originally called for legislation, said, “It is aimed at imams.” Henceforth, they’ll have to prove they’ve had an education and that they’re financially independent.
Once kicked into action, the Danes move fast. The bill is expected to be made law within two weeks.
To have any hope of being allowed into Denmark to settle, imams henceforth will have to prove that they have a good knowledge of Danish affairs and practices, a rudimentary knowledge of Danish and an understanding of the country's democratic traditions. In other words, not a hope. They are also going to have to prove that neither they nor their families will be a burden to the Danish taxpayer. (Unlike, say, Abu Hamza, the blind, steel-hook handed fundamentalist imam in Britain’s Finsbury Park mosque who receives around $500 a week in state handouts.)
According to The Daily Telegraph, the bill also calls for imams already in Denmark and who are found to have incited to racism or other forms of illegal acts, to lose their permits. First to go will be an imam who publicly stated in Jutland that female genital mutilation was “good for women”, and another who preached anti-Semitism.
Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen also said the legislation would stop the practice of Muslim parents sending teenage sons back to countries of origin for longer periods to become familiar with the traditions of their parents' homelands.
So, after 40 years of bending the knee to the aggressive multiculturalists, four European countries are finally fighting back to defend their Christian heritage and enlightened civilization.
Will the British follow in the continentals’ footsteps? Can we even look forward to reading of the deportation of claw-hooked radical hate-preaching bigamist, the Shriek of Araby? Pigs might fly.
Putting it crudely: it's time to puke.
America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
http://12thman.us/media/jihad.rm (Requires RealPlayer)
Except possibly US.
"the Germans say that the veil is a political, rather than a religious, statement and is a symbol of repression"In fact, it is a symbol of a political movement.
"It is to the Europeans’ credit that they tried peacefully to accommodate such a large indigestible clump of alien matter for over 40 years."No, it is not. The disaster their foolishness was creating was obvious. Such mindless stupidity is never to be commended.
Millions of Americans are guilty of the same kind of dangerous folly right now. Those who support the candidacy of John Kerry or John Edwards are guilty of this. Their foolishness is deserving of condemnation. Their mindless folly and "good intentions" are not deserving of praise.
Ignoring the obvious, creating a dangerous situation, and excusing it all by "good intentions" is to no one's credit. It paves The Road to Hell.
One of the most amazing political acts I've ever seen was when, before the last general election, all the candidates signed a pact that they wouldn't mention immigration. Say what? I mean, why would you need a pact unless you believed the issue would be a tremendous vote-getter for whoever brought it up. This is tantamount to saying, "here we have an issue that our people care about very much, so it would be wrong to address it."
I fear you are correct. At this point, if bin Laden denonated an atomic bomb in central London, the first reaction of the government, the chattering classes and the BBC would be a frenzied chorus of "we deserved it for our colonial sins", "the poor immigrants will be targeted in revenge by the BMP", etc.
The elites know best, don't they? The view must be much clearer from the heights of the social heap.
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