How Did Europe Become Home To 20 Million Muslims In A Mere Three Decades

"Game Boys" by Peter Howson 1991, Private Collection London

Blogging is light today, so I will give you below excerpts of an interesting article by Brendan Bernhard, about Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist, who stands in my mind, next to the courageous Arab-Americans like the much talked about Dr. Wafa Sultan and the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali (two women I greatly respect for openly challenging Islamist supremacism).

But first some background (courtesy of Wall Street Journal).

The seventy five year old Fallaci, who is dying of cancer, lives in New York, unfortunately in hiding, because of death threats she received after her strongly pro-American and anti-Islam book published two weeks after 9/11, 'The Rage and the Pride'.

One of the most renowned journalists of the modern era, Fallaci was indicted in 2005 by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state."

In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote in 2004--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason". Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs--which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.

It is a shame, in so many ways, that "vilipend," the latinate word that is the pinpoint equivalent in English of the Italian offense in question, is scarcely ever used in the Anglo-American lexicon; for it captures beautifully the pomposity, as well as the anachronistic outlandishness, of the law in question. A "vilification," by contrast, sounds so sordid, so tabloid--hardly fitting for a grande dame.

After spending most of the last century fighting against fascism, Oriana Fallaci continues to demonstrate the enduring grip of Orwellianism: she is to be tried in Italy for thought-crime. For spending her childhood fighting Hitler and Mussolini, and for dedicating the last four years of her life to rousing the West to the danger posed by Islamofascism, she more than merits designation as FrontPage Magazine’s Woman of the Year.

Oriana Fallaci has rebelled against fascism most of her life. She is not an ideologue, bound to implement any given ideology. Hers is a defensive mission. She is, by her own designation, neither a conservative nor a leftist, finding defects with both. Like FrontPage Magazine, her main concern is fighting encroaching totalitarianism, not advancing a narrow partisan agenda ruled by either orthodoxy.[...]

Her crime? She exposed the threat of Islamic jihad – from without and within. Europe, she wrote, is becoming “an Islamic province, an Islamic colony.” Describing increasingly Muslim Europe, she wrote, “In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a city run by the Quran.” When Shari’a rules certain areas of Christendom’s ancient home continent, and French girls cannot go through certain Parisian neighborhoods without wearing a burqa without fear of being raped, few could argue with her insight.

In Italy, the complaint came from Adel Smith, president of the Muslim Union of Italy, who was never charged with defaming Christianity after he referred to a crucifix as a “miniature cadaver” during his 2003 efforts to have depictions of Christ on the Cross removed from Italian schools. He has amassed a reputation as something of a crank after demanding that Christians deny aspects of their faith that offended his Islamic sensibilities: he has called for the destruction of Giovanni da Modena’s fresco The Last Judgment in the 14th-century cathedral of San Petronio in Bologna, Italy, because that priceless expression of Medieval Christianity depicts the Muslim Prophet Muhammad in hell. And in the mother of all frivolous lawsuits, Smith in February 2004 brought suit against Pope John Paul II and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, for offending Islam by expressing in various writings their opinion, utterly unremarkable from two Christian leaders, that Christianity is unique and superior to other religions, including Islam.

His new suit against Fallaci set down for June 2006 in Bergamo, which Fallaci refuses to attend, is hardly less frivolous, but Smith was able to find a judge willing to play along. Judge Armando Grasso of the Italian city of Bergamo ruled in a preliminary hearing that Fallaci’s latest book, La Forza della Ragione (The Force of Reason), contained eighteen statements “unequivocally offensive to Islam and Muslims,” and that therefore she must be tried.

It is useful to go through Fallaci’s eighteen outrages, (as Robert Spencer did) as specified in Smith’s complaint, in order to see just how devious and devoid of substance Smith’s suit is. The trial will need to employ a battery of historians: several of Fallaci’s offending eighteen statements are simply assertions of historical fact.

As Italian Justice Minister Roberto Castelli said in disagreement to Judge Grasso “In Europe,” he declared, “we are seeing the birth of a movement that is looking to silence those who don’t follow a single mindset, within which it is forbidden to speak ill of Islam….In Fallaci’s book there is very strong criticism but not defamation.”

Brendan Bernhard: "In 'The Force of Reason', the controversial Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades?

How did Islam go from being a virtual non-factor to a religion that threatens the preeminence of Christianity on the Continent? How could the most popular name for a baby boy in Brussels possibly be Mohammed? Can it really be true that Muslims plan to build a mosque in London that will hold 40,000 people? That Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam are close to having Muslim majorities? How was Europe, which was saved by the U.S. in world wars I and II, and whose Muslim Bosnians were rescued by the U.S. as recently as 1999, transformed into a place in which, as Fallaci puts it, “if I hate Americans I go to Heaven and if I hate Muslims I go to Hell?” [...]

If The Force of Reason sells a lot of copies, which it almost certainly will (800,000 were sold in Italy alone, and the book is in the top 100 on Amazon ), it will be not only because of the heat generated by her topic, but also because Fallaci speaks for the ordinary reader. There is no one she despises more than the intellectual “cicadas,” as she calls them — “You see them every day on television; you read them every day in the newspapers” — who deny they are in the midst of a cultural, political and existential war with Islam, of which terrorism is the flashiest, but ultimately least important component. Nonetheless, to give the reader a taste of what Muslim conquest can be like, in her first chapter, Fallaci provides a brief tour of the religion’s bloodiest imperial episodes and later does an amusing job of debunking some of its more exaggerated claims to cultural and scientific greatness.

The book is also animated by a world-class journalist’s dismay that she could have missed the story of her lifetime for as long as she did. In the 1960s and ’70s, when she was a Vietnam War correspondent and a legendarily ferocious interviewer going mano a mano with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, Fallaci was simply too preoccupied with the events of the moment to notice that an entirely different narrative was rapidly taking shape — namely, the transformation of the West. There were clues, certainly. As when, in 1972, she interviewed the Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who told her (while a bodyguard aimed a submachine gun at her head) that the Palestinian problem was about far more than Israel. The Arab goal, Habash declared, was to wage war “against Europe and America” and to ensure that henceforth “there would be no peace for the West.” The Arabs, he informed her, would “advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet.”

Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later did she realize that he “also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens … In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism.” It is a low-level but deadly war that extends across the planet, as any newspaper reader can see.

Fallaci is not the first person to ponder the rapidity of the ongoing Muslim transformation of Europe. As the English travel writer Jonathan Raban wrote in Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth (1979), in the mid-1970s Arabs seemed to arrive in London almost overnight. “One day Arabs were a remote people … camping out in tents with camels … the next, they were neighbors.” On the streets of West London appeared black-clad women adorned with beaked masks that made them look “like hooded falcons.” Dressed for the desert (and walking precisely four steps ahead of the women), Arab men bestrode the sidewalks “like a crew of escaped film extras, their headdresses aswirl on the wind of exhaust fumes.”

[...] Yet even in British journalist Adam LeBor’s A Heart Turned East (1997), a work of profound, almost supine sympathy for the plight of Muslim immigrants in the West, a London-based mullah is quoted as saying, “We cannot conquer these people with tanks and troops, so we have got to overcome them by force of numbers.” In fact, such remarks are commonplace. Just this week, Mullah Krekar, a Muslim supremacist living in Oslo, informed the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that Muslims would change Norway, not the other way around. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes,” he said. “By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim.”

In other words, Europe will be conquered by being turned into “Eurabia,” which is what Fallaci believes it is well on the way to becoming. Leaning heavily on the researches of Bat Ye’or, author of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Fallaci recounts in fascinating detail the actual origin of the word “Eurabia,” which has now entered the popular lexicon. Its first known use, it turns out, was in the mid-1970s, when a journal of that name was printed in Paris (naturally), written in French (naturally), and edited by one Lucien Bitterlin, then president of the Association of Franco-Arab Solidarity and currently the Chairman of the French-Syrian Friendship Association. Eurabia (price, five francs) was jointly published by Middle East International (London), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), the Groupe d’Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva) and the European Coordinating Committee of the Associations for Friendship with the Arab World, which Fallaci describes as an arm of what was then the European Economic Community, now the European Union. These entities, Fallaci says, not mincing her words, were the official perpetrators “of the biggest conspiracy that modern history has created,” and Eurabia was their house organ.

Briefly put, the alleged plot was an arrangement between European and Arab governments according to which the Europeans, still reeling from the first acts of PLO terrorism and eager for precious Arabian oil made significantly more precious by the 1973 OPEC crisis, agreed to accept Arab “manpower” (i.e., immigrants) along with the oil. They also agreed to disseminate propaganda about the glories of Islamic civilization, provide Arab states with weaponry, side with them against Israel and generally toe the Arab line on all matters political and cultural. Hundreds of meetings and seminars were held as part of the “Euro-Arab Dialogue,” and all, according to the author, were marked by European acquiescence to Arab requests. Fallaci recounts a 1977 seminar in Venice, attended by delegates from 10 Arab nations and eight European ones, concluding with a unanimous resolution calling for “the diffusion of the Arabic language” and affirming “the superiority of Arab culture.”

While the Arabs demanded that Europeans respect the religious, political and human rights of Arabs in the West, not a peep came from the Europeans about the absence of freedom in the Arab world, not to mention the abhorrent treatment of women and other minorities in countries like Saudi Arabia. No demand was made that Muslims should learn about the glories of western civilization as Europeans were and are expected to learn about the greatness of Islamic civilization. In other words, according to Fallaci, a substantial portion of Europe’s cultural and political independence was sold off by a coalition of ex-communists and socialist politicians. Are we surprised? Fallaci isn’t. In 1979, she notes, “the Italian or rather European Left had fallen in love with Khomeini just as now it has fallen in love with Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and Arafat.”

Considerably less intemperate than her last book on the topic of radical Islam, the volcanically angry The Rage and the Pride, The Force of Reason is despairing, but often surprisingly funny. (“The rage and the pride have married and produced a sturdy son: the disdain,” she writes with characteristic wit.) And, Fallaci being Fallaci, it is occasionally over the top and will no doubt be deeply offensive to many, particularly when, in a postscript the book might have been better off without, she claims that there is no such thing as moderate Islam. Nonetheless, the voice and warmth and humor of the author light up its pages, particularly when she takes a leaf out of Saul Bellow’s Herzog by firing off impassioned letters to the famous both living and dead. She is savage about the Left, the “Peace” movement (war is a fundamental, if regrettable, condition of life, she states), the Catholic Church, the media and, of course, Islam itself, which she considers theological totalitarianism and a deadly threat to the world. She is much more optimistic about America than Europe, citing the bravery of New Yorkers who celebrated New Year’s Eve in Times Square despite widely publicized terrorism threats, but here one feels that she is clutching at straws. Though Fallaci now lives in New York, little amity has been extended to her by her peers since the post-9/11 publication of The Rage and the Pride, and she remains almost as much of a media pariah here as she does in Europe. The major difference is that we’re not putting her on trial.

As that Norwegian Mullah told Aftenposten, “Our way of thinking … will prove more powerful than yours.” One hopes he’s wrong, but if he is, it will be ordinary Americans and Europeans,[...] who prove him so, and not our intellectual classes (artists, pundits, filmmakers, actors, writers …). Many of the latter, consumed by Bush-hatred and cultural self-loathing, are perilously close to becoming today’s equivalent of the great Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who so hated the British Empire that he sided with the Nazis in World War II, to his everlasting shame. The Force of Reason, at the very least, is a welcome and necessary antidote to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere."

The talented Michael van der Galien, one of the few liberal bloggers who gets this issue right, has a thoughtful post on the subject: "Why do they deny the elephant in the room?"

Comments

[Raimondo]

Hey Dhimwit!...Love that name!

Yup...you're right, however, European thought also spawned the seeds of justice that rectified the situation...As a matter of fact the founding fathers who's enlightened ideas formed this great nation of ours, were referring to the Roman Republic, Marcus Aurelius, et al, then the Magna Carta, and countless other European notions sapnning back for millennia...So yes you are partially right...just like your name implies...You are equipped with wit, but...What's in a Name...Who was the Dead White European Male who said that?

[dhimwit]

Let me say the unsayable. Europe has had long experience in the business of ethnic cleansing, Slobo being but the latest practitioner. If anybody else has a better idea of what to do with 20 million enemies, let's hear it.

[Raimondo]

Excellent blog Alexandra and excellent comment Liquid...

I hope more and more people realize what is going on. It may be a late collective reaction, but as the saying goes: "it's better late than never".

A word to Joseph Marshall...the Mexican, Hispanic, Latino, illegal immigrant issue is not as similar as you think to the Muslim issue. Latins share fundamental ethic and moral principles with us, such as a work ethic. While the issue of illegal immigration should be addressed...I don't equate it with the problem we are confronted with when a culture diametrically different than ours tries to impose itself upon us, shunning all that we hold sacred..like the work ethic for example. It is safe to say that the thugs who throw rocks at cops in the banlieues of Lyons, and Paris, are culturally not equipped with the concept of working hard to improve one's lot in life. Their stance is: "We are Muslim, therefore better than you heathens, shut up and submit yourselves to us". Hindus and Sikhs for example migrated to Europe at the same time as their Muslim counterparts, and have managed to improve their economic standing, to the point where there is no issue with Hindus and Sikhs, actually never has been. Their communities are extremely successful, often overtaking their European counterparts...Muslims, with very few exceptions, on the other hand don't really bother to integrate, actually they do quite the opposite, they focus on separating themselves, so they can impose their will within their communities first, then the world.

Joseph, be prepared to face Mecca and prostate yourself five times a day. Because there ain't nothin' you're going to do short of having your head separated from the rest of you, that will make it any other way, my dear. At least I read the Quran and can recite a few simple verses in Arabic. Start immersing yourself in their culture, or be ready to fight it! I'm afraid that if I immerse myself I'll end up like Grizzly Man...chomped up.

[Palestinians Humiliate Themselves]

Palestinians Humiliate Themselves

In a March 16 editorial in the New York Times titled, As If That Fire Needed Fuel, the Times writes:

"Israeli Army officials ordered inmates to strip to their underwear, which many did, marching out with clothing on their heads, an embarrassing and completely unnecessary provocation that trampled the dignity of any Palestinian watching that spectacle.

Given the humiliations that ordinary Palestinians suffer merely by trying to get through Israeli checkpoints every day, the prison raid just reinforced the already degrading reality of living under foreign occupation."
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stated, “What happened without a doubt is an ugly crime which can not be forgiven and a humiliation for the Palestinian people.”

Palesinians should feel humiliated. A majority of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem support suicide terrorism. A 2001 poll by Dr. Nabil Kukali and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), found, "a substantial majority [of Palestinians] (76.1%) support suicidal attacks like that of Netanya [in May, 2001], whereas 12.5% oppose, and 11.4% express no opinion." A 2006 poll taken by the Jerusalem Media & Communication Center after the recent Hamas political victories found, “56.2% [of Palestinians] strongly or somewhat support suicide bombing operations against Israeli civilians whereas 40.7% oppose such operations.”

Considering that the majority of Palestinians support suicide terror, and considering that Israel prevents suicide killings on a daily basis, it should come as no surprise that captured Palestinians are asked to remove their clothes during the process of incarceration. Why should any Israeli take a chance of being blown up? Why should Israel present Palestinians with opportunities to commit suicide killings? Palestinians should feel humiliated about their culture of death and they should be asked to strip naked during the process of incarceration as long as their population continues to support, condone, and commit suicide killings.

http://whypalestiniansgetitwrong.blogspot.com/

palestiniansgetitwrong@yahoo.com

[gringoman]

Fallaci's extraordinary cry is condensed, in a quiet way, in a new drawing: 'Cartoon Syndrome.' gringoman.com

Side note: Alexandra and fans may be interested in hearing that brainy beauty (and longtime gringo fave) Monica Crowley is going national with her ABC radio show. Beginning in two weeks it will be heard Saturdays noon-3pm (NY Time) I emailed her that Alexandra's site would be apprised.

[Liquid]

I would rather see Fallaci's books taught in our schools and universities here in America instead of the "Islamic studies" that were dealt and now forced upon us as part of history classes or part of an elective credit! Will our future continue to be distorted like our past truths are because our future generations are being dumbed down about history. The deception doesn't really care about the idle ones standing by right now...it's target is a select generation which it is grooming ripe for the picking. One thing that our patient enemy does understand adamantly is that you can create an army in and through a childhood and it's now our children that they have targeted along with our land! In fact, what most haven't figured out yet is that it is also our very souls they covet to take!

I worry about Europe, especially Britain, and when I interact with my British friends, I can hear the worry and despair of the situation in their voices, which always the troopers, seem to lipsynch the words of "We will rise up and defeat Islam when the time comes" but as each day continues to show more and more loss of freedoms for the British way of life and the statistics of more mosque attendance than church attendence make it even more bleak it makes one wonder if France is the microscopic view of things to come for the other European countries.

We can sit around and try to analyze "what got the west into this mess?" in order to get the west out, but IMHO, its really quite simple! When Europeans decided to live a life without God it began a spiral decline of spiritual protection. Now if any of you don't acknowledge such a thing, you can scroll on down past the rest of my post here, but others that see beyond mere material know exactly what I am suggesting.

I am suggesting that when a nation and/or individual for that matter, stop seeking their maker then their internal eye begins to droop, and it is on this hypnotic ride that they become vulnerable to the dangerous things of this world. Simply, one becomes vulnerable weak prey. This is what has happened in Europe! When you begin to blend and share everything, along with that comes a certain tolerance, we understand that in America very well, and there should be a desire on both sides to respect as respect is earned and not one sided, this type of tolerance is meant to be a respected amount of love in the name of freedom/free will, but when your heart is not working to it's capacity to hold love, then it will begin to allow a certain type of "fake" tolerance that tolerates the intollerable. In reality, when some of the intolerable are packing an agenda and are willing to die for it's pagan god more so than you, since you have tossed your belief system off to the side a long time ago, then you can see how helpless you are going to be during the "power of the god game" Now I use this term "game" not to belittle, for I know that the struggle is much more than a game and should be taken very seriously, but I chose that word because I know that all understand that in a game, there is always a winner and always a loser. In this struggle of principles, that is won and lost daily, we are seeing great concern over who is the actual underdog during such tournament of truths. What is most disheartening is to watch some, which are ill prepared and out of practice, without uniforms or skills to even participate, look so defeated pregame as the sports writers are jotting it all down for tomorrow's news! Some are standing naked even as the fans cheer with fever from the sidelines! Worst of all are some which have given up out of mere laziness to survive.

Unfortunately, what we see moving in Europe today is headed our way into America, because it's part of a certain agenda, and so if we Americans don't start taking our faith seriously, we will not have any "protection or guidence" for the really big games that are in front of us! We need to be able to stand up to the opponent with strength and refuse to be bullied!

[Joseph Marshall]

who deny they are in the midst of a cultural, political and existential war with Islam, of which terrorism is the flashiest, but ultimately least important component.

If you really mean "war" with Islam, then you mean we should be killing people if they are Muslim. That's what the word "war" means.

Are you willing to face what "war" means?

This just like the fact that when Michele Malkin "defends" the Japanese American internment, she is actually advocating a Muslim American internment, though she hasn't the face to say so.

To answer the question in your title, Europe is full of Muslims because Europe invited them in. Europe invited them in by imposing its own political dominion over most of what is now the Muslim world, and, later, by creating institutions [like the old "British Commonwealth"] which allowed entry on liberal terms to the formerly colonized as the price for keeping European control of or favorable access to, the resources the former colonies provided.

Europe also invited them in to do the European scutwork, [oh, pardon me, "guest work"] just like we invite in Mexicans today over here.

Once Muslims were there, secular [and many Christian] Europeans simply chose not to breed.

So A+B+C=ABC.

So now people are astonished and dismayed by Burhkas in Brussels, or Spanish spoken in Erie, Pennsylvania?

We live in one world. Period. We all get bird flu. We all get AIDS. We all get on planes and fly everywhere else. And everybody lives downstream from somebody else's outhouse.

We will all adapt to those facts, or we will all have real war and not merely phony, metaphorical "war".

Hopefully, we will all stay muliticultural enough for the next 25 years to prevent it. After that, I will almost certainly be dead and will no longer have a vested interest in the matter.

[Alexandra]

Victorino,

I must say I love being called "The Sexy Slavic-American Thing....To The Right Of Attilah The Hun" on your blogroll! It's kinda quaint and immediately disarming, despite disagreeing with every single thing you say. LOL!

[Dr Victorino de la Vega]

According to a New York Times article published today, it seems that the self-proclaimed “Sunni resistant” Ali Shalal Qaissi was not after all the famous man in the photograph that has become the symbol of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: a hooded man standing on a cardboard box, shivering, with electrical wires attached to his outstretched arms…

Fans of the systematic use of torture on Ayyrab detainees and other Neocon kultists will probably jump at the chance to discredit the “mainstream media”, or even worse, pretend that there never really was such a thing as the Abu Ghraib scandal…even though we have thousands of proofs documenting the mass persecution that took place in US-administered Iraqi prisons including graphic pictures of naked Iraqi women and children surround by barking German shepherds- President Bush’s canine homage to Commander Göring.

As retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski rightly said:
“Perhaps Lenin is another George Bush model. Lenin expected that Imperialism would be Capitalism’s highest stage, and clearly George Bush believes it. Lenin’s actions in 1918 were two-fold. He established "War Communism" at home to seize property, infuse domestic loyalty, and strengthen the federal state, along with a "Third International" to "promote world revolution according to the Russian communist model…The pattern fits. If you consider the philosophies and writings of his neo-conservative advisors, it begins to look eerily familiar. Lenin would approve”…

Anyhoo, whoever he is, the unknown Iraqi soldier on the box remains a very powerful symbol of the cruel bestiality of the Neocon Neros of Washington and TeX-Aviv: the hood is a fitting metaphor for the blindness of KKK nostalgics and other Southern Evangelical revivalists such as former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Texan-In-Chief George W. Bush.

As for the wires attached to the detainee’s outstretched arms, they are the technological embodiment of a Western civilization gone awry, a once glorious culture caricatured and debased by those who now speak and act in its name: machine-men and scientific cynics who believe in “harnessing the power of new technologies” to torture, kill and maim in the name of “liberty”.