Jersey City Muslims demanded that public schools make Eid-el-Adha a holiday. Officials refused to close the schools, but granted Muslim children a religious no-penalty excuse to take Thursday off. Muslims, however, were not satisfied.
Clarice Feldman finds the recent mass invasion of Europe by Islamic refugees reminds her of a certain apocalyptic novel she read way back in the early 1970s.
Not one of the rich Gulf States has offered to take in a single Syrian refugee. The U.S., which already spends one billion dollars a year on refugee resettlement and countless more in welfare benefits, is being asked to take in more of these refugees. This would further burden those already at the bottom of the labor market.
Either the West turns them away or it ceases to exist. It’s that simple. The EU and the U.S. had the chance to fight on foreign soil or accept an invasion of their own lands, and chose poorly. Their choice now is to refuse social welfare benefits, scratch multiculturalism, and require assimilation instead of kowtowing to demands for disparate treatment, or die.
This result is not one unforeseen. Over four decades ago, this development was foreseen among others by Jean Raspail, a French author, of The Camp of the Saints, a novel of Europe being overrun by refugees from the Third World. The left’s favorite hate group designator, the Southern Poverty Law Center, attacked the author, the book, and its publishers. “The book is a racist fantasy about an invasion of France and the white Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees, “a haunting and prophetic vision,”SPLC says, “of Western Civilization overrun by a burgeoning Third World population.”
Some fantasy. At the moment about 300,000 immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa have poured into Europe:
More than 300,000 people have crossed into Europe by sea — most of them from Libya to Italy or from Turkey to Greece — and 2,600 have died in the attempt. Thirty to 40 drowned Friday after a boat carrying more than 120 Somalis, Sudanese and Nigerians deflated off the coast of Libya.
The migrants who manage to get to Greece must then begin a difficult trek across Macedonia and Serbia before sneaking into Hungary in hopes of getting, eventually, to preferred destinations like Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, which are prosperous, offer the chance for jobs and have been more welcoming than other nation.
The pictures show the immigrants are almost entirely men and young boys and once they’ve been granted asylum, there surely will be a call to admit their wives and children and parents and other family members, most of whom will require substantial social welfare services. If history is a guide, most will be inassimilable and reside in self-contained ghettoes, demanding ever more concessions for benefits and special treatment.
“I should say a few words about politics too … Then I would talk about how Muslims are flooding, occupying, in clear verbs, destroying Europe, and how Europe relates to this, the suicidal liberalism and the stupid democracy … It always ends the same way: civilization reaches a certain stage of maturation where it is not only able to defend itself, but where it is in a seemingly incomprehensible worship of their own enemy.â€
On a high-speed train raveling from Amsterdam to Paris today, three American marines recognized the sound as the 26-year-old Moroccan loaded a Kalashnikov, and jumped him as he exited the lavatory. The gunman got off some shots while being taken down, injuring three people, two seriously. Those injured were one American, one Briton, and French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade.
Crew on Paris-bound train barricaded themselves in their staffroom and locked the door as Kalashnikov-wielding terrorist went on the rampage – leaving PASSENGERS to take him down.
And, as usual, the passengers were 3 Americans and a Brit. When an Islamic terrorist (Can I say that? The French called for caution before jumping to conclusions.) opened fire with an AK-47 (wait, you’re not allowed to have an assault rifle in France!) he was rushed and taken down by Americans Spencer Stone (U.S. Air Force) and Alek Skarlatos (Oregon National Guard) and subdued with the help of California student Anthony Sadler, and British national Chris Norman.
Deutsche Welle reports that the French Terror Alert Meter has reached the Surrender level.
Charlie Hebdo” editor Laurent Sourisseau has told “Stern” magazine he will no longer draw cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Souriseau’s statement comes six months after a deadly attack on the magazine’s offices.
During an interview with the Hamburg-based news magazine “Stern,” editor of the French weekly “Charlie Hebdo” said he would no longer draw comics of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
“We have drawn Muhammad to defend the principle that one can draw whatever they want. It is a bit strange though: we are expected to exercise a freedom of expression that no one dares to,” Sourisseau told “Stern.”
The editor said that the magazine had done what it set out to do.
“We’ve done our job. We have defended the right to caricature,” Sourisseau said. …
Sourisseau, who owns 40 percent of the company’s shares, survived the deadly terrorist attack on the offices of “Charlie Hebdo” on January 7 by playing dead.
Robert Tracinski, in The Federalist, points to the changes in the course of the last century in the ideology of Progressivism to explain why lefties refuse to recognize the aggression and intolerance inherent in Islam.
The left seeks to gain moral authority, not from what they are for, but from what they are against. If you look at the history of the left, you find that they have frequently changed their favorite causes and their vision of the ideal society, often in ways that are wildly contradictory. But the one thing that remains constant is what they oppose.
The left used to present themselves as hyper-industrial and super-technological. In H.G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, the ideal future society was going to be ruled by a technological elite of airplane pilots, while the Soviets projected a grandiose vision of industrial giantism, with huge hydroelectric dams, steel mills, railroads, and chunky Bakelite telephones. Then the left flipped, and now they’re anti-industrial and their central crusades are to shut down power plants and to eat locally grown organic kale. You can frequently catch them making this flip in mid-conversation, as with an acquaintance I was talking to recently who expressed his concern for the plight of the poor under capitalism—and then a few minutes later, after I argued that hundreds of millions of people across the world have been lifted out of poverty by capitalism, he told me that Western affluence is overrated and destroys the environment. Everyone on the right has, at some point, had a conversation exactly like this, and it is maddening.
Or: if you go back and look at early 20th-century Progressivism, you will find it shot through with racism of the pseudo-scientific sort—Progressive icon Woodrow Wilson introduced segregation in the federal government—along with schemes for eugenics and a generally uncomplimentary view of homosexuals. Yet today’s Progressives claim the opposite position on these issues as one of their central virtues. Or: the left will champion insults to Christianity as so essential to free speech that they must be funded by the government—then regard insults to Islam as so inflammatory that they must be banned as “fighting words.â€
So everything changes, but one thing stays the same. Capitalism is bad, the West is bad, America is vicious and corrupt and needs to be fundamentally transformed. Transformed into what? That’s always vague and subject to change without notice, and ultimately it doesn’t matter.
The left is fundamentally reactionary. It is a reaction against capitalism and against America. The left are defined by what they are against, or more accurately who they hate. So they are drawn to sympathy toward Islam because it is not-us: non-Western, non-American, neither Christian nor a product of the Enlightenment. And I guess that’s what the two ideologies have in common: they are both reactions against the supposed evils of the West. Which explains why leftists tend to find themselves uncomfortable and look for excuses to retreat when they are called upon to defend the West against this rival group of reactionaries.
Dan Greenfield explains the community of fashion’s preferred way of looking at the interaction of Islamic terrorism and Free Speech.
Call it Schrödinger’s Jihad. The more famous Schrödinger’s Cat is a paradox in which a cat in a sealed box with poison that has a 50 percent chance of being released is in an indeterminate state. It is neither dead nor alive until someone opens the box.
In Schrödinger’s Jihad, the Muslim terrorist is in an indeterminate state until some Western observer opens the box, collapses his wave function and radicalizes him. The two Muslim Jihadists were in an indeterminate state until Pamela Geller and Bosch Fawstin and the other “provocateurs†suddenly turned them into terrorists in a matter of days or weeks. It didn’t matter that Elton Simpson, one of the Garland terrorists, had already been dragged into court for trying to link up with Jihadists in Africa.
Every Muslim is and isn’t a terrorist. He is both a peaceful spiritual person who is eager to embrace our way of life and a violent killer who can be set off by the slightest offense. Like the cat in the box that is neither dead nor alive, he is both violent and peaceful, moderate and extremist, a solid citizen and a terrorist. He does not choose which of these to be or to become; we decide what he will be.
The Jihadist paradox is that the Muslim terrorist is always defined by what we do, not by what he does.
