James Neilson: Sveits mot islam bajonetter

-“Muslimer i Europa synes å være bestemt til å påtvinge sin tro og kulturelle normer for innfødte europeere. Mange europeere føler seg forrådt av sine egne regjeringer”.

-“Fremtidige konflikter mellom det opprinnelige europeiske folk og nykommerne som åpent sikter å erstatte dem, blir virkelig ikke vakkert å se”.

By James Neilson

for The Herald

To the dismay of all right-thinking people in Europe, the backward Swiss still cling to the old-fashioned custom of letting ordinary folk influence government policy. The fruits of such irresponsibility were made unpleasantly plain a couple of weeks ago when a majority voted in a referendum to ban the construction of more minarets in their country. Their objections had little to do with architecture. As Turkey ’s Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had helpfully explained to them: “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our army.” Seeing most Swiss dislike the idea of being stabbed in the guts by the soldiers of what to them is an alien creed, the desire of 57 percent of those who took part in the referendum to keep Erdogan’s “bayonets” out of sight was not that surprising.

Nor was it that in a series of polls improvised by newspapers elsewhere in Europe the majorities in favour of banning minarets were even bigger than in Switzerland. “Islamization” is now a hot issue everywhere from the northernmost tip of Norway to the southern coast of Crete. It is not a matter of racism as apologists for the status quo would have it: hardly anyone gets worked up by the presence of Chinese, Hindus or Sikhs. On the contrary, they are regarded as model immigrants. It is entirely to do with the aggressive refusal of too many members of one particular creed to make any attempt to assimilate. Like European colonists of yesteryear, Muslims in Europe seem determined to impose their own beliefs and their own cultural mores on the natives, many of whom feel they have been betrayed by their respective governments.

Ironically, the main reason European leaders opted to open the doors to indiscriminate mass immigration was the horror and shame so many felt for letting the holocaust happen. They told themselves that religious and ethnic prejudice led inevitably to genocide so it was wrong to pick and choose, admitting people they thought could adapt to the host society and rejecting those who in all probability would refuse to do so. The upshot was that an astoundingly creative minority was replaced by another whose contributions have, one might say, been mixed. Plenty of individual Muslims have proved to be fine upstanding citizens, but on the whole the large communities they have formed have been exceedingly troublesome and, for the welfare services, hugely expensive. When asked by reporters just why they had voted to ban minarets, many Swiss said they did not want their country to go the way of the UK, France, Belgium and Holland where street riots, terrorist threats, and the “honour killings” of women for breaking ancestral codes of conduct have become routine.

As was to be expected, government spokesmen in such bastions of religious freedom as Turkey , Saudi Arabia , Libya , etc, harshly condemned the Swiss. In most of the Muslim world, anyone rash enough to try to build a church or synagogue who manages to overcome the countless bureaucratic and legal hurdles is liable to be torn apart by an enraged mob, but because they are convinced that theirs is the only true faith, that minor detail did not impress them in the slightest. Their Western sympathizers could also insist that everyone should be true to his own principles, meaning that mosques, minarets, burqas and promises to decapitate anyone who speaks ill of the prophet Muhammad or his legacy should be tolerated in Europe and the Americas, but it would be most unreasonable to demand that Muslim countries treated Christians, Jews and Hindus with similar respect. For now at least, there is little chance that the Europeans will prohibit the establishment of mosques in their countries until Saudi Arabia permits the building of churches and synagogues throughout the kingdom, without excluding such “holy cities” as Mecca.

It is now widely agreed that multiculturalism, the notion that all ways of life and belief systems are equally valid and that providing Europeans make amends for their criminal past everyone can live happily together, was a big mistake. Unless people take some pride in their own achievements and those of their forefathers, societies will be in no shape to accommodate newcomers who reject out of hand the multicultural pieties because they know perfectly well that their own traditions are superior to all others. Unfortunately, it took several decades for awareness of that disquieting truth to sink in, decades in which the European Union acquired an intolerant minority that is already about 20 million-strong, with over 50 million in Europe as a whole, and which enjoys the enthusiastic support of oil-rich countries in the Middle East and North Africa whose leaders have no qualms when it comes to making use of their economic leverage. As far back as 1974, the Algerian leader Hoauri Boumédienne said Islam would conquer Europe “through the wombs of our women,” a promise that since then has been echoed frequently by his Libyan neighbour Muammar Khaddafy. Just how the resulting drama will play out is anybody’s guess; if the history of Europe, India and many other places is any guide, the conflicts to come between the native population and those who openly aspire to replace them will not be pretty.

The Herald