The slow-motion invasion of Europe continues apace and continues to make ground:
If we cared to look for the root cause of what’s happening in Europe — happening primarily without “violent extremism” — the answer is very simple: Islamist leaders have adopted a strategy of voluntary apartheid in their quest to Islamize the West.
The strategy has been championed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Its chief jurisprudent, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, urges Muslims to relocate to Europe, Australia, and North America. There, they should live among other Muslims, conduct their affairs in accordance with sharia (the law of Islam), and pressure Western governments to accept the primacy of sharia in Muslim enclaves — enclaves that will grow and spread and connect. By convincing “Western leaders and decision-makers of our right to live according to our faith — ideologically, legislatively, and ethically,” Qaradawi reasons that Muslims would “traverse an immense barrier in our quest for an Islamic state.”
…That is the plan, and it’s making extraordinary progress with a minimum of violent extremism. As Soeren Kern elaborates, in England Islamist organizations are now pressing to turn twelve British cities into Islamic emirates: autonomous Muslim enclaves governed by sharia law, independent of the national justice system. They call one proposed emirate “Londonistan” — surely not to honor Melanie Phillips, who wrote a book by that title, but confirming nevertheless the phenomenon she so brilliantly diagnosed. In these cities, non-Muslims are serially harassed, women are threatened (and worse) for failing to don the veil, and visiting officials such as former home secretary Jon Reid are heckled, “How dare you come to a Muslim area?”
In France, the government now posts on its official website the list of 751 Zones urbaines sensibles, the Muslim enclaves considered no-go zones. Non-Muslims are on notice: Enter at your own considerable risk. The police no longer go in. The nation no longer exercises sovereignty. The same pattern is seen in Brussels, Rome, Amsterdam, and the Ruhr: As the number of Muslims increases, so does the number of enclaves. The police will not enter without police escorts, which often means the police will not enter, period. As one police chief told the German press, the governments may deny it, but everyone knows these no-go zones exist, and “even worse, in these areas crimes no longer result in charges.” The Muslims are “left to themselves. Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture.”
The conquest, so far, is relatively bloodless, as these things go. That will change, though, if the Europeans decide to resist.
[Update a few minutes later]
On the other hand, is Islam as fragile as communism?
An index of Islam’s loss of faith is the unprecedented collapse of fertility in many Muslim countries, most notably Iran. The average Iranian has six siblings, but will have 1.5 children. The Persian nation will not survive this demographic collapse. There are seven working-age Iranians to care for each set of parents; in the next generation there will be one and a half. That is an impossible tax even for industrial nations whose per capita GDP exceeds $30,000, and an unimaginable problem for a country with a per capita GDP of only $6,000. Iran is going to die.
Why so few children? Just as Fr. Schall suggests, we will find when we poke through the rubble that Muslims are as rare in today’s Iran as Communists in the Russia of the 1980s. According to a BBC account Iran has the lowest mosque attendance of any Muslim country at just 2%.
The problem that the West confronts is not engagement with Islam, or reform of Islam, or democratization of Muslim countries, but the utter and final ruin of some of the most important Muslim nations. Turkey’s problems are just as severe: the fertility rate of native Turkish speakers is just 1.5, the same as Iran’s, while Kurdish fertility is around 4.5 — which means that the Kurds will comprise about half the country’s population a generation from now, in contrast to just under 20% today.
Much of the Muslim world remains rooted in traditional society, to be sure; 44% of Egyptians are illiterate and more than 90% of Egyptian women are subject to genital mutilation. But that model also has crashed and burned: a country immured in backwardness cannot survive in the globalized world. Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, and Chinese pigs will eat before the Egyptian poor.
The problem is that, as with communism, too many are willing to accept it as inevitable and accommodate it. Perhaps we need a new version of Reagan/Thatcher and their old strategy — we win, they lose.
Fairly typical pattern, repeated throughout recent history. It may also explain why each of these sought hegemony – it was do that, or become extinct.
As Bill Buckley used to love pointing out, the East Germans did not build the Berlin Wall to keep Westerners out. Similar situation with Iran today.
Within five years of Europe commencing a transition to more advanced energy sources beyond heavy dependence on fossil fuels, the Islamo-fascistic states will collapse (we will have already done so, but Europe buys their oil far more than we do). It will be a dangerous time – all cornered animals are dangerous – but it will pass.
That is why I am still an optimist. I owe that to my grandkids, unlike the greenie idiots. Fission, fusion, shale before that – we have a wealth of available energy sources. The only energy shortage we have is weak brainpower between the ears of statist politicos in the USA.
That, too, will pass; they also have low birthrates … 🙂
Another reason for Palin/West 2012.
Col. West is one of the few congress critters that understands the nature of Islam and is fully acquainted with its history going back more than 1000 years before this country was formed.
He’d also make a great attack dog for Palin. He’s got the balls to defend her.
He won’t pretend Islam is not intent on their purpose.
Rand: how many Muslims to you actually know, personally?
I know many, and most of those who moved to the West did so to get away from the living-in-the-past gang. The firmest resistance to ‘sharia’ will come from Muslims themselves.
This is the New Paranoia for the right – communism is dead, so we need a new enemy-to-fear.
The Islamic zone of nations is lagging seriously in economic development, and climate change is already hitting them especially hard. (That is the key aspect of the Arab Spring that no one is talking about – the role of prolonged drought in the stresses that initiated all these revolts.) They will be in no position to dictate terms, or conditions of living, to anyone else.
Rand: how many Muslims to you actually know, personally?
Several. I grew up in southeast Michigan. What is the point of your question?
I know many Marxists personally, too. That doesn’t change the fact that if their beliefs were fully implemented, it would be disastrous for the west.
Do you have anything to say about the subject at hand, or are you only interested in (irrelevantly) discussing my social circles?
There is, of course, danger in the great numbers of Muslims now in Europe, and it must be confronted forthrightly with courage and integrity. Having said that, there is also a great opportunity if the above is done.
@Kevin Greene,
And the firmest insistence on ‘sharia’ will come from
A) Episcopalians
B) Methodists
C) Hindus
D) Muslims
The correct answer is ‘D’. Without the massive influx of Muslims, sharia wouldn’t even be a notion, much less a suggestion, much less a demand.
It’s true that many Muslims moved to the West in an attempt to get away from Islamic law, but in 1300 years Muslims have never once succeeded at it. It follows them around like a stone around their necks. The immigrants’ children are still Muslims. They forget their parent’s complaints about their old country, find themselves strangers in their new country, and will eventually listen to imams who call for sharia.
I would wager that a hundred million people who lived under communism wouldn’t call a fear of communism “paranoia,” but clear-headed common se nse about one of the most monstrously oppressive and destructive social systems ever devised by man. Likewise, we have enough sense to think jumping back to the 7th century isn’t a good idea.
I suppose liberals are open minded enough to know that it’s primitive and racist to fear being ruled by a fundamentalist religion where women are beaten and gays, apostates, and infidels are executed. I just wonder how many times a liberal can stone an adulterer, an atheist, gay, Jew, or Hindu in the name of religious law before he realizes he might not be a liberal any more.
Kevin, you seem to be making the false and frankly obscene assumption that hating what is bad means hating people. I personally resent that greatly.
This is America. A country that has accepted people as people from where ever they come and with what ever they believe. In the past we expected those immigrants to accept certain common shared beliefs written in our founding documents. Sharia is the antithesis of these beliefs.
Islam has the goal of world domination (regardless of spin/taqiyya.)
Never will this country submit. We welcome Muslims or anyone else that share that commitment. Call me a racist and I will know you for an idiot.
“I know many, and most of those who moved to the West did so to get away from the living-in-the-past gang.”
That is true, and the American version of Islam is very different than Nigerian, Iranian, or Saudi Islam.
Interestingly enough one of the last times this topic came up we discovered the startling disparity between the number of christians and muslims emigrating to America from Arab countries. Christians make up a very small minority in Arab countries but they are the majority, or very close to it, of Arabs in America.
One of the nicest people I know is Muslim; she only eats Halal meat and would offer no resistance at all to Sharia. Anecdotes are not data and all that, but I doubt Muslims moving to the west would fight any harder against Islamification than Californians moving to Washington fought against Californication.