"Islam and the West at War" - NY Times

Islam and the West at War

By: Roger Cohen – Feb. 16, 2015

After a Danish movie director at a seminar on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” and a Danish Jew guarding a synagogue were shot dead in Copenhagen, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the prime minister of Denmark, uttered a familiar trope:

“We are not in the middle of a battle between Islam and the West. It’s not a battle between Muslims and non-Muslims. It’s a battle between values based on the freedom of the individual and a dark ideology.”

This statement — with its echoes of President Obama’s vague references to “violent extremists” uncoupled from the fundamentalist Islam to which said throat-cutting extremists pledge allegiance — scarcely stands up to scrutiny. It is empty talk.

Across a wide swath of territory, in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, the West has been or is at war, or near-war, with the Muslim world, in a failed bid to eradicate a metastasizing Islamist movement of murderous hatred toward Western civilization.

To call this movement, whose most potent recent manifestation is the Islamic State, a “dark ideology” is like calling Nazism a reaction to German humiliation in World War I: true but wholly inadequate. There is little point in Western politicians rehearsing lines about there being no battle between Islam and the West, when in all the above-mentioned countries tens of millions of Muslims, with much carnage as evidence, believe the contrary.

The Danish filmmaker Finn Norgaard was killed a little over a decade after another movie director, Theo van Gogh, was slain in Amsterdam for making a film critical of Islam’s treatment of women. The Islamists’ war is against freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of blasphemy, sexual freedom — in short, core characteristics of democracies seen by the would-be rebuilders of the Caliphate as signs of Western debasement.

Do not provoke them with cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, some say, show respect for Islam, the peaceful faith of some 1.6 billion people. But what, pray, was the “provocation” of Dan Uzan, the Jewish security guard outside the Copenhagen synagogue?

Islam is a religion that has spawned multifaceted political movements whose goal is power. Islam, as such, is fair game for commentators, caricaturists and cartoonists, whose inclination to mock the depredations of theocracy and political Islam’s cynical uses of the Prophet cannot be cowed by fear.

Over the more than 13 years since Al Qaeda attacked America on 9/11, we have seen trains blown up in Madrid, the Tube and a bus bombed in London, Western journalists beheaded, the staff of Charlie Hebdo slaughtered, Jews killed in France and Belgium and now Denmark. This is not the work of a “dark ideology” but of jihadi terror.

On the right of Europe’s political spectrum, anger is rising against Islam, against marginalized Muslim communities, who in turn feel discriminated against and misrepresented, with cause. Several thousand young European Muslims troop off to join ISIS. Europe’s Jews are on edge, with cause. Israel calls them home. In the United States, three Muslim students were killed this month by a gunman in a possible hate crime denounced by Obama as “brutal and outrageous.” A tide of retaliatory menace rises.

Who or what is to blame? There are two schools. For the first, it is the West that is to blame through its support for Israel (seen as the latest iteration of Western imperialism in the Levant); its wars (Iraq); its brutality, (Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib); its killing of civilians (drones); its oil-driven hypocrisy (a jihadi-funding Saudi ally).

For the second, it is rather the abject failure of the Arab world, its blocked societies where dictators face off against political Islam, its repression, its feeble institutions, its sectarianism precluding the practice of participatory citizenship, its wild conspiracy theories, its inability to provide jobs or hope for its youth, that gives the Islamic State its appeal.

I find the second view more persuasive. The rise of the Islamic State, and Obama’s new war, are a direct result of the failure of the Arab Spring, which had seemed to offer a path out of the deadlocked, jihadi-spawning societies of the Arab world.

Only Arabs can find the answer to this crisis. But history, I suspect, will not judge Obama kindly for having failed to foster the great liberation movement that rose up in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere. Inaction is also a policy: Nonintervention produced Syria today.

I hear the words of Chokri Belaid, the brave Tunisian lawyer, shortly before he was gunned down by Islamist fanatics on Feb. 6, 2013: “We can disagree in our diversity but within a civilian, peaceful and democratic framework. Disagree in our diversity, yes!”

To speak of a nonspecific “dark ideology,” to dismiss the reality of conflict between the West and Islam, is also to undermine the anti-Islamist struggle of brave Muslims like Belaid — and these Muslims are the only people, ultimately, who can defeat the black-flagged jihadi death merchants.

No Hebrew Please - This is Europe

Disturbing insights about the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe. Must read. - R.O.

No Hebrew Please - This is Europe
By: Bruce Bawer
Jan. 7, 2013 -- FrontPageMag.com

I wrote about it here recently: Israel’s ambassador to Denmark and the head of Copenhagen’s Jewish community have both warned Jews in that city that if they don’t want to be roughed up on the street by anti-Semites, they’d better not wear anything that would identify them as Jews – and, for good measure, they should also lower their voices when speaking Hebrew. The other day, in a supremely depressing article for Israel National News, Giulio Meottiprovided a round-up of similar developments from around Europe.

For instance: a Jewish theological seminary in Potsdam has asked its rabbis not to wear yarmulkes in public. Pupils at a Jewish school in Berlin have been warned to speak German, not Hebrew, on school trips – and to wear baseball caps over their yarmulkes “so you don’t give stupid people something to get annoyed about.” Jews at Rome’s main synagogue now remove their yarmulkes when leaving services; so do Jews in Malmö, Sweden. A Jewish teacher at an adult education center in Kristiansand, Norway, has been told “that wearing the star could be deemed a provocation towards the many Muslim students at the school.” And so on.

The reason for all this cautious behavior, of course, is to avoid the fate of people like the Paris Metro passenger who, Meotti noted, was recently beaten unconscious by a mob who pegged him as Jewish because he was reading a book by Paris’s chief rabbi.

Even Meotti’s laundry list didn’t come close to covering the full range of despicable anti-Semitic outrages, and reactions thereto, that have occurred in Western Europe of late. One example: in early December, it was reported that in the wake of episodes at Edinburgh University in which an Israeli diplomat was “mobbed” and a speech by Israel’s ambassador was “disrupted by chanting students waving Palestinian flags,” many Jewish students, fed up with the “toxic atmosphere” (and, in some cases, scared to publicly identify as Jewish) had left for other colleges – and other countries.

Meotti is among the few journalists who have been sounding the warning for some time about the rise of Jew-hatred in Europe. The last few weeks, however, have seen a flurry of articles on the topic in relatively high-profile places. Can it be that the see-no-evil approach to this international catastrophe is finally giving way under the increasingly heavy weight of reality?

For example, Haaretz, which in late December ran an article entitled “France’s Jews on High Alert,” followed it up on New Year’s Eve with a piece by one Joel Braunold, who – after recalling that as a Jewish kid in London he found Americans’ and Israelis’ comments about anti-Semitism in Europe “hyperbolic,” ignorant, and almost racist – admitted that Europe does indeed have “a serious anti-Semitism problem” now, and that “the number of safe European capital cities has shrunk to a tiny number.” To make matters worse, Europe’s governments “are not taking the issue seriously”: either they dismiss anti-Semitism as a far-right pathology, or they blame it on Israel. This, Braunold says, won’t do:

As Europe’s demography changes, governments have to start systemically educating their citizens that hating Jews is not ok, and that it is unjustifiable. This means going beyond Holocaust education and getting into touchy, hard topics such as Israel and Palestine. If the hate, fear and loathing come from today’s political situation, states have the obligation to make sure their citizens are not being brought up on a diet of racism. That starts with educating each and every child.

Nowhere in Braunold’s piece, incidentally, does he mention Islam or Muslims. There’s nothing unusual about this, of course: this is the New Reticence, to which millions around the world now devoutly subscribe. Yet I would submit that this reticence – this readiness to acknowledge the offense but not name the offenders – is an essential part of the problem that Braunold claims to be determined to help overcome.

Also on New Year’s Eve, the website of Public Radio International ran a pieceheadlined “Anti-Semitism a growing problem in France.” Noting that France has Western Europe’s largest Jewish and its largest Muslim populations, and that the Toulouse school shootings last March were only the most widely reported of “an alarming number of anti-Semitic attacks across France this year,” PRI quoted anti-Semitism expert Sammy Ghozlan as saying that French Jews now “avoid going out late, going to certain neighborhoods, wearing yarmulkes.”

PRI also interviewed a rabbi who travels around France with an imam, meeting young Muslims and trying to talk them out of their Jew-hatred. The rabbi explained that many Muslims justify their prejudice by citing Israel’s purportedly brutal treatment of Palestinians. Curiously – but, alas, not very surprisingly – the rabbi, instead of informing his Muslim interlocutors that they’ve been fed lies about Israel, said that he tells them not to think about Israel, but to focus rather on France. Sigh.

To its credit, PRI didn’t try to hide the fact that the problem at hand is, indeed, anti-Semitic prejudice and violence by Muslims. On the other hand, it did what it could – in familiar mass-media fashion – to spread the guilt around, as it were, making references to intercultural “tensions” and suggesting that the answer lies in “mutual understanding.” Needless to say, anyone who understands Islam understands that those whose mantra is “mutual understanding” just don’t understand at all.

Another article, on December 18, sought to sum up recent developments in Western Europe that have negatively affected people of faith. The authors referred in passing to bans on kosher and halal slaughter and to efforts to outlaw circumcision – matters, in short, of concern to both Jews and Muslims. But anti-Semitic violence? Not a word. Not even the Toulouse massacre rated a mention. On the contrary: the article’s main thrust was that a certain religious group – not Jews – is currently the object of cruel, widespread, and systematic attack:

• “France and Belgium now ban people from publicly wearing full-face veils while Switzerland, the Netherlands, and other European states have debated similar prohibitions. Islamic dress restrictions for teachers exist in some Swiss and German states.”

• “The distinctive dress of conservative Muslims has fueled a fear of ‘the other’ …The increasing restrictions on religious practice and expression in Western Europe both arise from and encourage a climate of intolerance against religious groups, especially those with strong truth claims and vigorous demands on their members. Muslims, in some instances, clearly are being targeted. This increasingly hostile atmosphere in turn triggers private discrimination, and sometimes even violence, against members of these groups.”

The authors’ conclusion: “If the lamp of liberty is to remain lit, Western Europeans must accept that the age of conformity to an official monoculture – secular or religious – is at an end. In the coming year, their countries should embrace their religiously diverse future and accord religious freedom to all.”

Where did this mischievous, duplicitous piece of nonsense appear? In theNational Interest, no less. And who wrote it? Two members of an “independent, bipartisan, federal body” called the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF): Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard law professor and former American ambassador to the Holy See who was appointed to the commission by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, andAzizah al-Hibri, a lawyer and philosopher who writes about “women’s issues, democracy, and human rights from an Islamic perspective” and who was named to the commission by President Obama.

In other words, the very arm of the federal government that should be joining Meotti and others in raising the alarm about the crisis of Muslim anti-Semitism in Western Europe would seem to be making a very explicit point of pretending that the crisis doesn’t exist at all – and of pretending, moreover, that the perpetrators of faith-based violence are, in fact, its victims. The grim truth about the plight of Jews in Europe, then, is starting to be articulated here and there – but U.S. authorities are doing their best, apparently, to turn that truth on its head.

Europe Volunteers Churches to Become Mosques

More than a little troubling, to say the least. What does this mean for the future of Europe? -R.O.

Europe Volunteers Churches to Become Mosques
Wed, October 24, 2012

by:  Giulio Meotti

The writer Emile Cioran cast a sad prophecy on Europe: “The French will not wake up until Notre Dame becomes a mosque.”

This is now a reality. But unlike the Middle East, where non-Muslim sites were razed or violently converted to Islam, in Europe this process is voluntary.

The church of Saint-Eloi in the French region of Vierzon will soon become a mosque. The diocese of Bourges has put on sale the church and a Muslim organization, l’Association des Marocains, made the most generous offer to buy the site.

The church of Saint-Eloi is located in an area inhabited by Turks and Moroccans. It’s the “de-Christianization” of Europe, which is naturally followed by its gradual Islamization and increasing anti-Semitism. Of 27.000 inhabitants in the town of Vierzon, only 300 go to church once a week.

In the past decade, French Catholic bishops formally closed more than 60 churches, many of which are destined to become mosques, according to the research conducted by the newspaper La Croix.

According to a recent report of the U.S. Pew Center, Islam is already “the fastest-growing religion in Europe,” where the number of Muslims has tripled over the past 30 years. One-third of all European children will be born to Muslim families by 2025.

Demography is the most important symptom of exhaustion: Without a cradle, you can't sustain a civilization.

To understand this historic process, one has to see the number of churches converted into mosques.

In the Netherlands, more than 250 buildings where Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists have prayed for centuries, have changed owners. Like the Fatih Camii Mosque in Amsterdam, which once was Saint Ignatius, a Catholic church. Or the church of S. Vincentius, which was put on sale along with the benches, the crucifixes and the chandeliers. Today more than half of the Dutch population is buitenkerkelijk, free from any religious affiliation. Catholics have decreased by 70 percent.

Islam is now considered the “most widely practiced religion” in the Netherlands. The Oude Kerk, the oldest church in Amsterdam, built in 1309, stands solidly in the heart of downtown. Around it is the red-light district with the South American and Eastern European prostitutes knocking on the glass to attract the attention of passersby.

The Neuwe Kerk, the church where the Dutch kings were crowned, is a museum. The only "church" in the city that is crowded is that of Scientology, which offers free stress tests.

4,400 church buildings remain in the Netherlands. Each week, two close their doors forever.

In Duisburg, Germany, the Catholic church closed six churches. In Marxloh, the only church that survives, that of St. Peter and Paul, will close at the end of 2012. In Germany 400 churches have been closed.

The municpality of Antwerp, Belgium proposed to transform the empty churches into mosques. Scandinavia lives the same phenomenon. To cite one case, the Swedish church of St. Olfos is used by the Muslims. The main mosque in Dublin is a former Presbyterian church.

In England, 10,000 churches have been closed since 1960. By 2020, another 4.000 churches will close while another 1,700 new mosques will be built, many of which will arise on sites of former churches.

“God is dead” declared Friedrich Nietzsche and Europe obliged. Now, Europe is poised to adopt the Koranic, “There is no God but Allah.” And the old Gregorian chants will be substituted by the muezzin.

Europe's tragedy is embodied by the sterile blocks of concrete and glass of the European Union in Bruxelles. Symbols of the moral emptiness within. Meanwhile the top seven baby boys’ names in Brussels are Mohammed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza.

A couple of years ago I visited Rotterdam, the Dutch industrial polmon. Everywhere are casbah-cafes, travel agencies offering flights to Rabat and Casablanca, and posters expressing solidarity with Hamas. Most of the population are immigrants, and the city has the tallest and most imposing mosque in Europe.

When arriving in the city by train, most striking are the mosques framed by the green, luxuriant, wooded, watery countryside. Rotterdam has the tallest minarets in Europe. The city was buzzing when the newspapers published a letter by Bouchra Ismaili, a city councilmanwho declared, "Listen up, crazy freaks, we're here to stay. You're the foreigners here. With Allah on my side, I'm not afraid of anything. Take my advice: Convert to Islam, and you will find peace."

A French friend showed me one of Rotterdam's main squares, where there is a mosque with Arabic writing outside proclaiming, "This used to be a church.”

Is Islam the destiny for the world's most affluent, relaxed and pacified societies which opted for self-liquidation?

Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio. He is the author of the acclaimed book, A New Shoah, that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims (published by Encounter). His writing has appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage, Makor Rishon and Jerusalem Post. He is working on a book about the Vatican and Israel.