In an observant manner expatriate writer Bawer, living in W. Europe, further documents how imams preach brazenly that Muslims should expect these welfare benefits—and feel justified in supplementing them by stealing from stores—as a form of jizya extracted from their infidel “host” societies. Yet in spite of the riots in France and the murderous attacks on Denmark many deny any Islamic etiology for major problems confronting Europe, and instead rather beget more Islam as the “solution.” This raises the question: why do W. European countries validate such, imbalanced bigotry?
Forgotten by the current generation the phenomena is not new, in 1916, Snouck Hurgronje, a Dutch scholar of Islam, underscored how the jihad doctrine of world conquest remained a potent force among the Muslim masses:
it would be a gross mistake to imagine that the idea of universal conquest may be considered as obliterated…the canonists and the vulgar still live in the illusion of the days of Islam’s greatness. The legists continue to ground their appreciation of every actual political condition on the law of the holy war, which war ought never be allowed to cease entirely until all mankind is reduced to the authority of Islam- the heathen by conversion, the adherents of acknowledged Scripture by submission. Even if they admit the improbability of this at present, they are comforted and encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period of humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah bestowed victory upon his arms; and they fervently join with the Friday preacher, when he announces the prayer taken from the Qur’an: ‘Thou art our Master; grant us then to conquer the unbelievers.’ And the common people are willingly taught by the canonists and feed their hope. The conception of the Khalifate still exercises a fascinating influence, regarded in the light of a central point of union against the unfaithful.
Based on my own field research I explained this from a contemporary point of view here.
Also in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Muslim immigrants account for 65-85 percent of all rapists. French girl and gang rape victim Samira Bellil has written a book about the prevalence of gang rape within the immigrant ghettoes. Girls who do not comport themselves according to Shari’a law – including native Europeans not wearing the burqa – are “sluts” who deserve to be raped. In one French city, perhaps as many as 88 men raped a 13-year-old girl over the course of several months.
Muslim victims must also know that in many cases, their local imams have endorsed their violators. Coppenhagen-based Mufti Shahid Mehdi told his spiritual flock women without headscarves are “asking for rape.” Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi even teaches rape victims should be punished after they are raped, if they were dressed “immodestly,” writing on the website IslamOnline, “for a rape victim to be absolved from guilt, she must not be the one that opens…her dignity for deflowering” by her dress. But where rape has long been the silent shame - gang rape multiplies the trauma, and the shame, several-fold. May the light of media exposure place the shame where it belongs: the rapists and their enablers posing as men of God.
Again if Islam wants Christian women to dress more modestly, yet at the same time some of them (although an exception in the countries mentioned above it is indeed very, common in Muslim countries like Pakistan for example) engage in sexual crimes (i.e. rape) against them. Isn’t there some kind of contradiction here in terms of what sexual morality is? It is supposedly wrong for a woman to wear what she wants, but it is somehow ok to rape her? And what kind of God does a person believe in when he is raping a woman and thinks that God is happy with, and supportive of, what he is doing?
By way of background, the Qur’an is rife with gender and religious discrimination. Thus, for example, Muhammad taught that women are inferior to men, their testimony in court carries less weight, and their inheritance rights are halved. Marriage (or sexual relations) between Christian men and Muslim women is prohibited, and punishable by death. But a Muslim man is allowed to marry a Christian woman, even if he has abducted and raped her. Plus, legally speaking it is virtually impossible to convict a Muslim man of raping a Christian woman. But, if a woman levels a charge of rape against a Muslim man and cannot prove it, she runs the risk of being severely punished for fornication or adultery, both ruthlessly punished by Islamic law.
However it was only in 2001 that I first became involved with researching the situation in Europe, when a documentary filmmaker-friend of mine was asked by the Belgian Government to make an investigative film for internal (not public) use about ‘crime’ in W.Europe. One of the rather shocking statistics that resulted from this project was that in 2001 alone, 65% of the rapes in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden (no statistics were available for Spain at the time), were committed by people with a ‘Muslim’ background. Plus, finally made ‘public’ in 2005, one Dutch commentator, drawing on a news story about Moroccan gangs in Den Bosch, did a little arithmetic and determined that 80 percent of Moroccan boys in that city, were "involved in street violence."
Another unusual trend noticed, was the disappearance of hundreds of young girls in each of these countries. In fact Bruce Bawer lifts the mystery of the missing girls when he explains: In 2004, my friends Hege Storhaug and Rita Karlsen of Human Rights Service came back from a trip to Pakistan with a harrowing eyewitness account of a Koran school in Gujarat: "From the outside, it looked like a prison. It was dark and cold and there was no electricity." The children, all Scandinavian girls, didn't look well; many were undernourished. There were no desks, chairs, or educational materials in sight. The windows were barred, and were so high up that the girls couldn't look out and outsiders couldn't look in. Between the first and second stories, there was no floor but only a grating. "We looked down and saw the children below, looking up at us." At any given time, about 250 Muslim pupils are known to be "missing" from schools in Oslo alone. (Bawer, 2006, p.19.)
The way it usually works in the countries cited again, is exemplified here: The parents of one Norwegian-born girl sent her back to their homeland at age three to attend Koran school. While they collected child benefits in Norway, she stayed at the school. Graduated at sixteen, she was married off at once. Just before having her first child, she returned to Norway-not knowing a word of Norwegian, and not having been educated in anything but the Koran-and brought her husband over through family reunification. Some months after giving birth, she contacted her Koran school to reserve a place for her child, who, like her, would be enrolled at age three. Far from being unique, this young woman exemplifies the ideal toward which many immigrant families strive in their effort to exploit European munificence while avoiding pollution by European culture.
To be sure, most Muslim children in Europe attend regular public schools, where even the most sheltered girl will be influenced to some degree by Western culture-inevitably picking up ideas about her right to date, have a career, select her own husband, and make her own decisions. This is why importing spouses is so crucial. By compelling his daughter to wed an illiterate villager for whom the very idea of female independence is anathema, who believes it's a husband's God-given right and duty to beat such ideas out of her (or, for that matter, to beat her for any reason whatsoever), and who will restrict her movements outside the home as fully as possible, a father can fight off the influence of the West and ensure that his daughter, though living in Europe, will have a life very much like that of a peasant woman in a Pakistani village.
The typical Muslim girl in Western Europe thus lives with the probability that she'll someday be compelled to marry an imported husband whom she'll be expected to obey without fail. (Bawer, 2006, p.20.)
Bawer who most recently lived in Oslo, further notes that Human Rights Service there, studied ninety cases of forced marriage in Norway and found that only three of the wives were not raped-either because they'd run away in time or because the marriage was pro forma. Girls forced into "marriages" who try to fight off their "husbands" on their "wedding nights" can't expect parents or in-laws to come to the rescue. One girl said that " when she screamed out for help, her new in-laws, still celebrating the wedding in an adjoining room, "just turned up the volume on the music." Another girl said, "I'll never forget the day after the wedding night. Everyone must have seen the pain in my face. But even my own mother gave no sign that I could ask for the least amount of support and comfort from her. (Bawer, 2006, 21.)
Traditionally, in Muslim countries, a new wife moves in with her husband's family-never the opposite. Among European Muslims this custom has been entirely overthrown. Nowadays, when a transnational marriage between Muslim cousins takes place, the spouse that migrates is invariably the non-European spouse, whose first residence after migrating is, as a rule, his or her in-laws' home. These marriages-which have acquired the name "fetching marriages" -accomplish two things. They enable more and more members of an extended Muslim family to emigrate/to Europe and enjoy Western prosperity. And they put the brakes on-or even reverse-whatever progress the European-born spouse might have made toward becoming Westernized. In other words, the disease of integration is prevented by injecting into the European branch of the family a powerful booster shot of ’values’ -that is, a hostility to pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and sexual equality. These inoculations have proven extraordinarily effective.
In January 2002, there was the case of an already more adult Swedish woman that received some attention after she refused to submit to a forced marriage, named Fadime Sahindal. Not only did her Swedish boyfriend died under mysterious circumstances, she herself -was murdered by her father. On his arrest, he readily confessed and called his dead daughter a whore. The story made headlines across Scandinavia. But this and other high-profile cases are only the tip of the iceberg; most honor killings in Europe, it's believed, never even come to the attention of the authorities. In 2004, Britain's public prosecutor began reinvestigating no fewer than 117 suspicious deaths or disappearances to determine if honor killings had taken place. Plus over a six-month period in the same year, eleven women were victims of honor killings in The Hague (one of the more ‘elevated’ small cities in W. Europe), alone.
Here's a sampling of some of the British cases. In south London in 2002, a young woman who'd been raped was murdered by her family to restore its honor. The next year, in Birmingham, twenty-one-year-old Sahjda Bibi was stabbed twenty-two times in her wedding dress by a cousin for marrying a divorced man and not a relative. In the same year, a Yorkshire teenager was murdered by her father in Pakistan over a relationship the family hadn't known about until her boyfriend dedicated a love song to her on Pakistani-language radio. In London in 2003, a lively sixteen-year-old London girl named Heshu Yones-who'd fallen in love with a Lebanese Christian boy and planned to run away with him-was stabbed eleven times by her father, who then slit her throat. In a farewell note to her father, Heshu referred to the frequent beatings he'd given her:
Bye Dad, sorry
I was so much trouble.
Me and you
will probably never understand each other, but I'm sorry I wasn't what
you wanted, but there's some things you can't change.
Hey, for an
older man you have a good strong punch and kick.
I hope you
enjoyed testing your strength on me, it was fun being on the receiving
end. Well done.
Saying that it didn't necessarily condone Heshu's murder, MuslimCouncil spokesman Inayat Bunglawala added that "many Muslims would understand Yones being upset by his daughter's apparent rejection of her faith." Journalist Val MacQueen in contrast noted in reporting this story; It was revolting, to see Bunglawala referring sympathetically to the "value system" of a man who'd just hacked his child to death.
What makes these murders different from others that take place every day in W.Europe is that many members of the perpetrators' subculture consider them defensible. According to the Sun, Yorkshire police investigating the song-dedication murder "met a wall of silence in the girl's Pakistani community." After the murder of Fadime Sahindal, Norwegian Muslims asked by reporters for their comments also declined to condemn it outright. More than one insisted that the father had done what he had to do. "I can't say it was right and I can't say it was wrong," volunteered one Oslo merchant. Did this unwillingness to criticize an unspeakable crime betoken approval of the father's actions or fear of challenging community norms?
While some young women are taken abroad to be trained as suicide bombers, sometimes girls are taken abroad to be murdered. Such was the case with Pela Atroshi, who, in 1995, at age fifteen, emigrated to Sweden with her parents and six siblings. Pela soon looked like an integration success story-she learned Swedish, was a good student, and made non-Muslim friends. This infuriated her father, who accused her of "living a European life." In spite of the fact that she agreed to submit to an arranged marriage, when she traveled with her father to Iraq for the ceremony, however, it turned out that her family had arranged not a marriage but a murder. An Iraqi court sentenced Pela's father and uncle to five months' probation for the crime. The reason for the lenient sentence was that their "motive was honorable."
Not surprising, after the 2005 terrorist attacks on London, it emerged that the four suspects had raked in more than half a million pounds in welfare benefits from the British government. The Telegraph reported, too, that Hizb ut-Tahrir founder Omar Bakri Muhammed (who preached that "we will conquer the White House ... we will be in charge and Muslims will control the earth") was getting "£331.28 a month in incapacity benefit and £183.30 a month in disability living allowance"; in addition, he collected a "housing benefit" and a "council tax benefit," not to mention his wife's welfare intake of "at least £1,300 a month." (Curiously, no mention was made of child benefits for his seven progeny.) Even his car had been acquired free of charge under a government program.
Eurabia by Bat ye’Or (2005), documented how the EU-eager to win markets for European goods, secure oil supplies, and placate terrorists-has not only turned a blind eye to the tyranny of Arab regimes, but has provided them (and terrorist groups) with massive aid while leavening its side of the Euro-Arab "dialogue" with grotesquely inflated praise for them and their cultures (not to mention hearty denunciations of America and Israel).The author angrily concluded that not only that Europe is on its way to becoming a colony of the Muslim world, but also that this is the result of ‘European design.’ I would say this overstated and would rather suggest it is due to a ‘ looking the other way.’
To give some examples of this, exemplified by the recent five kidnap for ransom cases of Jews in and near Paris, anti-Semitism is on the rise in W.Europe in the aftermath of 7/7 when Jewish and gay groups protested the granting of a visa to an extreme imam from Qatar, London mayor Ken Livingstone. On 7/7, Livingstone condemned the terrorists in tough, and blamed the 7/7 bombings on "eighty years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands."
Indeed Islamists could actually seek asylum in Britain on the grounds that their extremist beliefs were unwelcome in their native lands. And, instead of being placed in asylum centers, they could reside where they wanted-and collect welfare. Thus most Islamist leaders in Britain were living on support payments from the nation they'd vowed to destroy.
Another example is, many blamed filmmaker van Gogh for his own murder. In Britain, the Guardian-described his killer, as "a lone Muslim extremist"-savaged van Gogh's and Hirsi Ali's "magnificent disregard for the feelings they might be offending." On German TV; Middle East "expert" Ulrich Kienzie chastised the late filmmaker for breaking a "taboo." (Neither the moderator nor the other participants challenged him.) Dutch author Geert Mak, for his part, couldn't understand all the hullabaloo over the slaying: "we have only one murder, and everybody goes crazy." Few European writers or filmmakers denounced their colleague's murder. Danish author Ebbe K. Reich explained his silence by saying that while the recently assassinated Anna Lindh "was from our neighboring country and was a charming and wise woman," the rude and abrasive van Gogh had been, well, something else.
"Bit most recentlz one could ask," if Muslims are so offended by the cartoons why then, did they not protest when the cartoons in October already were printed in Egypt? Or why do they not call for executions of the Danish Muslims who drew three cartoons about the ‘prophet’ that were much more inflammatory than the 12 that were actually printed in the Danish newspaper? Do cartoons warrant the burning of buildings and the killing of innocent people? Since Muslims live in some of the poorest countries of the world with inferior economies that would collapse without oil, would it not be better to create jobs instead of preparing them for jihad? Or is it an attempt to intimidate European Nations into adopting Islamic blasphemy laws, just as the jihadists are also fighting in their way to compel them to do?
In fact the
cartoons were forcing a radicalization
of the Muslim community that are uneasy with the passions of
the moment.
