The Muslim View of Islamists
London has undergone a radical change over the past decade or so. From having been a lively multicultural city it has been transformed into a huge Islamist ghetto.
Not my words – as a Jew I might be considered insufficiently objective. The words came just last week from two Pakistanis living in London for several decades. Two highly devout Pakistani Muslims who pray five times a day, who are firmly anchored in both their Muslim religion and their Pakistani ethnicity, but who see themselves as a natural and integrated part of modern British society. I’ve known them all my life.
One of them returned to London after spending about ten years in the USA. A devout Muslim herself, she says that the transformation of London is appalling. The USA – “The land of the free” where personal freedom including freedom of religion is guaranteed in the constitution – is witnessing no such explosion of aggressive Islamism as is seen daily on the streets of London. She maintains that nowhere in Islam does it say that women have to wear a veil, nikab or burka, that it is only backward men with a primitive and obsessive control need who are forcing through this deviant interpretation of Islam.
She says that many Muslims are being increasingly ostracised in their own mosques in London as these establishments are increasingly taken over by aggressive, fanatical extremists clothed in the imam’s and/or the teacher’s role. She is adamant that the very thought of killing other people in the name of Islam is an insult to her religion, and that killing other Muslims while they are praying in their mosques is an aberration and a sin that only sick minds far removed from the teachings of Islam could nurture.
See here a short film in which Lebanese analyst Brigitte Gabriel speaks about how Islamism has destroyed the most flourishing country in the Arab Middle East.
She reflected over the Islamists’ many bombings of schools in Afghanistan, mosques in Pakistan, hospitals in Somalia, markets in Iraq, hotels in India, polling stations in the Philippines, trains in Spain, the Tube metro system in London, England. She talked about the terrible fire late one night in a girls’ boarding school in Saudi Arabia in which many of the students burned alive because they were not permitted to leave the building without sufficiently “modest attire” – they had run screaming from their beds as the building burst into flames but were driven back inside by the Islamic country’s baton-wielding “vice police” because it was unseemly for women to be seen in public without head-scarves. 15 schoolgirls died in the inferno.
She talked about her husband, who passed away recently. He too was a Muslim Pakistani, who at a large dinner with family and friends took issue with the openly voiced sentiment that the 9/11 attacks in the USA were the work of “the Jews” and that it was “part of the American Jewish mafia’s aim of strengthening its grip on the White House and on US foreign policy”. He expressed his outrage, asking how the guests, as Muslims and Pakistanis and thus a minority in Britain, could voice such racist allegations despite evidence showing the hand of Islamism in the attacks. He asked how they as Muslims and Pakistanis would feel if they heard that the general opinion was that all Muslims were terrorists and racists whose sole aim was to gather power through mass-murder. Would they not feel unfairly treated, victimized? He asked how they as Muslims and Pakistanis could demand the respect and acceptance of others abroad, when they themselves regarded other minorities in this insulting way.
She talked about her years in Saudi Arabia, where many destitute Muslims from poor countries such as Bangladesh and India are held by rich Saudis as indentured slaves. They are beaten, robbed and raped. They are promised a salary but upon arrival their passports are confiscated by their masters and the wages they get are at best half what they were promised. Sometimes they are not paid for years at a time. And when they are paid, they are required to spend their wages in the shop located within the walled compound which makes up the housing complex. The shop is owned by the Saudis who live in the complex … a hermetically sealed economy and a hermetically sealed lifestyle.
This in the country that claims to guard the two holiest sites in Islam, in Mecca and Medina. During the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, prices of accommodation and food quadruple, and the McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken fast-food joints incongruously located right beside the holiest of holies in Islam, the Masjid al-Haram mosque, do a roaring trade among often destitute Muslims on pilgrimage from desperately poor Muslim states. Pakistanis who have worked in Saudi Arabia are unanimous in their opinion that Saudi Arabia is the most godless country in the Muslim world.
See here a short film in which Syrian analyst Wafa Sultan describes Islamism.
Interestingly, many devout but politically moderate Muslims in London constantly refer to “them and us”. By “them” they are not referring to native Britons but to Islamists.
Islamism is a growing European problem. Islamism is an aggressive political movement that has learned that the best protection for its social sabotage and political subversion is to wear the mantle of religion. This renders the movement and its actions untouchable – nobody wishes to be regarded as racist or “Islamophobic”.
In fact, the word “Islamophobia” is regarded by many Muslim Pakistanis as being the biggest threat to acceptance, integration, seamless multiculturalism. The threat of being accused of “Islamophobia” prevents politicians from taking decisions that everyone understands are needed. But nobody wants to be the first to commit political suicide or draw the wrath of an aggressive Islamism that often takes the form of unspeakable violence. The threats are all too tangible. Theo van Gogh is a perfect example. The BBC gives the facts surrounding his death at the hands of an Islamist. For more background on why he was murdered in the name of Islamism, read the following and watch the film "Submission" which sparked it all off. Aayan Hirsi Ali is another example of the threats facing those who speak against Islamism. Unlike van Gogh, she has thus far managed to stay alive.
So the British continue fumbling in the dark, staggering ever closer to the brink while waiting for someone with moral courage to do the needful.
The problem, we are repeatedly told, is not Muslims, it is Islamists. Fanatics with an extreme political ideology strategically clad in a few Muslim symbols while at the same time trampling other fundamental Muslim beliefs – such as respect for the sanctity of life. The problem, however, is that Muslims by and large do not speak out against Islamists. If Britain’s Islamists are in fact speaking on behalf of all British Muslims, well and good, that is a situation that can be addressed. If they are not, and few Muslim voices of protest are heard, it is scarcely unreasonable to find that all Muslims are increasingly being held to account for the actions of the aggressive and vociferous few. It’s a lose-lose situation.
There is a saying that when racism rears its ugly head, its first victims are usually the Jews, but it seldom ends with the Jews.
The same goes for Islamism: its first victims are other Muslims – political dissidents, believers in a different branch of Islam (Shi’a, Sunni, Ahmadiya), the educated, pragmatists, women. Most of all women.
But the end game is not domination of other Muslims. The end game is world domination. The Caliphate – the global Muslim empire. The BBC has an interesting article on the concept of the Caliphate in modern times. Other sources can be found including leading Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes.
Whether that empire is controlled from Teheran or Riyadh is a totally irrelevant issue.
For the moment.
Here in Sweden, meanwhile, the political leadership is so blinded to the dangers – even the existence – of Islamism, that Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt is ramping up his attacks on the Jewish State. Read about his war against Israel, the sole bulwark against Islamisation in the Middle East, here, here and here.
His latest move: coerce the 27-member European Union, already a marginalised organisation renowned for funding Islamist intransigence in the Middle East, to declare East Jerusalem as the capital of a forthcoming Palestinian state. One problem: Carl Bildt makes no mention of any part of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state of Israel.
This forthcoming state of Palestine is intended to be ethnically cleansed of all Jews, along the same lines as Gaza, where not a single Jew remains. With, of course, the exception of Gilad Schalit, who was kidnapped from Israel as a teenager and has been held in an underground hole for more than three years, used as a bargaining chip for the release of Palestinian Arab mass-murderers. Yaakov Kirschen, the renowned Israeli cartoonist, runs a cartoon called “Dry Bones”. He sums up the Carl Bildt malaise perfectly:
Not my words – as a Jew I might be considered insufficiently objective. The words came just last week from two Pakistanis living in London for several decades. Two highly devout Pakistani Muslims who pray five times a day, who are firmly anchored in both their Muslim religion and their Pakistani ethnicity, but who see themselves as a natural and integrated part of modern British society. I’ve known them all my life.
One of them returned to London after spending about ten years in the USA. A devout Muslim herself, she says that the transformation of London is appalling. The USA – “The land of the free” where personal freedom including freedom of religion is guaranteed in the constitution – is witnessing no such explosion of aggressive Islamism as is seen daily on the streets of London. She maintains that nowhere in Islam does it say that women have to wear a veil, nikab or burka, that it is only backward men with a primitive and obsessive control need who are forcing through this deviant interpretation of Islam.
She says that many Muslims are being increasingly ostracised in their own mosques in London as these establishments are increasingly taken over by aggressive, fanatical extremists clothed in the imam’s and/or the teacher’s role. She is adamant that the very thought of killing other people in the name of Islam is an insult to her religion, and that killing other Muslims while they are praying in their mosques is an aberration and a sin that only sick minds far removed from the teachings of Islam could nurture.
See here a short film in which Lebanese analyst Brigitte Gabriel speaks about how Islamism has destroyed the most flourishing country in the Arab Middle East.
She reflected over the Islamists’ many bombings of schools in Afghanistan, mosques in Pakistan, hospitals in Somalia, markets in Iraq, hotels in India, polling stations in the Philippines, trains in Spain, the Tube metro system in London, England. She talked about the terrible fire late one night in a girls’ boarding school in Saudi Arabia in which many of the students burned alive because they were not permitted to leave the building without sufficiently “modest attire” – they had run screaming from their beds as the building burst into flames but were driven back inside by the Islamic country’s baton-wielding “vice police” because it was unseemly for women to be seen in public without head-scarves. 15 schoolgirls died in the inferno.
She talked about her husband, who passed away recently. He too was a Muslim Pakistani, who at a large dinner with family and friends took issue with the openly voiced sentiment that the 9/11 attacks in the USA were the work of “the Jews” and that it was “part of the American Jewish mafia’s aim of strengthening its grip on the White House and on US foreign policy”. He expressed his outrage, asking how the guests, as Muslims and Pakistanis and thus a minority in Britain, could voice such racist allegations despite evidence showing the hand of Islamism in the attacks. He asked how they as Muslims and Pakistanis would feel if they heard that the general opinion was that all Muslims were terrorists and racists whose sole aim was to gather power through mass-murder. Would they not feel unfairly treated, victimized? He asked how they as Muslims and Pakistanis could demand the respect and acceptance of others abroad, when they themselves regarded other minorities in this insulting way.
She talked about her years in Saudi Arabia, where many destitute Muslims from poor countries such as Bangladesh and India are held by rich Saudis as indentured slaves. They are beaten, robbed and raped. They are promised a salary but upon arrival their passports are confiscated by their masters and the wages they get are at best half what they were promised. Sometimes they are not paid for years at a time. And when they are paid, they are required to spend their wages in the shop located within the walled compound which makes up the housing complex. The shop is owned by the Saudis who live in the complex … a hermetically sealed economy and a hermetically sealed lifestyle.
This in the country that claims to guard the two holiest sites in Islam, in Mecca and Medina. During the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, prices of accommodation and food quadruple, and the McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken fast-food joints incongruously located right beside the holiest of holies in Islam, the Masjid al-Haram mosque, do a roaring trade among often destitute Muslims on pilgrimage from desperately poor Muslim states. Pakistanis who have worked in Saudi Arabia are unanimous in their opinion that Saudi Arabia is the most godless country in the Muslim world.
See here a short film in which Syrian analyst Wafa Sultan describes Islamism.
Interestingly, many devout but politically moderate Muslims in London constantly refer to “them and us”. By “them” they are not referring to native Britons but to Islamists.
Islamism is a growing European problem. Islamism is an aggressive political movement that has learned that the best protection for its social sabotage and political subversion is to wear the mantle of religion. This renders the movement and its actions untouchable – nobody wishes to be regarded as racist or “Islamophobic”.
In fact, the word “Islamophobia” is regarded by many Muslim Pakistanis as being the biggest threat to acceptance, integration, seamless multiculturalism. The threat of being accused of “Islamophobia” prevents politicians from taking decisions that everyone understands are needed. But nobody wants to be the first to commit political suicide or draw the wrath of an aggressive Islamism that often takes the form of unspeakable violence. The threats are all too tangible. Theo van Gogh is a perfect example. The BBC gives the facts surrounding his death at the hands of an Islamist. For more background on why he was murdered in the name of Islamism, read the following and watch the film "Submission" which sparked it all off. Aayan Hirsi Ali is another example of the threats facing those who speak against Islamism. Unlike van Gogh, she has thus far managed to stay alive.
So the British continue fumbling in the dark, staggering ever closer to the brink while waiting for someone with moral courage to do the needful.
The problem, we are repeatedly told, is not Muslims, it is Islamists. Fanatics with an extreme political ideology strategically clad in a few Muslim symbols while at the same time trampling other fundamental Muslim beliefs – such as respect for the sanctity of life. The problem, however, is that Muslims by and large do not speak out against Islamists. If Britain’s Islamists are in fact speaking on behalf of all British Muslims, well and good, that is a situation that can be addressed. If they are not, and few Muslim voices of protest are heard, it is scarcely unreasonable to find that all Muslims are increasingly being held to account for the actions of the aggressive and vociferous few. It’s a lose-lose situation.
There is a saying that when racism rears its ugly head, its first victims are usually the Jews, but it seldom ends with the Jews.
The same goes for Islamism: its first victims are other Muslims – political dissidents, believers in a different branch of Islam (Shi’a, Sunni, Ahmadiya), the educated, pragmatists, women. Most of all women.
But the end game is not domination of other Muslims. The end game is world domination. The Caliphate – the global Muslim empire. The BBC has an interesting article on the concept of the Caliphate in modern times. Other sources can be found including leading Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes.
Whether that empire is controlled from Teheran or Riyadh is a totally irrelevant issue.
For the moment.
Here in Sweden, meanwhile, the political leadership is so blinded to the dangers – even the existence – of Islamism, that Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt is ramping up his attacks on the Jewish State. Read about his war against Israel, the sole bulwark against Islamisation in the Middle East, here, here and here.
His latest move: coerce the 27-member European Union, already a marginalised organisation renowned for funding Islamist intransigence in the Middle East, to declare East Jerusalem as the capital of a forthcoming Palestinian state. One problem: Carl Bildt makes no mention of any part of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state of Israel.
This forthcoming state of Palestine is intended to be ethnically cleansed of all Jews, along the same lines as Gaza, where not a single Jew remains. With, of course, the exception of Gilad Schalit, who was kidnapped from Israel as a teenager and has been held in an underground hole for more than three years, used as a bargaining chip for the release of Palestinian Arab mass-murderers. Yaakov Kirschen, the renowned Israeli cartoonist, runs a cartoon called “Dry Bones”. He sums up the Carl Bildt malaise perfectly:
(Courtesy Yaakov Kirschen, Dry Bones: http://drybonesblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/swedish-meatballs.html
Thirty years ago, Sweden barely had any Muslims. Today they number almost half a million – out of a total population of 9 million. While many, perhaps most, are not Islamists and have indeed fled the excesses of Islamism in their home countries, the situation here is remarkably similar to that in Britain – the vast majority of Muslims remain a silent majority. Accordingly all Muslims are being tarred with the same brush since the only Muslim voices being heard (with a few notable exceptions) are those of the extremist fanatical Islamists, claiming to represent all their co-religionists.
The situation here has gotten so bad and Islamist sympathies are now so widespread that investigations have finally been ordered into the way Swedish tax revenues are being used to fund Islamist propaganda and the Islamist agenda. An audit is finally under way at the time of writing.
References:
The Independent, Daniel Pipes on Islamism, DP 2, DP 3, DP 4, DP 5, Professor Barry Rubin Meria 1, Meria 2, Meria 3, Rubin Gloria Prism homepage, Prism 2, Tundra Tabloids on Islamism in Finland
Melanie Phillips "Londonistan", Melanie Phillips 2, 3, Melanie Phillips on YouTube: "Jihad on Campus"
Ilya Meyer: The View from Sweden, Tensions in Swedish Society, An Illiterate Foreign Minister?, Where is Radical Islam Heading?, Moderation Through the Eyes of Islamists, Is Sweden Anti-Semitic?, Abuse of Swedish Tax Revenues, Church of Sweden Crusade Against the Jewish State
Etiketter: Dry Bones, English, Islamism, Londonistan, Muslim self-criticism, Pakistan, political Islam
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