At 9:09 PM -0700 10/30/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

I'm surprised the "Ask yourselves why we didn't attack Sweden" comment isn't discussed more

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yes&id=5096 HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE: The National Conservative Weekly Since 1944 'Europe Will Be Islamic by the End of the Century' by Robert Spencer Posted Sep 16, 2004 How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-laden career to be strangely disingenuous about certain realities of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, told the German newspaper Die Welt forthrightly that "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century." Or maybe sooner. Consider some indicators from Scandinavia this past week: Sweden's third-largest city, Malmx, according to the Swedish Aftonbladet, has become an outpost of the Middle East in Scandinavia: "The police now publicly admit what many Scandinavians have known for a long time: They no longer control the situation in the nations's third largest city. It is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants. Some of the Muslims have lived in the area of Rosengerd, Malmx, for twenty years, and still don't know how to read or write Swedish. Ambulance personnel are attacked by stones or weapons, and refuse to help anybody in the area without police escort. The immigrants also spit at them when they come to help. Recently, an Albanian youth was stabbed by an Arab, and was left bleeding to death on the ground while the ambulance waited for the police to arrive. The police themselves hesitate to enter parts of their own city unless they have several patrols, and need to have guards to watch their cars, otherwise they will be vandalized." The Nordgerdsskolen in Aarhus, Denmark, has become the first Dane-free Danish school. The students now come entirely from Denmark's fastest-growing constituency: Muslim immigrants. Also in Denmark, the Qur'an is now required reading for all upper-secondary school students. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it is unlikely, given the current ascendancy of political correctness on the Continent, that critical perspectives will be included. Pakistani Muslim leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed gave an address at the Islamic Cultural Center in Oslo. He was readily allowed into the country despite that fact that, according to Norway's Aftenposten, he "has earlier make flattering comments about Osama bin Laden, and his party, Jamaat-e-Islami, also has hailed al-Qaeda members as heroes." In Norway, he declined to answer questions about whether or not he thought homosexuals should be killed. Elsewhere in Europe the jihad is taking a more violent form. Dutch officials have uncovered at least fifteen separate terrorist plots, all aimed at punishing the Netherlands for its 1,300 peacekeeping troops in Iraq. And in Spain, Moroccan Muslims, including several suspected participants in the March 11 bombings in Madrid, have taken control of a wing of a Spanish prison. From there they broadcast Muslim prayers at high volume, physically intimidated non-Muslim prisoners, hung portraits of Osama bin Laden, and boasted, "We are going to win the holy war." The guards' response? They asked the ringleaders please to lower the volume on the prayers. What are European governments doing about all this? France is pressing forward with an appeasement campaign to free two French journalists held hostage by jihadists in Iraq. The Swedish state agency for foreign aid is sponsoring a "Palestinian Solidarity Conference," which aims, among other things, to pressure the European Union to remove the terrorist group Hamas from the EU's list of terrorist groups -- despite Hamas's long history of encouraging and glorifying the murder of civilians by suicide bombers. What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, the institutionalized oppression of non-Muslims in Muslim societies, chronicles in her forthcoming book Eurabia how it has come to this. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication before Islam in pursuit of short-sighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitude,' i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing." After the Beslan child massacres, however, there are signs from Eastern Europe that this may be changing. Last Sunday Poland turned away one hundred Chechen Muslims who were trying to enter the country from Belarus. This is the sort of measure that the countries west of Poland have been so far unwilling to take. But since one cannot by any means screen out the jihadists from the moderate Muslims, and the moderates are not helping identify the jihadists either, what choice did the Poles have? It might not be too long before they will have to turn away entrants from Scandinavia and France as well. ----- http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20031028-083517-4... The Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com Anti-Semitism in Sweden By Arnold Beichman Published October 29, 2003 By now we've come to accept that, as Germany was once the hotbed of anti-Semitism, it is the Middle East -- from Egypt to Damascus to Saudi Arabia to the PLO -- which today is a seething cauldron of racism. What, however, is even more alarming is that anti-Semitism is spreading to what would hitherto be considered the most unlikely places. I have before me a study published Oct. 20 in a leading Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, which reports that "Arab and Muslim attacks on Jews are rising sharply in Swedish society [while] silence surrounds Muslim Jew-hatred." The study, inadequately translated from Swedish, was prepared by two Swedish social scientists, Sverker Oredssom, a professor of history, and Mikael Tossavainen, his research assistant. The situation has become so bad, they report, that "Jews in Sweden today often feel compelled to hide their religious identity in public: necklaces with stars of David are carefully hidden under sweaters, and orthodox Jewish men change their kippot [skullcaps] to more discreet caps or hats when they are outdoors. Jews in Sweden nowadays get secret telephone numbers to avoid harassment. In Sweden. Today." In a Swedish population of some 9 million, there are about 20,000 Jews, mostly in Stockholm, Sweden's capital. The social scientists blame the Muslim migrants, now 3.9 percent of the Swedish population, for the growth of anti-Semitism. (Sweden has the second-largest percentage Muslim population in Western Europe. France has the highest Muslim population percentage, 7 percent.) "Most Swedes believe that anti-Semitism is an extinct problem in our country," they write. "Most Swedes believe that our society has evolved and that we are more enlightened today. ... Unfortunately, they are wrong. During the last year, the security police registered 131 anti-Semitic crimes. Nobody knows how many incidents go unreported. but the security police expect the number to be large." Jewish congregations in Sweden have noted a sharp increase in "harassment, threats and attacks by Arabs and Muslims against Jews in Swedish society during the last few years," the report states. "The problem is furthermore aggravated by the almost complete silence which surrounds this form of Jew-hatred. If anti-Semitism among Arabs and Muslims in Sweden is discussed at all in Swedish media, it tends to be in the form of trivializations or denials of the problem." The report's authors say anti-Semitism was once "only found among marginalized groups at the extreme right and left. That is not the case anymore. During the last decade, another form of anti-Semitism has started to spread in the suburbs of large Swedish towns: a Jew-hatred often imported from the Middle East and not seldom presented under an Islamic flag which also wins adherents among groups of Arabs and Muslims in Sweden." Teachers in Swedish suburbs report widespread hostility against Jews among Arab and Muslim students. Several Internet Web sites in Swedish report on Muslim political and religious topics and at the same time spread anti-Semitic propaganda in this fashion: the Holocaust is dismissed as a Zionist fiction, an event that never happened. Then comes another declaration, this one full of admiration for Adolf Hitler and regret that he didn't live long enough to complete his extermination campaign. One Swedish Web site announces the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, an announcement with which Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahatir Mohammed would be in full agreement. At some point the European democracies, like Sweden, will have to decide how far freedom of expression and other civil liberties extend when Web sites in several European languages, including Swedish, are publishing blood libels against Jewish citizens. The American philosopher, Arthur O. Lovejoy, has written: "The conception of freedom is not one which implies the legitimacy and inevitability of its own suicide. It is, on the contrary, a conception which defines the limits of its own applicability; what it implies is that there is one kind of freedom which is inadmissible -- the freedom to destroy freedom. The defender of freedom of thought and speech is not morally bound to enter the fight with both hands tied behind his back." Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'