John R. Houk
© January 2, 2010
Many Leftists especially European Leftists, claim Muslims are experiencing the same kind of prejudice today that the Jews received in the 1930’s. Leftists tend to point to this by the growing amount of Westerners that are arising to express their dislike of Islamic tenets. Islamic tenets are anti-Western especially toward American Constitutional Law.
Europeans infused with concepts of multicultural diversity have been continually caving in to Muslim demands to European nations to accommodate Islamic cultural mores and values. In Europe Free Speech takes a back seat in case the speech is considered offensive to a particular group whether it be race, sexual preference or religion (or perhaps the secular minded anti-religionists). Offensive speech in most European nations has been criminalized as hate-speech. Those in breach of hate-speech laws often themselves are recipients of fines or incarceration.
Now days, there is a conspicuous movement among Europeans that are beginning to voice their displeasure with Islamic encroachment into Western culture regardless of the penalty.
Geert Wilders a member of the Dutch Parliament produced the movie short entitled, “Fitna.” Fitna was an exposé on the brutal aspects of Islam especially as those aspects have been displayed in modern times. Fitna was not a flattering picture of Islam. Muslims became irate to the point that Wilders received death threats from Muslims who undoubtedly felt justified by Muslim Clerics producing a kill-Wilders fatwas (e.g. http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2840, http://www.nisnews.nl/public/280208_5.htm and http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2010/09/australian-fatwa-behead-wilders.html). Wilders’ Dutch journey has gone from European condemnation of Left leaning European governments which included a hate-crime prosecution in his home nation of Netherlands through to being perhaps the leader of the strongest political party in the Netherlands system of Parliamentarian government.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a gal born a Muslim in Somalia. She immigrated to the Netherlands and became a Dutch citizen and a member of the Dutch Parliament. As a Dutch Parliamentarian she became a woman’s rights gal castigating Muslim treatment of women. Her friend and collaborator of a film about abuse of Muslim women Theo van Gogh was murdered because of the movie. The murderer acting under the release of an Islamic fatwa said Hirsi Ali would be next. She stuck out her Dutch Parliamentarian job for a short time but eventually fled to America to feel safer from fatwa threats.
One could find many such examples across Europe that have negative results for one standing up for Western Culture rather than submitting to idiotic European multicultural diversity resulting in Islamic Supremacism and dhimmitude.
Islamic Supremacism is the principle propaganda agent of Muslims and Muslim apologists that are attempting to claim Muslims are being persecuted on the same level as the Jews were in the 1930’s. The comparison though is absurd!
Anti-Semitism against Jews in the early 20th century resulted in Conspiracy Theories that blamed Jews for the global ills of the time. The primary global of the 1930’s was a global economic depression called The Great Depression in America. Jews caused the depression to seize world governments to rule the world – don’t you know? This blaming of everything on Jews resulted in pogroms in which Gentile Christians (i.e. shameful Christians) would enter Jewish minority community centers pillaging and vandalizing homes and businesses with the occasional murder following.
What was the typical Jewish reaction to this injustice? Perhaps the Jews rose up in their communities rioting against whatever National government with acts of vandalism and murder against non-Jews? Perhaps the Jews formed Synagogues of hate in which the Rabbis would incite hatred toward non-Jews that might result in a non-Jewish male being beat-up or a female being raped within the bounds of a Jewish enclave? I mean how would you act if you were a part of a minority that formed a significant block of the population in an urban area or a rural area for that matter? What did Jews actually do?
This is what Jews did. Jews did their best to stay peacefully stay out of the way of the Gentile majority. Many Jews became extremely insular but not to form militant enclaves, rather the insular minded Jew would look inside the Jewish community for strength to survive in the face of Anti-Semitic persecution.
What do Muslim minorities do in Europe? Muslims riot: Muslims incite hatred in their Mosques, Muslims demand the host culture accommodate the foreign Islamic culture, Muslims threaten the life of those apostatizing Islam or non-Muslims criticizing Islam, Muslims often do acts of violence toward non-Muslims that may be within the influence of a Muslim enclave with the male receiving a beating and/or death as well as European women becoming the victims of rape.
The answer to the difference between Jews and Muslims is that Jews were insular and evasive of confrontation toward non-Jewish nations and Muslims are militant in any reaction that is thought of as critical to Islam, Mohammed or Allah.
I like the elaboration provided by Barry Rubin on the differences of treatment pertaining to Jews and Muslims.
JRH 1/2/11
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What's Happening in Europe: Holland As A Case Study on Islam and Israel
By Barry Rubin
January 1, 2011 9:23 PM
One should not generalize in describing European states. Still, the case of the Netherlands shows interesting points regarding attitudes toward both Israel and Islam.
Let's start with the Israel issue. I've been closely following the new Dutch government, formed after an election in which 55 percent of the voters supported explicitly pro-Israel parties.
When the new foreign minister Uri Rosenthal was asked about the country's policy toward Israel by the extremist (and virulently hostile) Green Left party, he replied that he thinks it's necessary to develop further the relationship with Israel because the right to exist of Israel, the only democracy in the region, is still put in doubt by some nations and groups. "The Netherlands want to push back against attempts of delegitimizing Israel. Israel's right to exist must be very clear and Israel should should (sic) feel supported in this by the international community."
If the Netherlands wants to support the peace process, even in pushing for Israeli compromises, this can only be done, he explains, if the country engages in more intensive cooperation with Israel.
We should remember that in most countries there is a strong--and party partisan--debate on these issues. Government policy often depends on who wins the elections. The clearest differences exist in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands; to a real if somewhat lesser extent in France and the United Kingdom, but this point is true everywhere in Europe.
Another development in Europe, however, is rising antisemitism. Here's an article providing examples of both sympathetic and unsympathetic reactions on the issue by various Dutch figures.
Having reliable statistics at last regarding the number of Muslims in Europe also makes it timely to discuss that issue. The European left often argues that Muslims face imminent persecution and even massive repression. One of the more sophisticated versions of this theme comes from the Dutch Labor Party journalist and intellectual Geert Mak in one of the country's leading newspapers:
"No, in the comparison between Jews and Muslims it's not about deportation and mass-murder. It's about the beginning, about the 1930s, when Jews felt themselves excluded and when it was spoken about them as it is now about Muslims."
Yet how can one deal with this issue without noting the fact that Islamists who are Muslim have committed more than 10,000 terrorist attacks in the last two decades? Or the fact that in many mosques in the West, preachers systematically incite hatred for Jews and Christians? Or that a whole series of special privileges are demanded by local Muslim leaders that break the Western democratic tradition of equal treatment under law? Or that the overwhelmingly main cause of growing antisemitism in Europe comes from the Muslim sector of the population?
Needless to say, Jews in the 1930s weren't doing any of these things. There was not a single incident of violence by Jews against the Christian majority. While Jews were sometimes accused of religiously preaching hatred against Christians, those claims were always false. And far from asking for special privileges, most Jews were trying desperately to assimilate culturally while the rest only wanted to be left alone. If one ignores these differences it is impossible to understand the situation today.
Here's one little detail reported by the French press agency, AFP that provides an ironic example of the problem. A Lebanon-born Swedish citizen named Munir Awad was arrested in Somalia in 2007 and again in 2009 in Pakistan on suspicion of involvement in terrorism. The Swedish foreign ministry helped get him freed on both occasions. Awad expressed his gratitude. Now Awad has been again arrested--in Sweden--after participating in a plot to "kill as many people as possible" in an attack on a Danish newspaper that published cartoons he found objectionable.
There is a real problem here and--as the Awad case indicates--neither generosity nor appeasement will make it go away.
But let's go back to what Mak said: "It's about the beginning, about the 1930s, when Jews felt themselves excluded and when it was spoken about them as it is now about Muslims."
In the 1930s though, when "Jews felt themselves excluded" the next step was that Jews were attacked by Nazis, fascists, and extreme nationalists. Isn't there, however, something hidden behind Mak's words? There's the implication that if Muslims feel "excluded" they will attack Christians and Jews. In other words, the situation is exactly the opposite of the Jews in the 1930s case.
From Indonesia through Thailand and India and through the Middle East and Europe and into the Americas, by the end of 2010 there had not been a single large-scale attack, much less any massacre, of people targeted as Muslims by Jews, Christians (with the exceptions of Lebanon, Kosovo, and Bosnia during civil wars in those countries), Hindus, or Buddhists.
Of course, Islamists and many Muslims portrays such things as the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or Israeli policies as wars against Muslims. But we know that this is not true. There is no deliberate desire to kill people as a goal; no targeting of Islam itself. Instead of incitement, there is a kneejerk stress in the West and Israel to avoid offense to Muslims at almost any cost.
In contrast, there have been plenty of such incidents the other way around. Indeed, in the last week there were major terrorist attacks against Christian churches in Baghdad and Cairo, with dozens of people murdered.
What is the response? Christian priests and ministers are not giving sermons telling on their flock to hate and kill or even to be rude to Muslims. There are no calls for revenge, no reprisal attacks on Muslims, and no real comprehension in many political, media, and academic circles of what is happening in the world.
Oh, and by the way, the Jews in Europe are also again feeling "excluded" to the point that some are leaving and more are thinking seriously about getting out.
Might these facts have something to do with reality? After all, "Islamophobia" means fear of Islam. This is quite different from hatred of Islam or wanting to kill Muslims. A Greek friend informs me that the word for hate in Greek is "misos." Thus, "Islamophobia" is not the same as "Islamomisos."
In fact, what we are seeing is a rational fear in the West based on events (Islamofovos, to use the Greek word) alongside the hatred of the West (Occidentomisos) in much of the Muslim-majority world.
The real concern in Europe, then, is that making Muslims feel "excluded" (that is, unhappy) is more likely the prelude to them killing you than it is to you killing them.
In literal terms, then, it is the appeasers and Multiculturalists who are "Islamophobic." They fear Islam so much that they are eager to make concessions to avoid being attacked verbally or with violence.
What we are seeing today in the West is a definitional struggle: Is the principal danger to European society "Islamophobia" or radical Islamism? If it is "Islamophobia" then it is possible to rationalize a policy ignoring the roots of terrorist attacks and radical forces in the Muslim community while tending to appease demands for more power, funding, and privileges. Otherwise, it is claimed, Muslims will be tortured, murdered, expelled, and mistreated.
Even a refusal to limit immigration, promote assimilation, deny special privileges, or ban polygamy can be justified as ways to avoid making Muslims feel "excluded."
Indeed, this is largely what's happening in Europe: almost is anything is justified to ensure that Muslims are happy.
Yet if the main threat is revolutionary Islamism and the collapse of national identity, stability, and democracy, then Europe is in a lot of trouble.
There is also a different way to look at the situation: By following these policies European governments are likely to increase not only the threat to their own stability, culture, and society from Islamism but also to increase the likelihood of antagonism toward Muslims. After all, increasing power, demands, extremism, and violence from Islamists is going to echo on the other side far more than would a more moderate strategy in dealing with these immigrants and citizens.
Of course, the radicals, militants, and activists cannot be made happy by being given money, privileges, and flattery since their goal is to control their communities and seize more and more power. By making these people look successful by giving them concessions, Western societies ensure that the Muslims (or, more correctly, the leaders who give the mosque sermons, teach in the schools, and represent the community to the government) will continue to shout out new grievances.
In other words, the Multicultural, Political Correct, criticism-of-Islam-equals-hate-crime approach is the worst possible policy, undermining the host country, radicalizing the Muslim community, and simultaneously stirring up mutual hatreds. There is nothing more likely to create something that might be called "Islamophobia" in the future than kowtowing to fear of this largely non-existent phenomenon in the present.
Let's start with the Israel issue. I've been closely following the new Dutch government, formed after an election in which 55 percent of the voters supported explicitly pro-Israel parties.
When the new foreign minister Uri Rosenthal was asked about the country's policy toward Israel by the extremist (and virulently hostile) Green Left party, he replied that he thinks it's necessary to develop further the relationship with Israel because the right to exist of Israel, the only democracy in the region, is still put in doubt by some nations and groups. "The Netherlands want to push back against attempts of delegitimizing Israel. Israel's right to exist must be very clear and Israel should should (sic) feel supported in this by the international community."
If the Netherlands wants to support the peace process, even in pushing for Israeli compromises, this can only be done, he explains, if the country engages in more intensive cooperation with Israel.
We should remember that in most countries there is a strong--and party partisan--debate on these issues. Government policy often depends on who wins the elections. The clearest differences exist in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands; to a real if somewhat lesser extent in France and the United Kingdom, but this point is true everywhere in Europe.
Another development in Europe, however, is rising antisemitism. Here's an article providing examples of both sympathetic and unsympathetic reactions on the issue by various Dutch figures.
Having reliable statistics at last regarding the number of Muslims in Europe also makes it timely to discuss that issue. The European left often argues that Muslims face imminent persecution and even massive repression. One of the more sophisticated versions of this theme comes from the Dutch Labor Party journalist and intellectual Geert Mak in one of the country's leading newspapers:
"No, in the comparison between Jews and Muslims it's not about deportation and mass-murder. It's about the beginning, about the 1930s, when Jews felt themselves excluded and when it was spoken about them as it is now about Muslims."
Yet how can one deal with this issue without noting the fact that Islamists who are Muslim have committed more than 10,000 terrorist attacks in the last two decades? Or the fact that in many mosques in the West, preachers systematically incite hatred for Jews and Christians? Or that a whole series of special privileges are demanded by local Muslim leaders that break the Western democratic tradition of equal treatment under law? Or that the overwhelmingly main cause of growing antisemitism in Europe comes from the Muslim sector of the population?
Needless to say, Jews in the 1930s weren't doing any of these things. There was not a single incident of violence by Jews against the Christian majority. While Jews were sometimes accused of religiously preaching hatred against Christians, those claims were always false. And far from asking for special privileges, most Jews were trying desperately to assimilate culturally while the rest only wanted to be left alone. If one ignores these differences it is impossible to understand the situation today.
Here's one little detail reported by the French press agency, AFP that provides an ironic example of the problem. A Lebanon-born Swedish citizen named Munir Awad was arrested in Somalia in 2007 and again in 2009 in Pakistan on suspicion of involvement in terrorism. The Swedish foreign ministry helped get him freed on both occasions. Awad expressed his gratitude. Now Awad has been again arrested--in Sweden--after participating in a plot to "kill as many people as possible" in an attack on a Danish newspaper that published cartoons he found objectionable.
There is a real problem here and--as the Awad case indicates--neither generosity nor appeasement will make it go away.
But let's go back to what Mak said: "It's about the beginning, about the 1930s, when Jews felt themselves excluded and when it was spoken about them as it is now about Muslims."
In the 1930s though, when "Jews felt themselves excluded" the next step was that Jews were attacked by Nazis, fascists, and extreme nationalists. Isn't there, however, something hidden behind Mak's words? There's the implication that if Muslims feel "excluded" they will attack Christians and Jews. In other words, the situation is exactly the opposite of the Jews in the 1930s case.
From Indonesia through Thailand and India and through the Middle East and Europe and into the Americas, by the end of 2010 there had not been a single large-scale attack, much less any massacre, of people targeted as Muslims by Jews, Christians (with the exceptions of Lebanon, Kosovo, and Bosnia during civil wars in those countries), Hindus, or Buddhists.
Of course, Islamists and many Muslims portrays such things as the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or Israeli policies as wars against Muslims. But we know that this is not true. There is no deliberate desire to kill people as a goal; no targeting of Islam itself. Instead of incitement, there is a kneejerk stress in the West and Israel to avoid offense to Muslims at almost any cost.
In contrast, there have been plenty of such incidents the other way around. Indeed, in the last week there were major terrorist attacks against Christian churches in Baghdad and Cairo, with dozens of people murdered.
What is the response? Christian priests and ministers are not giving sermons telling on their flock to hate and kill or even to be rude to Muslims. There are no calls for revenge, no reprisal attacks on Muslims, and no real comprehension in many political, media, and academic circles of what is happening in the world.
Oh, and by the way, the Jews in Europe are also again feeling "excluded" to the point that some are leaving and more are thinking seriously about getting out.
Might these facts have something to do with reality? After all, "Islamophobia" means fear of Islam. This is quite different from hatred of Islam or wanting to kill Muslims. A Greek friend informs me that the word for hate in Greek is "misos." Thus, "Islamophobia" is not the same as "Islamomisos."
In fact, what we are seeing is a rational fear in the West based on events (Islamofovos, to use the Greek word) alongside the hatred of the West (Occidentomisos) in much of the Muslim-majority world.
The real concern in Europe, then, is that making Muslims feel "excluded" (that is, unhappy) is more likely the prelude to them killing you than it is to you killing them.
In literal terms, then, it is the appeasers and Multiculturalists who are "Islamophobic." They fear Islam so much that they are eager to make concessions to avoid being attacked verbally or with violence.
What we are seeing today in the West is a definitional struggle: Is the principal danger to European society "Islamophobia" or radical Islamism? If it is "Islamophobia" then it is possible to rationalize a policy ignoring the roots of terrorist attacks and radical forces in the Muslim community while tending to appease demands for more power, funding, and privileges. Otherwise, it is claimed, Muslims will be tortured, murdered, expelled, and mistreated.
Even a refusal to limit immigration, promote assimilation, deny special privileges, or ban polygamy can be justified as ways to avoid making Muslims feel "excluded."
Indeed, this is largely what's happening in Europe: almost is anything is justified to ensure that Muslims are happy.
Yet if the main threat is revolutionary Islamism and the collapse of national identity, stability, and democracy, then Europe is in a lot of trouble.
There is also a different way to look at the situation: By following these policies European governments are likely to increase not only the threat to their own stability, culture, and society from Islamism but also to increase the likelihood of antagonism toward Muslims. After all, increasing power, demands, extremism, and violence from Islamists is going to echo on the other side far more than would a more moderate strategy in dealing with these immigrants and citizens.
Of course, the radicals, militants, and activists cannot be made happy by being given money, privileges, and flattery since their goal is to control their communities and seize more and more power. By making these people look successful by giving them concessions, Western societies ensure that the Muslims (or, more correctly, the leaders who give the mosque sermons, teach in the schools, and represent the community to the government) will continue to shout out new grievances.
In other words, the Multicultural, Political Correct, criticism-of-Islam-equals-hate-crime approach is the worst possible policy, undermining the host country, radicalizing the Muslim community, and simultaneously stirring up mutual hatreds. There is nothing more likely to create something that might be called "Islamophobia" in the future than kowtowing to fear of this largely non-existent phenomenon in the present.
__________________________
Are Muslim Minorities Treated the same as Jewish Minorities?
John R. Houk
© January 2, 2010
_____________________________
What's Happening in Europe: Holland As A Case Study on Islam and Israel
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
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