A prominent Islamic cleric has said that most of his fellow clerics forbid their followers from celebrating New Year’s. But this didn’t stop some Muslims from marking and marring the occasion with acts of mayhem.
With France now in an official state of emergency after recent terrorist attacks, approximately “90,000 security forces were deployed on French streets during the New Year celebrations where half a million revellers congregated,” reports the Express. Nonetheless, almost 1,000 cars were destroyed or damaged by arsonists on Sunday. There also were “many instances of security forces being hit with objects, or faced with attacks or insults,” said French Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux. Four hundred fifty-four people were arrested amidst the violence.
The government is accused of trying to hide the criminality’s magnitude, as it initially stated that only 650 cars had been torched, a figure indicating just “the number of vehicles ‘set on fire’ and not those engulfed in the ensuing flames,” writes the Telegraph.
The Express reports that the “custom” of burning vehicles on New Year’s Eve began in Muslim areas in Strasbourg, Germany, and eastern France in the 1990s. Yet despite the “custom’s” continuation and the other violence this past Sunday, Minister Le Roux said the celebratory day went off “particularly well.”
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The New American cannot be certain whether “well” has the same meaning in French culture as it does in ours.
In Austria, it was shades of last New Year’s Cologne debacle, where mobs of Muslim men sexually attacked more than 500 German women on an evening the police, in a coverup, initially described as peaceful. The Austrian sex crimes were lesser in magnitude — 19 were reported on New Year’s — no surprise since the nation has admitted far fewer Mideast migrants than has Germany. Yet they were no less shocking, with the women stating that the “the men encircled them and grabbed at their breasts and groin,” reports the Express.
With euphemizing becoming a Western art, the perpetrators were alternatively described as “dark-haired men with beards,” “foreigners,” and as having a “southern appearance,” the last of which, be assured, does not mean they looked like Colonel Sanders.
The Express also reports that a police spokesman “said it is likely the men ‘had a system’, much like the sickening Cologne sex attacks” of a year ago. As to this, Professor Jörg Baberowski of Berlin’s Humboldt University recently stated that the high-profile Cologne New Year’s celebration was targeted because the Muslim perpetrators wanted to send the West a message: “You cannot defend your women.”
Fast-forwarding to Germany this year, Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed in her New Year’s address that terrorists won’t change the way her people live their lives; meanwhile, a Bloomberg writer lauds how Germans have changed their lives to deal with the threat of Muslim terrorism. For example, Cologne was relatively peaceful — because authorities flooded the area with 1,700 police officers and herded many North African men into vans. Elsewhere in the country, however, there were sexual assaults on women and fireworks attacks on police.
The picture was even worse in Sweden. As the Express informs, “Police struggled to cope with rowdy crowds wreaking havoc across the Scandinavian nation as more than 50 incidents of people sending rockets at police, public transport and rescue services were reported in west Sweden alone.”
It appears matters were worst in Malmo, Sweden’s third-largest city, where the Express claims a “migrant gang” turned the area into a “war zone.” Quoting photographer and eyewitness Freddy Mardell, the Express writes that he
told Friatider: “An Arab jumped on the roof of a car and yelled ‘Jihad! Jihad!’ repeatedly.
“Swedish teenagers gathered in a large group to avoid being robbed.”
Continuing, the photographer claimed police, who were out in force as NYE celebrations in the area are known to get out of hand, were too afraid to leave their cars.
“Malmo is a lost city,” Mr Mardell added as he said even journalists decided to leave out of fear for their own safety.
One journalist reportedly said: “Staying here isn’t worth it. I’m not risking my life for this.”
One of Sweden’s more heavily Muslim cities, Malmo has experienced ongoing violence. In 2015, for example, there was a report that the locality had been the scene of 30 grenade attacks in just six months.
As with Germany, Sweden’s liberal migration laws have invited waves of Muslim migrants in recent decades. In fact, the demographic change has been so profound that multiculturalist Social Democrat politician Mona Sahlin actually said in 2001, “The Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back.”
There’s also a question as to whether peaceful Western holy days (and holidays) are ever coming back, given the teachings in most mosques. As dissident French imam (Muslim cleric) Hocine Drouiche writes at AsiaNews:
Almost all of the imams in France (and in neighbouring Belgium) forbid French Muslims from celebrating Christmas and New Year and wishing Happy Holidays to both Muslims and non-Muslims.
They keep on saying that Islam is a religion of peace, a mantra that is repeated in endless ways. Yet, today I saw with my own eyes the results of these incomprehensible and illogical formulations, meeting several devout Muslim who view best wishes for the New Year as an insult.
They are embarrassed, they look at you in a strange way, they answer: But this is not our religion! As if the new year belonged to a specific religion.
Stating that such Muslim thought dominates in other Western nations as well, Drouiche warns, “Qurʾānic schools in the West are places that extol political Islam based on jihad and hatred of the ‘enemies.’”
This is in line with Islamic State doctrine, mind you. The group just recently issued a statement insisting that “‘to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the kuffar is to embrace their idolatry and paganism and to shun the rulings of our Lord. Allah says: ‘O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians as Auliya’ (friends, protectors, helpers), they are but Auliya’ of each other,’” reports OneIndia.
Thus has anti-Islamic jihad crusader Robert Spencer warned that our recent heightened security at Christmastime — Islamic state had released a list of 15,000 U.S. churches its followers should attack during the period — made this Christmas “the Ghost of Christmases to Come.” “Nation-building” hasn’t succeeded in bringing the West to the Middle East. But bringing the Middle East to the West is proving to have much more of a transformative effect.