The battle goes to the passionate, is so often the case. Culture wars are no exception, and a handful of stories from the past week — involving the Islamization of the West — illustrate this point well.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history,” George Orwell once noted. This brings us to the United Kingdom, where a Monday Express headline reads, “Schools teach Islamic history… but ignore 1066 and all that.” The issue is the new national curriculum, through which “teachers are being told pupils need not study British kings and queens, but must learn about early Islamic civilisation, Mayan culture or of Benin in west Africa,” the paper explains. It reports that the curriculum makes the “teaching of landmark events and personalities in British history ‘non-statutory.’” The Magna Carta, the reign of Elizabeth I, the Battle of Waterloo, the Napoleonic wars, Trafalgar, heroes such as Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, and even the two world wars aren’t required to be taught by the government schools.
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So while a 2009 poll shows that British teens’ knowledge of WWII is already woefully lacking, this problem will now only worsen. Moreover, given that Islam is taught in a politically correct manner, children will be unlikely to learn that the Middle East and North Africa were mostly Christian until conquered by Muslim hordes or that the Crusades were a response to just such Islamic expansionism.
This has its effect. After all, if you don’t consider your culture and history something special, why preserve it? In fact, upon being instilled with the usual politically correct notion that Western civilization is a misbegotten force and non-Western cultures are enlightened, a youth may gravitate toward the latter. This brings us to our next story.
There’s now something called World Hijab Day, every February 1, on which girls of all faiths are urged to don the Muslim veil. The idea is to increase “understanding” and “tolerance”; of course, Muslims aren’t encouraged to reciprocate and wear a cross or yarmulke. But it all sounds so alluring. As Jihad Watch reports, “The World Hijab Day website presents hijab-wearing as a sign of empowerment; women and girls who wear hijabs are called ‘queens, princesses, and sultanas.’” And this certainly had an impact on American Megan Baase. Wrote she, “I would’ve never learned about Islam if it weren’t for world hijab day…. After reading what Islam is about and why women wear hijab, I decided to convert. …My four year old son asked if he could wear hijab at home today to be just like mommy. I couldn’t say no!” (the Taliban and ISIS may kill a person for that, by the way). That women must wear veils, do note, is a Sharia dictate.
In the same vein, some German politicians are complaining that pork — the nation’s most popular meat — is disappearing from some canteens, schools, and cafes in order to avoid offending Muslims. Of course, what’s offensive (as opposed to what’s wrong) is wholly subjective; most everything offends someone and most everyone is offended by something. So it can’t be a reliable guide for law and social codes, which should be based on the objective.
Moreover, will Muslims become less easily offended as their population share grows? Or will they request, and receive, ever more concessions? Note that abstention from pork is another element of Sharia.
Also in Germany, the Arriba water park in Norderstedt in the Schleswig-Holstein region has decided to segregate men and women on its water slides during certain times of day after sexual attacks by Muslim migrants. Gratuitous sex segregation is also mandated by Sharia.
Meanwhile, a man in neighboring Austria required hospitalization after he was attacked by a “Sharia patrol.” His sin? He told the Muslims to stop threatening his wife and daughter for not being properly dressed.
Moving north to Sweden, formerly one of the most crime-free nations on Earth, the police chief of Östersund has warned that women shouldn’t venture out at night alone due to the threat of (Muslim migrant) crime. Of course, that women shouldn’t travel without a male escort is Sharia teaching again.
The shocking CBN News report “Soviet Sweden? Model Nation Sliding to Third World” tells us that in today’s Sweden, “assimilation” is a dirty word. Yet Britain reflects this mentality as well. The Daily Mail reported just over a week ago that the U.K. has approximately 85 “Sharia courts,” run by clerics who support amputation for theft, marital rape, wife-beating, and child marriage. As to the last, Ishaq Akintola, a professor of Islamic Eschatology and director of the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC), said in a Sunday interview that “Islam has no age barrier in marriage and Muslims have no apology for those who refuse to accept this.”
Yet the much trumpeted Western tolerance enabling the above is conspicuously absent when the matter is patriotic Westerners. Aside from all the hapless citizens persecuted for anti-Muslim “hate speech” — such as a U.K. political leader being arrested for publicly quoting Winston Churchill — is the recent story about British schoolboy Joe Taylor. After going online to research immigration following a classroom discussion on the subject, he was hauled from school and interrogated by police. His “crime”? He logged on to the page for the United Kingdom Independence Party, which favors leaving the EU and reducing immigration. He had raised red flags, as his teachers put it, by visiting “politically incorrect websites.”
Of course, critics view publication of the above as fear-mongering; they’ll say there’s nothing to see here, move along. Yet cultural change isn’t revolutionary, but evolutionary. And is a general pattern not evident? It reflects what Dr. Mudar Zahran — a Muslim refugee living in Europe who warns against accepting Muslim migrants — calls “the soft Islamic conquest of the West.”
And this pattern will likely continue because, again, battles go to the passionate. As the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens put it last year, “Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent,” because “it stands for shallow things, shallowly. Europeans believe in human rights, tolerance, openness, peace, progress, the environment, pleasure.” They’re also largely bereft of faith and awash in relativism — but face people most absolutist. To wit: Islamic Professor Akintola also stated, quite unabashedly, “Islam is a complete way of life. As a religion, non-Muslims will have to take Muslims as they are, not as they want them to be.” Does this sound like a recipe for integration?
Perhaps it does — in a way. As Swedish internationalist and multiculturalist Mona Sahlin said in 2001 while commenting on the planned Islamization of her land, “The Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back.”
Yet this attitude is no surprise. Writing at Gates of Vienna, author Matthew Bracken astutely pointed out that global jihadists and international socialists (One Worlders, internationalists; call them what you will) share a common goal: “To both supranational groups,” he writes, “borders and nations are anachronistic constructs to be ignored, trampled, and discarded over time.” Jihadists want the world for the caliphate, the internationalists want it for a secular, planetary Big Brother — but either way the last remnants of Christendom are extinguished.
Of course, none of this would be a factor if faith hadn’t already been largely extinguished, and replaced by materialism, in the hearts and minds of Western millions.
