Brussels: European capital or Islamic center?

By Michael Curtis

Brussels as the headquarters of the European Union is the nominal “capital of Europe.”  One would expect the city to be the center of enlightenment—the exemplification of political and social tolerance and freedom of speech, assembly and religion, not to mention an advocate of human rights.  Disappointingly, recent events have shown that Brussels has increasingly become a place of lies, deliberate disinformation, political manipulation, anti-Semitism and attacks on Israel.

Recent developments, particularly Islamist political as well as physical aggressiveness, justify this sad conclusion.  One is the election in November 2012 of two Muslim politicians of the new Islam Party, Lhoucine Ait Jeddig and Redouane Ahrouch, who won seats in two of the 20 municipalities of Brussels, Molenbeek-Saint-Jean and Anderlecht.  Considering  their unqualified stated objective to make Belgians understand the advantages of having Islamic people and Islamic laws, their assertion that “then[,] it will be completely natural to have Islamic laws and we will become an Islamic state” is quite chilling.

The Islam Party intends to continue running candidates in future Belgian and European-wide elections.  It is likely to gain further successes because of demographic changes in the country.  Calculations suggest that Muslims in Belgium now number 625,000, more than six percent of the total population.  Brussels contains 300,000 Muslims—more than a quarter of its population.  It is now the largest Islamic city in Europe; by 2030 it will, according to the sociologist Felice Dassetto in her book “The Iris and the Crescent,” probably have a Muslim majority.

The heavily Muslim-populated districts of Brussels have become troubled areas, experiencing a considerable increase in crime, including about 250 gang rapes a year since 2007.  For some years, these areas have been arenas of violence: in the riots of September 2009, the Muslim inhabitants attacked the Belgian police with Molotov cocktails, stones, and tear gas.

Among other consequences of this violence, the U.S. advertising agency BBDO in June 2011 left its offices in the Molenbeek district of Brussels after stating that there had been more than 150 assaults on its staff. Other multinational corporations left the area for similar reasons.

Simultaneously with its declaration that its ultimate goal was to establish Shariah law in Belgium, the Islam Party issued three main immediate demands: halal meals in public cafeterias, national recognition of Muslim holidays and insistence that all women publicly wear hijab coverings.  The danger of that ultimate goal of the Islamic extremists has now been recognized publicly in March by the Belgian foreign minister, Didier Reynders.  He made a point of saying he was not critical of moderate Islam views but was calling for more monitoring of the messages that some imams in Belgium, about 300 of whom obtain state subsidies, are preaching in their mosques.  He drew attention to those imams or other types of preachers “who adhere to more salafist and fundamentalist views, or who support radical movements, instead of having more moderate views.”

Reynders, member of the Mouvement Réformateur, the largest Francophone party in Belgium, described his personal encounter with Islamic intolerance.  When he and other Belgian officials met in April 2012 with Abdellah Benkiran, the Muslim Brotherhood prime minister of Morocco, the latter refused to speak with Reynders’s colleague, Annemie Turtelboom, the Belgian minister of justice, because she is a woman.

Reynders is conscious of the same problem in Belgium.  Muslim leaders have refused even to shake hands with women, including a local mayor, or to mix with women in public transport.

The problem is immediate and growing.  In Antwerp, a majority of elementary school children are Muslims.  The most common name for boys born in Belgium during the last few years is Mohammed.  The country has witnessed an increase in the number of mosques and minarets, more veiled women in public, and more extreme salafist Islamic organizations.  The Muslim politicians and imams want to implement Islamic Shariah law throughout Belgium…

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Muslims in Europe

Europe: A Continent in Flight

By Bruce Bawer

….The situation in Denmark has only gotten more and more rotten. Yesterday, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran an article headlined “Why you can’t be a Jew in Copenhagen,” in which Martin Henriksen, immigration and integration spokesman for the Danish People’s Party, bluntly noted that owing to Muslim anti-Semitism, schools in Copenhagen “encourage Jewish parents to find other pastures” for their children. “We haven’t witnessed anything like this since the Occupation,” he wrote.

As I said at the outset: different places, same story. Danish Christians and Jews are being bullied by Muslim thugs into checking out of their neighborhoods and moving to safer locales. French Jews are taking it on the lam from Paris to settle in marginally less dangerous parts of London. Londoners are leaving their increasingly dodgy city and, literally, heading for the hills. East Oslo is being drained of ethnic Norwegians. And all of them are running scared for one reason, and one reason only: they’re terrified of getting beaten up by primitive thugs with a primitive religion who, at these European taxpayers’ expense, have been imported from some of the most primitive parts of the world. Years and years ago these cultural hooligans, these religious autocrats, these would-be enforcers of sharia, were welcomed to Europe by clueless, spineless political leaders, and – although the reality of “creeping jihad” has long since set in – they continue to be celebrated by most of those leaders (as well as by craven mainstream-media cheerleaders such as Mark Easton) for purportedly enriching European culture. And all the while, as a result, European culture is quickly going down the tubes.

When you’re discussing such large-scale phenomena such as this one – hundreds of thousands of Muslims occupying this or that part of this or that city, hundreds of thousands of native Londoners relocating hither and thither in consequence – it can be hard to grasp it all, to reduce the big picture to a comprehensible, human scale. As Stalin put it, one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. Yesterday Daniel Greenfield told the terriblestory of how relentless harassment by Muslim schoolmates drove a nine-year-old English boy not to flight but to suicide. The other day the Norwegian newspaper Aftonbladet reported on another European boy who found himself in the jihadist crosshairs and was forced to flee.

Here goes. On the evening of February 16, a boy – whose named has been withheld, whether because of his age, or to protect him from reprisals, or both – got on a bus in the town of Egersund in western Norway. He was headed back home to Stavanger, fifty or so miles away, and was carrying his puppy. Upon boarding the bus, he checked with the driver to make sure it was OK to take the dog onboard. The driver said yes: he had no problem with it. Unfortunately, three other passengers, whom Aftonbladet identifies as being “of foreign origin” (another source actually dares to use the word “Muslim”), did have a problem. One of the men walked up to the driver and expressed his strong objection to the presence of the pet; another approached the boy and informed him that if he did not get off the bus with his dog at once, they would beat him up.

What happened next is in dispute. According to the boy, the driver, afraid not to cave in to the men’s demands, pulled the bus over and ordered the boy and his dog off the bus. The driver, for his part, claims that he knew nothing of the tensions between the boy and the Muslims, and insists that the boy left the bus of his own accord. In any event, the undisputed fact is that the boy exited the bus at a spot on the highway that was smack dab in the middle of nowhere. The temperature was below freezing; the time, just before midnight. Fortunately he had a cell phone, and was able to phone a friend to pick him up. When she finally got there, some time later, she said, “he was cold and still and it was plain that the incident had had a powerful impact on him.” The national railway system, which operates the bus, has chosen to accept the driver’s account and will not investigate the boy’s complaint.

Whatever the specific details of the story, the narrative’s main point is clear – as is its larger import. The story of that boy and his dog, simply put, is the story of today’s Europe in miniature –  the story of a continent whose natives are increasingly being tormented by Koran-wielding tyrants, and increasingly in flight.

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Europe’s Multicultural Model Is Changing

by DR. LAINA FARHAT-HOLZMAN

Europeans do not have a record of religious tolerance, as can be clearly seen in their history of religious wars (16th – 18th centuries) and their appalling Anti-Semitism for 2,000 years, culminating in the Holocaust.

But in the newly emerging Europe after World War II, Western European countries (Britain, France, Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Germany) were determined to create a new European multiculturalism. First, national barriers were coming down as European elites created the European Union (EU), sharing not only a monetary system but also a raft of common values.

As Europe recovered from the devastation of World War II and a new issue, population decline, the floodgates were opened to immigrants and refugees from the less fortunate world, the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, and India/Pakistan. The newcomers were welcomed by their new governments with monetary assistance, housing, and welfare. What should have been temporary assistance turned into permanent ghettoes, and because the immigrants were not offered a real opportunity to integrate, they became a new constituency for today’s neo-fascist movement, Islamism.

France. Recognizing their well-intentioned generosity has had unforeseen consequences, the French are beginning to reverse their laws. France, which has a huge Muslim population, has learned that locking up Muslim criminals has created a perfect environment for turning French prisons into schools for converting French delinquents to Islam. In September, French police rounded up a number of young terrorists, almost all of them new converts, with plans to sow mayhem and murder in French Jewish neighborhoods. There are also neighborhoods in France so dangerously under the control of Islamists that the French police dare not go there.

England. The UK has been inundated with Muslims from the former British colonies of today’s India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The first generation of these new immigrants wanted nothing more than to become British (and many did, such as Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses). But now the third and fourth generations find themselves in Muslim ghettoes, undereducated, too long on welfare, and easily seduced by Islamist clerics and operatives into going to Pakistan or Yemen to “learn Arabic” and ready themselves to become suicide bombers. London has already survived one huge suicide bombing attack on their metro system and has scurried to prevent an encore. Now, finally, despite EU law, they have deported some of their worst Islamists to the United States, where they have been wanted for terrorism and murder….

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No Hebrew, Please — This Is Europe

By Bruce Bawer

I wrote about it here recently: Israel’s ambassador to Denmark and the head of Copenhagen’s Jewish community have both warned Jews in that city that if they don’t want to be roughed up on the street by anti-Semites, they’d better not wear anything that would identify them as Jews – and, for good measure, they should also lower their voices when speaking Hebrew. The other day, in a supremely depressing article for Israel National News,Giulio Meotti provided a round-up of similar developments from around Europe.

For instance: a Jewish theological seminary in Potsdam has asked its rabbis not to wear yarmulkes in public. Pupils at a Jewish school in Berlin have been warned to speak German, not Hebrew, on school trips – and to wear baseball caps over their yarmulkes “so you don’t give stupid people something to get annoyed about.” Jews at Rome’s main synagogue now remove their yarmulkes when leaving services; so do Jews in Malmö, Sweden. A Jewish teacher at an adult education center in Kristiansand, Norway, has been told “that wearing the star could be deemed a provocation towards the many Muslim students at the school.” And so on.

The reason for all this cautious behavior, of course, is to avoid the fate of people like the Paris Metro passenger who, Meotti noted, was recently beaten unconscious by a mob who pegged him as Jewish because he was reading a book by Paris’s chief rabbi.

Even Meotti’s laundry list didn’t come close to covering the full range of despicable anti-Semitic outrages, and reactions thereto, that have occurred in Western Europe of late. One example: in early December, it was reportedthat in the wake of episodes at Edinburgh University in which an Israeli diplomat was “mobbed” and a speech by Israel’s ambassador was “disrupted by chanting students waving Palestinian flags,” many Jewish students, fed up with the “toxic atmosphere” (and, in some cases, scared to publicly identify as Jewish) had left for other colleges – and other countries….

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