This story, unsurprisingly, does not fully address the reasons why there is a high crime rate among Muslim immigrants to Europe. Nevertheless, it contains some useful information. From the New York Times, with thanks to Anthony:
In less than a decade, there has been a radical shift in France's prison population, a shift that officials and experts say poses a monumental challenge.Despite making up only 10 percent of the population, Muslims account for most of the country's inmates and a growing percentage of the prison populations in many other European countries, an indication of their place at the bottom of the Continent's hierarchy.
With radical strains of Islam percolating through Europe, authorities are unsure how to address the spiritual needs of the prisoners while guarding against the potentially toxic mix of extremist ideology and a criminal past. One result is often neglect, which officials say can be a still greater force for radicalization....
Two months ago Pierre Raffin, the director of La Santé detention center, warned officials looking into the role of religion in France that extremist proselytizing in prisons was growing.
Other countries are facing the same problem. Spain's chief counterterrorism magistrate, Baltazar Garzón, said recently that the men accused of plotting to blow up the country's main counterterrorism court were recruited from among fellow inmates by an Islamic militant serving time for credit card fraud.
Most famously, Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a Miami-bound airliner in December 2001 using a bomb in his shoe, converted to Islam while in a British jail.
Those who are detained or convicted for terrorist-related crimes are not always separated from the larger prison population and are often ready to act as spiritual guides at a time when mainstream Muslim chaplains are in severely short supply.
Abdullah (prison rules prevented him from giving his last name) said that while he was at Fleury-Merogis, militants were active in the prison yard, preaching that Christians and Jews are enemy infidels. In May, the militants defied prison rules by organizing a prayer meeting during an exercise break. Several prisoners were disciplined as a result.
"Islam is becoming in Europe, especially France, the religion of the repressed, what Marxism was in Europe at one time," said Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranian-French scholar who has written a book on Islam in prisons. He says the growing Muslim prison population is evidence of an Islamic underclass that is developing across Europe and, at its margins, is increasingly sympathetic to the coalescing ideologies of political Islam.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FL07Aa01.html
Writing off Europe
By Spengler
http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=289575&page=1
Is Islam Endangering 'Europeanness?'
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11805031_1
The Islamization of Europe?
http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/story.asp?ID=6881
The Rage of Oriana Fallaci
http://www.azure.org.il/19-berlinsky.htm
The Hope of Marseille
To the bewilderment of French Jews, the Palestinian Intifada has attenuated, but the so-called French Intifada has not-except in one city. The violence in Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg, and other major French cities has continued, and in some places worsened. In these cities, anti-Semitism appears to be uncontainable. But in Marseille, the animus has fizzled out. The city reacted with revulsion to the burning of the Or Aviv Synagogue. City-wide protests against anti-Semitism were immediately organized; Arabs participated in the demonstrations. The leaders of Marseille’s Islamic community firmly condemned the attack. By contrast, after similar violence in Toulouse, Muslim community leaders offered not one single gesture of solidarity.1
Marseille is a city of immigrants. Fully a quarter of its population is of North African origin, and demographers predict that Marseille will be the first city on the European continent with an Islamic majority. Its Jewish community is the third-largest in Europe. The most ethnically diverse city in France, then, has paradoxically been the most successful in containing this outbreak of ethnic violence.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1294945/posts
Returning from an intensive two-month trip throughout Europe, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, former chief rabbi of Israel and a Holocaust survivor, declared Sunday that European Jewry has no future. "In the past months I've traveled to Austria, Britain, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, and I'm telling you there is no future for European Jewry," said Lau in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post. "I see the end of the exile for European Jewry." Lau said that outward signs of anti-Semitism are not a new phenomenon and since the resurgence of Palestinian violence four years ago there has been a sharp rise. But the anti-Semitic violence has spread to include the burning of synagogues, the desecration of graves, attacks against Jewish schools, and anti-Semitic propaganda spread via the Internet and on university campuses.
France is doomed. Will it go unlamented by its own (ex-christian) people is the question.
Wonder what it'll take for the authorities to dump politicalcorrectness and do the right thing - like ban islam in jails (if not ban islam, period.) Another mass attack? 1000s more dead? Jeez, inertia is such a hopeless thing. But I suspect actve dhimmitude is beyond mere inertia, its fear coupled in as well.
Evviva La Fallacci!
As far as the parallels between Marxism and Islam, I note as well the fascination with violence--as long as it is directed against the hated "other": the bourgeois for the Marxists, the harbis for the Muslims.
Bertholdt Brecht celebrated Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife) to skewer bourgeois hypocrisy, and Marxists dared to wonder why their welfare states (and even the planned economies of the ex-Eastern bloc) bred hooliganism. Muslims celebrate suicide bombers and the intifada, and they will dare to wonder why their own new polities they will build in Europe will be subject to revolution and instability. Both breed an impatience and utter lack of tolerance for human frailty--perhaps because both believe in human perfectability; perhaps because both cannot stand to admit that humans cannot be saved except by Jesus Christ, while at the same time appropriating large chunks of the Christian tradition and worldview.
The West is like Israel in the days of the judges. It rebels against God, and finds itself oppressed or tossed about by all kinds of people who hate it.
Headline should read:
"Islam is becoming in Europe, especially France, the religion of the self-repressed, what Marxism was in Europe at one time"
Case in point: According to the UN sponsored report on Arab Human Development in 2002, "The GDP in all Arab countries combined stood at $531.2 billion in 1999--less than that of a single European country, Spain ($595.5 billion)."
Even when free to organize their political, economic, social and cultural framework freely over a period of more than a thousand years, the adherents of the Islamic ideology cannot manage to rise above the material and intellectual poverty induced by the failure of their ideology to compete with the ideologies of the West and the East. So it should come as no surprise that when they interleave with non-Muslim societies and self-organize into enclaves, impoverished crime and disease ridden ghettos naturally develop.
If muslims reach the 50 percent mark, then I am sure that there will be another holocaust. So I say to all Jews; get out of Europe, and get out now while you still can.
{{Islam is becoming in Europe, especially France, the religion of the repressed, what Marxism was in Europe at one time}}
The idea that Islam is in a 'religion of the repressed' must be examined and refuted. Islam is and has been, throughout its history, a severely repressing agent. In the context of present day European prisons, the more accurate analogy would be with extreme right wing Neo Nazi organisations like the BNP or National Front in England, or the Aryan Nation in America.
Islam has an agenda to repress all others. It actively represses its women. It glorifies the imperialism of its ancestors, and justifies the repression of its subject. Its very meaning ‘Submission’ is a corollary of repression...to submit under something, to be repressed under something.
Islam in the context of prisoners is Islam rampant and free; an ideology of hate and imperialism, hot wired from the darkest parts of the human soul, that impulse to destroy, oppress, bring down, vandalize, and oppress.
Of course, left wing academics are in glee with this symptom of Islamic failure and criminality. It allows them to dust down their Marxist tropes, the inanities of their ideology, to cast Western liberal democracy once again as the source of all failure, iniquity, and injustice.
This is how they glorify and whitewash each others ideology, this squalid meeting of twisted minds, the Marxist and the Jihadi, a match made in janaat.
Ali Dashti -
Many thanks for the link to that interview with the wonderful Oriana Fallaci. Recommended to all.
A link to La Fallaci's prophetic article about the invasion of Iraq:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003191
Where are today's younger, photogenic, headline-grabbing equivalents of Fallaci and 'Bebe' Bardot???
"Islam is becoming in Europe, especially France, the religion of the repressed, what Marxism was in Europe at one time"
Yes and look where Marxism got them. I suggest everyone read the book "The Road to Serfdom" by FA Hayek
I read it when I was about 12 years old and I have become totally immune to totalitarian ideology. You will too.
After you are done reading Hayek, start with Rand, Mises and Rothbard. Mohamed will soon look like the scowling, irrational dictator that he really is. You will be able to say, “The Emperor has no clothes.”
The Stark Logic of Islam
If Islam says that a woman is like a farm animal.
Then logically - Islamic people should see their mothers as animals.
What is offensive to most people – is actually the teachings of Islam taken to its logical ends.
Whenever Islam is trying recruit new members, it often uses these little booklets. The book is separated into two parts – the main part and a special part for women, where women are usually told how important or special they are under Islam and how good they will be treated.
The woman will learn later that in the religion, she is like a farm animal and that the man has the right to beat her and withhold her food as a method of control or discipline.
A moderate Islam has to face – that this stuff was written a long time ago, by writers who really did not understand a whole lot. To moderate these religious teachings - leaders of Islam need to – say yes - the Koran does say these things – but that our mothers are no less animal than we are and that in a modern world the practice of wife beating should be abandoned.
Humble Islam
Nice book list, Sheik Canuck (do I have to add the "swt'?)
If I might recommend an introductory novel of Ayn Rand's, I would start with "Anthem". Of course, you can find out more about the Goddess of Objectivism at the Ayn Rand Institute on-line:
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer
Nice book list, Sheik Canuck (do I have to add the "swt'?)
Posted by: Mike
No swt required. I am neither a prophet nor an emperor.
Here is a link for some of the authors I recommended. I don’t think Rand is listed at this site, but people can find her at the link you gave.
http://www.mises.org/store/
Canuck (no swt needed)
JUST SOMETHING HEAVY??
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/12/3/15702.shtml
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Pakistan's Most Dangerous Man
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Friday, Dec. 3, 2004
"The leadership vacuum created by the sad demise of [Palestinian] President Arafat can only be filled by Osama bin Laden and [Taliban leader] Mullah [Mohammad] Omar, the real leaders that are the only dedicated individuals with the mass support of the Muslim world," said the front-page statement in Pakistan's mass circulation, Urdu-language newspaper Nawa-e-Waqt.
The author was none other than Gen. Hamid Gul, the notorious former head of Pakistan's intelligence service (ISI), perennial agitproper and America-hater, who is "strategic adviser" to the six-party coalition of politico-religious extremists known as MMA. In a subsequent Nov. 19 interview in the same newspaper, Gen. Gul flayed U.S. foreign policy now in the hands of "warrior princess" Condi Rice. He said: "The U.S. has created the dilemma of the sociopolitical and economic collapse in Pakistan. Now with Rice's appointment, the U.S. will influence and control Pakistan's nuclear program, which is our only remaining strength, through which the right nuclear balance in the region [with India] is maintained."
MMA plans nationwide protests this week against President Pervez Musharraf's military offensive in the federally administered tribal areas (FATA) to find Osama bin Laden. Presumably to pre-empt the extremist demonstrations, Mr. Musharraf announced military operations in FATA were now completed and the army was satisfied bin Laden was not hiding somewhere in the 2,500-kilometer-long Afghan-Pakistan frontier region.
The unmarked border snakes through rugged mountains and remote plains, and with less than 10,000 troops engaged in the search, and the first snowfalls of winter, finding the proverbial needle in a haystack would have been easier.
If anyone knows bin Laden's whereabouts, it would be Gen. Gul. An internal CIA assessment describes Gen. Gul as Pakistan's "most dangerous man." The general doesn't hide his admiration for bin Laden and is a personal friend of Mullah Omar. Bin Laden and Gen. Gul share a geopolitical vision that merges Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the oil riches of a post-monarchy Saudi Arabia in a revived Muslim caliphate.
Earlier this year, Gen. Gul told a closed meeting of MMA leaders at a wake for the wife of the coalition's vice president Sami ul-Haq, they should begin planning Mr. Musharraf's succession. Gen. Gul's candidate: Abdel Qader Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and, opinion surveys say, the country's most popular man since Ali Jinnah, founder of the republic.
"Musharraf and the new Prime Minister Aziz are just the informers and not the real leaders of Pakistan as they were not elected by the people," Gen. Gul said in a recent interview that called for "elected and brave only" leaders. Mr. Musharraf has survived eight assassination plots.
Gen. Gul's candidate is the same Mr. Khan who confessed to running the world's first international black market for nuclear materials and bomb-making wherewithal. His clients were Iran, North Korea — two of the three members of President Bush's axis of evil (the third was Iraq) — and Libya (now on probation in reform school).
Mr. Khan first began catering to the Iranian ayatollahs' nuclear yearnings in February 1986. At that time, the secret program was split up and compartmentalized into raw materials, uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing, technology procurement and weapons design.
In the 1980s, there was no yarn about the need for nuclear power to cover nuclear weapons goals. Iranian Majlis speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani said in an address to Pasdaran officers, rebroadcast on Oct. 6, 1988, "We should fully equip ourselves both in the offensive and defensive use of chemical, bacteriological and radiological weapons." The $800 million deal with Russia for nuclear reactors at Busheir was a convenient smoke screen for the different phases of the nuclear weapons program scattered in the rest of the country.
Negotiations between Europe's Big Three and Iran, and IAEA and Iran, are pure cat-and-mouse charades. Iran is already trying to fit a WMD warhead to a long-range missile. And IAEA lacks authority to scour the country for nuclear weapons.
After burrowing their way into the club courtesy of Pakistan's nuclear Daddy Warbucks, Iran and North Korea are now the world's ninth and 10th nuclear powers. The fiercely anti-American Mr. Khan also sent two nuclear engineers to Afghanistan before September 11, 2001, to confer with Mullah Omar (on an agricultural project, Pakistan lamely explained when the news leaked). Gen. Gul was also in Afghanistan for two weeks immediately prior to September 11.
Mr. Musharraf granted A.Q. Khan a full pardon. He was allowed to keep his lucre stashed in foreign banks. Mr. Musharraf realized bringing such a national icon to trial would have triggered nationwide riots.
Worse than riots, A.Q.K.'s handiwork may well precipitate a wider regional conflict. Both Israel and the United States have said a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Iran, on the other hand, sees itself bracketed between two countries now occupied by the U.S. — 20,000 U.S. troops to the east in Afghanistan and 135,000 to the west in Iraq. Again, seen from Tehran, Iran is surrounded by half the world's nuclear powers — Russia, Israel, Pakistan and India.
So Iran has legitimate security concerns. And the fear of U.S. armed forces on its flanks has strengthened the grip of hard-liner ayatollahs.
Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, some prominent neoconservatives advocated hitting Iran first, not Iraq. They argued, as the Iraqi hawks did about Baghdad, that countless millions were anxiously waiting to be liberated. For the U.S. to take on Iran and its 70 million people without a clear casus belli would make Iraq look like a walk in the park. The inevitable strategic debacle would topple Pakistan's President Musharraf and bring about Gen. Gul's vision of a nuclear caliphate.
The U.S. Defense Science Board in a 111-page report this week found U.S. credibility among Muslims is down to zero and urged policymakers to spend more time "listening" to their intended audience and use messages that "seek to reduce, not increase, perceptions of arrogance, opportunism and double standards."
At the same time, another U.S. survey showed anti-American prejudice and hostility in Europe far exceeding those during the Vietnam War. Today, every large European country has a Muslim minority of several million. A preemptive U.S. attack on Iran would only worsen matters for the Bush administration and governments still backing the U.S. in Iraq. We would likely be on the receiving end of a paroxysm of global rage — and Osama bin Laden, as Hamid Gul suggested, anointed the Muslim world's Jihadi-in-Chief.
Unencumbered by image problems in Europe and the Muslim world, where it has long been seen as the villain, Israel is ready and able to seriously disrupt Iran's nuclear buildup, much the way it killed Saddam Hussein's reactor at Osirak before it went critical in 1981. Israel won't wait for a wink and a nod from the White House before acting. But the U.S. will be blamed anyway.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large for The Washington Times and United Press International.
LOVE HOW THEY SEND THEIR SPYS TO TAKE YOUR MIND OFF THE REAL CHESS BOARD??
Partof the American Tribe
Squirrel Hunter
Spider Killer
God Bless the USA and her Fighting Forces and ALL who Fight with her give them Strength,Sight,Wisdom, and Courage to stay the course to Victory to Destroy All islamic terrorist and ALL who Support them Open the Worlds Eyes to their Threat Amen
PS
Snow still in GOOD!!
Sheik Canuck-
I don't know if you're aware of Samizdata.net, but it's an interesting Libertarian site that also has some useful links along the right sidebar:
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/
BTW, I love the photo at the top left - Guns and Books, the Free World's greatest weaponry against the forces of Tyranny...
In the Netherlands the prisons are overpopulated with non-western europeans as well. Around 55% is of non-dutch origin, but probably the numbers are must higher, reaching 75%. Mostly the prisons are populated by turks, moroccans, antillians, africans and people from eastern europe.
SHEIK CANUCK (swt),
Excellent choice! May I add to your suggestion another book, Ludwig von Mises' "Economic Policy."
It is extremely engaging, very short (a collection of six lectures he gave in Argentina in the late fifties), and very, very informative.
In addition to Hayek's works, it is very important to read von Mises and others (such as Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics") because economics isn't even TOUCHED in the overwhelming majority of schools, despite the fact that it is the integrating principle of society, the means through which all our thoughts and activities are related.
When studied in association with philosophy, it explains why collectivism can't work, EVER, why Islamia is so inclined to poverty and no Nobel Prizes, EVER, and why free enterprise is the essential partner of creativity and productivity, ALWAYS.
The hypocracy by Muslims is incredible,in Canada groups like CAIR and the C.I.C. rant on about how Muslims cost society less money becuase of the values that make them live clean,Law-abiding lives.
When a issue about crime made the headlines a University teacher insisted that figures showed that white-Canadians were the major reason for crime and over-crowded jails. Now we hear that Muslims are happy that the Government hired a prison Imam to deal with the high Muslims population that's disproportionally represented.
Multiculturalism has made self-segragated pockets of minorities that suffer from high unemployment from limited skills in out two Official lamguages. There are far too many Muslim criminals in jail for all of the cases to be based on Islamophobia,Islam is so restrictive that it creates poverty and oppression by the females held back from education and employment.
Last night a CBC special interviewed a British Muslim convert and he avered the right to kill the 5 Billion non-Muslims on Earth to reclaim the world for Allah.
If that doesn't wake-up the French and Dutch to the ultimate goal of Muslims in Europe then it will take a major disaster where Islamists slaughter thousands of Gods children for Allah.
Sheik Canuck-
I don't know if you're aware of Samizdata.net, but it's an interesting Libertarian site that also has some useful links along the right sidebar:
Posted by: Mike
Thanks for the info Mike! It’s added to my favorites.
Canuck
Excellent choice! May I add to your suggestion another book, Ludwig von Mises' "Economic Policy."
Posted by: cubed
I have read Mises’ “Economic Policy” as well as “Human Action” (scholar’s edition), “Socialism”, “Bureaucracy”,
“Liberalism” and various other books, essays and papers written by him. I also liked Rothbard’s “Man, Economy and State with Power & Market”. I have read several of Rothbard’s other books. I would recommend for anyone interested in a basic book on economics and the Austrian school of economics to read “Economics for real people” Gene Callahan.
"My only consolation is the inherent instability of evil."- A.N. Whitehead.
But, when it gains nuclear arsenals (how many assassination attempts will 'Perv' Musharraf of Pakistan survive?) this is now cold comfort.
The Soviets, being 'godless', were actually safer to confront than Islam, since they could NOT hope for "another life" -if they committed M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction). And were therefore resigned to NEEDING the world- if only as a place to terrorize with their quasi-theocratic state.
Their simple equation: No Earth, nowhere to exploit.
The religio-terrorists, however, have NO such restraint -as the news reveals daily. No concern for any life, whether dog ("unclean") or the entire biosphere ("Paradise will be better!").
All 'divine' cults are willing to see the entire planet extinguished -if only it will gain them Heaven.
As Caligula, the Roman predecessor to Mohammad, put it: "If only the whole world had but a single neck, that I could strangle it all at once!"
You cannot reason with the theologically and ego-maniacally illogical.
Reason requires accepting some limits. To human arrogance. And the acknowledging of an 'earthly' structure to the laws of thinking, behavior and consequences.
The followers of Absolutisms scoff at such human weaknesses as: intellectual humility, (skepticism, doubt) and the progressive unfolding of consciouness (from Socratic 'daemons' to the 'id/ego/supergo').
The one consolation I feel is that the Islamic fanatics may have played their cards too soon.
While their infidel enemies are better armed.
Now, they are trying to disarm us.
With charm ("woman prisoner of Taliban converts to Islam, and thanks Allah she was not a prisoner at Abu Ghraib under the true terrorists, the evil Americans...").
Or slaughter ("...theo van gogh was shot 6 times, had his head nearly severed, and a butcher knife was stabbed into his heart with a jihadi manifesto pinned on his dying body...").
But their intent is identical.
Tyranny over the Mind of Man and Woman.
The sooner they join the Soviets, as one more ghastly footnote on the crimson book of History, the happier the Earth will be.
To quote a guy who studied the Muslims (and especially the Sufis and dervishes) close up:
"Do not let your past become your future."
-G.I. Gurdjieff.
(Finally, a 'sura' that makes some sense.)