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Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > AP Discovers Civilizational Conflict Between the West and Islam

AP Discovers Civilizational Conflict Between the West and Islam

March 16, 2010

By WILLIAM MAYER and BEILA RABINOWITZ

March 16, 2010 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - When even the pedantically leftist AP takes note of the "growing unease," with which Europeans view their burgeoning Muslim populations, there must be considerable fire behind the smoke. [see, Culture clash: European art provokes Muslims, http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16029/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=Ndcy9Xih]

At issue here is the central question in the culture clash between the West and Islam - at what point does our tradition of laissez faire liberalism - especially when it comes to accommodating alien and often antagonistic cultures - become a suicide pact?

Such questions are faced on a daily basis in both Europe and North America where similar migrations of primarily Third World individuals have often chosen not to become acculturated to their new surroundings.

On the Continent, France seems to have the most pressing problem with nearly 10% of its population being Muslim. Crammed - by choice and design - into segregated neighborhoods, these communities have been the scene of numerous violent Intifada type riots involving hundreds of participants.

"Six North Paris municipalities are burning, victim of an increasingly violent Intifada style uprising in Muslim immigrant communities that had its start two years ago and has been simmering ever since, this time flaring up over a traffic accident in which two immigrant youths on a speeding motorcycle were killed in a collision with a police car." [see, Muslims Riot In France - Shades Of The Intifada - What The MSM Doesn't Want You To Know, http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=france11.28.07%2Ehtm]

With its citizenry having reached the saturation point regarding the increasing stridency of Muslim demands for accommodation, France has embarked on an active push-back, seriously considering the banning of face coverings [niqab or burqa] after having earlier banned hijab [head scarves] in settings such as classrooms.

England, home to approximately 1.6M Muslims, has in many ways fared worse than France in this confrontation, having in large part capitulated to the adherents of Shari'a, even to the extent of creating a dual justice system allowing family matters among Muslims to be adjudicated in Shari'a courts. [see UK's Shari'a Court System Metastasizing At Exponential Rat, http://www.pipelinenews.org/2009/UKs-Sharia-Court-System-Metastasizing-At-Exponential.html]

Despite a continent-wide effort to placate its Muslim population - agreeing to a level of accommodation that would have been unimaginable a relatively few years ago - Europe's graciousness has been repaid with more demands accompanied by jihadist violence.

A few examples:

This January an axe wielding Somali with ties to al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab Mujahideen invaded the home of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard who had drawn a satirical cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. Westergaard saved himself by retreating into a "panic room." The attacker turned on the police before being shot and subdued. [see, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6973966.ece]

Last week seven were arrested in Ireland [one since released] and one in Philadelphia, alleged to have been plotting to kill Swedish cartoonist Lars Wilks, who had depicted Mohammed's head on the body of a dog. [see, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0310/Jihad-Jane-alleged-target-Lars-Vilks-I-have-an-ax-here]

In July 2009 three Muslims were jailed in the UK for perpetrating an arson attack on the home of a publisher of a book on Aisha, the child bride of Muhammad. They poured diesel fuel through the letter box and set it afire. [see, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8139076.stm]

In 2005 Flemming Rose, the editor of the Danish newspaper the Jyllands Posten, published twelve cartoons depicting Mohammed. Both he and the cartoonists receiving a blizzard of death threats . [see, http://www.meforum.org/1758/naser-khader-and-flemming-rose-reflections-on]

Indicative of the great lengths to which Europeans have gone in order to accede to the demands of the Islamists, in 2008 Dutch police arrested the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot after a complaint by a radical Dutch imam. Authorities charged that he was "publishing cartoons which are discriminating for Muslims and people with brown skin." Nekschot [a pseudonym] was told by the police that he had "lost his anonymity." Both the cartoonist and his publisher received death threats as a result of running the allegedly defamatory works. [see, http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3257]

Whatever push-back against this intolerance exists, is coming at the hands of a few rogue politicians backed by overwhelming popular sentiment, in Holland the rise of Geert Wilders is due to largely to this phenomenon.

Despite AP's noting of the challenge to Western traditional political thought posed by these events, they of course present it in the peculiar way that observers of AP have grown accustomed, essentially saying that violating Muslim sensibilities through non-Shari'a compliant acts is tantamount to incitement.

"With the West locked in conflicts across the Muslim world, why would anyone throw fuel on the fire?" [source, http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16029/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=Ndcy9Xih]
The piece concludes, "'I wonder whether the liberal order is really quite so weak and inept, whether the story is quite over just yet,' Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote in one review." [source, ibid]

What the mavens in AP and big media in general either fail to realize or - more believably - simply ignore for the sake of politics, is that this is genuinely a clash of civilizations [in the full sense that Samuel Huntington wrote about in 1993, see, http://history.club.fatih.edu.tr/103%20Huntington%20Clash%20of%20Civilizations%20full%20text.htm] - one liberal and devoted, to greater or lesser degrees, personal and religious freedom and the other ossified, often barbaric that is not at all interested in assimilation but rather in dominion.

Given Europe's recent history of lassitude it is by no means clear that Western civilization has the remaining vitality needed to resist such a clever assault. If America's predicament is not yet that dire it is certainly not because our leaders have learned from the experience of their brothers in the First World.

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