In early May, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi predicted Europe’s future: “We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe — without swords, without guns, without conquests.
The 50 million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.” And he is right, if present trends hold. Muslims will dominate Europe if Turkey, which contains 77 million Muslims, is allowed into the European Union, as is now proposed, and its citizens are allowed to live anywhere in the EU.
That is about the only conclusion one can draw from the growing Muslim population of the continent, which shows no signs of slowing. The demographics prove it. About 1.5 million Muslims live in Great Britain. Another 890,000 live in the Netherlands, with 380,000 in Belgium and 280,000 in Sweden. Nearly 200,000 live in Austria. France and Germany have more than 6 million and about 3 million respectively. In all, some 50 million Muslims have entered Europe since the 1950s, when virtually no Muslims lived there. They now compose 7 percent of the population.
As Muslim birth rates surge, native Europeans are aborting and contracepting themselves to death. The collapsing birth rates across Europe aren’t just low; they are below replacement levels, meaning that Europeans will soon go the way of the dodo bird. The bare minimum replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman (or 210 children per 100 women). Germany and Italy, at 80 births per 100 women and negative population growth, are headed for literal extinction. The German government predicts that the land of Goethe and Beethoven will be a Muslim country by 2050. France isn’t far behind with 125 births per 100. The Netherlands’ and Spain’s rate is about 100 births per 100 women. The European Union as a whole is 102.5 births per 100 women.
The concern is what Europe’s face will look like when Muslims are ascendant demographically, and how much that face will remotely resemble what used to be called Christendom.
Cultural Change
Naturally, as the Muslim population has grown, so has its visible presence. Rotterdam’s mayor is an immigrant Muslim. Another Muslim immigrant sits in the British House of Lords. In Southern France, mosques are more numerous than Catholic churches. As European Christianity declines, its churches become mosques as well. Minarets poke into the skyline of Europe’s old cities and towns. In Brussels, Belgium, Muslim squatters simply began holding services in Our Lady of Perpetual Succor, apparently with the permission of the bishop. Open-air meat markets line city streets. Schools serve Halal food (foods permissible under Islamic law), not just to Muslim children but also to Christians without their knowledge, while so many Muslims populate Norway’s prisons that the authorities gave up trying to serve different foods and adopted an all-Halal diet for prisoners to keep the Muslims quiet. Public swimming pools now segregate men and women into different times of the day. In London, the Croydon Council adopted a Muslim-only swim time.
The Muslim transplants often do not accept cultural differences and are not hesitant to show their disdain of non-Muslims. As the late Oriana Fallaci observed, Muslims in Europe often show their contempt for Christianity by publicly urinating on church properties. Others urinate in baptismal fonts or defecate on altars.
Crime
This sacrilege and cultural jihad is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what Europeans face every day, for the illegal immigrants from North Africa and elsewhere are also conducting a crime wave.
A quick Google search of the Internet reveals just what radical Muslim immigrants and their European-born children have done, and are doing, to the continent. A few years ago, a Muslim fanatic murdered Theo van Gogh because he produced the film Submission, which documents Islam’s inherent misogyny. The woman who produced it with him, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is under sentence of death by Muslim radicals. In November 2005, Paris and other cities in France went up in flames when “youths,” as the media described them, went on a rampage after police killed another “youth” they were pursuing for a crime. Of course, the “youths” were Muslims, and cars burned around Paris for three days. In the City of Lights, the police know which areas they had better not go into.
In Scandinavia, European girls have suffered under what the European blogger Fjordman calls a “rape wave.” As he reported in 2005, “according to a new study from the Crime Prevention Council, Brå, it is four times more likely that a known rapist is born abroad, compared to persons born in Sweden. Resident aliens from Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia dominate the group of rape suspects. According to these statistics, almost half of all perpetrators are immigrants. In Norway and Denmark, we know that non-western immigrants, which frequently means Muslims, are grossly overrepresented on rape statistics. In Oslo, Norway, immigrants were involved in two out of three rape charges in 2001.”
And then, of course, Europe is suffering with its share of “honor killings,” the Muslim practice of killing wives, daughters, and sisters who displease their husbands, fathers, and brothers by considering divorce, dating non-Muslims, or adopting western attitudes or accouterments.
On February 7, 2005, the Boston Globe reported in 2006, a man walked up and shot his sister to death because she fled the husband in her arranged marriage and returned to Germany with their son. She also refused to wear the hajib, the Muslims’ scarf, and instead adopted western wear, including earrings, makeup, and jeans. Frighteningly, all three of her brothers planned it. Students at a Muslim school outside Berlin, the Globe reported, “greeted news of her slaying with loud approval. Her brothers were hailed as local heroes.” Der Speigel, in its article on the subject in 2005, put an even finer point on the schoolboys’ approval of these killings. “She only had herself to blame,” one boy said. “She deserved what she got. The whore lived like a German.”
Nor is Britain spared these grisly murders. In London in 2004, Iraqi Kurd Abdullah Yones held his 16-year-old daughter over a bathtub, then slashed her throat. Her crime? She wrote love letters to a classmate. In Birmingham in 1998, 19-year-old Rukhsana Naz, pregnant by her lover, tried to leave an arranged marriage. Her brother strangled her with a jump rope while her mother held her down. Fadime Sahendal also refused an arranged marriage and planned to marry a Swede. In 2002 in Stockholm, her father put a bullet in her head.
These honor killings are so widespread that European police forces convened a meeting in The Hague in 2004 to discuss them. As Der Speigel reported, “The Turkish women’s organization Papatya has documented 40 instances of honor killings in Germany since 1996. Examples include a Darmstadt girl whose two brothers pummeled her to death with a hockey stick in April 2004 after they learned she had slept with her boyfriend. In Augsburg in April [2005], a man stabbed his wife and seven-year-old daughter because the wife was having an affair. In December 2003, a Tuebingen father strangled his 16-year-old daughter and threw her body into a lake because she had a boyfriend.”
In its article from 2006, the Globe reported that police in Germany and England are investigating cold-case murders. In 2005 alone, eight women in Berlin were murdered suspiciously, along with nearly 50 in the six years before the Globe article was published. In 2005, British police reclassified 18 murders as honor killings: “Scotland Yard has reopened probes into 109 suspicious deaths, covering a 10-year span, that seem to have been family conspiracies to kill Moslem women.” London’s metropolitan police began reviewing files as well. In 2004, they began reinvestigating 52 murders in London and 65 across England and Wales.
Nothing has changed since that report was filed in 2005. In May last year in Hamburg, Germany, a Muslim man, also a career criminal, stabbed his sister 20 times because she was not living the sedate life of an obedient Muslim woman as he thought she should. She paid for that “crime” with her life. A year later, also in May, the Voice of America disclosed that “a report compiled by the Council of Europe warns that the killings of women by family members to protect their so-called honor is far more extensive in Europe than previously believed. The report was published by the council’s gender equality committee at a meeting in Istanbul.”
Given that Europeans are considering admitting Turkey to the European Union, they may want to consider what they might be importing. “Here in Turkey the figures for 2007 show that over 200 women were killed here in the name of family or community honor,” a British parliamentarian told VOA. “And it’s just the tip of the iceberg: In the United Kingdom; in Germany; in Belgium; in France; in Norway, there is evidence of honor crimes and honor killings.”
The End of Free Speech
Aside from criminal violence, Muslims in Europe, particularly politically active Muslims, are perpetrating another crime against the Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, and others who welcomed them. Those who would protest the Islamization of Europe have for several years suffered criminal prosecution for violating hate-speech laws.
The most prominent among the last is Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders. Alarmed by what Muslims are doing to the Netherlands, Wilders produced a 14-minute film called Fitna, which documents the violence, misogyny, and anti-Semitism with which the Koran, the Muslims’ holy book, imbues its religionists. As reported on The New American’s breaking-news website, Wilders has been subject to all manner of indignities for telling the truth about Islam. Indeed, Wilders runs afoul of some hate-speech law every time he speaks.
For producing Fitna, Wilders must face a trial. In January, after a lower court ruled that Wilders was merely exercising his free-speech rights making Fitna, an appeals court ruled that Wilders must be prosecuted for making “statements which create hate and grief.”
In early May, organizers of a free-speech conference in Denmark postponed their conference because of Wilders. According to the Copenhagen Post, the Danish Foreign Ministry feared Muslims would not attend a climate conference in the country if Wilders were allowed to speak the truth about the creeping sharia gaining power over Europe.
Before that, in February, as The New American website reported, Britain denied entry to the Dutch politician after Nazir Ahmed, a Muslim member of the House of Lords who was born in Pakistan, decided Wilders must not be allowed to speak. Wilders lives under 24-hour guard thanks to a Muslim death threat, but it was he, the British border agency said, who threatened harmony and public security. After that ignominious episode, the French Association for the Defense of Human Rights (AEDH) announced that it wanted the authorities to prosecute Wilders for “hate speech.” AEDH cited a speech he gave at the Hudson Institute in New York in September, which was part of Wilders’ truth-telling crime spree.
If convicted, Wilders could face a year in prison. In the United States, Wilders invited the ire of the notorious Council on American-Islamic Relations after a speech in Florida. CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas terror-financing trial that shut down the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.
Wilders, however, isn’t the only courageous voice baying in the European wilderness. Brigitte Bardot has been convicted five times for speaking out against Islamic immigration and Muslims. Oriana Fallaci, the famous journalist and resistance fighter from World War II, faced trial in Italy for “hate speech” against Muslims before she died of lung cancer. Fallaci, who called herself a “Christian atheist” because she loved the cultural patrimony Christendom bestowed upon Europe, authored three books that sent Muslims into a rage. Of course, she told the truth.
Rise of the Dhimmis
Unhappily, intolerant Muslims can count on allies in their effort to stop free speech and to dictate behavior according to sharia. Among the collaborators are the Archbishop of Canterbury in England, who said that Europeans and Britons likely must accept some form of Muslim law, known as sharia. In Germany a few years back, a woman judge actually ruled against giving a battered Muslim woman a divorce because the Koran sanctions “castigating wives.”
As Srdja Trifkovic described the case in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, “The husband routinely beat his 26-year-old German-born wife, mother of their two young children, and threatened to kill her when the court ordered him to move out of their apartment in Hamburg. The police were called repeatedly to intervene. The wife wanted a quick divorce — without waiting a year after separation, as mandated by German law — arguing that the abuse and death threats she suffered easily fulfilled the ‘hardship’ criteria required for an accelerated decree absolute. The judge — a woman by the name of Christa Datz-Winter — refused, however, arguing that the Kuran allows the husband to beat his wife and that the couple’s Moroccan origin must be taken into account in the case.”
The judge even referred to Sura 4, Verse 34 of the Koran: “Men have the authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.”
Trifkovic made a trenchant observation:
Such treatment of women might be expected to make Islam abhorrent within the cultural milieu epitomized by the equal-rights obsessed European Union and the neofeminist New York Times, but this has not happened. There is a reason for this. It is the refusal of Islam to accept the wife as her husband’s closest and inseparable loving partner and companion. Islam therefore challenges Christian marriage in principle and in practice. Moslem teaching on marriage and the family, though “conservative” about “patriarchy,” denies the traditional Christian concept of matrimony. Islam is therefore an “objective” ally of postmodernity, a few beatings here and a few rapes there notwithstanding.
The judge’s point seemed to be that sharia must supersede German law, which is what the Archbishop of Canterbury said last year. Echoing that sentiment, Piet Hein Donner, the Dutch minister of justice, agrees that sharia is coming to his country: “It must be possible for Muslim groups to come to power via democratic means,” he said in an interview for a book. “Every citizen may argue why the law should be changed, as long as he sticks to the law. It is a sure certainty for me: If two thirds of all Netherlanders tomorrow would want to introduce sharia, then this possibility must exist. Could you block this legally? It would also be a scandal to say ‘this isn’t allowed!’ The majority counts. That is the essence of democracy.”
Not surprisingly, Donner does not believe Muslims should assimilate: “That is not my approach.”
Indeed it isn’t. Western elites will not condemn Muslim outrages and fight against uncontrolled immigration for two reasons: first, they hate their own culture and themselves. Second, they are terrified of the “racist” or “Islamaphobic” label.
A Muslim woman forced into an arranged marriage at 15 years old could not persuade German publishers to use her writings. Serap Cileli told Der Spiegel magazine in 2005 that “people were afraid they would be called Nazis if they dared to bring up issues of human rights in the Turkish community.” Thus, “everything I wrote from 1994 to 1999 was rejected, even by newspapers. They told me I was writing about a minority issue and they were afraid of appearing racist.”
Oddly, these same Europeans, who are at least nominal or baptized Christians, have little problem trashing their own culture and other Christians.
Across the board then, the left in Europe views its own society, particularly Christianity, as oppressive and patriarchal, worse than Islam, it seems. But the multicultural left will learn the hard way that when Muslims predominate, Muslims will not tolerate them. When Islam ascends, the feminists and homosexuals will feel the sword of Islam drop upon their necks.
Turkey
Donner’s “approach” brings the subject back to Turkey, for all these truths suggest that Turkey’s bid for membership be rejected, regardless of President Barack Obama’s enthusiasm for the idea. And the bid ought to be rejected for a simple reason: Turkey is a hardline Islamic nation. Even its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, disputes the widespread belief that his country or Islam is “moderate.”
“It is unacceptable for us to agree with such a definition,” the prime minister has said. “Turkey has never been a country to represent such a concept. Moreover, Islam cannot be classified as moderate or not.” The Hurriyet Daily News Service, which reported those remarks, also added these from Erdogan: “It should be known that adopting a malicious and offending approach toward the sensitive issues of [the] Islamic world by hiding behind some democratic freedoms like freedom of speech and right of free publication is unacceptable.”
Erdogan, as mayor of Istanbul, opposed Turkey’s entering the EU and thought the nation should quit NATO. He was jailed for Islamist sympathies, which included these words from a poem: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” In 1995, Erdogan said, “You cannot be secular and a Muslim at the same time. The world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are waiting for the Turkish people to rise up. We will rise up.” Erdogan, who now supports EU membership for Turkey, may well implement sharia there.
So the question for Europe, given that Islam is already reshaping the continent legally and politically, is whether it can tolerate another 77 million Muslims.
The answer is obvious.
R. Cort Kirkwood, managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va., has been writing about American politics and culture for more than 20 years. Mr. Kirkwood has written for Chronicles, The New American, National Review, The Remnant, The Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, The Orange County Register, Taki’s Top Drawer online magazine, and LewRockwell.com. For several years, he syndicated a column, “The Hard Line.” Mr. Kirkwood is the author of the nonfiction title, Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans To Know And Admire, published by Cumberland House.
