Author: Val MacQueen
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: February 27, 2004
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12372
After 40 years or more of blowing
feckless multi culti soap bubbles, the
governments of some European countries
have suddenly become alive to the dangers of being too tolerant towards
Islamism, an ideology that is intolerant and crusading.
Two years after the brave and flamboyant
homosexual Pym Fortuyn sounded the alarm in Holland regarding the threat
of fundamentalist Islam to his relaxed and liberal homeland, the Dutch
establishment, that had previously condemned him as a bigot, has suddenly
done an about face and adopted his agenda.
It was Fortuyn who first noted in
public what the Dutch had been noting in private for several years: that
Holland's Islamic population not only refused to assimilate into the host
country but, indeed displayed a bitter intolerance for Dutch laissez-faire.
He was so alarmed at the rising radical threat to Holland's tradition of
tolerance that he started a new political party, The List. The List
demanded an end to Islamic immigration and demanded that the immigrant
children be taught in Dutch. Within three months of its formation, The
List had captured something like 20 per cent of Dutch constituencies.
His opponents, Holland's traditional
politicians, were robbed of the traditional weapon of the thought police,
the charge of racism. Fortuyn's present and former amours came in a wide
range of colors and he had chosen as his deputy an articulate black immigrant.
Accusations of racism would have been met by the electorate with dismissive
laughter. Had he lived, Fortuyn would have been prime minister of
Holland today, but he was assassinated as he left a radio station after
an interview two years ago. For an outpouring of a public sense of loss,
his funeral was second only to Princess Diana's, four years previously.
On the surface, Dutch politics returned
to normal, but the seed had been planted, and all those hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, who had intended to vote for him did not forget his agenda.
Now, after years of pandering to
the multi culti ethic, the Dutch government has suddenly admitted that
the immigrant Muslims top the "no" list: they have the highest incidence
of unemployment, domestic violence, disability payments, truancy and crime.
And, after three generations in Holland, at least 30 per cent of them return
to their "home country" to marry and bring back a spouse.
Dutch patience with fundamentalists
on endless state benefits and allowances has snapped. Earlier this
month, they hauled up the drawbridge and declared a four year moratorium
on immigration, including so-called asylum seeking, to allow for assimilation.
If the immigrant population still refuses to assimilate, I suspect the
moratorium will be extended indefinitely. At the same time, they are repatriating
over 26,000 "asylum seekers" whose claims for asylum were rejected years
ago but who failed to leave the country. These are now demanding their
"human rights" to continue to be supported on the generous Dutch welfare
system, in Holland.
Notoriously, south of Holland, the
French government has just let it be known that their patience with the
zealotry, arrogance and imperialistic streak demonstrated by its own large
unassimilated Muslim population has just run out.
In a jaw dropping statement, Chirac
said that the wearing of the hijab by schoolgirls was "an aggressive act
against the host nation". And he is correct. It is not the wardrobe
choice of little girls, but of their fathers and brothers who impose it
on them because they don't want men and boys "looking at" their females.
France has come to the end of its tether with the tournantes - gang rapes
as punishment for girls - both Muslim and indigenous - who dare to venture
out of their homes in the projects without wearing a Muslim hijab.
In many of the projects and nearby schools, Muslims constitute 50% or more
of the population.
At the end of 2002, the movie The
Squaw on this subject shocked not just French theater goers, but Jacques
Chirac and French education minister Jack Lang. That was the genesis of
the long and winding road to the headscarf ban. The film, although
intended to highlight a grave and unacknowledged social problem, at the
same time struck a killer blow to the governing elite's multicultural dreams
of European countries and immigrants from their former colonies living
in happy accord.
Both France and Holland had now
recognized that the immigrants were not the eager middle classes who come
to the United States for their educations, or to settle. These are groups
with an imperialistic, intolerant, colonizing mentality of their own.
While the liberal press and political
multicultural proselytizers were still expressing shock at the Dutch and
the French, who had decided at last to abandon constant appeasement and
take control of Islamic zealotry and aggression in their countries, the
dominant party in the German state of Hesse proposed a ban on headscarves
on all civil servants. This goes further than other German states, which
have proposed a ban on school teachers swathed in the hijab. Despite criticisms
from the usual human rights suspects, the Germans say that the veil is
a political, rather than a religious, statement and is a symbol of repression.
Americans, in a nation of successful
immigrants, find it hard to understand indigenous peoples who have occupied
their land since time immemorial, and whose ancestors, and their ancestors
before them, established their countries' boundaries through millennia
of war, whose customs became encoded in law, and whose arts have developed
uniquely to that culture. There has always been movement of people between
European countries, but before, there was a common agreement on religion
and, broadly, social behaviour. And never on this scale. During my lifetime,
12m people from a more primitive, intolerant culture have moved into Western
Europe. It is to the Europeans' credit that they tried peacefully to accommodate
such a large indigestible clump of alien matter for over 40 years. What
is not so clear is, why mass immigration was forced on democratic peoples
by the parties in power. And paid for out of their taxes.
Whether it was a Native American
marrying into another tribe, the vast movements of peoples from Europe
to America over the last two hundred years or so, or the 40,000 Jewish
displaced persons Britain took in after WWII, or the 45,000 East African
Indians ejected from Uganda by Idi Amin and also taken by Britain, immigrants
throughout human history have set their minds to integrating and embedding
themselves in their new lives.
Not so with Islamic immigrants to
European countries (unlike most Muslim immigrants to the US, it must be
said) who arrived with a grudge and have held themselves apart for generations
preaching disapproval, divisiveness and violence against their host societies
- encouraged to do so by liberal pandering special interest groups. Ever-greater
concessions from the host societies are demanded, all the while preaching
their destruction. They are using the tolerance of the West to try to impose
their own theocracy. In Britain now, in some municipalities, Muslims have
demanded that municipal swimming pools have special times for women-only
swimming and men-only swimming. Such an alien notion will, in these politically
correct times, be imposed on the historically tolerant British, at one
more cost to their own national identity.
Yet, as British conservative columnist
Melanie Phillips wrote recently, "in Britain, the corrosive idea which
seethes beneath the whole immigration controversy is the belief in fashionable
circles that such a national identity is somehow illegitimate and that
to defend it is 'xenophobic'."
Heaven forefend anyone in Europe
would dare, for fear of being so-labeled, tell the fundamentalists in their
midst to put a sock in it.
Until now.
Chirac, who has never been known
to say an unpleasant word about a North African in his life, referring
to all these yards of hijabs in schools with a high percentage of Muslim
students, referred to wearing the veil "an act of aggression". And
indeed, it is worn as a badge of superiority. A senior member of his party
said, "You give [these people] a bit of a finger and they eat your arm
all the way up to the elbow." A Dutch minister has said the immigrants
top the "no" list.
Close on the heels of the Germans,
the other day, mild, laid-back Denmark announced it's had enough of fundamentalists
preaching the destruction of the West and has put a lid on them. And the
Danes aren't even splitting hairs. It's right up front. Although
the target of the legislation is "restrictions on foreign missionaries",
Peter Skaarup, spokesman for the nationalist Danish People's Party, which
originally called for legislation, said, "It is aimed at imams." Henceforth,
they'll have to prove they've had an education and that they're financially
independent.
Once kicked into action, the Danes
move fast. The bill is expected to be made law within two weeks.
To have any hope of being allowed
into Denmark to settle, imams henceforth will have to prove that they have
a good knowledge of Danish affairs and practices, a rudimentary knowledge
of Danish and an understanding of the country's democratic traditions.
In other words, not a hope. They are also going to have to prove that neither
they nor their families will be a burden to the Danish taxpayer.
(Unlike, say, Abu Hamza, the blind, steel-hook handed fundamentalist imam
in Britain's Finsbury Park mosque who receives around $500 a week in state
handouts.)
According to The Daily Telegraph,
the bill also calls for imams already in Denmark and who are found to have
incited to racism or other forms of illegal acts, to lose their permits.
First to go will be an imam who publicly stated in Jutland that female
genital mutilation was "good for women", and another who preached anti-Semitism.
Danish prime minister Anders Fogh
Rasmussen also said the legislation would stop the practice of Muslim parents
sending teenage sons back to countries of origin for longer periods to
become familiar with the traditions of their parents' homelands.
So, after 40 years of bending the
knee to the aggressive multiculturalists, four European countries are finally
fighting back to defend their Christian heritage and enlightened civilization.
Will the British follow in the continentals'
footsteps? Can we even look forward to reading of the deportation of claw-hooked
radical hate-preaching bigamist, the Shriek of Araby? Pigs might fly.
