Vincent Cooper : Muslim Immigration and the Future of Europe: Where’s the Democracy?

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Muslim Immigration and the Future of Europe: Where’s the Democracy?

May 24, 2017 8:28 pm 

By Vincent Cooper

 

 MANCHESTER

The Canadian writer and broadcaster Mark Steyn asks a simple but fundamentally searching question about the problem of Islamic terrorism in Western society today, a question that few mainstream liberal politicians want even to acknowledge, let alone attempt to answer.
The simple question Steyn asks is: 

What’s the happy ending here?

In other words, Steyn is asking if Islamic terror in the West, and Europe in particular, is ever going to end and allow us to get back to normal living, to get back to those days when Islam didn’t dominate our news screens, back to those days when we weren’t threatened on our living-room TV screens with beheading if we did not show “respect”, or has Islamic terrorism now become a major and integral part of our Western way of life, just as it is in the Middle East and much of the Muslim world?

Throughout the Western world today, largely because of the post Second World War liberal consensus on Muslim immigration and growing Islamic terrorism on our streets, the West’s ruling liberal clerisy is under unprecedented pressure from an enraged public.

Witness the growing electoral strength of the anti Muslim-immigration AfD party in Germany; the growing strength of the Front National in France which, although losing to Mr Macron in the recent general election, has established Muslim immigration as an issue of serious voter concern, with the FN now a major force in French politics. Witness the growing strength of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, whose electoral support for a ban on Muslim immigration frightened the pro-immigration prime minister Mark Rutte into telling Muslims who don’t like “our values” to leave Holland. And, of course, the election of Donald Trump, whose victory over the bien pensant clerisy of America’s East and West coasts had much to do with ordinary voter concerns about security and Muslim immigration. And of Brexit, where the British people were deeply concerned about Angela Merkel’s almost unilateral open invitation to the world’s Muslims to come and settle in Europe.


The Western, but particularly the European political landscape is changing. It’s no longer simply the traditional Left/Right questions of economics that divide people, but something much more fundamental: the question of a Muslim threat to Europe’s historical identity as a Christian/secular culture. Islamic immigration is now a major defining feature of European politics.

Everyone can now see the literally bloody disastrous results of jihadist terrorism on their streets, results that far outstrip even the dire predictions of the clichéd British bogyman Enoch Powell (Powell predicted irrational inter-racial violence on Britain’s streets, not targeted and deliberate civilizational destruction).

European, American, Canadian and Australian peoples now see their towns, their cities, their airports, even their Christian churches and private homes turned into slaughtering dens by jihadi killers, many of them second and third generation “Westernised” Muslims who, according to that same Western liberal consensus, should today be fully-functioning secular Muslims enjoying the benefits of mini-skirted Muslim women and same-sex Muslim marriage.

Of course, that great liberal dream of a secularised “Western Islam” hasn’t worked out as the liberals hoped, and anyone who understood Islam always knew it never would.

Although much of the European Union political class simply will not admit it, a real inconvenient truth today is that Muslim immigration and Islamic terrorism are showing clear signs of fracturing Europe’s cultural identity. 

Conservative anti-immigration movements throughout Western Europe today blame not simply Muslim immigration, but Western liberalism itself for what they see as Western Europe’s political and cultural decay. Liberalism, many believe, has given Europe in particular a catastrophic and perhaps in the long term an unsolvable security problem, with jihadism now deeply embedded in Western European society.

France, for example, is still in security lockdown since the Paris 2015 gunning down of innocent teenagers and the Nice 2016 jihadi truck slaughter. Germany is in a similar state after the Munich jihadi truck attack. And now Stockholm, perhaps the most generous country to immigrants, has experienced its own truck jihad slaughter. As I write, the Louvre in Paris is under siege from an Islamic jihad attack, with much of the city’s transport closed down.

All of these jihadist outrages have in common a cowardly assault on innocent men, women and children in public areas going about their normal business. These innocents were targeted precisely because they were innocent, freedom-loving Western people, many of them so innocent in fact that they had supported the right of Muslim immigrants, including their killers, to come and live among them.

The truth is that we in the West today, but again particularly in Europe, have imported an existential threat to every basic value we hold dear.

The extraordinary truth is that today much of Continental Europe’s famed public culture of easy-going street life is now done only under armed police protection. Because of militant Islam, many people in Europe are now fearful of doing things that were once considered perfectly safe and normal, such as strolling carefree in their towns and cities, or women walking or travelling alone. In one report, a German train company, Mitteldeutsche Regiobahn, has introduced women-only carriages, apparently in response to the widely-reported Cologne sex-attacks by Muslim gangs.

These are enormous changes to our way of life in Europe today, brought about in many cases by jihadi killers in the Muslim immigrant community. In many parts of Europe, public street life is now so tense and threatening that it is dangerous to go out at night, as I personally experienced in the northern French towns of Amiens and Verdun on a First World War commemoration tour in 2015.

This, of course, is not what Muslim immigration was supposed to have been about. This was not how immigration was sold to us all those years ago, back in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, to a sceptical public that never wanted and never voted for large-scale immigration in the first place.

Europe’s public were always told, and still are told, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that Muslim immigration would enrich and enhance our Western way of life. Muslims, we were told, came to Europe because they valued our secular pluralist society. Be tolerant, said our European liberal class, and you will see that we are all one big happy multicultural family.

As is now patently obvious, that’s not how things have worked out, not by a long shot. Much of Western Europe’s public life today is effectively under armed guard, and all because of mass immigration and jihadist terror.

But it’s not simply, or even mainly, the past or present that is of most concern to Europeans now. It’s Europe’s future with continuing Muslim immigration and a growing Muslim population that is of most serious concern. What is Europe’s Muslim immigrant future to be like? Will there ever be an end to this Islamic violence in our European homeland?

This brings up Steyn’s simple question again: what’s the happy ending here? When is this terror threat going to end? The truck jihads, the machine-gunning of innocents, the knife attacks on police in their own homes and clergy saying Mass, the security lockdowns, the women only carriages and street police protection for what was once spontaneous free behaviour, is all this a temporary nightmare, or is this what Muslim immigration intrinsically means for Europe, a permanent terror threat that will intensify long into Europe’s future?

These are perfectly reasonable and important questions for any European to ask, and nobody should feel intimidated for asking them. Nor should anyone feel intimidated by truthful answers.

But that’s not what is happening. Western liberal political culture has effectively erected a language barrier that can criminalise honest criticism of Islam in the West today. The liberal class have appropriated the language of social justice, and any criticism of the West’s pro-Muslim immigration policies, any expressed concern about Muslim immigration and the future of Western culture is labelled “racist”, and has to break through the language barrier of liberal prejudice before even beginning to make a case.

For example, it is de rigueur for most mainstream politicians today to preface all debates about Islamic terrorism in Europe with the mantra “it has nothing to do with Islam”. Someone who may want to question that claim, or question its universality has first to prove he is not Islamophobic, something that is almost impossible to do in our liberal culture because, by definition, anyone who disagrees with the liberal claim is Islamophobic.

The fact is that the intellectually dishonest liberal/Left language barrier, where “Islamophobia” is plastered all over any reasonable criticism of Islam and Muslim immigration, makes it impossible to get an honest debate on the most urgent issues of our day: Muslim immigration, Muslim demographics and the future of Europe.

How has this intellectual dishonesty in debate come about?
The problem was always Western liberalism. Since the end of the Second World War, liberal Europe has experienced, largely because liberal Europe greatly encouraged, an immigration programme from the Muslim world the scale of which no other society in history has ever even contemplated.

Not coincidently, such an immigration programme fitted very well the new consensus among left-wing intellectuals that it was the non-white Third World native, not the now affluent and embourgeoised white industrial working class, that needed liberation from exploitative Western capitalists. Third World immigration to the welfare West was, and still is, seen as a moral crusade to “expropriate” the ill-gotten gains of the affluent West, a form of punishment and payback for years of supposed colonial exploitation.

Western Enlightenment teleological liberalism (a secular outgrowth of Christianity) has always had at its heart the assumption that the world’s civilizations are moving towards one goal: a universal Western secular culture. Third World Muslim immigration to the West was seen as part of the process that would bring about this universal goal.

Liberals simply assumed that Muslim immigrants to Europe would grasp at the chance to become freedom-loving secular liberals. They assumed that the sheer power of Europe’s traditional homogeneous secular culture would unify Muslim, Christian and secularist and eventually create a religion-free modus vivendi, turning Europe into a secular heaven on Earth, with eventually the whole world becoming an Enlightenment secular civilisation.

Alas, this liberal globalist dream, as Europe very much to its cost now knows, is over. Many of Europe’s Muslims, perhaps the vast majority of them, reject most, if not all of the West’s secular liberal programme. And who can blame them?

So too do many Westerners. The election of Donald Trump and the Brexit result are, to some degree, a rejection of what many see as a long-running Western liberal drift into anarchic, nihilistic secularism. In America and Britain, the blue-collar proletariat and much of the middle class have revolted, not just out of economic self-interest, but out of perfectly reasonable concerns about Islamic terror and the threat to Western values from relentless mass immigration.

But liberal Europe’s problems go way beyond the election of Donald Trump and Brexit. Europe now has a legacy of over fifty years of heavy Muslim immigration, and whether or not it is culturally or politically acceptable to say it, Europe now has a problem, not just with individual acts of Islamic terror, but, many would argue, with Islam itself, as even the former socialist President Hollande of France finally, after many years of denying it, admitted.

The fact is that the supposed unifying power of Europe’s traditional homogeneous culture has failed in its liberal-inspired historic task of creating a homogenised, secular modus vivendi out of Europe’s fractured mass-migrant culture. Europe today is dividing, not so much racially, but along cultural, or rather civilizational fault lines, and to any reasonable person the policy of unquestioned, never-ending large-scale Muslim immigration must now, surely, be questioned.


Yet amazingly, Europe’s liberal political class, and much of the media, are effectively in denial about the impact that Muslim immigration has had, and continues to have, on Europe’s culture and political stability.

Political correctness, misplaced sensitivity, but particularly fear, fear that speaking the truth might offend or could cause social unrest, have all combined to create throughout Europe an almost schizophrenic public mentality on anything to do with Islam. Many simply do not feel free to speak their mind on the dangers they see ahead for their continent.

The politicians say one thing, yet the ordinary people know it’s not true. There are two worlds in Europe today when it comes to Islam: one a fabrication of the liberal politicians and media, and one actually inhabited by ordinary people. 

The people want the truth, they want an honest debate about Islam and immigration, but suspect that the political class and the media are running scared of that debate.

In Britain, everyone knows that the press buckled under the threat of Islamic violence by refusing to publish the Muhammad cartoons. Whatever the security concerns may have been, the public can see that the press surrendered to threats, and now have little respect, particularly for the mainstream media.
Currently, many in the British media are furious at the British Government’s proposed press legislation, particularly section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. The Act will curtail the freedom of the press, they say. But of what use is this much-vaunted press freedom if the media do not have the courage to use and defend that freedom?

The fact is that much of the political class and the mainstream media simply do not speak freely and honestly about Islam, particularly about the religious and ideological source of jihadist terror and its threat to Europe’s future. As the political philosopher, John Gray — very much a traditional liberal — put it:

• Britain is a country “where a minority of fundamentalist Muslims that is estranged from whatever remains of a common culture, and which rejects the tacit norms of toleration that allow a civil society to reproduce itself peacefully, has effectively curbed freedom of expression about Islam in Britain today”. (Post–liberalism: studies in political thought)

Even after 9/11, when one might have expected a change of tack on Muslim immigration, liberals reiterated their absolutely unquestionable mantra: “Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam” (therefore we can continue with relentless Muslim immigration). Incredibly, instead of perhaps even a moratorium on further immigration after 9/11, many Western countries actually increased Muslim immigration.

Such a denial of common-sense public concerns about Islam and immigration — many would say a denial of reality — is surely perverse. “Islam is not the problem”, insists the West’s ruling liberal political class. “We will defeat the terrorists”, says Merkel and the other EU leaders. Jihadi terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, they insist, without even considering the possibility that they might be wrong, or that they may not understand the theology of Islam, and that the concerns of the ordinary man on the street might just have a point.

“It’s just a few bad men”, liberals insist after every jihadi act of terror, and we will “take them out”, they say. And when the bad men are “taken out”, we can all go back to peaceful living, go back to secularised Muslims and secularised Christians living together in a secular pluralist state where we can all walk the streets again without fear of a lorry being driven at us, without our children being knifed because they are wearing swimwear, or being blown to bits while innocently standing in an airport queue.

Such hopes about Europe’s multicultural, multi ethnic future are surely nothing more than that — hope. It’s a refusal even to consider the historical and contemporary facts about at least certain interpretations of Islam.

While the majority of Muslims are peaceable and law-abiding, what liberals refuse to acknowledge is what more and more ordinary people in the West now understand and see as militant Islam’s historical propensity to violent cultural assertiveness, Islam’s difficulty sharing space with non-Muslims, and the fact that Islam has bloody borders right around the world, even in countries that have nothing to do with the Middle East. Peaceable, law-abiding Muslims seem to have made little difference.

Of course, Islam is not the only religion to have a bloody history. However, as Samuel Huntington wrote in his prescient book The Clash of Civilizations:

• “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbours. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of late-twentieth-century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in inter-group violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming.” (The Clash of Civilizations page 256)

The evidence is indeed overwhelming, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Europe, with its large and growing Muslim population, will escape this bloody clash of civilizations. At the very least, on any rational assessment of Europe’s immigrant-based future, Huntington’s findings would surely be a consideration in all honest and serious political debate.

The London Underground bombings, the Madrid train bombings, the Brussels airport bombing, the Paris and Nice jihad slaughter, the Berlin truck rampage, the Stockholm truck rampage, German, Swedish and Danish knife and gun attacks, all pose a disturbing question, particularly for Europeans: is Europe, after over half a century of heavy Muslim immigration, now a new Islamic jihadi front? Is Europe now a permanent part of Islam’s violent perimeter?

These are disturbing but absolutely essential questions that people in a free society must feel free to ask. That Europe might now be facing a long-term terrorist future seems to have been confirmed by the former socialist French Prime Minister Manuel Valls who, ominously, told the French people after the Nice jihadi truck outrage to “learn to live with terrorism”.

Equally, London’s socialist Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan has said terrorist acts are “part and parcel” of city life today.

What Mr Valls and Mayor Khan failed to point out is that such despicable acts of terror did not happen before large-scale Muslim immigration.

Given the level of public concern about immigration, and given the possibility that the French Prime Minister was right and that Islamic terrorism will continue to be an integral part of European life, surely all debate about Europe’s future must now address the question of whether continued Muslim immigration is compatible with the survival of European culture and Europe’s long-term security. On any reasonable assessment of Europe’s predicament, Europe must now debate whether Western European states are now, in Samuel Huntington’s phrase, an integral part of Islam’s bloody borders.

Not everyone, of course, will be so pessimistic. For those of a more positive outlook, it could be argued that Europe’s security forces will manage to contain Islamic violence within certain “acceptable levels”, in Reginald Maudling’s phrase about IRA violence.

To that end, “learning to live with terrorism” might well be the only rational, long-term strategy our liberal political elite have to offer us. Under the protection of what might be some form of martial law, “normal” life could continue and Europe’s cultural values maintained.

But such a prospect, even if one were prepared to accept it, is surely wishful thinking. It is a common belief that sharia law, for example, is a product of Islamic fundamentalism. Defeat the fundamentalists, Western liberal governments say, and you nullify or defeat sharia. If you nullify sharia in Europe, then multicultural secular Europe will be at peace. A non-sharia Islam, or an Islam that dissolves on contact with Europe’s hedonistic and consumerist culture, seems to be the Western liberal’s idea of an ideal Westernised Islam.

The idea of a non-sharia Islam was, and still is, a common hope in Western liberal thought; but it is almost certainly a mistake. Sharia law is not a product of fundamentalism, but in fact is a product of ordinary mainstream Islam. The Irish writer, Conor Cruise O’Brien (another traditional liberal) has this to say on the attempt to distinguish fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Islam:

• “Fundamentalist Islam is a misnomer which dulls our perceptions in a dangerous way. It does so by implying that there is some other kind of Islam, which is well disposed to those who reject the Koran. There isn’t. Islam is a universalist, triumphalist and political religion. It claims de jure dominion over all humanity.” (Independent, Jan 5, 1995)

This was written in 1995, before large-scale Islamic terrorism in the West.
The fact is that Western consumerist materialist culture has not, as hoped, weaved its magic on Europe’s successive generations of Muslims. Today’s younger generation of European Muslims is even more committed to sharia than were earlier generations, an intriguing example of Islamic indigenization taking root, not in a Muslim country but right in the heart of secular/Christian Europe.

So, on any reasonable assessment, there will be no sharia-free Islam in Europe. Several opinion polls of Europe’s Muslims have shown large numbers to be strongly supportive of sharia law, and not just for Muslims, but for everyone. Many Muslims believe sharia should be the main legal source in their new European homeland.
A German government-funded study (WZB Berlin Social Science Centre) of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants in Europe found that 65 percent believed that sharia law is more important to them than the laws of the country in which they live.
In the Irish Republic, where Islam is now the fastest growing religion, 57% of Muslims, according to one poll, want the country ruled by sharia law. In Britain, according to some polls, 40% of Muslims support sharia law for the whole of the UK.
On that basis, it is perfectly reasonable to claim that, with an ever-growing Muslim population in Europe, by sheer demographic weight sharia law will gradually begin to elbow-out and replace traditional Western values over large areas of the Continent.
It’s already happening. Today in many European countries, the deliberate self-segregation of Muslims is gradually creating semi-Balkanised communities in many of Europe’s cities, where secular pluralist values are explicitly rejected and where deeply conservative, even illegal Muslim traditions are reinforced.
There are now in Britain’s heavily Muslim areas well-established sharia courts or “councils”, dispensing “justice” according to Islamic law, mainly in matters of marriage, inheritance and divorce. According to lawyer Aina Khan as reported in the Daily Telegraph of 2015, there are up to 100,000 sharia “marriages” in Britain, many of them polygamous.
These marriages are not recognised under UK law but, either out of indifference or liberal accommodation, or even out of a craven deference to Muslim demands, the authorities condone and encourage these polygamous relationships by tailoring welfare entitlements to the many vulnerable wives and children. The British taxpayer is effectively reinforcing the consolidation and spread of fundamentalist Muslim culture in Britain.

Germany has similar concerns, with the German courts regularly incorporating sharia principles into mainstream law, where polygamous marriages are recognised for all welfare entitlements, provided the “marriages” were legally performed in a Muslim country.

In France, Muslim demographics and violence are creating hardened separate cultural identities. Almost routine Muslim banlieue riots have turned large tracts of French cities into no-go areas, except for the riot police and fire-fighters to douse the torched cars.
And such rioting has little to do with the by now boring liberal excuse of social injustice or “Islamophobia”. As the writer, Andrew Hussey put it in his disturbing book The French Intifada, the Muslim banlieue gangs who rioted and torched cars in 2007 were shouting Na’al abouk La France — Fuck France: “the rioters, the wreckers, even the killers of the banlieues are not looking for reform — They are looking for revenge.”      
Clearly, many French Muslims do not want to live in French secular culture; they want to live as Muslims under sharia law, but in welfare France. 
And of course, such hardened separate identities are reinforced by continuing large-scale Muslim immigration from poor and traditional Muslim societies, with welfarism locking them into a state of permanent dependence and permanent grievance, with rioting as a way of extracting more money out of the state.

The ruling liberal establishment in the EU are in denial about the true significance of what is happening in many of Europe’s cities. 
They acknowledge there’s a problem, but with the usual platitudes deny it has anything to do with Muslim immigration and the self-segregation and cultural separateness favoured by many Muslims.
Again and again it’s the same old “social injustice” and “Islamophobia” story.
Invest more taxpayers’ money in Muslim communities and end Islamophobia, they say. Europeans must change their ways and pay more tax, then we will have an integrated, happy pluralist society.

For most ordinary people in Europe today this liberal explanatory model is little more than an insult to their intelligence. It simply does not account for what people see and experience in their own towns and cities across the European Continent.
It is now an observable fact that the appearance and atmosphere of many of Europe’s public spaces and city landscapes are becoming more and more Islamic, as anyone who has travelled round Western Europe in recent years will confirm, as will those who remember Paris and Lyon, and many German towns and cities from the 1960s. These enormous demographic and cultural changes to Europe’s cities have, for many Europeans, resulted in a strong sense of alienation from their own traditional European roots, an alienation they never wanted and never voted for. Hence the rise of anti-immigration right-wing and far-right parties.

And with growing Muslim immigration to Europe, such cultural changes are set to continue and deepen. Very likely, at some point in the future the adhan, or call to prayer, will almost certainly become a prominent feature of many European cities, and sharia dress code enforced (or advisable) in autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim areas. In time, more and more areas of many of Europe’s cities will look and sound Islamic.

Europe’s central and local governments will also, very likely, begin to reflect the changing demographics. Separate Muslim education (there will almost certainly, eventually, be a separate Muslim educational system, no matter what Europe’s governments say today) would very likely have a school curriculum catering exclusively for Muslim beliefs and values. How would such a Muslim curriculum teach World War Two and the Holocaust, for example? Or evolutionary science? With a growing Muslim demographic, Europe may well find it impossible to maintain the common assumptions that for centuries have underpinned the norms of Western education.

The Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha would also very likely become official holidays, street names may even change (as was actually recommended for France in a report commissioned by former Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault), and foreign policy, particularly on Israel, would almost certainly begin to reflect the new European Muslim dispensation.

Whether one welcomes these changes as part of an unstoppable evolution towards some ideal happy multicultural world of the future, or sees them as an extremely ominous development for Western culture and values, the fact surely needs to be publicly acknowledged, certainly as part of mainstream public debate, that Muslim immigration is radically changing Europe.

It has to be acknowledged that large-scale Muslim immigration does not add to what Europe already has, it changes what Europe has always been. More Muslim immigration means less Europe. That’s an empirical fact, and it’s a fact that the political class and the media need to be frank and honest about.

With continuing Muslim immigration, higher than average Muslim birth rates and below-replacement native European birth rates, by the sheer weight of demographic numbers a determined, hyper-identity political Islam is surely on course to turn many European cities semi-Islamic. Why would this not happen, if the demographics are there to support it? The burden of proof is surely now on those who would disagree.

To point all of this out is not necessarily to criticise Islam, and certainly not to pass judgment on all Muslims. But it is to say that Europe is experiencing by far the greatest change in its history, and that if Europe is democratic, then the European peoples should be consulted on these historic changes, and their views respected.

Yet amazingly, one of the most extraordinary facts about post-Second World War Western European democracies is that this democratic consultation on Muslim immigration did not happen. The European peoples have been systematically ignored and denied a democratic say on who, and how many, should be allowed to settle in Europe.

This extraordinary lack of democracy in the EU, including Britain, is captured by the American journalist Christopher Caldwell in his book: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, where he quotes a European cabinet minister on the subject of immigration to the EU:

•  “We live in a borderless world in which our new mission is defending the border not of our countries but (of) civility and human rights” (page 270).

New mission? Who sanctioned this “new mission”? Does this anonymous EU cabinet minister have a mandate to create a borderless Europe? Have the European peoples given him and his EU colleagues a mandate to globalise European culture?

Very unlikely, when you consider that, as Caldwell points out: “Only 19 percent of Europeans think immigration has been good for their countries” and “73 percent of French people think their country has too many immigrants, as do 69 percent of the British.”

Those statistics represent opinion in 2009. Today, with Europe experiencing perhaps the heaviest Muslim immigration in its history, a wide-ranging Chatham House survey of European opinion shows that eight out of ten European countries want an end specifically to Muslim immigration.

And yet European countries and the European Union continue to ignore public opinion on the issue. The EU’s ruling liberal class, from both Left and centre Right of the party-political spectrum, appear to believe that Third World immigration to the EU must happen, irrespective of the democratic will of the voters. It’s as if there were some historically determined imperative for Islam to come and settle in Europe. And to ensure that this moral imperative is carried through, to ensure that Islam comes to Europe, Muslim immigration is to be decided, not by the European voters, but only by the high priests of the bien pensant liberal class.

It was this high priest bien pensant class in the US and throughout much of the West that exploded in rage when Donald Trump, during his election campaign, first suggested that the American people — meaning the voters — should have a say in Muslim immigration to the United States. It wasn’t that liberal opinion simply disagreed with what Trump had said; it was that there should be no place, democratic or otherwise, for such an opinion. To question Muslim immigration to the West was to question the very direction of history itself.

The late Robert Bork, an American judge and conservative jurist, captured well the contempt that modern liberals have for popular democratic opinion:

• “Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will. The most important institutions for liberals’ purposes are the judiciary and the bureaucracies. The judiciary and the bureaucracies are staffed with (liberal) intellectuals—–and thus tend to share the views and accept the agendas of modern liberalism.” (Robert H, Bork Slouching Towards Gomorrah 1996 page 318) 

  
Many in the European Union power structure believe they should be insulated from public opinion on a large range of issues, particularly on globalisation and Third World Muslim immigration.
The West’s liberal class today believe that a normative liberal agenda of open borders and unlimited Third World immigration to the West should be the default, unquestionable position of the whole of Western society.
We saw this default position in operation when Angela Merkel, unilaterally, welcomed to Germany unlimited numbers of unassessed, mainly male Muslim migrants, and then sought to spread them around EU countries whose peoples had had no say in the matter.

By contrast, the American primaries and caucuses offer a much stronger sense of democratic accountability. At the recent US elections, the people of the United States were finally offered a voice on Muslim and Third World immigration, and they gave Donald Trump a democratic mandate to act. The vote for Trump was a vote to change direction and to at least begin to preserve what remains of America’s traditional Judeo-Christian core identity.

Because of Donald Trump, debating Muslim immigration is no longer a taboo subject in the US. Thanks to Donald Trump, Muslim immigration is now a central part of the national political debate.

No such debate has yet taken place among the ruling liberal class in Europe. Muslim immigration, in spite of widespread public concern and the rise of anti-immigration movements throughout the continent, is still a taboo subject among the mainstream political class and media. The majority of Europeans want an end to large-scale Third World immigration, yet the European Union continues to ignore this democratic voice.

The truth is that in Europe today, Third World and Muslim immigration are not subjects to be decided by democracy, therefore immigration policy continues as if 9/11 never happened, as if the London Underground bombings never happened, as if the Paris slaughter of well over 100 people never happened. The Nice truck attack that killed 87, the Madrid train bombings that killed almost 200 and injured 2,000, relentless Muslim immigration continues as if they had never happened.
Europe today desperately needs its Donald Trump.


https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/05/muslim-immigration-and-the-future-of-europe-wheres-the-democracy
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Muslims Have Greater Religious Freedom than Christians in Europe, Says Anti-Discrimination Chief

Muslims Have Greater Religious Freedom than Christians in Europe, Says Anti-Discrimination Chief

In Europe, Muslims have greater freedom to follow their faith than Christians do, the head of an anti-discrimination group has said.

Martin Kugler, Austrian historian and founder of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, said Christians were being marginalised on the continent while Muslims are treated much more carefully.
Speaking to ACI Prensa, the Spanish edition of the Catholic News Agency, Mr. Kugler accused Europe’s elites of pressuring Christians into hiding their faith while permitting Muslims to display theirs.

Europe has witnessed a secularist offensive, he added, but politicians have different criteria in dealing with Christians and Muslims, permitting the Islamic veil while trying to removing crosses from public places.

He cited the example of air hostesses and nurses disciplined, or sometimes even fired, for wearing small crosses, or attempts to remove nativity scenes from public places.

“The justification is separation between church and state, but in my opinion this is no more than an excuse. What European radical secularism is trying to do, in the name of tolerance and neutrality in the public square, is impose an ideology that means the expulsion of Christians from public life.”

Mr. Kugler also pointed to the rise of Islam in Europe driven by demographic change, saying it is a “great challenge” for Christian culture, but adding: “I think aggressive secularism is more dangerous for European Christians.”

“If Christians had the freedom to follow their conscience, with their schools and their rights, it would be much easier for them to confront the rise of Muslim culture.”

He referred to the words of German Chancellor Angela Merkel who said: “We do not need less Islam, we need more Christianity.”
“It is interesting that Angela Merkel made this statement, because she is not a very observant Christian,” he added.
It is also necessary for Christians to have better knowledge of their own faith if they are to have any hope of protecting it.
“Many German Christians do not know to explain the message of the bible to Muslims, or the significance of Christian celebrations such as Easter. They do not know how to explain Church teaching. There is a lack of formation and bravery on the part of European Christians.”

“Many Christian citizens, or ‘conservatives’, behave like an ‘angry majority’ instead of acting like a ‘creative minority’, forgetting that practising Christians in Europe are already a minority.”

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/04/05/muslims-greater-religious-freedom-christians-europe-says-anti-discrimination-chief/
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Italian Officials Call For Investigation Of Soros-Supported NGO Migrant Fleet

by Tyler Durden

Authored by William Craddick via Disobedient Media,

Italian authorities are calling for monitoring of the funding of an NGO fleet bussing migrants into the EU from the North African coast after a report released the European Border and Coast Guard Agency has determined that the members of the fleet are acting as accomplices to people smugglers and directly contributing to the risk of death migrants face when attempting to enter the EU.
The report from regulatory agency Frontex suggests that NGOs sponsoring  ships in the fleet are now acting as veritable accomplices to people smugglers due to their service which, in effect, provides a reliable shuttle service for migrants from North Africa to Italy. The fleet lowers smugglers' costs, as it all but eliminates the need to procure seaworthy vessels capable making a full voyage across the Mediterranean to the European coastline. Traffickers are also able to operate with much less risk of arrest by European law enforcement officers. Frontex specifically noted that traffickers have intentionally sought to alter their strategy, sending their vessels to ships run by the NGO fleet rather than the Italian and EU military.
On March 25th, 2017, Italian news source Il Giornale carried remarks from Carmelo Zuccaro, the chief prosecutor of Catania (Sicily) calling for monitoring of the funding behind the NGO groups engaged in operating the migrant fleet. He stated that "the facilitation of illegal immigration is a punishable offense regardless of the intention.” While it is not a crime to enter the waters of a foreign country and pick them migrants, NGOs are supposed to land them at the nearest port of call, which would have been somewhere along the North African coast instead of in Italy. The chief prosecutor also noted that Italy is investigating Islamic radicalization occurring in prisons and camps where immigrants are hired off the books.
Italy has for some months been reeling under the pressure of massive numbers of migrants who have been moving from North Africa into the southern states of the European Union. In December 2016, The Express cited comments made by Virginia Raggi, the mayor of Vatican City, stating that Rome was on the verge of a "war" between migrants and poor Italians. The wave of migrants has also caused issues in southern Italy, where the Sicilian Cosa Nostra has declared a "war on migrants" last year amid reports that the Italian mafia had begun fighting with North African crime gangs who entered the EU among migrant populations.

In February 2016, Disobedient Media published research indicating that multiple ships operating in the fleet mentioned by Frontex are sponsored by NGO groups with financial ties to organizations run by George Soros and donors to Hillary Clinton.
Reports have also emerged citing a study by counter-extremism group Quilliam which states that ISIS now controls the human trafficking scene in North Africa and is actively recruiting from the migrant population. In addition to acting as de facto accomplices of human traffickers, the NGO's criticized by Frontex may also be contributing to the worsening terror situation in Europe though their actions.


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-27/italian-officials-call-investigation-george-soros-supported-ngo-migrant-fleet
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December 2011, Pages 34-35

Special Report

The Political Uses of Islamophobia in Europe

By John Gee

Members of the right-wing English Defense League listen to founder Stephen Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) during a Feb. 5, 2011 rally in Luton, a working-class town north of London with a history of racial tension. Orthodox Rabbi Nachum Shifren also spoke at the rally. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

For half a century after the end of the Second World War, the far right in Europe was typically anti-Semitic and worshipful of the Third Reich. Realizing that their association with Nazism alienated the vast majority of the public, those who ran for office tried to distance themselves from it to some extent, but rarely succeeded for long. They seemed to find it impossible to avoid letting slip their real views, giving Nazi salutes and selling anti-Semitic writings by individuals whose pro-Nazi sympathies were well known.

Those groups still exist, but they have been partially displaced on the extreme edges of European politics by organizations that have made Islam the primary object of their hatred. In some cases, this may be tactical: the British National Party, for example, has concentrated on campaigning against the Muslim presence in Britain in the past decade, but among its core leaders are men with a track record of anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi sympathies. In others, the focus on Islam is genuine: they don't have a secret agenda—or at least, not a neo-Nazi one.

As a result, they have been able to capitalize on the fears of some sectors of the public concerning Islam and migrants from Muslim countries in ways that the old far-right organizations could not. Inflammatory language and the blanket labeling of an entire religious group comprising people of widely varied national origins, values, and degrees of religious practice was acceptable in a way that similar expressions of hostility toward Jewish, Asian or Black people would not be.

It has to be said that Muslim extremism is not merely a figment of their imagination, as it has brought death and suffering to many people. But to project the values of a small segment of the world's Muslims onto all has no justification in the beliefs and conduct of the vast majority of Islam's adherents. Political leaders and opinion-makers have played upon and amplified real anxieties felt in some non-Muslim communities as a way to build political support.

In Britain, the English Defense League (EDL) was launched in May 2009, shortly after eight Muslim extremists stood shouting abuse during a march past them by the Royal Anglian Regiment, returning from service in Afghanistan. Although it presented itself as a movement of "ordinary people," the EDL relied heavily on football hooligans for support, and, as its leadership became better known, it emerged that some of them had been activists with far-right organizations. It received favorable publicity from the tabloid Daily Star and financial support from Alan Lake, a North London businessman. Lake also helped the EDL to build up international contacts. These include the Sweden Democrats, Pastor Terry Jones, who attracted publicity with his threat to burn Qur'ans, and Pam Geller, director of Stop Islamization of America. (EDL members attended Geller's September 2010 protest against the establishment of an Islamic Center near the site of the World Trade Center.)

Lake arranged for Nachum Shifren, an Orthodox rabbi, to speak at an EDL rally in Luton on Feb. 5, 2011. Referring to Muslims as "dogs," the rabbi said: "History will be recorded that on this day, read by our children for eternity, one group lit the spark to liberate us from the oppressors of our two governments and the leftist, fifth column, quisling press, and that it was the EDL which started the liberation of England from evil." Shifren emigrated from the USA to Israel in 1977, served in the Israeli army, and, while studying, lived in the Kfar Tepuah settlement in the West Bank, later returning to California and standing as a Republican candidate for the state senate in 2010.

In the Netherlands, Islamophobia was made respectable by the 2002 electoral success of Pim Fortuyn. A former leftist and openly gay, Fortuyn always rejected any association with the established parties of the European far right—which meant that when he referred to Islam as "a backward culture" and sounded the alarm over the alleged danger posed by Muslim immigration, he was not hindered in putting his message over by Nazi baggage. With the Liveable Rotterdam party, he won 36 percent of the seats in the formerly staunchly socialist city. He formed a new party, the List Pim Fortuyn, which won 26 parliamentary seats in the 2002 general election, helped rather than hindered by Fortuyn's assassination during the campaign. It was very much a personal vehicle, however, and lost its last parliamentary seats in 2006.

Geert Wilders has stepped into Fortuyn's shoes. Unlike Fortuyn, Wilders' background was conservative and he was a member of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy until 2004, when he fell out with it over Turkey's efforts to join the European Union. This was a rallying point for Islamophobes across Europe. Wilders wanted the Turkish application to be rejected, not negotiated. He established the Freedom Party, now the third largest in the Dutch parliament.

Wilders claims that Islam is a fascist ideology and compares the Qur'an to Hitler's Mein Kampf; in this he is more strident and extreme than Fortuyn. He was reportedly influenced as a young man by his travels in Israel and the neighboring Arab states.

Indeed, Wilders is strongly supportive of Zionism of a far-right variety. In December 2008, he participated in the "Facing Jihad" conference in Jerusalem, organized by National Union Knesset member Aryeh Eldad. Eldad, whose party favors the expulsion of all Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory, said that the conference was "to plan practical steps in the struggle against the spread of Islam in Europe." Eldad told theJerusalem Post that the Arab-Israeli conflict was between Islam and Western civilization, not a dispute over territory.

So rabid was Wilders' contribution that fellow participant Daniel Pipes was moved to challenge him on his assertion that there was no such thing as "moderate Islam" and on his rejection of the Qur'an in its entirety. (Other conference participants included Itamar Marcus, of the highly selective Palestinian Media Watch, and Robert Spencer, director of the U.S.-based Jihad Watch.) Wilders' anti-Islam film, "Fitna," was shown.

Prior to the conference, Wilders told an audience at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, "We are organizing this event in Israel to emphasize the fact that we are all in the same boat together." In December 2010, Wilders met in Jerusalem with Avigdor Lieber, the Israeli interior minister and leader of the Russian immigrant-based far-right party, Yisrael Beitenu. Wilders was a member of the Swiss-based European Freedom Alliance delegation to Israel that also included two members of the European Parliament from the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), two members of Flemish Interest (VB), based in the Flemish part of Belgium, and an MP from the Sweden Democrats.

The mindset of these organizations and individuals was reflected in the manifesto issued by Anders Breivik, who murdered 76 people in Norway on July 22. They all rushed to dissociate themselves from Breivik's actions, but he had drawn inspiration and justification for what he did from their writings—just as Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, drew encouragement from the violent incitement of the Israeli right and the settler leadership, which also tried to distance itself from the consequences of their words. Without themselves laying hands on guns or explosives, they created an atmosphere in which individuals such as Breivik and Amir could muster a sense of self-righteous legitimacy that left them feeling entitled and impelled to kill.

Nowhere in Europe do Islamophobic parties and movements have majority support, but they have managed to achieve electoral gains in some countries and have broken to some extent with the obsessions of the post-World War II extreme right that contributed greatly to its relative political isolation. Typically, they cherry pick the liberal and leftist values that they reject for elements that can serve them: claiming to oppose "Islamization" because it would mean the oppression of women, the persecution of gay people and the suppression of democratic liberties, and comparing Islam to Nazism and fascism. They should be seen instead as playing a complementary role to the Muslim extremists they denounce: each feeds upon the rage and inflammatory words and deeds of the other. Especially in these times of economic woe, people who want a decent society must take a stand and reject demonization of any community on the basis of its religion, as well as nationality or color.

Marriage of Convenience?

Trips to Israel by right-wing politicians have been used by them to shrug off the taint of anti-Semitism and fascism. Alessandra Mussolini visited shortly before launching her own political career. The Italian Social Movement (MSI) was founded by Giorgio Almirante, a former member of Benito Mussolini's Nazi puppet regime, the Social Republic, after the Second World War, but his successor, Gianfranco Fini, re-established it in 1995 as the National Alliance. He visited Israel in November 2003 as Italy's deputy prime minister. Israeli radio commented that Fini believed that the road to the Italian premiership passes through Jerusalem. In 2008, Fini came in for a torrent of criticism after he said on a talk show that the burning of Israeli flags by left-wing protesters on May 1st was "much more serious" than the brutal beating in Verona the same day of 29-year-old Nicola Tommasoli by neo-Nazis. Tommasoli later died of his injuries.

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John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore, and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.

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Destruction of Spain’s Economy Duplicates Greece

Destruction of Spain’s Economy Duplicates Greece

by Jeff Nielson

April 5, 2012

More than two years ago I began warning readers of the most heinous acts of fraud ever perpetrated by the Western banking crime syndicate, which I dubbed "economic terrorism". These swindles involved nothing less than the destruction of entire European economies, solely so that the banksters could profit on approximately $100 trillion in bets they had placed on the debts of these economies.

The mechanics of this economic rape have been explained many times in the past.  First of all the bankers duped governments and institutions all over the Western world into placing trillions of dollars (and/or euros) in bets that interest rates were about to soar higher – just before they crashed interest rates to the lowest levels in history. This swindle is known as "interest rate swaps".

The second (and even more destructive) form of fraud perpetrated against these governments didn’t even require their participation – merely their naïve acquiescence. The bankers began placing huge bets (totaling at least $60 trillion) that these nations would default, and then had the audacity to call these bets "insurance" (credit default swaps). Note that such "insurance" had been banned in the U.S. for more than half a century – based upon anti-gambling statutes.

Here is the question which these banksters would never answer: how does a third party placing bets on whether someone’s home would burn down provide any "insurance" to the owner of the home? The answer of course is that it doesn’t. What it did do, however, was to create a $60 trillion motive for "arson".

This is precisely what we have we have seen. After the banksters (primarily based in Wall Street) got assorted chumps to take the wrong side of this $60 trillion, unregulated mountain of bets – betting that these Euro governments would not default – they then began to systematically burn-down the economies of Europe one by one.

I have explained this process several times in the past already, so those readers new to this will have to refer to my previous work. In a nutshell, the Wall Street terrorists can manipulate the interest rates of these nations to (literally) any number they choose via the fraudulent manipulation of the credit default swaps market. I warned readers that this made Greek default inevitable, since if interest rates can be manipulated to any level then any nation can be bankrupted on its debt.

This is exactly what took place with the destruction of Greece’s economy. Each time that Greece’s government served the bankers by announcing a new round of "austerity", the terrorists would immediately drive-up the interest rates on Greece’s debt so much higher that every dollar of budget-cutting was consumed in higher interest payments…plus a little bit more.

The result was that instead of austerity improving the solvency of Greece’s economy, the Wall Street terrorists always ensured that its economy was worse off after each new round of budget cuts – immediately creating even more pressure for even more austerity. It was nothing but a totally masochistic vicious circle. At one point the banksters had manipulated Greek interest rates more than 50 times higher than those of the U.S. – despite the fact that (as I have explained previously) the U.S. economy is even more fundamentally insolvent than that of Greece.

Now the terrorists have targeted Spain.

What we see taking place in Spain today is an exact, carbon-copy of what we saw in Greece. On the one hand, we have a traitor-government willingly imposing round after round of Friedman Austerity on its own people – despite the utter futility of such sadistic budget-cutting. On the other hand we have the banking crime syndicate (with the gleeful assistance of Big Media) relentlessly driving interest rates on Spain’s debt ever higher, clawing back every penny of that austerity in interest payments to the Bond Parasites.

Said Spain’s Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy:

"Spain is facing an economic situation of extreme difficulty, I repeat of extreme difficulty, and anyone who doesn’t understand that is fooling themselves…the alternative is infinitely worse."

Congratulations Chicken Little! Rajoy succeeded in convincing his people that the sky is falling. Unfortunately, what he forgot to tell them was that the budget-cuts he’s imposing have absolutely zero chance of improving things for his own people, while only engorging the Bond Parasites. Already Spain’s government is budgeting €29 billion this year for interest payments alone, roughly 30% more than one year ago – while imposing savage budget-cuts on his own people.

At the same time, Rajoy then increased upward pressure on the country’s budget deficit by announcing "amnesty" for the nation’s tax-cheats. Milton Friedman must be smiling from Hell. The wealthy get the "carrot" in Spanish austerity, while the Little People get only the "stick" – exactly as occurred in Greece. Even worse, having granted amnesty to tax-cheats once, this creates massive incentive/reward for future tax evasion – guaranteeing that government tax revenues will plummet lower, and the deficit will soar higher.

As for Rajoy’s threat/warning to his own people that "the alternative is infinitely worse", Spain’s official (i.e. phony) unemployment rate has already reached 24%, even higher than in Greece and the highest in Europe – while he rewards tax-cheats and whacks his own people with more than €27 billion in new budget-cuts. I would suggest that nothing could be infinitely worse than that.

Meanwhile (exactly as occurred in Greece), immediately after this new "austerity" is announced, Bloomberg and the Wall Street terrorists are busily at work manipulating Spain’s interest rates much, much higher – their reward for the budget cuts just announced by their amigo, Rajoy.

Here is Bloomberg’s salvo just for today:

…Spanish borrowing costs have been going up since Rajoy announced on March 2 that his government wouldn’t comply with the deficit target the previous administration had set with the European Union…The country hasn’t met the EU’s 3 percent [of GDP] deficit ceiling  since 2007, and the government forecasts debt to reach 79.8 percent of GDP, the highest in more than three decades.

What the propagandists of Bloomberg fail to include in their "analysis" (for context) is the fact that the U.S. is currently running budget deficits equal to roughly 10% of GDP. And its $14+ trillion national debt is already 100% of GDP. Yet we have Bloomberg explaining to its readers "why" Spain’s interest rates should continue going higher – even though they are already several multiples of U.S. interest rates.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg  (and the bankers themselves) considers it totally appropriate for interest rates on U.S. debt to be at the lowest levels in history, despite the U.S. having the largest deficits and debts in the history of the world (even without including the $100+ trillion in "unfunded liabilities", which it excludes from any/all official calculations).

Obviously when the biggest sovereign deadbeat in the history of the world enjoys the lowest interest rates on its own debt in history (see "Maximum Fraud in U.S. Treasuries Market"), while lesser debtors see their own interest rates (and interest payments) ratcheted-up inexorably higher this is empirical proof of the fraudulent manipulation of our debt-markets – wholly deserving of the label "economic terrorism".

If it isn’t bad enough already that individual European governments are willingly facilitating the economic rape of their own nations, we see/hear increasing talk of these traitor-governments creating a "Euro bond": one bond for all of Europe, and thus one debt market for all of Europe. Should the bankers be able to persuade (and/or blackmail) their political lackeys into embarking upon this act of collective, economic suicide; the Wall Street terrorists would then be able to do simultaneously (to all of Europe) what they currently have to perpetrate against these nations one at a time.

While obviously it is primarily the peoples of Europe who should be demanding the immediate, unilateral repudiation of all credit default swap contracts relating to their own markets, we see absolutely no indications of awareness among their own populations about what is really taking place. Consequently, people in North America should also be very, very concerned – and actively lobbying to remove the political stooges who permit such crimes-against-humanity.

For the question we should all be asking ourselves is this: once the Wall Street terrorists have finished laying waste to the economies of their friends in Europe, whose debt markets do you think they are going to destroy next?

Sarkozy accused of using ‘extras’ to pose as supporters

Henry Samuel – Telegraph.co.uk January 3, 2012

 

The accusations against the French president come ahead of elections he is polled to lose.

Mr Sarkozy, 57, received a warm response from workers when he visited the social housing construction site in Mennecy, Essonne, near Paris on Thursday.

However, yesterday it was claimed that half the crowd of “workers” who braved the cold to meet the President had been specially drafted in for the occasion and had nothing to do with the building work.

“I only recognised two or three but I didn’t know the others,” Ambroise, one bona fide bricklayer told Europe 1 radio.

“They wanted more people around Nicolas Sarkozy,” he said, adding that there were twice as many workers than usual.

Bosses on sites from other locations had ordered staff to attend. They were then told to “pretend to work in front of the press,” he said.

In theory, none of them should have been working due to the unusually cold weather, and the place was deserted shortly after Mr Sarkozy’s departure.

“It’s total nonsense, it’s ludicrous,” said the Elysée.

Management of the construction company in charge of the site “categorically denied” any stage-management, saying “only the 67 workers working daily on the site, were present, as well as support staff.”

But a spokesman for the opposition Socialists slammed the visit. “If correct, this episode says a lot about the relationship with the truth the outgoing president keeps with the French,” said Claude Bartolone.

“It is proof of his taste for permanent trickery.”

The far-Right National Front wrote: “The workers are abandoning him, extras will have to do.”

The controversy could not have come at a worse time for Mr Sarkozy, a day after an Ifop poll placed him behind Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, in voting intentions among France’s active workforce.

Miss Le Pen stood to win 24 per cent of the vote, with Mr Sarkozy on 18 per cent.

François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, was in first place with 27 per cent.

Mr Sarkozy is still tipped to reach round two in nationwide polls.

This is not the first time the French president has been accused of stage-managing visits. In September 2009, factory workers at the Faurecia auto parts company in Normandy said they had been hand-picked to appear alongside the diminutive leader because they were short.

The Elysée dismissed the reports as “grotesque and absurd”, despite the fact that staff confirmed they had been selected because they were “no bigger than the President”.

Muslim immigrants want Switzerland to change national flag

A group of Muslim immigrants wants to force Switzerland to abandon the current flag - a white cross on the red background. They say that it violates the rights of the representatives of non-Christian confessions. They seem to have been hurt by the recent ban on minarets construction. However, their proposal is unlikely to be welcomed by the native Swiss and will only increase the number of votes in favor of the treasury of the local far-right People's Party.
   


The first suggestion to remove the cross from the Swiss flag was made not by a Muslim, but (judging by the name) an ethnic Croat and Catholic vice-president of the association of immigrants Secondos Plus Ivica Petrushich. "The cross does not fit today's multicultural Switzerland," he said. The organization of the Turkish, Albanian and other immigrants from Muslim countries followed with a similar initiative. Instead, they suggested using a green-yellow-red flag of Helvetic Republic that existed at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. It has no cross on it.

It is hardly coincidental that the issue of replacing the flag was raised by the representatives of immigrant organizations. Today, over 20 percent of seven million-strong Swiss population is immigrants. Naturally, the Muslims will be more than others insistent on replacing the flag. There are nearly 400,000 of them (more than five percent of the population). The largest "ethnic Muslim" community is Albanian, followed by the Turkish one. Arabs and Bosnian Muslims also reside in Switzerland. Many of them certainly do not like the cross.

The vast majority of Swiss Muslims virtually broke off with the religion of their ancestors. No more than 50 thousand of the faithful pray five times a day. However, women in headscarves have become an integral part of the cityscape of Zurich or Geneva. Furthermore, the birthrate in religious Muslim families is much higher than among the other population. Finally, all Swiss followers of Islam are not natives, but immigrants and their descendants. Their support of changing the appearance of the flag is, to say the least, ambiguous.


Apparently, this circumstance was taken into account by the head of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Switzerland Mayzar Hisham, who called the idea of ​​changing the flag "counterproductive." He said that they did not demand anyone to change the ancient traditions of their countries. It is hard not to agree with his words. The relations of the indigenous Swiss and immigrants have already passed a difficult strength test. The desire to change the flag will only add fuel to the fire.
Two years ago the Muslim community wanted to attach minarets to the existing mosques. However, Switzerland is different from all other countries in a way that each more or less relevant issue is solved by holding a referendum. Negotiations with the government officials were not sufficient, and they had to ask the opinion of the population. This opinion was not in favor of the Muslim immigrants.

The initiator of the referendum two years ago was the ultra-right Swiss People's Party that called to stop the "creeping Islamization". A deputy of the Swiss Parliament Ulrich Shlyuer said that minarets were a political symbol of the implementation of Islam. Step by step, Sharia was conquering Switzerland, acting in parallel with the Swiss law. Statistics show that the degree of religiosity of the local Muslim population is exaggerated, but for the ordinary Swiss even a hint of a violation of their habitual way of living was sufficient.



The results of voting on November 29, 2009 shocked Europe. 57.5 percent of the Swiss population was in favor of a ban on construction of minarets. At the same time kosher and halal slaughter of animals was banned (because of cruelty). Islamic organizations, human rights activists, and many European politicians expressed their outrage. However, the law came into force. The EU could not influence Switzerland as it is not its member.
 
Many of those dissatisfied with the verdict (including indigenous Europeans who had departed from the religion) were eager for revenge, and eventually decided to strike from the other side. They inquired why the flag of the Swiss Confederation had a Christian cross on it if construction of minarets was banned. Allegedly, it violated the rights of not only Muslims but also non-believers. That is why the red-green-yellow flag of the Helvetic Republic would be better.

Would the majority of the Swiss agree with this point of view?

Unlike neighboring France and Germany, the Swiss society is rather conservative. While there is no case of absolute religiousness of the Swiss society, the number of believers in Switzerland is higher than in the neighboring countries. This can be partially explained by a high proportion of rural population scattered along numerous mountain valleys in 20 cantons and six half-cantons of the country. Approximately half of the indigenous Swiss are Catholics; a little fewer are Protestant Calvinists. The cross on the flag is something that unites the country, and does not divide it.


As for the flag, the current symbol was first used in Switzerland in 1339, when the union of separate cantons just started to take shape. It achieved its official status in 1848, when the last standoff on this land ended, crowned with a robust Swiss Confederation. To some extent, it is a symbol of freedom and peace, a path to which took many centuries and numerous wars. 
The Helvetic Republic, whose flag is offered instead of the current one, is not particularly respected by the Swiss. It was created by Napoleon who occupied the country and decided to build entities supervised by the French on its territory. For the free-spirited Swiss this flag is a symbol of oppression.

Not to mention the fact that the combination of green, red and yellow colors is characteristic mainly of African countries. In Europe, only Lithuania has a similar flag.
 
Do the immigrants have a right to teach the Swiss tolerance? For over 160 years there has been no bloodshed on this territory. This is all the more surprising considering that the country is multinational. Nearly three-quarters of the indigenous Swiss speak German, one-fifth speaks French, five or six percent speak Italian, and a little less than one percent - the Romansh language. All these languages ​​have the official status, but there is one dominant language group in each canton (with rare exceptions). They managed to combine small mono-national "houses" with a multinational one. The country is not threated by a collapse.
 
Encroaching on the foundation of the state, immigrants cause a reaction from the German Swiss, French Swiss and Italian Swiss.  

Ultra People's Party is gaining popularity among all of them. Its symbol is three white sheep (the number of the top three language groups), kicking the fourth, black one. This is a clear hint to what should be done with immigrants. Four years ago, the party secured 29 percent of the Swiss votes, and it was a shock to Europe. In the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 23, the result may be even higher.



As is evident from the story with the restrictions on ritual slaughter of animals and minarets construction, the Swiss are not afraid to challenge the infamous political correctness. A ban on wearing the veil is to follow. The more you attempt to encroach on the foundation of the Swiss state, the stronger will be the response. It took Switzerland and its people too long to achieve stability and peace of mind to just give up on their values.


Vadim Trukhachev


Pravda.Ru