IW News Brief: Shari’a Creep in (Not So) Jolly Old England

by David J. Rusin

Gender segregation at UK universities

A briefing by Student Rights documents 46 events on UK campuses from March 2012 to March 2013 that “either explicitly promoted segregation by gender, or implied that this would be the case.” The Commentator reports: “The events in question have been primarily hosted by Islamic societies on campuses, who often use separate telephone numbers for men and women to book their attendance.” Some groups advertise specific events as segregated; others have general policies to that effect. Student Rights concludes that these “are not ‘isolated incidents’ but rather form a part of a wider, discriminatory trend on UK university campuses.”

A March 9 debate at University College London (UCL) ignited the issue. The Islamic Education and Research Academy held “Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense?” It pitted lecturer Hamza Tzortzis, who has said that “we as Muslims reject … even the idea of freedom,” against physicist Lawrence Krauss. When Krauss threatened to leave once he realized that segregation was being enforced, the organizers relented. “You are in a public arena and not in a mosque, not in a private event,” he told a woman who objected to mixing. He added: “It is the obligation of people who don’t feel comfortable with that to decide how they are going to mesh with broader society, not the other way around.” UCL has banned the group from taking part in future events.

 

Left: A cell phone captured Lawrence Krauss (seated) warning, “Quit the segregation or I’m out of here.” Right: These signs were posted at a University of Leicester event in March.

 

Muslims fill Christian schools, accommodations follow

Christian schools with large Muslim student populations frequently dial back the Christianity, a truth demonstrated by the state-funded Slough and Eton Church of England Business and Enterprise College, where three-quarters of the pupils, aged 11 to 19, are Muslim. “Hymns have been dropped from assemblies at a Church of England school which has also introduced separate prayer rooms for girls and boys,” the Daily Mail explains in a summary of a story published by the Sunday Times. The assemblies “are not based specifically on the Bible”; they merely “make reference to it alongside other religious texts.” Unsurprisingly, the meat is halal as well.

The article notes that many Church of England schools are more than 80 percent Muslim. Catholic schools face similar challenges. The Telegraphreported in 2009: “At English Martyrs in Sparkhill, Birmingham, just 36 of the 410 pupils are Catholic while the vast majority are Muslim. At Sacred Heart Primary in Salford, there are only seven Catholic pupils,” and “an inspection by the diocese in 2007 said the situation was ‘seriously affecting the school’s ability to provide a traditional Catholic education.’” According to the piece, Catholic authorities still recommended “multi-faith prayer rooms” and facilities for ritual cleansing in church-run schools….

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France’s Clockwork Orange

By Bruce Bawer

If the impressive success of Laurent Obertone’s new book La France Orange Méchanique(France Clockwork Orange)proves anything, it’s that there are a great many French citizens who don’t share their national media’s apparent indifference to the Islamization of France. To be sure, the author’s focus (the name Obertone, by the way, is a pseudonym) isn’t on Islam per se, but on the “veritable cultural revolution” that France has undergone as a result of mass immigration from corners of the globe whose social norms are profoundly alien to those of la belle République.

By “cultural revolution,” Obertone means, in a word, crime. In France, the years around 1900 are legendary for the lawlessness that erupted on the streets of Paris thanks to a gang called the Apaches; yet in the Apaches’ heyday, Obertone shows, crime was only about 4% of what it is today. Indeed, the Apaches represented a minor blip in an otherwise steady drop in crime rates from the end of the Middle Ages to the second half of the twentieth century. From 1830 all the way up to the outbreak of World War II, French crime rates were a tiny fraction of what they are now; from 1980 to 2000, the rate of violent crime multiplied by a factor of five.

Yet the crime rates are just part of the story. What France is undergoing today, Obertone argues, isn’t just crime but “a new type of ultra-violent crime.” It’s not “’classical’ violence”; it’s a “violence of conquest.” Yet the police response is woefully inadequate; the courts no longer believe in punishment; prisons have become a joke. And the national media all but ignore the whole situation. If you want to know the facts, don’t bother looking in Le Monde or on TV; it’s the local papers, with their steady drumbeat of matter-of-fact reports on atrocities that never make the national headlines, that tell the real story. Obertone devotes page after page to chilling lists of barbaric offenses he read about in regional dailies you never heard of.

To be sure, while France’s national media virtually never acknowledge the reality of the ultra-violent new order, they do occasionally report on individual criminal acts. When they do, however, they’re quick to insist that the incident in question is “an isolated case” and to warn against making “generalizations.” They also routinely draw on a glossary of euphemisms intended to nullify the horror: neighborhoods so treacherous that even the cops hesitate to enter them are called “sensitive,” “difficult,” or “underprivileged.” And they typically describe locals as being “in shock,” as if nothing of this sort has ever happened before: “To believe the journalists, everyone is always in shock.”

Just as English-language journalists habitually describe transgressors as “youths,” their French counterparts go heavy on the word jeunes. Obertone is appropriately sarcastic about the “semantic regression” that allows the French media to refer, for example, to a certain group of malefactors as “garçons d’une vingtaine d’années” – boys of around twenty years old. (On the other hand, as he’s quick to add, one of the remarkable aspects of today’s France is that those who commit ultra-violent offenses sometimesare just boys – kids no older than eight or ten.) And he observes, perceptively, that French journalists have developed a way of writing about this or that ferocious act of mass brutality as if it were, say, an earthquake or tsunami – and thus as unpreventable as any other natural disaster….

….Needless to say, hardly any corner of Western Europe is immune to Muslim mayhem, and France’s largely impotent reaction to it is far from unique. But just as the lame reaction of Scandinavian authorities to this growing crisis can be explained in large part by the Jante Law and a deep-seated Lutheran missionary mentality, and the British response can be accounted for, in no small measure, by lingering guilt over the imperial past, there’s something distinctively Gallic about the French elite’s combination of effete pacifism and sentimentalization of immigrant violence. This is a country, after all, whose modern history is rife with riot and revolution. In many educated French minds, social disorder is inextricably linked with social virtue. One aspect of the elites’ internal conflict is that even as they believe in their own incomparable goodness, they also regard themselves as the unjustly privileged heirs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and identify the savage foreign gangs in their streets with the poor, oppressed stormers of the Bastille. As Obertone makes so vividly clear, this cognitive dissonance, in all its moral bankruptcy and social irresponsibility, is nothing more or less than a formula for national self-destruction. How tragic it is that the people in France who most urgently need to attend to the message of this gutsy, forthright book are also those most likely to either ignore it or to shower it with condescending ridicule.

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Allah Finds a Home in a German Cathedral

By Giulio Meotti

During the last hours of their agony in 1453, the Christian faithful took refuge within the hallowed walls of the Hagia Sophia. The Muslims killed the weak and the elderly and reduced the others to slavery. When the carnage came to an end, Sultan Mehmed II ordered an Islamic scholar to declare that there was no God but Allah and Mohammed was his Prophet. The ancient church was then converted into a mosque; hundreds of other churches in Constantinople and other places suffered the same fate.

Today in Europe we are witnessing the same process of conversion, but there is no bloodbath nor ceremony. It is a voluntary and sterile process of conversion. It is enough to sign a piece of paper in front of a notary and Europe turns to Islam.
Ten years ago the Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature, Günter Grass, proposed transforming empty churches into mosques. “It would be a great gesture”, proclaimed the “painful consciousness of Germany”.

Now a Lutheran church in Hamburg, the Kapernaumkirche, is about to be converted into an Islamic place of worship.
Because of Europe’s rampant de-Christianization, the church has no more faithful. The same has just happened to the the Church of Saint-Eloi in the French region of Vierzon, which will soon become a mosque. The diocese of Bourges put the church up for sale and a Muslim organization, l’Association des Marocains, made the most generous offer for the site.

The publication Spirit estimates that out of about 45,000 churches in Germany, 15,000 soon will no longer be needed. There are many church buildings in Germany that are now used for art classes, commercial activies and sports courses. In Wilhelmshaven, six out of nine Catholic churches are slated to be destroyed. The St. Maximin’s Abbey in Trier now serves as a school gym, while the Sacred Heart Church in Katlenburg houses a school for dance and Pilates.

And now, for the first time in Hamburg, a Church will serve the Islamic cult.

The new owner of the Hamburg church is the Nour Islamic Center, an umbrella organization for immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. As planned, the building of Hamburg will begin worshipping the Koran from October 3, the day of German unity. Islamic organizations announced that they want to celebrate that day as the “tag der offenen mosques”, the day on which the mosques open to non-Muslims….

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State Investigation Launched After Students Dress in Burqas

by Todd Starnes

A Texas lawmaker is launching an investigation after a teacher reportedly invited female students to dress up in Islamic garb and then told her classroom they should call Muslim terrorists – freedom fighters.

State Sen. Dan Patrick, chairman of the senate education committee, told Fox News he is very disturbed by the photograph as well as reports that students were exposed to a story that blamed Egypt’s turmoil on democracy – rather than the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Parents are very sensitive to any issue that seems to be anti-American – that blames democracy for some sort of trouble in the world,” he said.

A Texas mom became outraged after she discovered a Facebook photo of her child wearing Islamic garb.

The lesson on Islam was taught in a world geography class at Lumberton High School. The teacher brought burqas and other Islamic clothing for the female students to wear. They were also assigned to write an essay based on a Washington Post story that blamed Egypt’s troubles on democracy – instead of the Muslim Brotherhood.

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The Islamification of Texas

by Todd Starnes

Imagine browsing Facebook one day and discovered a photograph of your 14-year-old daughter wearing a burqa – at school.

That’s exactly what happened to a parent in Lumberton, Tex. She asked me not to disclose her identity because she fears for her daughter’s safety.

Her daughter’s world geography class was supposed to be learning about the continents. Instead, they were given a tutorial in Islam – complete with authentic Muslim garments. Some of the young ladies were photographed – and the image has now gone viral.

The students were told the purpose of the class was to change their perceptions of Islam. They were instructed to no longer call those who commit terrorist attacks terrorists. Instead, the Muslim terrorists were to be called freedom fighters.

They were also assigned to write an essay based on a Washington Post story that blamed Egypt’s troubles on democracy – instead of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I am outraged,” the angry mom told me. “I felt my blood pressure go through my head.”

The parent said she was not even aware of the lesson until she discovered the Facebook photograph.

“As parents we should have been made aware this,” she said. “I felt like the line had been crossed.”

The parents said they immediately contacted the principal of the high school who defended the program and said it was required under CSCOPE – a controversial electronic curriculum system that provides online lesson plans for teachers…..

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