This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/4302
March 16, 2010
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.
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. ©2010 PipeLineNews.org LLC. All rights reserved. |
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This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/4302