In Europe and America,
There’s a growing feeling of hysteria…
. . . But what may save us, me and you,
Is if the [Muslims] love their children too.
—Adapted from ‘Russians’, by Sting, 1985.
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of Sting’s solo career with his critically acclaimed, jazz-inflected hit album, Dream Of The Blue Turtles. Included on this radical departure from the musical stylings of Sting’s former band, The Police, was the sobering meditation, Russians. (Complete lyrics here. Watch his live performance at the 1986 Grammys here.)
Although I disagree with some of Sting’s political sensibilities (after all, Reagan won the Cold War), his use of a simple, rhetorical question was most compelling. (Of course, the Russians love their children!)
In any case, today, thirty years after Russians was released, we seem to have entered into a new phase of a different war, a very, very old war, with ominous clouds on the horizon.
Ours is a time of fitful contradictions and spasms of policy incoherence, as the United States, the UK, and the West vacillate between outright denial of the threat of Islam, and ill advised alliances with the very forces seeking to destroy us. Sorely lacking is a clear-headed appraisal of and strategy to meet the mortal threat posed by a globally emboldened, militant Islam, which, after fourteen hundred years, is once again 100% determined to conquer us, through immigration, birth rates, lawfare, politics, stealth, and conversion when necessary, by terrorism wherever possible, and by open warfare whenever the odds are in their favor.
No doubt you’ve seen the projections: England will be a Muslim majority country in a couple of decades. Europe too. The growth of Muslim populations in major European cities has led to sharia “no-go zones,” where police seldom venture, and from where Muslim youths routinely riot over the slightest offense. Last Spring it was Sweden which burned. In 2005, the outskirts of Paris. This year (so far) it’s Denmark.
Generational Assimilation among Western Muslims?
Rather, the reverse seems to be happening, as numerous reports indicate second and third generation Muslim immigrants are committing far more crimes (218% more in Denmark) and are far more inclined to join the global jihad in Syria than their supposedly less-acclimated parents. There are whole French and German-speaking units in ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the most bloodthirsty jihadist faction among the Syrian “rebels”) made up primarily of second and third generation descendants of Arab immigrants and Muslim converts.
In the Netherlands, 65% of Moroccan Muslim youths have been arrested by police, and a third of that group have been arrested five or more times.
There are reports, too, of whole Muslim families joining the jihad, as in the case of a British Muslim father who took his five sons across Europe and Turkey in order to wage jihad with them in Syria.
And that’s just the West.
Media Watch Groups report on Global Muslim views
There are shocking video reports out of the Middle East of Palestinian, Egyptian, Lebanese and Syrian TV programs and videos geared expressly towards children, which portrays Christians and Jews as sub-human, openly calling for their slaughter, and prepping Muslim children for suicide operations. A quick list of examples follows.
Syria —
- A Sunni Muslim sheikh called on children aged 5-12 to “slaughter all Christians for being infidels.”
- A child, prodded by the Free Syrian Army, cutting the heads off of Syrian men for apparently being loyal to the Assad government.
- The FSA making another child hack a man’s head off—again, to cries of Allahu Akbar.
- Young children in the town of Ras al-Ayn are shown playing “Behead the Enemy.”
- An early 2014 video by ISIS shows young children (under six years old), swearing allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and holding and cocking rifles.
- A devout Muslim father handed over his three young sons to the leader of Jamaat-ut-Dawah (the parent Islamic organization behind Lashkar-e-Taiba, the jihadist group which committed the 2008 Mumbai massacres which killed 166 people), saying: “I hand over my three young sons to you for jihad (holy war). They will be now on your hands in your struggle.”
- The Investigative Project on Terrorism reported earlier this year on Hamas training 13,000 teens to emulate Muslim “suicide martyrs.”
- Palestinian Media Watch reports on the Hamas children’s program Tomorrow’s Pioneers, with a child host teaching another child to “shoot all the Jews,” while a giant happy-faced bumblebee nods cheerfully.
- The Muslim “Mickey Mouse” teaches terrorism to Muslim kids. Per the news report: After seeing how the Islamist terror group had appropriated her father’s work to encourage genocidal hatred, Diana Disney Miller – daughter of Walt Disney – voiced her disgust to the New York Daily News: “Indoctrinating children like this, teaching them to be evil. The world loves children and this is just going against the grain of humanity… What we’re dealing with here is pure evil.”
Egypt —
- A Muslim child preacher cites the infamous genocidal antisemitic hadith, calling for Muslim extermination of the Jewish people.
- Muslim children profess their eagerness to become martyrs through fighting the kuffar.
- A Muslim mother lauds her three sons as “martyrs,” who were killed in attacks against civilians in Israel, and lamented that she did not have one hundred sons to die attacking Israelis.
- A UN-sponsored camp for Palestinian children, supported by U.S. tax dollars and supposedly neutral, teaches antisemitism, war, jihad and martyrdom to take back Palestine from “the Jews,” who are compared to wolves.
- Hezbollah “indoctrinates youth with messages of hate and murder.”
- Hezbollah’s brainwashing includes everything from “songs praising martyrs to support for jihad-like movements and glorifications of death. The organization’s goal is clear: to inspire children to become terrorists.”
- In the Muslim homeland of the Boston Marathon jihad murderers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, children are imitating their parents by filming their own jihad videos.
FGM, Child Marriage, and Honor Killing
The situation of Muslim girls is perhaps the most dire of any segment of the global population, with the probable exception of Christian girls in Islamic countries such as Egypt, Syria, Pakistan and Nigeria, where incidents of rape, abductions for ransom, and forced conversions are widespread. How a culture treats the most vulnerable members of its community reveals a great deal about that culture. Islam’s treatment of women from infancy to adulthood is abhorrent and misogynistic in the extreme, and speaks volumes.
Sting’s repeating thought in Russians is the secular/scientific call for peace:
We share the same biology, Regardless of ideology…
Yet it seems there is a frighteningly powerful counter-impulse permeating and afflicting the Muslim world. In Islam, death has both practical purpose and divine sanction. The life of a non-Muslim is not sacred, as elaborate religious laws make clear in prescribing penalties for murder. And there is no penalty for a parent, grandparent, sibling or close relative for the killing of a Muslim woman or child who is perceived as bringing shame upon the family (the Muslim phenomenon of honor killings). Similarly, a Muslim apostate may be killed by any member of the umma without penalty; they are discharging Allah’s judgment.
The indoctrination of each successive generation of children in Muslim cultures to hate the infidel, prepare for warfare, bloodshed, murder and suicide missions, offers little hope for the world. To an indoctrinated Muslim, the kuffar are unclean, even sub-human. We only “share the same biology” if we embrace the Islamic ideology. Biology alone is not a universal standard in Islam.
Do the Muslims love their children too?
As we ponder the failure of the West to assimilate and rehabilitate second and third generation Muslim immigrants, as they riot and become career criminals at home, or run off to join the Islamic State and the Global Jihad, breathlessly eager to then bring the jihad back to America, Canada, Britain and Europe to advance the worldwide caliphate, the answer to Sting’s once rhetorical question seems neither pleasant nor hopeful.
But what may save us, me and you, is if the Muslims love their children too.
Ralph Sidway is an Orthodox Christian researcher and writer, and author of Facing Islam: What the Ancient Church has to say about the Religion of Muhammad. He operates the Facing Islam blog.