Western Europe’s Muslim Problem

posted by Joseph Puder at American Thinker 

Radical Muslim gangs who harbor hatred for Western culture and believe that Islam is the answer for all bear a visceral and violent antisemitic hatred for Israel and Jews.  The pogrom perpetrated by Arab and Turkish Muslims earlier this month on Israeli and Jewish fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, a leading Israeli soccer team, in the streets of Amsterdam illustrates the point.  The local (Amsterdam) authorities feigned efforts to contain the Muslim horde, which did not prevent the beating of scores of Israelis and Jews and the hospitalization of six.  For many, it conjured up images of the evil perpetrated by the SS of Nazi Germany and the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.  Attacks on Jews and Israel are now widely evident in other major western European cities, including Berlin, Brussels, London, Madrid, and Paris.

Referring to the recent pogrom, there were kind words from the king of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, who told Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again.”  Geert Wilders, leader of the largest party in the Dutch parliament, blamed Moroccan Muslims for the attack on the Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.  He noted that the Muslims do not hide the fact that they want to destroy Jews and recommended the deportation of those people convicted of involvement in the pogrom if they have dual nationality.

Muslim migrants arrived at the industrialized Western European states after WWII, many from the countries that were their former colonial possessions.  Thus, Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian Muslims landed in France and in Belgium (since French was also widely spoken there).  Turkish Muslim temporary laborers were brought to Germany and never left.  The Netherlands became home to Indonesian Muslims.  South Asian Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims settled in Britain.  Many of those early Muslim settlers sought a quiet life, economic betterment, and freedom.

The revival of Islamic sense of power, with Saudi Arabia accumulating unimaginable oil riches and power in the 1970s, created an initial stirring, followed by the 1979 Islamic (Shiite) revolution in Iran and the defiance against the Western world and its culture.  The mayhem in Iraq and the endless terror in the aftermath of the Bush Jr. administration’s 2003 war that deposed Saddam Hussein eliminated the secular Sunni-Muslim rule in Iraq and led to Shia Muslim supremacy and Iran’s stranglehold on Iraq.

Then came the civil war in Syria a decade later, which created millions of refugees.  The guilt-ridden European and former colonial powers opened their doors to hordes of Muslims from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.  Angela Merkel’s misplaced guilt about the Holocaust invited over a million Syrian and Iraqi Arabs and Afghan Muslims to Germany.  Most of these had been brought up to hate Jews and Israel.

For the new arrivals in particular, the Western practice of separation of church and state is unfamiliar and unacceptable.  Islam is the state religion in most Arab states and, especially, in Iran.  The majority of recent Muslim immigrants express less attachment to their western European host countries and greater loyalty and attachment to their country of origin.  This situation is exacerbated by the fact that the host countries do not promote assimilation into the culture.  The Muslims have separate communities, separate schools, and separate rules of law.

Europe used to have a “Jewish problem” and still does, but not for the same reasons as their “Muslim problem.”  The Jews integrated well and enriched European culture in multiple ways.  Many European Nobel laureates were Jews.  Today’s Muslim immigrants commit a large percentage of the violent crimes, whereas crime coming out of the Jewish communities was virtually nonexistent.  In most cases, Jews spoke the native tongue better than the Christian natives.  The problem, until the late 18th Century, was religious animus and discrimination, which later transformed into antisemitic racism.  In Europe, Jews became the scapegoats for the ills of their societies.

The late Oriana Fallaci, famed Italian journalist and author, who later in life became a staunch defender of Israel and Jews, famously stated, “I stand with Israel, I stand with the Jews.”  “I defend their right to exist, to defend themselves, and not to allow themselves to be exterminated a second time.”

While earlier in her career Fallaci defended the Palestinians and Muslims, she was subsequently quoted as saying, “The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us.  I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture — it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.” 

Fallaci made no secret of her hatred of the way Islam enforced passivity and submission of women through sharia law.  She famously ended an interview with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini by ripping off the chador she had been obliged to wear — yelling about “these medieval rags!”  She wrote of “the monstrous darkness of a religion which produces nothing but religion .. secretly envious of us, confessedly jealous of our way of life. ... [I]n Europe the mosques literally swarm with terrorists or candidate terrorists.”

In Europe today, Islamists and the radical left have allied themselves in the Green-Red alliance with a common antisemitic agenda under the guise of anti-Israelism.  Their vocal demonstrations in the streets of Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, London, and Paris have intimidated the governments, who have done little to stem the gushing hate displayed and the violence accompanying such events, as demonstrated earlier this month in Amsterdam.  Whereas peaceful demonstrations are a given in western democracies, incitement to violence is proscribed.

With the Muslim population in Europe swelling into double-digit percentages, and stagnant native European birthrates, it is only a matter of a generation or two before radical Islam truly becomes dominant in Europe.  In her 2005 book titled Eurabia: The Euro‐Arab Axis, Bat Yeor, the pen name for Gisèle Littman, pointed out that Europe has surrendered to Islam and is in a state of submission (described as dhimmitude) in which Europe is forced to deny its own culture, stand silently by in the face of Muslim atrocities, accept Muslim immigration, and pay tribute through various types of economic assistance.

Incoming U.S. president Donald Trump, by acting on his unintimidated commitment to deport illegals and criminal aliens from the U.S., may just show the Europeans how to save their culture.  It is time for the European elites to consider acting aggressively on behalf of their survival.