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A New Europe?
Frontpagemagazine ^ | June 18, 2024 | Bruce Bawer

Posted on 06/18/2024 6:24:19 AM PDT by SJackson

Reflections on the EU election.

This is perhaps nothing more than wishful thinking, but my sense is that in Europe, when it comes to Islam, things may just possibly be coming increasingly to a head. I suspect that the monstrous Hamas attacks of October 7 awakened the imaginations of millions of Europeans who, although on some level surely knowing better, had lulled themselves into passivity with the notion that those surly-looking Muslims living in their midst, some of whom occasionally spoke out loud about conquering Europe in the name of their prophet, couldn’t possibly mean what they said or be as dangerous as they looked. Surely, moreover, the far from peaceable pro-Hamas protests that have taken place every weekend in any number of major cities around Europe have impressed upon people who, until recently, had their heads firmly stuck in the sand, that over the last few decades they had imported into their countries huge numbers of people who not only loathed and looked down on them but who might very well be prepared, early on any given morning, to do to them more or less what Hamas did to innocent Israelis on October 7.

Which brings us to the recent elections for the European Parliament (EP). Now, the parliament itself, for all its air of self-importance, is a rather meaningless and impotent organ, a rubber-stamp legislature whose function within the European Union brings to mind the role of the Supreme Soviet back in the USSR. Traditionally, European citizens, recognizing its irrelevance, have tended not to bother voting in EP elections. Even this year, the voter turnout was nothing to write home about. Nonetheless, those people who did bother to cast their ballots produced a set of results that have caused an earthquake from one end of the continent to the other. The French President immediately called for new elections. The Belgian Prime Minister resigned, reportedly in tears.

In 2006, I published a book entitled While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. If I had written the book a couple of years later, I’d have omitted the word “radical” – and removed references within the text to “extreme Islam” and the like. Because in the meantime I had come to realize that Islam is Islam. So-called “radical Islam” isn’t some kind of aberration, some twisted deviation from the peaceful norm – it’s Islam itself, the Islam of the Koran, the Islam of the prophet. It’s what Islam looks like when it’s taken seriously and practiced by the book. In the nearly two decades since that book came out, I’ve been writing endlessly about the topic – and, along with fellow truth-tellers, being dismissed as a racist, a conspiracy theorist, an Islamophobe, and a subscriber to an apparently bizarre, far-out, cult-like set of ideas known as the “Eurabia theory.”

Our allies in the corridors of power have been thin on the ground. One of them has been the courageous Dutch politician Geert Wilders, whose Freedom Party, now the largest in the Netherlands, won big in the EP elections. Other European politicians have also sounded the alarm about Islam, but have been routinely isolated, suppressed, and demonized by the political and media establishment. No more. Jimmie Åkelsson’s Sweden Democrats, which has been vociferously critical of Islam and which was long depicted as the virtual equivalent of Nazis, are now the second largest party in the Swedish Riksdag. In France, Marine Le Pen has run for President three times, coming in third once and coming in second twice; in the recent EP elections, her party, the National Rally, crushed Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party, after which she told a gathering of supporters: “Give me one reason, only one, to keep on our territory foreigners who collaborate with a totalitarian ideology that wants the death of the French.”

Yes, Le Pen – like Wilders, and Åkelsson, and others – has made similar declarations in the past. But in the aftermath of the EP elections these words suddenly sound rather different. They feel as if they carry more weight. They sound, at long last, as if they’re being spoken from a place of potential power. No, gaining a bunch of seats in the EP isn’t the world’s largest electoral coup, but it certainly signals that the veteran Le Pen and 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, the charismatic president of National Rally, may well be on the verge of displacing Macron and the rest of the useless, wishy-washy French political establishment and actually being in a position to take France back. “We are ready to govern,” Bardella said in an interview on Tuesday, and when his interviewer replied with a typical reference to him and Le Pen as leaders of a “far right” that strikes fear into the hearts of millions of Frenchmen, Bardella didn’t even bother to dismiss that stupid label “far right”; all he said was: “Times have changed.”

And it looks as if they really have changed. Or are, at least, changing. I’ve previously mentioned that another of the parties that did well in the EP elections, the Alternative for Germany, has its ticklish aspects (to put it mildly), but the other day one of its leading members, Maximilian Krah, sounded for all the world like Justin Peterson, reminding us that, as Andrew Breitbart said, the political is always downstream from the cultural: “One in three young men in Germany has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them?…Don’t watch porn, don’t vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don’t believe you need to be nice and soft.” If Bardella didn’t bother to reject the term “far right,” Krah went so far as to embrace it: “Real men stand on the far right.” Some might read this as nothing less than a declaration of solidarity with neo-Nazis, but to me it sounds more like a tongue-in-cheek thumbing of the nose to mainstream journalists and politicians who reflexively use the term “far right” to label anyone to the left of Stalin. “Real men are patriots,” declared Krah. “That’s the way to find a girlfriend!” This kind of rhetoric might have sounded frightening if delivered by certain figures in the Germany of the 1930s, but today I read it, tentatively in any case, as a welcome corrective to the sort of political and social thinking that has bred a generation of cowardly soy boys who put on masks, pick up truncheons or other weapons, and, ganging up against helpless innocents, pretend to be fighting fascism.

These developments are happening, note well, at a time when challengers, Muslim and otherwise, to the European status quo are increasingly outspoken about their determination to conquer and increasingly violent – not just toward ordinary citizens but toward the previously immune people at the top. Last Friday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen suffered whiplash after a man approached her in a Copenhagen square and punched her in the arm. Yes, her assailant was Polish – an immigrant group that’s heavily represented in Western Europe these days, and known far more for being law-abiding and for being hard workers than for committing acts of violence. But, hey, it happened. And it’s the kind of thing that simply wouldn’t have happened in Denmark a couple of generations ago.

As the Guardian noted, this was the latest of many violent attacks on politicians in Europe: “In May, Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was shot and seriously injured. A German Social Democrat MEP was hit putting up posters in Dresden.” Two German politicians were also assaulted – one of them hit in the head, the other stabbed. Frederiksen’s comments on her own incident sounded naive. “I am so sad about this,” she said, “because we have always been so happy – and I think proud – of a country where the prime minister cycles to work.” Well, way back in 2004 – twenty years ago this coming November 2 – the filmmaker, columnist, TV personality, and all-around raconteur Theo van Gogh was cycling to work in Amsterdam when he was shot multiple times and then had his throat slit by a young Dutch-Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri, whose motive for this chilling act of butchery was that van Gogh, in collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, had made a short film critical of Islam’s treatment of women.

Van Gogh’s murder followed that of another Dutchman, Pim Fortuyn, who was killed on May 6, 2002, at a moment when he was on the verge of becoming his country’s prime minister. Fortuyn, a professor, sociologist, journalist, and old–school boulevardier, was an eloquent voice against the Islamization of Europe. He was gay, and, apropos of the Islamization of his country, famously commented: “I have no desire to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again.” The exciting prospect of his rise to power seemed to portend a remarkable new era in Europe – an era when political leaders, learning from Fortuyn, would dare to speak the truth fearlessly and act upon it responsibly. Then, all at once, he was dead – and the Dutch queen herself, to her everlasting disgrace, was obviously so worried about how Muslims might react that she avoided saying or doing anything of substance to express her respect or mourning. After that horror, it somehow took a very long time for the Dutch people to rally again, in significant numbers, behind a gutsy critic of Islam. But now, all these years after the martyrdom of Fortuyn and van Gogh, it’s finally looking as if, under Wilders, the promise they embodied may yet be fulfilled. Of course, some of us wonder whether it’s already far too late to speak seriously, as Le Pen does, of removing from Europe “foreigners who collaborate with a totalitarian ideology that wants the death” of the continent’s native inhabitants. But better to try than to surrender.


TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: elections; europe; farright; farrightwins

1 posted on 06/18/2024 6:24:19 AM PDT by SJackson
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To: dennisw; Cachelot; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Alouette; Optimist; weikel; Lent; GregB; ..
Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
2 posted on 06/18/2024 6:24:44 AM PDT by SJackson (The Pilgrims—Doing the jobs Native Americans wouldn’t do)
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To: SJackson

Maybe a fulfillment of the prophecy of Daniel, “They shalt not cleave one to another.”


3 posted on 06/18/2024 6:26:13 AM PDT by Jonty30 (He hunted a mammoth for me, just because I said I was hungry. He is such a good friend. )
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To: SJackson

Yet in their national elections, they vote for socialism.


4 posted on 06/18/2024 6:29:37 AM PDT by buckalfa (Gut feelings are your guardian angels)
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To: SJackson

France and UK are lost already.


5 posted on 06/18/2024 6:35:33 AM PDT by Uncle Miltie (Israel, in order: https://freerepublic.com/tag/unclemiltieadventure/index)
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To: SJackson

“those surly looking muslims”

In Jerusalem, muslims and Jews look about exactly the same, being from nearly identical genetic stock.

Except the Jews always look happy amd the muslims always look angry. That’s how you can immediately tell them apart. In my experience.


6 posted on 06/18/2024 6:38:43 AM PDT by Uncle Miltie (Israel, in order: https://freerepublic.com/tag/unclemiltieadventure/index)
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To: SJackson

Always astounding that an atheist left which mocks religion and hates Christianity,

Embraces and makes excuses for fanatical Islam, which despises women and homosexuals, and has a history of relentless violence.


7 posted on 06/18/2024 6:39:42 AM PDT by Williams (Stop Tolerating The Intolerant)
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To: Jonty30
To a degree, I believe you may be correct - the Man of Lawlessness is going to have his hands full even trying to rule over his own subjects - but, they've already got their new Tower of Babel



European Union poster for promoting membership in the EU


8 posted on 06/18/2024 6:45:04 AM PDT by SaveFerris (Luke 17:28 ... as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold ......)
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To: SJackson

Europe has been forever transformed. Between 1914-1945 there was the irreplaceable loss of the best genetic stock. After the war widespread birth control and abortion futher prevented any recovery of what was lost. The people themselves embraced epicureanism. The culture entered an era of post Christian neo pagan hedonism and decadence. Into this void came the confident, fervent Muslims. No elections will change what has happened and continues to happen. BTW twenty years aften 9/11, one out of eight residents of New york City is now a Muslim. Just the way it is. Political realities follow.


9 posted on 06/18/2024 6:48:06 AM PDT by allendale
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To: SJackson

Quotes from Greenfield:

In Luxor, Egypt, the terrorists danced, sang and killed and mutilated the foreign tourists. They “took all the young women, the girls, and disappeared with them. I don’t know where they went with the women, but they hurt them. We could hear screams of pain.” Among the dead was Shaunnah Turner, a 5-year-old British girl.

When a Muslim terrorist set off a bomb in Manchester at a concert full of children and teens, there was shock and outrage. Nails were pulled out of children’s faces.

When Muslims gang raped and sawed in half a Hindu schoolteacher in Kashmir, it was about India’s treatment of Muslims. And when they rampaged through the Bataclan theater in Paris, killing everyone within reach, they were protesting France’s treatment of ISIS. And when they rape a woman at a concert in Israel by the bodies of her murdered friends, they’re protesting for Gaza.

in 1929, Muslim mobs in the Jewish city of Safed burst into an orphanage and “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands.” During the Hebron Massacre that same year, a British policeman described how, “on hearing screams in a room I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child’s head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut, but on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed

When a Muslim chronicle boasted that during the genocide against the Sikhs in the 18th century, “the shrieks of the women captives who were being raped, deafened the ears of the people”, was this a response to globalism or Zionism? Or was this just Islam.

A Yazidi girl abducted by the Islamic State when she was only 12 described how the Jihadist who raped her explained to her that because she “practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it”. He “bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he knelt to pray again”. The girl begged him to stop, but he “said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to Allah.”

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has set off bombs in churches on Christmas. In 2015, a Muslim couple opened fire at a workplace Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, while a year later a Muslim terrorist drove through a Christmas market in Berlin and a 12-year-old Muslim boy tried to detonate a nail bomb at another Christmas market in Germany.

In Algeria, they beheaded Trappist monks while in Thailand, they beheaded Buddhist monks. In Boston, they blew the legs off marathon runners while in France they drove a truck through a crowd on Bastille Day until the wheel well filled up with body parts.

We must reject terms like “senseless violence” because there is nothing senseless about it. Our enemies know who they are and what they want. We refuse to understand who they are.

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2023/10/its-islam-stupid.html?m=1


10 posted on 06/18/2024 6:57:19 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
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To: SJackson
So-called “radical Islam” isn’t some kind of aberration, some twisted deviation from the peaceful norm – it’s Islam itself

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Islam is societal cancer. Always has been, always will be.

11 posted on 06/18/2024 7:06:19 AM PDT by Sicon ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - G. Orwell>)
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To: SJackson; All

Posts BUMP!


12 posted on 06/18/2024 7:22:05 AM PDT by PGalt (Past Peak Civilization?)
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