IS ISLAM SICK?

The Sick Man of Europe meets Islam

Posted: 04 Oct 2009 07:53 PM PDT
Turkey was once known as the Sick Man of Europe because it appeared to be a failed state headed for collapse and ripe for colonization, but today it is Western Europe that appears to be sick, and Turkey's Islamists, along with their co-religionists in the Middle East that are heading up the reverse colonization effort.

Yet it is an oversimplification to pretend that the problem began with Islam, Western Europe has been sick for some time now. Before Islam there was Communism and before Communism there was Nazism, and each time it appeared to only be a matter of time before Europe fell under the sway of one or the other.

The indecisiveness of the former great powers allowed a failed state like Germany led by a bunch of cheap thugs with a raving lunatic at its head nearly destroy them. What brought Europe to this catastrophic state of affairs was its emphasis on appeasement over defense, and even the willingness to carve up nations like Czechoslovakia rather than confront the clear and present danger of Nazi Germany. By the time they woke up, it was all but too late and only American intervention saved Europe from becoming part of the Thousand Year Reich.

But the end of WW2 demonstrated that Europe had learned no lessons from the disaster, except to once again reassert the dangers of nationalism, a fallacious idea that had led Englishmen and Frenchmen to regard their own nationalism with skepticism while giving the German and Russian varieties a pat on the head. England woke up long enough to let Churchill have his way, but then tossed him out in '45 as soon as things were wrapped up, to once again limp down the curving road of socialism. As is so often the case in the West, the "Stiff Upper Lip" only lasted as long as the bombs were falling. When the fighting was done, it turned out that what the people of the West really wanted was a nanny state to take care of all their needs.

It was once again the United States that had to step in to save Europe from Communism, often against its own protests. American forces stood watches, airlifted food, fought Communist infiltration and did their best to try and rally Europe in its own defense with NATO-- in the face of riots and violent protests from the European left, claiming once again that the real enemy was not the USSR, but the capitalists and warmongers of the United States. And the protests never ended, at US bases and in front of embassies. Anti-Americanism became politically de rigueur for intellectuals and artists. When the Berlin Wall was finally torn down, there was very little acknowledgment that a wall did not enclose far more of Western Europe only because the United States had sent men to stand and die at their posts defending Europe against Communism.

Today German Nazism and Russian Communism have passed into historical memory, the new Russia is National Socialist and nearly as aggressive, but for now has a rich banquet to gobble down in the way of its former republics. It is Islam that threatens Europe's survival, that streams conquering armies into European cities, towns and villages, that burns, rapes and plunders everything in its path. That intends to create a new Thousand Year Ummah in Western Europe. But there are no massed armies now, and the problem has passed beyond the limits of American intervention. Only Europe can save itself now.

America's response to 9/11 helped bring the question of Islamic terrorism into greater focus, but by treating it as a purely military problem, the United States and its European allies have become bogged down in hunting down armed terrorists. But like Communism and Nazism in the decades before WW2, Islam does not yet present a true military threat. For now it consists of armed bands and infiltrators, both armed and more dangerously, those working to build political networks abroad.

If an Islamic Caliphate emerges, a counterpart to the way that Soviet Union came to embody the true incarnation state for Communist and Socialist aspirations, it will field actual military forces bent on conquest. And the world at that point will look very different. Once such a state emerges as the focal point for a Muslim efforts to establish Islamic law and rule worldwide, it can be fought directly, though make no mistake that will be no easy task. Especially since its likeliest points of emergence are either in the Gulf States of Saudi Arabia and the UAE by way of revolution, in Pakistan or Turkey by militarization, or the destroyed remains of Israel. If the projected time of birth is extended far enough, it will likely emerge in Europe itself. Such a state will almost certainly have nuclear weapons and a vast army at its disposal. And then an entirely different sort of WWIII will begin than the one we expected. But that day has not yet come.

For now the Islamic threat is one that strikes at the exposed weaknesses of the West, like the Communists and Nazis before them, Islamists are facile at exploiting the democratic political structures that they don't believe in, to gain influence and power, to divide and conquer, and finally to rule. The colonization and conversion of Europe however is a vast venture taking place on a dizzying array of economic, political, demographic and cultural levels. It is a far vaster and better funded effort than even Soviet backed Communism ever put forward primarily because Islamism has one asset that the USSR did not, a vast army of immigrants with which to swarm and overrun Europe-- all in the name of tolerance, opportunity and open-mindedness.

But all this is only occurring and could only occur by way of consent and apathy. Europe is opening the doors to its own annihilation and subjugation, just as it did toward Nazism and Communism. Viruses may attack a healthy organism, but they are quickly repelled. They only swarm around sick bodies. Were Muslims to try and seize China, they would be laughed at and then shot, not necessarily in that order. By contrast they are experiencing a great deal of success not only in Europe, but in Israel, Australia and to a lesser degree in Canada and the United States. Even Russia, which is hardly liberal or tolerant, is projected to hold a Muslim majority because generations of Communist policies have rotted the Russian birth rate through and through, and not only that of Russia, but virtually every former Soviet republic. A fact of life that Putin's heavy dose of National Socialism has done nothing to change.

But throughout it all there is a perfect combination of factors that draws the carrion eaters in black most enthusiastically forward, low birth rates to make it easy to outbreed the native population, cultural liberalism to deter any resistance to the invasion and finally socialism to ensure a population that is increasingly less productive and incapable of thinking for itself. When combined together, socialism helps generate a low birth rate which creates a diminishing tax base that must be filled by importing new workers, while cultural liberalism speeds up their accommodation quickly transitioning to appeasement. The final outcome of this process can be seen in Europe, where talk of adopting Islamic law has grown serious, and the capital cities of once great nations are being transformed into Istanbul, Cairo and Islamabad.

This is the combination that has made Europe sick to death, and unless Europeans shake off all three of these factors, Europe will perish. At the heart of all three is socialism, the interlocking lines between the culture of entitlement and the culture of political liberalism. The election of 1945 that turned England away from Churchill and toward cradle to grave socialism must be refought with the right outcome, or WWIII, or Yeats' "War in Our Time" scenario, may be the best hope for Europe's survival. The Sick Man of Europe has met Islam and if he does not cure himself of the same bad thinking that bred the disease, he will perish and die.
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YALE MEETS Sharia

By Diana West

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Last week's column was about something that doesn't exist — a multi-level strategy to combat the advance of sharia (Islamic law) across the West.

The strategy doesn't exist because there's little understanding that the entrenchment of sharia in the Western zone poses a threat to liberty in the Western zone.

This understanding doesn't exist because the critique of sharia (a legal system best described as sacralized totalitarianism) required to devise a defensive anti-sharia strategy, is not considered possible. Why not? The main obstacle is, well, the advance of sharia across the West. In other words, we cannot criticize the spread of sharia simply because sharia, or its influence, has spread. Thus, from Norway to New Haven, from BBC to Fox News, the reflex reaction to critical commentary — even a newspaper page of political cartoons — is to follow Islamic law and stop it (or try), or just shut up.

That's certainly what Yale University has done, as events beginning in August demonstrate. That's when news broke that Yale and Yale University Press were omitting the Danish Mohammed cartoons (and other Mohammed imagery) from a forthcoming book expressly about the Danish Mohammed cartoons. This sudden act of censorship, Yale said, was due to fear of Muslim outrage over the Mohammed cartoons again turning into Muslim violence. (Roger Kimball, Stanley Kramer and I have laid out evidence that Yale's censorship was also due to fear of alienating Muslim donors.) This violence, along with general Muslim outrage, has its roots in Islamic legal prohibitions of life imagery, criticism of Mohammed and sarcasm about Islamic law — all outlawed by the standard Al Ahzar University-approved sharia manual, Reliance of the Traveller, and all tools for the political cartoonist moved to comment on the connection between Mohammed and jihad violence. And why not? Indeed, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, arguably the most influential Islamic cleric in the world, calls Mohammed "an epitome for religious warriors."

The publication of the Danish cartoons forced the question: What is more important to the West — freedom of speech, or Islamic law masquerading as something Orwellianly known as community harmony?

With its censorship of the Mohammed imagery, Yale chose sharia. But that wasn't all. Wearing my hat as vice president of the International Free Press Society (IFPS), I asked Yale's Steven Smith, master of Branford College, one of Yale's 12 residential colleges, if he would be interested in hosting Kurt Westergaard, the most famous of the Danish cartoonists, at a "master's tea" for students. The IFPS was then finalizing Westergaard's U.S. tour long-planned to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the publication of the cartoons on Sept. 30. Smith agreed and held the event on Oct. 1. And Yale, it seems, will never be the same.

Of course, Yale was already "never the same," something the Westergaard visit further confirmed. If the Western reaction to the Danish Mohammed cartoons exposed the humiliating bargain the West had already made with Islam, trading away freedom of the press in exchange for "community harmony," the Yale reaction to Westergaard's visit following its censorship of the Mohammed cartoons exposed the rotten fruit at the core of American academia: namely, the politically correct drive to censor material "offensive" to multiculturalism mated to the sharia-correct drive to censor material "offensive" to Islam.

Even now, institutional consternation at Yale over Westergaard continues. In the pages of the Yale Daily News, ire is directed at Westergaard's Yale host, Steven Smith, simply for having issued the invitation, as attested by letters from University Chaplain Sharon Kugler and "coordinator of Muslim Life for the University" Omer Bajwa, and even Smith's fellow Yale masters, Davenport College's Richard Schottenfeld and Tanina Rostain. At a panel this week sponsored by the Chaplain's Office and the Yale Muslim Student Association, several Yale professors discussed "what made the cartoons offensive … and how the West's response heightened tension." (Given the West's near-universal capitulation, I'd like to have heard that last bit.)

The lesson here? Free speech about Islam at Yale is a liability: something to censor, oppose, even remove physically, as symbolized by the administration's decision to bus students to the edge of campus to attend Westergaard's talk. Campus security — bomb-sniffing dogs, two SWAT teams — was so extreme it stood as a reproach to critics of Islam, and perhaps as justification for Yale's decision to censor the cartoons in the first place.

Having shrouded free speech in the Islamic veil, Yale stands exposed.