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Europeans Face Tough Choices on Islam

Nov 6, 2004 6:39 pm By Robert Spencer

This AP story has some good information in it, but quickly runs off the rails with tosh like this from professor Jan Rath (looks like profs are the same in every nation): “My impression is the European voices that say, `Everyone is equal, but we are more equal than Muslims,’ are growing,” Rath said. Note that not once, nowhere in this story does it make any mention of the radical Muslim imperative to subvert non-Muslim societies and ultimately impose Sharia upon them.

Yet that is the key point of this story. The lesson of van Gogh’s killing is not that all Muslims are evil, or that evil right wingers want to portray all Muslims as evil. It is that Muslims in the West are willing to enforce provisions of the Sharia that directly contradict Western freedoms. Now what are Western societies going to do about that? I suspect they will do a lot more of what AP writer Brian Murphy is doing here: wringing his hands about the poor Muslims who feel victimized by Europeans who view Islam as a “monolith,” without ever addressing the question even of to what extent the views held by van Gogh’s killer are held also by European Muslims.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Europe’s complex interplay with Islam appears to stand at a tipping-point, and the slaying of a Dutchman who made a movie critical of Islam could indicate one direction in which it is headed. “The Muslims say they’re scared,” said mourner Nicolette Toering. “No, we’re scared.”…

A five-page letter pinned to the body of Theo van Gogh, brutally murdered Tuesday as he was riding his bike down a busy boulevard in Amsterdam, called for Muslims to rise up against the “infidel enemies” in the West.

Other messages “” later left at the sidewalk shrine where the 47-year-old filmmaker’s throat was slashed “” dripped with equal venom against radical Islam. “Enemies live among us,” read one missive in a bed of flowers, votive candles and crosses.

“Equal venom”: you see? There are bad guys on both sides. The problem is that thing called “hate,” which can overcome people anywhere. This is the typical depth we get in analyses these days, and of course it betrays a blithe indifference to the derivations of that “hate,” its causes, and above all to the possibility that it could be encouraged more on one side than the other.

The attack has underscored the hard political and social choices that European leaders face about Muslims and the wider Islamic world….

But those big issues fade on the streets of many European centers. Here “” even in places like tolerant Amsterdam “” it’s often expressed as a gnawing feeling that militant factions in Islamic immigrant communities are gaining ground and chipping away at values such as free speech and secular politics.

“There is a general feeling that a social collision is becoming inevitable,” said Jan Rath, co-director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. “People think it’s been building for years and now finally coming to the surface.”

The landmarks along the way included the 1989 death threat “fatwa,” or religious edict, against British writer Salman Rushdie for alleged insults to Islam in “The Satanic Verses,” the rise of neo-Fascist movements, the assassination of Dutch anti-immigrant politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and France’s ongoing showdown with Muslims over a ban on headscarves and other religious apparel in schools.

“My impression is the European voices that say, `Everyone is equal, but we are more equal than Muslims,’ are growing,” Rath said.

The Netherlands offers a good vantage point to gauge changing attitudes toward Muslim communities across Europe “” which have grown more than 100 percent in the past 15 years, according to U.N. reports. Some sources place the Muslim population as high as 13.5 million in Western Europe, or more than 2 percent of the population, in addition to more than 6 million native-born Muslims in the Balkans….

The workers, mostly Turks, assimilated well into Dutch society. Moroccans and other North Africans began arriving in the 1970s and 1980s, when more lenient laws allowed men to bring in their families.

But the situation in Holland was getting tougher. Jobs were more scarce “” especially for the Moroccan immigrant children “” and some politicians began trying to connect the rising crime rate with the swelling Muslim community: now about 1 million in a country of 16 million people.

“Some politicians began trying to connect the rising crime rate with the swelling Muslim community.” Obviously Murphy’s implication is that there is nothing at all to this connection. Some self-serving and no doubt right wing politicians tried to use the poor Muslims to gain political capital, that’s all. Unfortunately, the actual crime data from Europe suggests otherwise.

Last year, a parliament member, Geert Wilders, pressed for a five-year ban on immigration from Turkey and Morocco. Dutch anti-terrorist agents, meanwhile, have intensified probes into alleged radical recruitment among young Muslims.

Alleged. No radical recruitment is going on for sure. Despite the fact that the Dutch were concerned enough about this that they outlawed jihad recruitment last August.

Van Gogh “” a distant relative of the famous 19th-century Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh “” often tested the boundaries of free expression by denouncing Muslims in the most graphic terms. His last work, “Submission,” a joint project with Somali-born lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali, attacked the treatment of women under Islam.

The filmmaker’s fans were as passionate as his detractors.

“He was trying to warn us about the dangers of radical Islam,” said teacher Geert Plas as he visited the site where Van Gogh was ambushed. “Now maybe we’ll listen. To me this is not just a small event. It’s part of the World Trade Center and Madrid. We must see this.”

The letter pinned to the victim’s body also threatened death to Hirsi Ali, who has gone into hiding, and predicted the downfall of the “infidel enemies of Islam” in Europe, America and the Netherlands.

“The jihad (holy war) has come to the Netherlands,” parliament speaker Jozias van Aartsen said.

The memorials that piled up on the dark brick sidewalk often crossed the line from sympathy to seething recriminations. “This is the true face of Islam,” said a handwritten message. A framed poem called “Imam” ends with a stanza: “If you want to improve the world, start with yourself and your faith.”

A banner waved from a fence: “Theo rests his case.”

Christian prayer cards, crosses and biblical passages sat amid the flowers “” a rare religious outpouring in one of Europe’s most secular states.

“This doesn’t just say something about the Netherlands,” said Baukje Prins, assistant professor of social philosophy at Holland’s Groninjen University. “It is an example of how international relations have become polarized.”

Van Gogh’s murder shows that international relations have become polarized? Do tell. I thought it showed that jihadist thugs felt free enough in the Netherlands to commit murder for Islam in broad daylight. Seems as if in this case maybe international relations weren’t polarized enough on the streets of Amsterdam.

At a mosque near the murder site, Friday prayers were dominated by talk of the slaying “” sprinkled with worry about a possible backlash.

“We are in danger,” a Moroccan man told a group of friends sitting in a circle on a carpeted floor.

“No, no,” another man said. “We cannot give in to fear. This is our home now.”

How noble. See? While the Dutch are giving in to fear, their noble Muslim immigrant population isn’t. Murphy has deftly shifted the victim tag from van Gogh to the Dutch Muslims.

Moulay Idrissi listened and shook his head.

“I’m afraid. I can’t deny it,” said Idrissi, who emigrated from Morocco in 1978. “I feel respect for Muslims is falling away in Europe. When people have no respect, anything can happen.”

A few hours later, suspected arsonists set fire to a mosque in the central Dutch city of Utrecht, but no injuries were reported.

A 22-year-old student, Abdul Salam, said he tries to tell Christian friends that Muslims have been in Europe since the Moors crossed into Spain in the 8th century.

Salam doesn’t mention, at least according to Murphy, that Muslims have been in Europe since the 8th century in what was up until modern times a continuous state of war with Christendom, with peace only coming when the Christians were defeated and subjugated.

“So I don’t know what to think when people say I don’t belong here because I’m Muslim,” he said. “I was born here. I don’t even speak Arabic. I am European. That’s what I feel. That’s what I am.”

But Salam represents just one side of an internal struggle within Muslim communities in Europe, said Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington.

“Right now the West sees all Islam as a kind of monolith and wipes away all nuances,” said Ahmed. “Some want to draw boundaries around Islam in Europe. Other Muslims want to deal with non-Muslims in a broad and tolerant way. It’s not new to Islam. It’s just new to Europe.”

Yes it is. But the pusillanimous dhimmitude in this article is not new; it is as old as the first Christian communities in Spain and Eastern Europe to be conquered by the warriors of Islam.

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