Islam's in an expansionary phase. In case you hadn't noticed

[deckchick]

Here is an interesting article in McLeans magazine.

Wake up, ostriches

Islam's in an expansionary phase. In case you hadn't noticed.

BARBARA AMIEL

With the exception of a brief moment at the University of Prince Edward Island's student newspaper, no Canadian publication, including this magazine, showed the Danish cartoons of Muhammad that caused worldwide violence by Muslims. (my note; Western Standard published it this week, to bitter complaints. Some retailers have refused to carry the issue. Fucking cowards!http://www.westernstandard.ca/websit....cfm?page=home ) To justify this omission, "responsible" was a favourite word, "respect" a close second. Foreign Minister Peter MacKay managed both, plus a drum roll of "diversity," "understanding," "sensitivity" and "freedom of expression." The CBC's Alison Smith asked a couple of editors if there had been any discussion about printing the cartoons "for clarity" so Canadians could figure out what the fuss was about. Allan Mayer, editor of the Edmonton Journal, looked perplexed. "No, not really," he answered.

Perhaps one needs to have lived under sharia to get it. Canadians haven't, but Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali has. The point, she explained, was that illustrators in Denmark could draw Jesus, Moses or God but were afraid for their lives to draw Muhammad. Journalists should not, and could not, cave in on this, she insisted. I'll hazard that one reason for the cartoons' suppression here is that publication is probably against our religious/racial incitement laws -- Minister MacKay's "freedom of expression" notwithstanding. As it turns out, depictions of Muhammad are not prohibited by the Koran. A statue of him stands in the U.S. Supreme Court building and paintings of him hang in some museums in the Muslim world. The "prohibition" is political, not Koranic.

It's unlikely that Indonesians throwing stones in Jakarta were subscribers to the Jyllands-Posten, any more than mobs in Gaza or Lahore were. Since not a leaf is plucked in Syria without government approval, the mobs that torched the Danish embassy in Damascus must have been drummed up by the Syrian authorities. The Danish Islamist group that ignited the issue was organized by Ahmed Abu-Laban, a 60-year-old Palestinian immigrant residing in Copenhagen with links to a Muslim Brotherhood cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The motives are multiple. Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, is under the gun from dissenters outside his country and for probable involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri -- so any diversion is welcome. Displays of Islamist violence cower European governments who are currently in a tense impasse with Iran and Hamas. Violence gives Islamists around the world a boost.

There's a lesson here should the winterized Canadian ostrich take its head out of the snow. If there is not a radical course correction, Europe will become Islamized within the lifetime of our children. As in the days when the Mughals conquered India and the Ottomans went up to the gates of Vienna, Islam is once more in an expansionary phase. The birth rates of Western Europeans are low, those of Muslims high, and one does not have to be a great prophet to know what happens if a people cannot reproduce themselves. In January's New Criterion, Mark Steyn writes after watching a Washington abortion rally that "women marching for their 'reproductive rights' . . . might like to ponder demographic realities." As he says, the chances of Gloria Steinem's successors being able to chant "Keep your Bush off my bush" from under burkas are slim.

Normally, a people don't willingly acquiesce in the demise of their own culture, especially one as agreeable as Western democracy, but you can see how it happens. Massive Muslim immigration takes place and at the time, no one gives much thought to consequences. Germany wanted cheap labour. France wanted to keep the fiction of la Francophonie alive, and Britain was sentimental about the Commonwealth. Little attention was paid to integration, and Muslims may not have been ready to integrate anyway.

One can't be sure government programs would have helped. I doubt that North American Indians could have ever got European explorers to integrate with them. The Jews that came to Palestine weren't interested in assimilating with Arab communities. Some immigrants don't want to integrate. Britain has Muslim MPs and affirmative action programs -- and yet has had bad race riots. What Britain does not have, in common with most of Europe, is the political will to solve the situation.

In Damascus on Feb. 3, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal railed against the West's double standards: "They allow offences against Allah . . . but when a historian among them talks about the Holocaust, it is the sin of all sins . . . The West, which waved the slogans of liberty after the French Revolution, does not respect its own principles or slogans today. It violates them." Unfortunately, Khaled Meshal speaks the truth. We may declare that freedom assures our right to insult or blaspheme, but question the Holocaust, make a sexist joke, use an ethnic slur and you face unemployment and perhaps jail. We have made laws and allowed practices in our universities and workplaces that in the name of so-called human rights have denied the very values we claim to defend. Surrendering such values to pressure groups is a critical weakness of liberal democracy.

Canada has a relatively small Muslim population. Moderate Muslims are probably the majority, but in a time of expansionism, the fringe determines the course. Young Muslim Internet sites in Canada extol the merits of fundamentalism, cite extremist clerics as role models. Chat rooms discuss the virtues of the Islamic state.

Moderate Muslims are by and large excellent citizens who move easily in the mainstream. But some cities are developing exclusively Muslim areas in which old country values are reinforced. Canada is a culture in its own right and not a tabula rasa on which large groups of newcomers may impose their values. Time perhaps to back off from the bland approach of the "Happy Holidays" crowd with its thin gruel of multiculturalism, and reassert the historical traditions that presumably attracted immigrants to our shores in the first place.

http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/c..._121867_121867

[A*O]

Interesting article and she makes some valid points. Just bear in mind that Jewish Barbara Amiel (aka Lady Black, wife of Lord Conrad Black, disgraced newspaper magnate) is a well known right-wing Zionist so her views aren't exactly impartial.

[SVZ]

Conrad Black's son went to my school

[deckchick]

Originally Posted by A*O

Interesting article and she makes some valid points. Just bear in mind that Jewish Barbara Amiel (aka Lady Black, wife of Lord Conrad Black, disgraced newspaper magnate) is a well known right-wing Zionist so her views aren't exactly impartial.

Oh yeah, I remember her well from when she was an editor for the Toronto Sun. If I remember correctly, she was just divorcing her first hubby George somebody.. That was way way before she married Lord Tubby.

But she does have some very good points.

[Hazeleyed_Honey]

From my point of view, this is all scare tactics in trying to keep up this charade against the politics of Islam in scaring the population by inciting that Islamic fundamentalism will dominate the world. This kind of thinking is not new, it all started in 1993 by the bigot Samuel P.Huntington who insisted in his article Clash of Civilizations that Islam has "bloody borders". Didn't they do the same exact thing when it was the Cold War, in saying that communism was a threat to the Western world and like a cancer?Well, I do not believe in the hype.

Islamic fundamentalism is the politica tooll that is used by alienated individuals in the Middle East to resist "Westernization" and the foreign policies of the Western powers. Yes, Islamic fundamentalism is a problem...But it will remain alive and well as long as the western powers keep imposing on the Middle East their destructive foreign policies.

It takes two to tango.

And someone like Barbara Amiel's views will not be taken that seriously by me when she is known for her prejudice views.

[Grimmlok]

Somehow I doubt, that if the west suddenly vacated the middle east and refused to engage anymore in that theatre, that islamic fundamentalism would just simply vanish.

Right now, the west is a big fat REASON FOR EVERYTHING WRONG.. remove that, and those nations will just turn on each other, or Israel. No shiek is going to give up his palaces or his profits. They'll tear each other apart.

I wouldn't be surprised if the west wasn't the only thing keeping them together.

[Hazeleyed_Honey]

Originally Posted by Grimmlok

Somehow I doubt, that if the west suddenly vacated the middle east and refused to engage anymore in that theatre, that islamic fundamentalism would just simply vanish.

Right now, the west is a big fat REASON FOR EVERYTHING WRONG.. remove that, and those nations will just turn on each other, or Israel. No shiek is going to give up his palaces or his profits. They'll tear each other apart.

I wouldn't be surprised if the west wasn't the only thing keeping them together.

What I notice with the Western media outlets is that they play this Islamic fundamentalist media hype and make it to be stronger and more powerful that it really is. Islamic fundamentalism only makes the Western powers look better when you have these radical hooligans go out and bomb people to pieces in the West. So,on the side, the western powers will keep churning up the oil and making wars and relating it to islamic fundamentalism to justify wars even though they have NOTHING to do with them..(ex. the U.S. government's justification of the invasion of Iraq by relating to Al-Qaeda).

The day that Islamic fundamentalism dies is the day this "War on Terror" will die....This war will keep going until the corporate greedy cronies and the Western powerful elites and politicians like Bush and Rumsfeld will get their hands on what they want.

The Cold War DID benefit the Americans in the end. After the fall of the Soviet union and when communism starting disappearing from most of the eastern countries, the U.S. became the ultimate hegemony and the main superpower leaving the Soviet Union and its archrival in the dust.

In the end, these wars benefit the mighty,the greedy and the powerful and we are just the victims being affected by it.