Posted on 12/07/2004 12:20:04 PM PST by robowombat
Stoned to death... why Europe is starting to lose its faith in Islam By Charles Bremner Islamic fundamentalism is causing a 'clash of civilisations' between liberal democracies and Muslims
DAYS before she was due to be married, Ghofrane Haddaoui, 23, refused the advances of a teenage boy and paid with her life. Lured to waste ground near her home in Marseilles, the Tunisian-born Frenchwoman was stoned to death, her skull smashed by rocks hurled by at least two young men, according to police. Although the circumstances of the murder are not clear, the horrific “lapidation” of the young Muslim stoked a French belief that the country can no longer tolerate the excesses of an alien culture in its midst.
A few days ago, pop celebrities joined 2,000 people in a march through Marseilles denouncing violence against women, particularly in the immigrant-dominated housing estates. The protest against Islamic “obscurantism” and the “fundamentalism that imprisons women” was led by a group of Muslim women who call themselves Ni Putes ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Submissive).
The movement, which emerged three years ago to defend Muslim women, is spawning similar groups across Europe, supported by a mainstream opinion that has recently abandoned political correctness and wants to halt the inroads of Islam.
From Norway to Sicily, governments, politicians and the media are laying aside their doctrines of diversity and insisting that “Islamism”, as the French call the fundamentalist form that pervades the housing estates, is incompatible with Europe’s liberal values.
The shift is not just a reaction to exceptional violence such as the Madrid train bombings, or the murder of Theo van Gogh, the anti-Islamic Dutch film-maker, by a Dutch-Moroccan. It stems from a belief that more muscular methods are needed to integrate Europe’s 13-million strong Muslim community and to combat creeds that breed extremists and ultimately, terrorism. With mixed results, governments are trying to quell the scourge by co- opting Muslim leaders to promote a moderate European Islam.
In Germany, with its three million — mainly Turkish — Muslims, and France, with its five million of mainly North African descent, television viewers were shocked when local young Muslims approved of Van Gogh’s murder. “If you insult Islam, you have to pay,” was a typical response.
“The notion of multiculturalism has fallen apart,” said Angela Merkel, leader of Germany’s Christian Democrat opposition. “Anyone coming here must respect our constitution and tolerate our Western and Christian roots.” Italy’s traditional tolerance towards immigrants has been eroded by fear of Islamism. An Ipsos poll in September showed that 48 per cent of Italians believed that a “clash of civilisations” between Islam and the West was under way and that Islam was “a religion more fanatical than any other”.
Similar views can be heard across traditionally tolerant Scandinavia — and no longer just from the populist rightwing party’s such as Pia Kjaersgaard’s People’s Party in Denmark. The centre-right Government of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has equipped Denmark with Europe’s toughest curbs on immigration, largely aimed at people from Muslim countries. In Sweden, where anti-Muslim feeling is running high and mosques have been burnt, schools have been authorised to ban pupils who wear full Islamic head-cover, although the measure comes nowhere near France’s new ban on the hijab in all state schools.
In Spain, with a rapidly rising population of nearly a million Muslims, the backlash has been less visible despite the bombings, but thousands demonstrated in Seville this week against plans to build a mosque in the city centre. The Government has also won approval by sending 500 extra police to monitor preachers and Muslim associations.
Police across the EU are closely watching prayer meetings in makeshift mosques in cities and housing estates, and media accounts of the jihadist, anti-Western and anti-semitic doctrines of the imams are fuelling public anger. In Germany, pressure is growing for sermons to be preached in German rather than Turkish or Arabic. Hidden TV cameras recently broadcast an imam in a Berlin mosque telling worshippers that “Germans can only expect to rot in the fires of hell because they are nonbelievers”.
The debate over the limits to free speech is loudest in France, which now acknowledges the failure of its “republican” approach to integration whereby immigrants were supposed to blend harmoniously into society and not exist in separate communities.
Dominique de Villepin, the Interior Minister, is deporting foreign imams who support wife-beating and other uncivilised practices. This week the Government moved to ban a Lebanon-based television channel for anti-semitic broadcasting. The left wing, which long shunned criticism of Islam as the stock-in-trade of Jean-Marie le Pen, the far-Right leader, now denounces the “totalitarian”, anti-feminist, antisemitic doctrines of the fundamentalists. Jacques Julliard, a leading left-wing commentator, said the Left’s longstanding tolerance had been used as “an agent for the penetration of Islamic intolerance”.
Some on the Left have also taken strong exception to the concept of “Islamophobia”, a supposed sin defined by EU anti-racism watchdogs as akin to anti-Semitism.
The French consensus was symbolised by the 80 per cent public support for the head-scarf ban, which started with little trouble in September. While many Muslims felt stigmatised, the Government took comfort from the approval of the ban by a substantial minority of the 10 per cent of the population that is of immigrant origin.
Among them is Fadela Amara, a Muslim town councillor from Clermond Ferrand, who heads the Ni Putes, Ni Soumises movement. “The veil is an instrument of oppression that is imposed by the green fascists,” she says. Mme Amara, who led the Marseilles march, advocates an “open Islam, an Islam of French culture a bit Gallic around the edges”. This is also the aim of the state, which two years ago created a national Muslim Council to promote moderate mainstream Islam. The council was set up by Nicolas Sarkozy, the then Interior Minister, who now heads the UMP, President Chirac’s centre-right party.
M Sarkozy has just caused a stir by going a stage further, proposing that France’s rigorously secular state fund the building of mosques. “Whether I like it or not, Islam is the second biggest religion in France. So you have to integrate it by making it more French,” he said. To general dismay, however, the national council is coming increasingly under the effective control of radicals.
Reluctantly, some intellectuals have lately concluded that the model for Europe should be the US. On Tuesday a writer for Libération, the French left-wing daily, noted that immigrants in the US threw themselves into “the American dream” and prospered. “There is no French, Dutch or other European dream,” she noted. “You emigrate here to escape poverty and nothing more."
Something tells me we'll let them rot before we help them out of the abyss of their own making.
"...immigrant-dominated housing estates." Newspaper code for a slum.
THAT war lasted 250 years.
I have a new slogan for those who would ask the US to fight another European war. No War for Olive Oil. How about No War for Champagne? No War for bad teeth!
The euros are going to be totally occupied trying to deal with the muslims in their midst to be any bother to us.
This is nice and dandy, but unless European women start having more children, they (the European countries) are doomed. Pat Buchanan said "they face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World".
Islamic trailer park.
Some here will disagree.... its OK if we can assimilate them.
The ever tolerant and preachy Europhiles are getting a wee bit peevish, docha know.
Europe sure as hell doesn't "get it". Wait until there is real trouble from "peaceful" Muslims. France will be begging for the US to save them, again.
But is that true now? Aren't Moslems required to view themselves as a part of the Moslem nation first and foremost. Aren't "Chicanos" 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants who refuse to assimilate for fear of losing their culture. I don't think the melting pot is working anymore.
"But is that true now? Aren't Moslems required to view themselves as a part of the Moslem nation first and foremost. Aren't "Chicanos" 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants who refuse to assimilate for fear of losing their culture. I don't think the melting pot is working anymore."
No, Chicanos are as American as they have always been. They do recognize their culture but no more than those who celebrate being of Irish, Jewish, or Italian stock. They all celbrate where they come from but are Americans first.
No second generation "Chicano" sees Mexico as their home or prefferable to the US. Don't equate being American with being white as can be. Should a war with Mexico ever happen, Mexican-Americans of the Southwest will fight under the Stars and Stripes as enthusastically as anyone else.
I remember an interview of a Palestinian woman a few years back. She said something like "we will win this because Arab women are willing to have 10 children for Allah, and the Jews only have one or two". The Islamofacists certainly aren't worried about population control!
Europe is in serious decline. The demographic profile is morbid indeed, with European fading even as Muslim immigrants aggressively advance. The fundamentalist jihadis are replicating at a very high rate. The numbers look very bad. Further, the core of European civilization, Christianity, has carried them forward since Constantine, nearly a millenia. Yet, the Jacobins have held sway. Failing to totally secularize France, the radical left egalitarians spawned their proteges, the social utopians. Undeterred by the lunacy of "Thermidor", they sought to eliminate God and replace divinity with the State. The resultant dystopias of Hitler and Stalin worked their havoc. Fewer and fewer European people go to church. Today, the great cathedrals stand as anachronistic hulks, vestiges of Europe's prior faith. Perfectly preserved, they are ruins just the same as the Acropolis or the Forum. How could Europe have forgotten the heinous terror of the Turks or the Moors? Has Islam's hegemonic lust for Europe not enslaved, butchered and impaled enough Spaniards, Italians, Serbs, and Austrians? For 1200 years, jihadis of one Muslim dynasty after another has sought to conquer the Ferengi, the infidels of Europe. Today, the Dutch are over run with by their dissolute hash houses, their brothels, and their self-satisfied "tolerance" of the millions of Muslim invaders, fresh from post-colonial Indonesia. The French, only slightly less dissolute, are submerged by hordes of Morroccans and Algerians. The slums of vast housing projects that ring Paris and other cities, ring out with Arabic chants. Illegals from Yemen and Turkey and Sudan swarm into Milan, Hamburg, and Florence. London's mosques, full of Pakistanis, draw larger congregations than the Anglican Church. The Iranians will soon be able to strike at the heart of Europe with nuclear missiles.(Is it me, or is it puzzling that the Euro is so strong against the dollar?) Some in Europe are alerted, but not many. The prevailing fear has been against America's power and religious fervor. After Beslan, after Van Gogh, after Madrid, one would think that the situation would be clear. After 911, after WTC I, after Bali, Munich, and the Rome airport, it seems that myopia would diminish. I guess some folks can only see the truth by fire light.
Who are we to judge the Muslim extremists? After all, we have our own problems in our Western culture... we have glass ceilings against women, high incidents of date rape, and misogynist music videos.
[/end of liberal rant]
On top of that, they're excitable, violent pricks.
regarding your post #10.
With all due respect, that's a load of hoooooey!
I do NOT see the MAJORITY of recent (illegal) immigrants in the southwest throwing themselves into "The American Dream" and prospering.
I see hordes preying on the taxpayers of this country with greedy hands open.
But even Islam can't be perpetuated if the women don't buy into it, if you know what I mean.
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