The Coming Universal Caliphate

Jerry Gordon who used to blog with me on Israpundit and now blogs at the Iconoclast has just written an excellent review of Bat Yeor’s new book

Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate
Baat Yeor as you may know is coined the terms Eurabia and Dhimmitude and has written a number of books on such subjects.  Jerry and I know her well.  Here’s an extract of the review.

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European Backlash against Multilateralism and Multiculturalism

In late November, 2009 the Swiss SVP (Swiss People’s Party) launched a successful referendum banning construction of minarets by mosques that was passed by a margin of 57 percent of eligible voters. Oskar Freysinger, head of the conservative SVP, noted in a London Times report, “In no case does this impinge on religious freedom. This has nothing to do with the practice of religion.” Ulrich Schuler said in response to Swiss Government fears that the ban would breach the law on freedom of religion said, “This is not against Islam. The minaret is a symbol of political power.” That was a reference to the comments by controversial Turkish  Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, when as AKP party leader and Mayor of Istanbul in 1998 he was convicted for inciting religious hatred after reading a Muslim poem that included the lines:”The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” Most of Switzerland’s 350,000 Muslims (four percent of the population) are Turkish in origin.

In February, 2011, UK Prime Minister David Cameron followed by French President Sarkozy lamented the failures of multi-culturalism. Cameron said: “We have allowed the weakening of our collective identity. Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live [. . .] apart from the mainstream.” French President Sarkozy said: “We have been too concerned about the identity of the immigrant and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him.” That was echoed by German Chancellor Merkel who called multi-culturalism, “an absolute failure.” The adoption  of strident multi-culturalism had been launched over three decades ago by the European elitists (held up to critical scorn by Bat Ye’or in Eurabia), who accommodated the demands of the OIC and Muslim immigrants opposing their cultural and civil integration in host countries.

Muslim opposition to integration was reflected in the adoption of shari’a law in special courts in the UK and de facto ‘no go areas’ in major EU cities, where non-Muslims feared to tread.

Wilders in a speech at the Magna Carta Foundation in March, 2011 on “The Failure of Multiculturalism and How to Turn the Tide” noted:

Europe is Islamizing at a rapid pace. Many European cities have large Islamic concentrations. In some neighborhoods. Islamic regulations are already being enforced. Women’s rights are being tramapled. We are confronted with headscarves and burqa’s, polygamy, female genital mutilation, honour-killings. “In each one of our cities” says Oriana Fallaci, “there is a second city, a state within the state, a government within the government. A Muslim city, a city ruled by the Koran.”

[. . .]

In October, 2009, Andrew Neather, the former advisor of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, confirmed that the British Government had deliberately organized mass immigration as part of a social engineering project. The Blair Government wanted to –I quote – “make the UK truly multicultural.” To achieve this end, 2.3 million foreigners were allowed to enter Britain between 2000 and 2009; Neather said this policy had ‘enriched” Britain.”

[. . .]

Last month, a poll in Britain showed a staggering 48 percent of the British consider supporting a non-fascist and non-violent party that vows to crack down on immigration and Islamic extremists and restrict the building of mosques.

Wilders went on to echo Bat Ye’or’s criticisms of the unaccountable Eurabian elitists who had become useful fools for the OIC’s agenda.

On account of international treaties, EU legislation prevails over national legislation and cannot be reversed by national parliaments. In 2008, the European Court of Justice annulled both Irish and Danish immigration legislation. In March, 2010, the European Court of Justice annulled Dutch legislation restricting family reunification for immigrants on welfare.

The ease with which Europe’s political elite conducts an immigration policy aimed at the deracination of Europe shows the insensitivity of this elite. It willingly sacrifices its own people to its political goal without consideration for the people involved.

Danish Psychologist, Nicolai Sennels in a New English Review, article, “Muslims and Westerners: The Psychological Differences” discussed the evidence that European Muslims do not identify with their host countries.

A French survey in Le Figaro showed that only 14 percent of the country’s estimated five million Muslims see themselves as “more French than Muslim.” Research made by the German Ministry of Interior shows that only 12 percent of Muslims living in Germany see themselves as more German than Muslim. A Danish survey published by the pro-Muslim pro-democratic organization Democratic Muslims led by the Danish PM and Muslim Naser Khader showed that only 14 percent of Muslims living in Denmark could identify themselves as “Democratic and Danish.”

One of the most popular books in German is Thilo Sarrazin’s Germany Abolishes Itself. As noted in a Gates of Vienna blog translation of a recent Die Zeit interview,” his criticism of Muslim immigration created more uproar than it would have if it had been written by a “right-wing extremist.” Sarrazin is a banker and a Social Democrat. The scandal was intensified by his assertion that mass Muslim immigration is lowering the average IQ of the German population.”

In the Die Zeit interview Sarrazin commented on one of the underlying problems in Eurabia: intimidation of Islamization critics:

Recently, the writer Chaim Noll wrote: If the Federal President says, Islam belongs in Germany, and then criticism of Islam also belongs in Germany. I thought that was well said. If criticism of Islam is not possible, there is this stifling atmosphere where you feel that you and your opinions are persecuted, stonewalled and oppressed. Where there is argument, there is at least a draft passing through. And where there is a draft, there are at least no small niches where a “stink” hangs.

That “stink” that Sarrazin decried has victimized Wilders, Danish free thinker, Lars Hedegaard, Austrian Politician Susanne Winters and counter-jihadist, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolf. Wilders was acquitted of all charges by an Amsterdam District Court in June, 2011. Hedegaard in Copenhagen was convicted, of charges of ‘racism.’  Austrians Winters in 2009 and Sabaditsch–Wolf in 2010 were separately convicted in Vienna courts of “anti-Muslim incitement” for criticizing Islamic doctrine and the less than exemplary behavior of the Prophet Mohammed. These trials were brought by Muslims and leftist media using hate speech laws adapted ironically to combat antisemitism. Instead they were used to throttle criticism of Islamic doctrine that denies international standards of human and civil rights such as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As we have noted, the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam of the OIC rejected the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. Instead, the Cairo Declaration vaulted shari’a’s legal position overarching all human and civil rights laws of the EU, America and ironically the UN.

Soeren Kern noted the Dutch government turnabout on its multiculturalism programs in a Hudson Institute article in September, 2011:

A new integration bill (covering letter and 15-page action plan), which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, reads: “The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society.”

The letter continues: “A more obligatory integration is justified because the government also demands that from its own citizens. It is necessary because otherwise the society gradually grows apart and eventually no one feels at home anymore in the Netherlands. The integration will not be tailored to different groups.”

This Dutch turnabout on multiculturalism followed by just a few days, the acquittal of Hon. Geert Wilders, “on all charges” in an Amsterdam court.

Is this pushback against Eurabia succeeding? Bat Ye’or doesn’t think so. At the conclusion of her new book, she writes:

Europe has lost its bet. A hostage to hatred of Israel, it thought it could salvage peace by its surrender to Palestinian terrorism since the late 1960’s. Burnishing the instruments of its own defeat, it has argued that terrorism will not be defeated through the military option, but rather through dialogue, multilateralism and multiculturalism, the main argument of the coming Caliphate.

The Palestinization of Europe has brought the Caliphate intro the cities of Europe. . . It has moved forward on gilded carpets in the corridors of dialogue, the networks of the alliances and partnership, the corruption of its leaders, intellectuals and NGOs, particularly at the United Nations. The Caliphate is already alive and growing within Europe. In the extinction of the basic freedoms, control over thought, opinions and culture, subverting democratic laws by Shari’a, fatwas, self-censorship and fear-inseparable companions of dhimmitude.

Is America, next?

Will what Bat Ye’or describes as OIC infiltration and official dhimmitude occur here in America?

Perhaps it already has, but with some mitigating circumstances.

Let’s looks at the history.

Sixty years ago, the CIA in the Eisenhower Administration entered into an arrangement with Dr. Said Ramadan, co-founder of the World Muslim League that supported the spread of the Salafist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Ummah. Ramadan seized a mosque in Munich originally sponsored by a group composed by an ex-Nazi operative Gerhard von Mende and ex- Waffen SS Muslim soldiers from the Caucasus and Central Asia.  The takeover of the Munich mosque by Muslim student leaders and later Muslim Brotherhood leaders from Egypt ironically facilitated founding in the US the Muslim Student Association and the Islamic Society of North America.

In the period following 9/11, despite the report and findings of the Congressionally- chartered Commission, we witnessed the start of official multiculturalism in Washington during the Bush Administration. The first evidence of that was the mantra that the terrorism had nothing to do with Islam, an alleged religion of peace, so we were told. Then the Bush Administration formally recognized the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 2007, since renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), appointing a Texas Muslim businessman as a special envoy to the Muslim Ummah. The Obama Administration appointed another Texas Muslim, who was a White House Deputy Counsel to become the second special envoy to the OIC. Then we had the deracination of the official government counterterrorism lexicon by substituting “manmade disasters,” instead of terms like Jihadist or Islamist connected to the term terrorism. We had the removal of a Pentagon consultant on jihad warfare doctrine, Army reserve Major Stephen Coughlin at the behest of Heshem Islam, a Muslim outreach aide to the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush Administration. Islam accused Coughlin of being “a Christian fanatic with a pen.” Early in the Obama Administration, the President officially reached out to the Ummah via trips to Ankara, Turkey, praising its Islamist government as a model, and Cairo where President Obama gave a speech at the al Azhar University, apologizing for US conduct in the Arab Muslim heartland. Nonetheless, his Attorney General, Eric Holder, opened up investigations into removing barriers to misuse of Muslim Charities or Zakat that designated as one of its seven purposes, jihad, as the way of Allah. In 2008, a Federal Court in Dallas, Texas convicted founders of the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim Charity on 108 charges of funneling upwards of $35 million in funds to Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, Hamas in Gaza. In the course of that trial, the FBI had obtained copies of a secret plan to engage in a Grand Jihad in America to introduce shari’a to supplant the US Constitution. Further, the Holy Land Foundation federal prosecutors had identified as unindicted co-conspirators several Muslim Brotherhood front groups, who have yet to be prosecuted.

The Obama Administration appointed members of the Muslim Brotherhood to policy positions and advisory posts at the Department of Homeland Security. In the wake of the Fort Hood massacre by Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army Chief of Staff said that the first victim of that slaughter was “diversity.” In the eruption of the mega mosque controversies that coursed from ground zero in lower Manhattan to Murfreesboro in Middle Tennessee and Temecula, California, the US Department of Justice intervened in local court proceedings declaring that Islam was a protected religion under our Constitution. Christian and Jewish groups obsessed about engaging Muslim  clerics in dialogues that conveyed da’wa- the call to Islam – as a benign peaceful faith hiding its real doctrine and misleading both sponsoring non-Muslim groups and the general public. Mainstream media promoted this view that Islam was a benign faith evading the realities of Muslim Brotherhood strategic plans uncovered by private investigators containing a political agenda of conquest by infiltration and deception. Infiltration of our bi-partisan political party system occurred through the election to office of Muslim candidates at both Congressional and state levels, fostered by leading figures with deep connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Like the grass roots efforts in the EU to combat dhimmitude, there have sprung up in the US opposition to mosque building and campaigns to introduce anti-shari’a legislation in more than 20 states. Three such statutes were enacted in Arizona, Tennessee and Louisiana during the 2010 and 2011 legislative sessions.  Congressional Homeland Security Committees in both the House and Senate undertook investigations of home grown terrorism. Radical clerics in America were found to be recruiting youths as Jihadis who engaged in murderous lone wolf attacks here or joined al Qaeda groups abroad fighting our troops in the field.

What Bat Ye’or laments as a foregone conclusion about dhimmitude in Europe may also have infiltrated this country with the condonment of the administrations in Washington and in major state capitals, the mainstream media and even non-Muslim religious bodies. However, there appears to be more resolve at the grass roots level here to fight this development, to stifle the spread of the universal Caliphate to this bastion of democracy and freedom. We have something that Europe doesn’t have-a written Constitution with a Bill of Rights – the First Ten Amendments – with the right to exercise free speech embedded in the First Amendment.