From 18 until 28 December, the ten-day “Christmas Festival” for homosexuals will a “gay X-mas open-air market,” Gay nativity scenes”featuring Baby Jesus with either two Josephs or two Marys”several Gay gatherings, a “pink ice skating rink” (for travestites), and streets lined with pink Christmas trees.
The organizers, who also organize the Amsterdam Gay Pride Parade each August, say they want to “increase the range of options for homosexual men and women during Christmas week when there is not much to do.” They intend to turn the event into an annual Pink Christmas Festival and expect that in the long run Pink Christmas will become even more popular than the August Gay Pride Parade, a floating Parade on barges and boats through the famous Amsterdam canals.
The Dutch Calvinist merchants, who built the canals in the 17th century to provide easy access to their warehouses, could never have imagined that their spoilt, affluent offspring would turn the city, which they made into the commercial hub and the capitalist center of the world, into the world’s showpiece of depravity. Today’s Amsterdammers hold nothing sacred of what their ancestors cared for”except money.
Pink Christmas, the organizers say, is also an attempt to “reclaim Amsterdam for gays” and to counter the rising intolerance in the city. Over the past years, assaults on homosexuals have occurred with increasing frequency. Though the parades, parties and festivals continue, homosexual couples who venture into the streets risk being beaten up or thrown into one of the canals.
While the homosexuals make a parody of Christmas, mocking the Christians with an open show of blasphemy during the holy season, it is not the Christians whom the homosexuals fear. Those who pretend that “religious people” are intolerant will find few examples among the remaining followers of Christ in Holland. The attacks on homosexuals are perpetrated by Muslim youths. The growing presence of Islam in the Dutch capital, which is already almost 20 per cent Muslim, has made life in the city less gay”and less “Gay””than it used to be.
Europe’s Christians, however, would be naïve to expect that the Muslims will have greater respect for Christmas nativity scenes. Radical Islamists want to ban them altogether. In an interview earlier this year Belgium’s Cardinal Godfried Danneels said that Christians may thank Muslims for the growing respect for God in present-day Europe, but the liberal Cardinal does not seem to understand that the God of Islam is not the God of Christianity.
In Antwerp, in Danneels” own Belgium, the city authorities have decreed that public shools, even during the Christmas season, have to avoid all references to Jesus, Mary and Joseph. The authorities do not want to upset the schools” large population of Muslim kids. “Christmas should be a neutral event, not focused on one particular religion, but on enjoying food and drink together with friends and family,” the city officials wrote in a letter to the schools.
For the time being, Christmas trees are still allowed in Antwerp, although last year a Muslim civil servant and trade union representative demanded that the city show “its commitment to complete neutrality by banning Christmas trees and Easter eggs” from public buildings and spaces.
Like Amsterdam, Antwerp still tolerates the word “Christmas.” In Oxford, England, however, the city council has decided to ban the C-word and replace it with the term “Winter Light Festival.” This is done in order “to include all religious denominations.”
Meanwhile, Oxford University Press has removed other words associated with Christianity and British history from Britain’s leading dictionary for children, the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Words like “bishop,” “chapel,” “abbey,” “saint,” “monarch” and “empire” have been axed. The publisher claims the changes are made to “reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.”
What multifaith means was experienced by the non-Muslim children of a junior school in Nottingham which cancelled the traditional Christmas nativity play because it got in the way of the Muslim children celebrating the Islamic Eid festivities.
In Sarajevo, Bosnia, Christmas has been
>abolished in all the city’s kindergarten institutions. In order not to offend Muslims, even Christmas trees have been banned from the kindergarten premises. 43 percent of Bosnians are Muslims.
In Cologne, Germany, the windows of the Galeria Kaufhof department store no longer display traditional Christmas scenes. Instead, passers-by can marvel at Islamic scenes of mosques with minarets, desert abodes and puppets dressed like Arabs, including veiled women (see pictures here).
Over 30% of Cologne’s inhabitants are Muslims.
In Europe, the war against Christmas is being waged on all fronts, with the institution under attack from two sides: from secularist fundamentalists, who turn it into a mockery with two Josephs (or two Marys) amidst pink Christmas trees, and from Muslim fundamentalists who tolerate no nativity scenes and no Christmas trees at all.
It is time for all men of good will to raise their banners and fight: for the family and the right of child to live and to be raised”like Jesus”by a father and a mother, instead of two fathers or two mothers; for green Christmas trees; for words and concepts like Christmas, bishop, chapel, abbey, monarch and empire; in short, for God, sanity and tradition.
Paul Belien is a Flemish journalist and founder of The Brussels Journal, Europe’s leading conservative website. His wife is a member of the Belgian parliament for Vlaams Belang.
]]>The attendees, among them ambassadors from Arab countries and French academics, businessmen and politicians, listened to a message from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who called Arabic the “language of the future, of science and of modernity.” He added: “We must invest in the Arabic language because to teach it symbolizes a moment of exchange, of openness and of tolerance, and it brings with it one of the oldest and most prestigious civilizations of the world”
Sarkozy expressed the hope that “more French people share in the language that expresses great civilizational and spiritual values.” He reminded his listeners: “It is in France that we have the greatest number of persons [in Europe] of Arab and Muslim origin. Islam is the second religion of France.”
The number of Muslims in France is estimated to be between 6 and 12 million, or between 10 and 20 per cent of France’s population of 61 million. In 2003, the French Interior ministry estimated the total number of Muslims at 6 million. But French Muslim organizations claim to represent 12 to 13 million people. French Muslims are a young population and the Muslim proportion of the French population will only grow in the years to come.
In September 2005, the Institut français des relations internationales (French Institute for International Relations, IFRI) published a report stating that 10 to 20 per cent of the army is of immigrant origin, most of them North African. “Their loyalty is continuously questioned,” Christophe Bertossi of IFRI reported.
The high percentage of Muslim soldiers is said to have been the main reason why the army was not sent in to restore order during the 2005 and 2006 riots in the French Muslim neighborhoods. The authorities doubt whether Muslim soldiers would accept orders to coerce fellow Muslims into respecting the law of the French republic.
Sarkozy’s de facto acceptance of the new”Arab”face of France, as expressed by his “hope” that more and more Frenchmen learn to speak “the language of the future,” was not the worst recent example of France’s willing submission to Islam.
Last month, a (native) French police officer was punished because, while conducting an investigation into the infiltration of radical Islamists in the French civil service, he had asked the authorities in the region surrounding Lyons, France’s second biggest city: “Would you be so kind as to indicate if among your personnel, you have employees belonging to a religion other than Christianity.”
The Grand Mufti of the Lyons mosque lodged an official complaint with President Sarkozy, who had the French Interior Minister order an investigation into the matter, which resulted in an official punishment of the police officer. On September 16th, the Prefect (Governor) of Lyons apologized to the Muslims: “We must sever this link, this confusion, between Islam and radicalism. It is the second religion of France; one day perhaps it will be the first.” The prefect also announced that the officer had been punished: “He committed not an error, but a grave fault, an individual fault. He acted outside of any authorization. This functionary received two punishments that take effect today. He was reprimanded”and this will stay on his record”and he has been transferred out of his functions as of 8:00 a.m. today. It was important to act quickly. The fault is serious. The Muslim population must not feel stigmatized. It is the second religion of France.”
The French have allowed the Muslims to become so populous in France that they act as if they are being held hostage by them. They are not the only ones to act in this way. So do the authorities in Britain, who, last month, officially installed Sharia courts, and Germany, where, also last month, governing politicians congratulated themselves for “standing up to protect Muslims” by giving thugs a free rein to beat up peaceful anti-Islamization demonstrators.
]]>Since you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I am going to spit you out of my mouth. You say, “I am rich. I have become wealthy. I don”t need anything.” Yet you don”t realize that you are miserable, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. (Revelation 3:16-17)
While 44 per cent of Americans attend a place of worship once a week”and this is mostly a Christian place of worship”only 15 per cent of Europeans do so”and many of them go to a mosque instead of a church. The European disease was aptly analyzed by Pope Benedict XVI who said that it was caused by “the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations.”
Here lies the explanation for Europe’s current predicament. What we see happening today in Europe is not Islam replacing Christianity; during the past decades secularism replaced Christianity. What we see happening now is Islam replacing post-Christian secularism.
In an interview in the German newspaper Die Welt last month, Father Notker Wolf, the German professor and monk who is the head of the Benedictine monks worldwide, suggested that Islam might perhaps be “a provocation from God.” Father Notker implies that Islamization can only be stopped if Europe rediscovers its Christian roots.
Michael Nazir-Ali, the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, is convinced that the dire situation which Europe is currently facing, is not caused by the fact that there are so many Muslims in Europe, but that there are so few Christians left.
According to Bishop Michael, who lives in a residence discreetly guarded by the police after he received Muslim death threats, Islamization is not the cause but the consequence of Europe’s collapse. The Bishop says,
The real danger is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. If people are not given a fresh way of understanding what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a Christian-based society then something else may well take the place of all that we”re used to and that could be Islam.
What the consequences might be of replacing Christianity as Europe’s religion by Islam was explained almost 200 years ago by Alexis de Tocqueville. This 19th century Frenchman, who was a great, though critical, admirer of the United States, pointed out that the deep religiosity of the Americans is the foundation of America’s freedom. However, not every religion or faith leads to freedom. In 1840 Tocqueville wrote, in a passage which is highly relevant to Europe today:
Muhammad brought down from heaven […] not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others. (Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 1, ch. 5)
If Tocqueville is right, Islam cannot hold its power in an enlightened and democratic environment. If we wonder why Islam is gaining strength in Europe we should not confuse cause and consequence. Europe is not becoming less and less free and democratic because it is becoming Islamic, but Europe is becoming Islamic because it has become less and less free and democratic following the demise of Christianity. In Europe, the religious vacuum left by secularisation is being filled by Islam. One should not blame Muslims for this. The people to blame are the Europeans.
Society cannot exist without a shared set of moral values. Typically these are provided by religion. Failing this the state usurps the role of religion and governments will impose moral standards. We have been witnessing this phenomenon in Europe throughout the past four decades, during which governments, aided by supra-national organizations such as the EU and various UN organizations, have begun to impose a doctrine of multiculturalism. This doctrine, which destroyed the Christian foundation of Western Europe, has opened the latter’s doors to Islam. Christianity died in Western Europe before Islam took over.
The situation is dire all over Western Europe, but perhaps nowhere is it as bad as in the Netherlands. The country was in the forefront of secularization. It was one of the most radical and vehement in rejecting the Christian heritage and moral values of its ancestors. In so doing the Dutch created a massive religious, and also demographic, vacuum which attracted Islam to fill it.
The Netherlands was the first European country to legalize abortion as well as euthanasia and the first to open up the institution of marriage to homosexuals. What happened in the Netherlands has happened”and is happening”all over Europe, but it seems to have happened first in the Netherlands because, together with Sweden, it was one of the first to become a fully-fledged welfare society. For over half a century the Dutch have been pampered by an extensive welfare system. People who have the state take care of them from the cradle to the grave no longer need God. They have traded their freedom for material security. They have replaced God by the golden calf of the welfare state. The state has become their god.
The state is, however, an envious god. The welfare state intentionally undermines the Christian principles to crush the spirit of freedom among its subjects. It also undermines demographics, because people who do not believe in God do not believe in the future and consider children to be a burden. Today, Islam is filling the void that was left when the Dutch created a religious and demographic vacuum in the heart of their culture.
In combination with the above, a wholly new danger emerged, namely that of welfare immigration”the immigration of people, increasingly from cultures which have not been shaped by the basic forces of European civilization, who come purely for the purpose of claiming welfare benefits.
Of the 16 million inhabitants of the Netherlands, ten per cent are immigrants. There are 1.1 million “traditional immigrants””the so-called “guest workers” and their families. These are mainly Turks and Moroccans”and 600,000 asylum seekers. Of the latter group an additional 10,000 enter the Netherlands each year, of the former some 55,000. They are mainly young people of childbearing age. The problem of Islamization will only increase in the future because the Muslims are fecund, while the secularist Dutch have hardly any offspring.
There are currently 360,000 ethnic Turks in the Netherlands, 45 per cent of whom are “second generation” Turks, meaning that they were born in the Netherlands. There are 316,000 Moroccans, of whom 47 per cent are second generation. Among the asylum seekers the largest groups are Iranians (37,000, of whom 12 per cent are second generation) and Afghans (29,000, of whom 17 per cent are second generation).
The Dutch birthrate is declining fast. In 2002, there were still 202,000 babies born in the Netherlands; in 2005 only 190,000 and in 2007 barely 181,000. In 5 years the number of births fell with a staggering 21,000 or 10 per cent.
Within this shrinking group of births, the number of immigrant newborns (of the second and even third generations) continues to grow: from under 40,000 in 1996 to 50,000 ten years later. A quarter of them are ethnic Moroccans, a fifth are Turkish.
In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague half the newborns are of non-Western origin and Mohammed is the most popular name for newborn boys. Ethnic Dutch women have on average 1.5 children. The number for Moroccan women living in the Netherlands is 3.3 and for Turkish women 2.3.
An existential uneasiness has engulfed the country that thought it could do without God. Many of the natives, the indigenous Dutch, are fleeing. Last year, as in every year since 2004, more ethnic Dutch natives moved out of the country than newcomers moved in. Almost 123,000 people left the Netherlands in 2007, while fewer than 117,000 immigrated in. People who have lost faith in God do not fight. They run. Since they do not believe in life after death, this life is the only thing they have to lose. One emigrant Dutchman, a homosexual author who now lives in Brussels, wrote recently: “I am not a warrior. I do not fight for freedom. I am only good at enjoying it.”
This mentality has affected the whole of Western Europe. All over Europe, Muslims regard Western women as whores waiting to be raped. The number of reported rapes in Sweden is three times as high as in New York City, which has roughly the same number of inhabitants but is a metropolis, whereas Sweden is a country with mostly rural areas and villages.
While many women in Western Europe fear what might happen to them, they have become almost fatalistic about it. A young German woman said that it is “better to let yourself be raped than risk injuries while resisting, better to avoid fighting than risk death.”
This attitude is very un-American, but is typical for the secularist Europeans. Europe has chosen the path of submission. The path of submission is the path of Islam. The very word Islam means “submission.” Many Europeans have submitted already. In that sense, they have already, and voluntarily, become Muslims. The self-inflicted disease of welfarism saps people of the strength to take care of themselves, to stand up for their rights, to fight for their freedom and even for their physical integrity.
Western Europe’s contemporary culture is one of repudiation, a culture based on negatives for every aspect of the traditional European heritage, such as Christianity, monogamous marriage, national loyalty, monocultural identity and so on. Western Europe’s refusal to uphold the old forms of moral and civil order make it impossible to curb the welfare state, to control immigration, to maintain order in its cities, to resist Islamization.
About five per cent of the Muslims in the Netherlands are suspected fundamentalists. On November 2, 2004, one of them, Mohammed Bouyeri, a then 26-year old Dutchman of Moroccan descent, ritually slaughtered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
The assassination of van Gogh, two years after the May 2002 murder of the popular anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, sent shock waves through Dutch society.
During most of his trial Bouyeri, who wore a Palestinian scarf, hardly spoke a word. He displayed the same calmness he had shown whilst he slit van Gogh’s throat in a busy Amsterdam street.
In July 2005, the court in Amsterdam sentenced Bouyeri to life-long imprisonment for the murder. The public prosecutor had asked that the assassin also be deprived of his active and passive voting rights: i.e. the right to vote as well as the right to be elected in Parliament. The court, however, rejected this request.
This attitude is typical of European societies, such as the Netherlands, with their refusal to defend their own order and fight for their own survival. Bouyeri despises the Dutch, he wants to annihilate them, but the Dutch allow him to vote in their elections and even to be elected. The ludicrously permissive Dutch open their doors for those who want to assassinate them. In a secularist and politically correct society, it is harder to withhold rights (apparently even from a man who butchers fellow citizens) than to magnanimously grant them, displaying one’s tolerance and broad-mindedness as one does so. What harm, the liberals think, because for them these rights are no more than abstract professions of non-discrimination.
During the trial Bouyeri said he did not in the least regret butchering van Gogh. He added that he would do it again. Is it far-fetched to think that the fierce, indeed, the murderous, intolerance of about five percent of the Muslims in the Netherlands has been caused by the excessive ultra-tolerance and permissiveness of the Dutch? Perhaps the Muslim hate for the Dutch is caused by their deep contempt for the secular nihilism of the latter.
The murdered Theo van Gogh had been an icon of Dutch liberalism. In his films and newspaper columns he deliberately set out to shock and insult anyone who believed in anything, especially if these people were religious. The Netherlands having been traditionally a Christian nation, Christians were van Gogh’s first targets. He called Jesus “the rotten fish of Nazareth.” Jews were offended by van Gogh’s quip that “cremating Jewish diabetics must have smelled like caramel.” Bouyeri had been offended by the movie “Submission,” a documentary that van Gogh made about the position of women in Islam, but also by his reference to Muslims as “goat fuckers” who believe in “a pig called Allah.”
In the late 1980s and early “90s, a number of Christians and Jews took van Gogh to court, but in vain. Freedom of speech cannot be limited by laws, except in totalitarian states. Van Gogh’s diatribes, however, prove that freedom of speech becomes self-defeating in a society where all constraints of decency and manners have crumbled under the onslaught of moral relativism and liberal secularism. This is exactly what happened in the Netherlands in the 1970s and “80s.
Pim Fortuyn, another Dutch public figure who had been threatened by Islamist fundamentalists (although he was murdered by an animal welfare activist), was a notorious promiscuous homosexual who claimed that he was not a racist because he “had sex with young Moroccan boys in darkrooms.”
Though it is no excuse for murder, the moral deprivation of the West helps explain the contempt of fundamentalist Muslims for our societies. The fact that the murderer Bouyeri was allowed to keep his active and passive voting rights will not enhance the fundamentalists” respect for Dutch democracy. Without such respect it is unlikely that they will be less inclined to destroy it.
Criminal gangs of young Muslims assaulting natives in Sweden openly admit that they do it because they despise their victims. “When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes,” they say. “Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet. We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to.” They do not express any sympathy for their victims: “If they get injured, they just have themselves to blame for being weak.”
Van Gogh and Fortuyn were atypical for most European secularists in that at least they resisted Islamization. They refused to submit. While van Gogh insulted and fought Christianity and Judaism, he also insulted and fought Islam. Most European secularists, however, consider Islam a useful ally in their attempt to eradicate Christianity. Hence, they facilitate Islamization, confident that they will be able to secularize the Muslims in due course. This seems to be the official policy of the Dutch authorities.
In 2006 the Netherlands introduced a so-called “integration test for immigrants which the latter must pass before being allowed to settle in the country. The test includes a film which exposes the would-be immigrants to scenes of kissing homosexual men and topless women. The message, as the Associated Press pointedly summarized two years ago, is that “If you can”t tolerate gay lifestyle and public nudity, you can”t come” and live in the Netherlands.
Apart from their usefulness in undermining the Christian foundation of Western Europe, European secularist politicians also value the Muslim immigrants as an electoral life insurance. Welfare immigration led to the welfare immigrants becoming the new electorate of the political parties which created, and which still uphold, welfare statism. In Western Europe these are not just the socialist and social-democratic parties, but all the traditional so-called “mainstream” parties of the right, such as the Christian-Democrats.
The “mainstream” parties actively search for the Muslim vote. This phenomenon has become increasingly important because the Muslim population has continuously grown, thereby becoming the power broker in the elections. Apart from the so-called “far-right”, all political parties compete with each other in giving in to Muslim demands.
These demands range from separate swimming hours for men and women in public pools; to the serving of halal food for everyone (Muslims as well as non-Muslims) in school and factory cafeterias; the state-subsidized building of megamosques; an anti-Israeli foreign policy; the prosecution of so-called “Islamophobic” individuals, journalists and cartoonists on the one hand, and the refusal to prosecute Muslim criminals and extremists on the other hand; the prohibition for all civil servants (Muslims as well as non-Muslims) to eat in public during Ramadan; the introduction of Sharia law; the banning of demonstrations in remembrance of the victims of the 2001 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington; the abandonment of entire neighbourhoods to Islamic youth gangs; and so on.
An example of the degree to which the authorities condone Muslim violence could be found recently in the middle-sized Dutch city of Gouda, famous for its cheese. On 21 September, a police officer was knifed in a Muslim area of Gouda. Though colleagues of the officer had arrested a suspect, the Public Prosecutor’s Office released him, while the authorities minimized the attack and a police spokesman said that the incident was “very unpleasant of course, but a knifing is too big a word. The knife only caught his buttock.”
Indeed, the Dutch can no longer rely on civil order or effective law enforcement. In October 2008, the Dutch government even established a telephone help-line for mayors who face aggression and violence. According to the Dutch Interior minister, 60 per cent of mayors in the Netherlands feel personally threatened. The situation has deteriorated despite the fact that, following the 2006 local elections, many Muslims became members of Dutch municipal councils.
The degree to which the Muslim vote has tipped the electoral balance in the Netherlands indicates that turning the tide of Islamization will be very difficult. The elections in the Netherlands reveal the growing importance of the Muslim vote. Immigrants overwhelmingly vote for left-wing parties. This is hardly surprising since most of the immigrants were attracted to the country by its generous welfare benefits, which they want to safeguard. Indeed, Western Europe’s cultural submission to Islam seems to equal a political submission to Socialism.
Over 80 per cent of the immigrants voted for Labour in the March 2006 Dutch local elections, so this party was very keen on attracting their continued support. It placed many Moroccan and Turkish candidates on its list, but Labour fell out with the Turks when the latter discovered the official party line on the Armenian genocide. Labour’s position is that this genocide really took place and that Ankara should recognize it as a historical fact before Turkey can join the European Union. As a result, in the November 2006 general elections in the Netherlands, the Turkish vote shifted to smaller parties of the far-left, which became the biggest winners of these elections.
Seventy per cent of the immigrants participated in the 2006 Dutch general elections, indicating a political awareness almost as high as that of the indigenous Dutch. Eight Muslims were elected in the Dutch Parliament, which has 150 seats: four of them are Moroccans, three are Turks, including one Kurd, and one is an Afghani. One Muslim is a Christian-Democrat member of Parliament, three MPs belong to the center-left and four are members of far-left parties. All eight Muslim MPs hold dual nationality, being citizens of the Netherlands as well as of their country of origin. The same is true for Ahmed Aboutaleb, the Dutch secretary of state for Social Affairs and Employment, who holds Moroccan as well as Dutch citizenship, and Nehabat Albayrak, the Dutch secretary of state for Immigration, who holds Turkish as well as Dutch citizenship.
Last year, the Dutch Parliament approved a proposal submitted by Secretary Albayrak to give permanent resident cards to everyone who has been living illegally in the Netherlands since 2001. Opponents fear that Albayrak’s amnesty might attract up to half a million new immigrants”many of them Muslims”to the Netherlands. The new generation of Dutch immigrant politicians cater for their fellow Muslims. They have little in common with the former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born immigrant who was a Muslim apostate advocating anti-islamic legislation. Hirsi Ali left the Dutch parliament in 2006 and moved to the United States.
The newly elected immigrant politicians, on the contrary, represent a growing and demographically young electorate that insists on its Muslim identity. Their loyalties lie more with their countries of origin than with the Dutch nation, which they look upon mainly as a welfare distributing Santa Claus.
The same phenomenon can be noticed in neighbouring countries, such as Germany and Belgium. In the 2005 German general elections, 94 per cent of the Germans of immigrant (mainly Turkish) origin voted for the parties of the left. These parties”Socialists, Greens and “Post”-Communists”gained 51.1 per cent of the national vote. Also in Germany, the Muslim vote tipped the balance towards the left.
In the October 2006 Belgian local elections, the immigrant vote also tipped the balance in the major cities in favour of the Socialists. In Antwerp, the Socialists became the largest party. They won 22 of the 55 seats in the municipal council”a gain of ten seats. Seven of the Socialist councillors, almost one third of the total, are Muslims. The only party able to avoid being swallowed up by the Socialists in the 2006 Antwerp local elections were the Christian-Democrats. They managed to keep their six seats by putting forward immigrant candidates as well. The result, however is, that two of their elected candidates, one third of the total, are Muslims. One of them, Ergün Top, an advisor to the Belgian Christian-Democrat Prime Minister Yves Leterme, admits that he feels more loyalty towards Turkey than towards Belgium. He told an audience of Turkish-born Belgian voters that if there ever were a war between Belgium and Turkey, he would join the Turkish army and fight Belgium.
In order to attract Muslim votes, the Belgian Socialists and Christian-Democrats even put extremists on their electoral lists. One of them, Murat Denizli, was elected for the Parti Socialiste (PS) in the large Brussels borough of Schaarbeek, which has a Muslim population of 47.9 per cent. Mr Denizli was introduced on the Socialist list by Laurette Onkelinx, the Belgian vice prime minister. Though indigenous Schaarbeek Socialists had rejected Mr Denizli and other immigrants who adhered to what they called “rather religious and conservative Muslim values,” Onkelinx demanded that these candidates be accepted because, as she said, “they are popular and the party has to win the elections at any price.”
Molenbeek, another Brussels borough, has 50.5 per cent Islamic inhabitants and one of the largest concentrations of North African immigrants in Belgium. Molenbeek has all but been taken over by the Muslims. Its mayor, Philippe Moureaux, a Socialist, got elected thanks to the Muslim vote. Mr Moureaux has declared that it is “not expedient” for the police to patrol in Muslim quarters and has forbidden police officers to drink coffee or eat a sandwich in the street during Ramadan.
On September 11, last year as well as this year, Freddy Thielemans, the Socialist mayor of Brussels, banned memorial services for the terror victims of the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington. Mr Thielemans does so because he fears such memorial services will upset the city’s large Muslim population”33.8per cent of the Brussels inhabitants. Mayor Thielemans’s PS is the largest party in Brussels. It holds 17 of the 47 seats in the city council. A majority, 10 of the 17, socialist councillors are Muslims.
The Socialists govern Brussels in a coalition with the Christian-Democrats, who have 11 councillors, of whom 2 are Muslims and 3 are immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. Only 13 of the 28 councillors in the governing coalition of the city are native Belgians. Mayor Thielemans is the most conspicuous of these. He is an atheist who is fond of Muslims, not because he respects religious people, but because he hates Christians. On 2 April 2005, the Brussels mayor was attending an official cocktail party when the news of the death of Pope John Paul II reached him. On hearing the news he ordered “Champagne for everyone!” Upsetting Christians has never particularly worried the Socialist mayor of Brussels, for instance when he refused to ban posters from public areas which portrayed the Virgin Mary with bare breasts.
Since there are few indications of improvements, Europe’s future looks bleak. Western Europe will only be able to avoid a Muslim future if it rediscovers its Christian roots. As pointed out earlier, Islamization is not the cause but the consequence of Europe’s collapse. If Europe had still been Christian, it would have regarded the coming of millions of Muslim immigrants as an opportunity to bring Christ to these people. Having renounced Christ, Europe could only offer its culture.
There is a flicker of hope, though. It was offered last March by Pope Benedict when he baptized 55-year old Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born Italian journalist and a former Muslim. Mr. Allam moved to Italy in 1972. For almost thirty years he defended Islam and argued in favor of immigration. Since 2002, however, his views altered radically. Today he advocates a ban on mosques in Italy and claims that Islam is inseparable from Islamic extremism.
“I asked myself,” he wrote after his conversion to Catholicism,
how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a “moderate Islam,” assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Quran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.
Mr. Allam also advocates proselytizing among Muslims. He wrote that by personally baptizing him
His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.
In France, a group of former Muslims who converted to Evangelical Protestantism, does missionary work in Muslim neighborhoods. I met some of them recently and was very impressed by their courage. They told me that there is a “hunger for God” among the French Muslims and that the Muslims are the prisoners of Islam and are very receptive towards Christianity. If so, and if Europe fails to grasp this unique opportunity, it surely will only have itself to blame for the collapse of its civilization in the second quarter of this century.
Paul Belien is a Flemish journalist and founder of The Brussels Journal, Europe’s leading conservative website. His wife is a member of the Belgian parliament for Vlaams Belang.
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“Apart from myself no one will ever be able to stop me,” the confident 58-year old politician had boasted a couple of years ago. He proved to be right.
Barely two weeks ago Haider led his party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÃ), to an election victory, gaining 10.7% in the general elections, up from 4.1% two years ago. Haider began his political career in the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÃ), the former liberal party, whose leader he became in 1986. He transformed the party into a nationalist party.
Haider was young, charismatic and he had chutzpah. He ran marathons, did bungee jumping, visited discos, and provoked the Austrian and international establishment with refreshing anti-statist, anti-EU, and anti-immigration positions, as well as with politically incorrect statements about the Second World War and the Nazi regime. He led his party from victory to victory, until the 1999 general elections in which the FPÃ gained 27% of the votes. Unfortunately, Haider had a self-destructive streak.
When he brought his party into government in 1999, he refused to take part in the government himself because he did not want to be the second in command in a coalition government with the Christian-Democrats. He retired to his regional Alpine stronghold of Carinthia. There he polled over 40% of the votes, partly for his deliberate provocations of the Slovene ethnic minority in the province.
Without his leadership, the FPÃ unraveled at the federal level. In 2002 the government fell, after infighting within the FPÃ. In the following elections the party dropped to 10.2% of the national vote. Three years later Haider left his own party and established a new one, the BZÃ, which was a largely Carinthian phenomenon. However, in the September 28, 2008, elections, the flamboyant Haider made a political comeback, attracting the support of one in every ten Austrians, although his former party, the FPÃ, did better with 17.5%. Together the two parties exceeded the 1999 result.
In his self-destructiveness Haider resembled Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the French Front National. It is difficult to understand why politicians such as Le Pen and Haider always feel compelled to start debates about the Second World War with deliberately controversial statements. In Haider’s case, the Nazi past of his parents may explain an urge to condone them. Since many Austrians come from families tainted with pan-German sympathies, his statements caused little political harm. Nevertheless, sensible and responsible politicians focus on present and future problems, not on those of the past.
Moreover, a politician who has become the hope of thousands of voters should behave responsibly. By driving twice as fast as the speed limit, Haider indicated that he did not have the sense of responsibility one would expect of an adult. Despite his charisma, he failed his wife and children as well as his voters. He had failed many of his former nationalist former voters, too, with the pro-Islamic stances that he began to adopt around the turn of the century, making foreign trips to Arab dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi, whom he called his friends. He also supported Turkey’s bid to enter the European Union.
Most of his voters probably did not support his pro-Islamic views. Perhaps the new leaders of his party, which was basically a one-man party, may reunite with the FPÃ. This would make the FPÃ-BZÃ the major political force in Austria.
]]>Italy and Spain are two frontline states on Europe’s southern border. They are being overrun by millions (no exaggeration) of immigrants, many of whom cross the straits in boats from the African shore of the Mediterranean. Three years ago Spain (40 million inhabitants) announced a collective amnesty for a staggering 800,000 undocumented aliens, despite having already offered six other amnesties in the past 15 years. Two years ago, Italy (58 million inhabitants) amnestied 500,000 illegal immigrants, having already offered five similar regularizations between 1988 and 2006. And still the immigrants keep coming. Immigration, however, is not the “big question of national identity” The Economist is referring to.
Obviously, economics is mostly on The Economist‘s mind. Consequently, economic reform is what the above editorials mainly dealt with, though in Spain’s case the magazine also mentioned the “national identity” question in a reference to the seats won by regionalist and separatist parties from Catalonia and the Basque country. These parties kept Mr Zapatero from an absolute majority in the Spanish parliament. Hence, he will have to accommodate them in some way.
Strangely”though tellingly for a magazine which, like The Economist, is representative of Europe’s mainstream media”the editorial on Italy did not mention the astonishing electoral success of the Lega Nord, a constituent of Mr. Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance.
Like the parties in Catalonia and the Basque country, the Northern League (full name: Lega Nord per l’Indipendenza della Padania”Northern League for the Independence of Padania) is a regionalist, indeed separatist, party. Padania, in case you have never heard of it, does not exist as a nation; it is the collective name that the League uses to denote the various regions of northern Italy (such as Lombardy, Piedmont, Venice, Tuscany, South Tyrol, and others). The League is made up of several parties (including the Lega Lombarda, the Liga Veneta, the Alleanza Toscana) that want to restore to their regions the sovereignty that they enjoyed prior to the formation of the Italian State in the 19th century.
The success of the Northern League was the pivotal element in the victory of Mr. Berlusconi’s alliance. It enabled him to win an absolute majority in the Italian parliament. The League completely wiped away the left in the north. It doubled in size and won a stunning 8.3% of the national vote, sending 60 deputies (+37) and 26 senators (+13) to Rome. In some northern regions, it had the support of up to 50% of the electorate. This remarkable result, however, was not worth the consideration of The Economist, or of the rest of the European media. As they did not report on the League’s victory, they did not need to explain to their readers why the party had done so extraordinary well. Indeed, the international media preferred to lament the return of “the jester” rather than point out that the Northern League won so massively because of its forceful anti-immigration platform.
On Monday (21 April), the leftist Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera wrote, “Fear boosted the Northern League’s vote, doubling and tripling its haul in front-line towns where local prosperity is undermined by thefts and burglaries. Unpunished crimes generate anger and people lose trust.” It is telling that even this leftist newspaper talks about “front-line” towns”-as if a war is going on”to describe the blue-collar areas around Milan where immigrants are making life unbearable for indigenous workers who no longer feel at home in their own neighborhoods. Roberto Mura, the League’s secretary for the district of Pavia and the mayor of San Genesio, 25 kilometers south of Milan, told the Corriere: “We struggle to shake off […] the image of the rough and ready, apolitical racist League militant. […] I know we”ve got to live with immigration, but the rules have to be respected. The League has been saying so for fifteen years. We”re now reaping the reward for the coherence and clarity of our project to defend the territory.”
As Mr Mura points out, the “apolitical” Northern League is in politics not for the sake of politics itself, but to “defend the territory.” There is something remarkable going on here, though it will never hit the mainstream media because the latter do not want to see it:
The most successful anti-immigration parties in Europe are regionalist/secessionist parties. They are “apolitical” because they do not particularly like politics. Their militants, members and voters do not like the state, they want to be left alone. They defend local communities that want to run their own affairs. They are parties of the land and the community, rather than the state. They are, as the media and the political establishment derisively call them, “populists.”
Milan, the capital of Lombardy, is 700 kilometers (430 miles) to the south of Brussels, the seat of the European Union, that supranational European superstate in the making which already accounts for 75% of the legislation in its 27 member states. The League is as opposed to Brussels as it is to Rome: it’s regionalist, restrictionist, and “Eurosceptic,” meaning that it doesn”t much like supranational mingling in local affairs.
Let us now travel from Milan to Brussels. First we must cross the Lombardian border into Switzerland, then we cross the Alps in order to reach the valley of the Rhine River. We follow the Rhine, which constitutes the border between France and Germany, until we arrive in the Low Countries, in particular in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium, where Brussels is situated. There, we can visit the buildings of the European and the Belgian parliaments but also those of the Flemish Regional Parliament.
The largest party in the latter parliament is the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party. It represents a quarter of the Flemish electorate and is considered one of the most professional and successful of Europe’s patriotic parties. It is remarkably similar to the Lega Nord. It is separatist, in favor of restricting immigration and Eurosceptic.
The VB was founded in 1978 by Flemish nationalists aiming for the independence of Flanders. The Flemish provinces are the historic southern, Catholic half of the Netherlands. In fact, the Flemish provinces belonged to the Netherlands until the International Powers gave them to the newly created French-dominated state of Belgium in 1831. From the start, the VB warned against immigration by people from a culture entirely alien to that of Flanders; indeed, the VB was the first party to address the issue. It still demands that immigrants assimilate and, hence, that their numbers remain low enough to assure that this is possible. The party’s position is also that immigration from countries with a culture closer to that of Flanders should be given preference, but they have to adapt to the locals and learn the language of the Flemings, Dutch.
The VB is critical of immigration for exactly the same reason why it demands Flemish independence: because it wants to preserve Flemish national identity. As Frank Vanhecke, the then VB leader, wrote in The Flemish Republic in July 2003: “We defend the Flemish national identity, against the Belgian state as well as against immigrants who abuse our hospitality to wage an anti-Western war in Flanders. The VB is a party of Flemish patriots, prepared to defend Flanders” culture and traditions, its values and, above all, its freedom.”
The Flemish provinces experienced their heyday in the Middle Ages, when the Netherlands was a confederate cluster of autonomous provinces. The provinces were dominated by powerful cities, such as Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, who made it quite clear to the nominal dynastic ruler that he had to leave the burghers in peace or face rebellion. In northern Italy, the situation was almost similar, with powerful city-states running their own affairs. And so it was all along the 700 kilometers that we have just traveled. The cities along the Rhein, such as Cologne and Strasbourg, enjoyed considerable autonomy, while Switzerland was a confederation of tiny, sovereign republics of Alpine farmers. This was not a coincidence. In fact, these regions have a common history that goes back to the time when Charlemagne’s empire was divided, almost 1,200 years ago.
Charlemagne, king of the Franks, a Germanic tribe, conquered most of continental Western Europe and was crowned Emperor in 800 AD. He was the first ruler France and Germany had in common. His son, Louis the Pious, was the last. In 843, the Carolingian empire was divided. Charlemagne’s grandsons, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, became the first kings of, respectively, France (West Francia) and Germany (East Francia). There was, however, a third brother, Lothar, the eldest. He inherited the lands that lay between those of his brothers: Middle Francia.
Lothar’s kingdom was named after him: Lotharii Regnum or Lorraine. Today, Lorraine is the name of a province in the east of France. It is the province where Joan of Arc, France’s national heroine came from. However, contemporary Lorraine is only a tiny part of the Lorraine of old. In Lothar’s time, Lorraine comprised all the countries that lie between France and Germany today”the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland”plus the eastern part of present-day France, the western part of Germany and the northern half of Italy.
When Lothar’s son died without offspring in 875, the middle territories were divided between Charles the Bald and Louis the German. However, as these regions lay on the periphery of their heartlands, generations of kings of France and Germany were never able to establish a firm rule over them. The result was that throughout the Middle Ages, and for some up to the 18th century and even today, the lands of Lothar, Old Lorraine, were made up of self-governing republics of farmers, independent counties controlled by burghers or city republics.
Self-governing, with little interference from greedy princes, their tax controllers and meddling civil servants, these lands became very prosperous. Capitalism has its origins here. This whole axis from Amsterdam in the north to Siena in the south developed into the economic spine of Europe. The former Carolingian Middle Lands saw not only the birth of capitalism but also of limited government. A decentralized political culture developed where the burghers governed themselves without caring much about faraway rulers.
Later, and gradually, French and German monarchs succeeded in bringing most of the regions of the ancient Middle-Frankish realm under their control. The kings of France and Prussia succeeded in subduing their part of the Rhen region. The French Revolution swept away all the existing self-governing systems, and after the fall of Napoleon only Switzerland returned to its old constitutional order. To a large extent, however, the spirit of Old Lorraine lives on today in the lands of the former Middle Kingdom where citizens are still influenced by centuries of independence, self-reliance and adherence to a local identity that opposes centralizing authorities in far-away capitals.
In Switzerland, the only remaining sovereign part of Old Lorraine (at least until Flanders and Padania regain their independence), these feelings are so strong that the country stubbornly refuses to become a member of the European Union. Switzerland itself is a regionalist nation, made up of 26 provinces (cantons) that to a very large extent rule themselves. The country has strict immigration laws and the Swiss want to make these even stricter. The last elections, in November 2007, were won by the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party, SVP), which with 29% of the votes reinforced its position as the biggest party in the country. The international media describe the SVP as “far-right,” “populist,” “xenophobic” and “intolerant.” Like the Vlaams Belang and the Lega Nord, the SVP is localist. It combines a strong attachment to local communities with a clear affirmation of the right of these communities to “defend the territory” and preserve their own, traditional, ethnic identity.
Most of the regionalist parties in Europe, such as those in the Basque country, Scotland and elsewhere, are leftist. Except along the “spine of Europe.” These parties are the most successful of the parties of the European right. They have a localist quality, and yet they are fighting to protect the Christian, Western heritage of the continent as a whole. The SVP is currently campaigning for a referendum, on 1 June, to “stop mass naturalization” of immigrants. Italy’s new Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, comes from the Northern League and has announced “tough measures against clandestine immigration.” The VB, under constant harassment by the Belgian authorities, is working on a project to export its model to neighboring countries. Last January, the party established an international network called “Cities against Islamization,” in which it has aligned itself with local parties in cities along the Rhine”Pro Köln (Pro Cologne) from Cologne in the German Rhineland and Alsace d”Abord (Alsace First) from Strassbourg, the capital of Alsace, the French Rhine province. Like the VB, these parties defend local interests and oppose Islamization.
While France succumbs to North Africans and Germany to Turks, the parties from Old Lorraine, the spine of Europe, are preparing to fight for the preservation of their own identity. Owing to the massive immigration by people from an entirely different culture, many ordinary Europeans no longer feel at home in their own countries. Home is that cosy, often small, place where people feel safe among those whom they know and trust. The fight for the preservation of Europe is a fight for one’s own home, village, town, city, provence. That is why it is a localist issue.
Resistance to Islamization is not a matter of ideology, as one prominent American “anti-Jihadist” seems to think. The successful resistance in Europe has a provincial and an ethnic basis. It is about the right of the Europeans to hand their traditions, their identity, their cultural heritage down to their children so that the latter can continue to enjoy Europe’s ancient freedoms. The spirit of Old Lorraine has survived for 1,200 years. “Populist” parties in Flanders, Switzerland, Lombardia, Cologne and Alsace and other regions along the spine of Europe are popular for the simple reason that they are not prepared to let twelve centuries of capitalist self-reliance, self-governance and limited government fade away simply because foreigners are moving in with a spirit adapted to Arabian desert life.
“It is the wrong way to fight the global jihad,” writes the American anti-Islamist. “To form one group for indigenous Europeans, as has been done in several countries, reduces virtually every issue to the one non-negotiable issue of race and ethnicity, discourages cooperation, and thus encourages Balkanization, works against the idea of representative government, and obscures the common values of Judeo-Christian civilization that are shared by people of many races and ethnicities.”
Ethnicity, however, is not by definition a racial concept; it is a cultural one. Ethnicity is about the spirit, the culture that we share. For the above parties this culture is precisely the culture of limited government, of the common values of Western civilization, the adherence to home. Is all this bad because it is indigenous rather than ideological?
Paul Belien is a Flemish journalist and founder of The Brussels Journal, Europe’s leading conservative website. His wife is a member of the Belgian parliament for Vlaams Belang.
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