*Originally published on this blog in July, 2015
If you (reader) are one of the twenty million devout Muslims currently resident in Europe, I’d like to try explain to you why I believe your beliefs are incompatible with the culture of your adopted home. But more than this, I hope also to persuade you that this view (shared by a growing majority of Europeans) does not emanate from ignorance or racism, and why it may not be a defeat or a humiliation for you to agree with it.
You or your parents probably came to Europe initially for economic reasons, seeking a better life and a more secure future. There is nothing dishonourable or unusual about that. Most non-Muslim migrants make the journey with the same ambitions. The West is very wealthy and safe relative to the rest of the world and so it is only rational to want to join it.
Once here, you or your parents probably planned to exist in a peaceful but separate state to the majority, maintaining your beliefs and traditions quietly in the same way that Orthodox Jews and Eastern Orthodox migrants have done in the past. Increasingly, this doesn’t seem to be possible, if it ever was. And in my view, the reasons for that directly relate to the nature of Islamic belief and the sense of mission that is so inseparable from it.
Unlike Christianity or Judaism, yours is a conquering faith, not a persuading one. Relatively little importance is given to peaceful proselytization in Islam. While there are occasionally stalls set out in front of tube stations or elsewhere in city centres to preach Islamic doctrine, this is an imitation of Christian practice and not something organically ‘Muslim’. Rather, Muslims have historically sought to attain dominion over society by violence, sometimes later permitting religious diversity within that society, but never allowing any symbol to enjoy precedence over the crescent. Their hope, indeed their expressed intention, has always been to exalt Islam to a position of cultural dominance and authority. While Christians and Jews have peacefully resided as minorities in many different parts of the world, Muslims have always struggled with the very concept of minority life. Since Allah is supposed to be the only authority to which submission is made, it is seen by most Muslims (and perhaps by you specifically) to be incongruous that a divine authority is subordinate to any non-Islamic regime, whether secular or religious. Minarets are built to tower above all other buildings for grander reasons than amplification. They proclaim symbolically the primacy and authority of Islam over the territory Muslims inhabit. It will simply not do that cathedrals or government buildings are larger or invested with more power and importance. Indeed, it is blasphemous and idolatrous. As Islamists never forget to proclaim before they demolish some priceless artefact – “Nothing and no-one is worthy of veneration except Allah”.
This sense of mission, inherent within Islamic theory, has radically altered human history. The nations of Lebanon, Libya and Syria were once Christian. The territory of what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan was once Buddhist. Persia was once Zoroastrian. That these places are now Muslim is testament to Islam’s conquering urge and military spirit. Islam seeks not only to convert, but to dominate and subdue. It is expansionist by its very nature. It was not designed to be one faith out of many, but to be the one and only faith of all humankind. The Quran itself is not shy of stating this. I would quote the passages urging the subjugation of unbelievers here but this would be so long as to be disruptive to my argument.
Your faith is antagonistic to everything but itself. And since you began settling in Europe back in the 1960s, members of your community have behaved in a way harmonious with that analysis. Just recently in Britain, there has been a wave of serious sexual assault committed by Muslims against exclusively non-Muslim children. Some estimates put the number of girls assaulted by British Pakistanis as high as 200,000. In the town of Rotherham alone, at least 1400 girls are known to have been forced into sexual slavery by Muslim gangs.
And even when it doesn’t lead to assault, your behaviour around women (if you are a man) is infantile and tactless. It would appear customary that upon meeting a woman (Muslim or otherwise, online or in real life) your first words either involve sex or invite a personal relationship that can lead to sex. It might surprise you – it probably has surprised you – but non-Muslim women do not enjoy being asked for their phone number or address by a complete stranger without any preceding conversation. Your lack of charm – indeed, your failure to even understand the idea and purpose of charm – is absolute. To you, women are merely sexual animals, possessing no greater value or agency than cats and dogs. For this reason, perhaps more than any other, I find it difficult to breath the same air as you.
Then there are the acts of extreme violence. Members of your community blew up the train network in Madrid, Spain and the subway in London, England. Members of your community massacred the staff of a cartoon tabloid in Paris. Members of your community have beheaded European citizens, the most recent case occurring only a month ago. You even hunt your own kind! Hundreds of Muslim women have now been killed in Europe in the name of ‘honour’ – and usually by members of their own family. Every year, thousands of Muslim girls are taken abroad to have their vagina mutilated by a shaving razor and then brought back to lead a miserable, painful existence with the perpetrators.
How could we possibly put up with this? What kind of people would we be if we did?
Face the facts, a growing proportion of the native population of Europe actively despises you, and does so without allowing any distinction for your race, Islamic school or individual contribution to European society. After decades of aggressive dysfunction and sickening crime, people simply hate you. They hate you and they fear you. And it is becoming difficult for even the most committed liberal to propose a reason why they shouldn’t.
There is an obvious – some would say cartoonish – contrast between the Islamic conception of society and the hopes and opinions of the Europeans. We value things you view as Satanic. You value things we regard as barbaric. You put faith before reason. We put reason before faith. You regard women as second-class human beings. We regard the sexes as equal. You view freedom of speech as being limited to secular matters. We believe it should permeate every corner of life and thought.
Even if this weren’t the case, your religious tradition is not the one that we are used to and which has inspired and characterised our manners and rituals over centuries. No European books are dedicated to your God. No statues of your Prophet (even if this were allowed) grace the Piazzas of our cities. Few if any Qur’anic phrases have entered our common parlance. We don’t celebrate your holy days, and have no regard for your heroes and saints.
You might reply that Hindu and Sikh mythologies do not inform our ways either, but then Hindus and Sikhs have proven themselves to be comfortable with that. I have never heard of an act of Hindu terrorism, nor any religiously-motivated outrage committed by a Sikh, Buddhist, Scientologist or Jain organisation. Islam has actively distinguished itself in violence, in readiness to fight and to make war where there is peace.
You are wrong if you take us for fools. We know well enough what the phrases Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam mean. We recognise the desire on your part to transfer us from one to the other and by what means. You must have known from the start that a project of this historical magnitude would be resisted with passion and fire. And, please believe me, that passion and fire is already generated in sufficient quantity should we ever be given the excuse to unleash it.
There are people on this (uniquely civilised) continent who would gladly slaughter you like dogs. It is not fantastical anymore to foresee a new Nazi movement emerging in Europe and going on to behave in a Hitlerian fashion. Nobody (save a few lunatics) wishes to go back there. Peace in Europe has been a blessing. Democracy is deserving of all the celebration dedicated to it. But your behaviour is testing the hold of democracy to its white-knuckled limits.
How then can we defuse this bomb? How might we organise a solution that forbids the need for mass violence and the self-destruction of democratic liberalism? This of course is the great question of my generation, and the most important task of the Western World, ahead of the environment, Russia, or any other exaggerated diversion.
That there is – or rather, that you are – an issue in need of resolution can no longer be sensibly denied. We are obliged by everything we hold dear to guarantee that the Islamisation of Europe ceases and that what progress it has already made is reversed. The Western way of life is not just ‘different’ to your own, but a million times superior. We are behaving very rationally by seeking to protect it.
Incidentally, you can deny this last fact as much as you want. It makes no difference to me. Deep down, beneath all the evasions and the layers of self-hypnosis, I’m sure you accept it as much as I do. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t still be here.
And that is the real, embarrassing truth, no? Whatever your friends have scrawled on placards in the past, you don’t ‘hate our way of life’ at all. You are simply jealous of it, and angry that your ancestral lands have failed – and are still failing – to develop in a like fashion.
For an effective and rapid solution to this problem, I propose the following measures – If you are brave, honest and intelligent enough to rid your mind of the numbing circularities of Islamic thinking, a space in the European future can and should be found for you. If not, and if you continue to display the toxic side effects of Islamic belief, then no more kid glove treatment should be forthcoming. If you espouse anti-Semitic, anti-Democratic and anti-Western ideas, you should be arrested and receive criminal records, with all the implications that has for finding employment, pursuing political office and securing tenancy and accommodation. The wearing of the Niqab must be outlawed and repeat offenders deported to a country where it is still the prevailing fashion. All Muslims involved in the mass-rape of British children must hang. Any Mosque preaching violence against Jews, Christians or Homosexuals must be shut down and demolished, and the same with colleges and Islamic faith schools. There must be an end to all immigration from Muslim countries, including from those cultures touted as exceptional (like Tunisia, Turkey or Iran). The culture of the West must be openly celebrated as the supreme culture of the world, and no ‘noble’ savagery must ever be taught as a desirable alternative to our children.
Our foreign policy must also be redesigned to reflect our desire to survive. Turkey should be expelled from NATO and replaced by Armenia. Any sanctions lifted from Iran must be reimposed. Investment in alternatives to Middle Eastern oil, including fracking (in lightly populated areas), fusion technology, nuclear and renewable energy must be radically increased. Western arms should only be exported to regimes which ruthlessly suppress Islamist activity (like Egypt and Jordan) and never to theocratic countries, whether ‘allies’ or not (Saudi, UAE, Kuwait etc…). Needless to say, our support for Israel must be great and unconditional.
In all these efforts, our motivating principle (and final goal) must be that Islam is forever segregated from the Western World.
Finally, reader, I promised at the beginning to tell you why it isn’t a humiliation for you to agree with my arguments… This is for the simple reason that you were a human being long before you were a Muslim, and this will always be the most salient fact about you. You are no more biologically predestined to ignorance and poverty than a Swede or a German. If you wish to become free, you can become free! And if you prefer slavery, well, then there is no defeat in relocating to pursue it, if that is your dream. There can no ‘shame’ in wanting to be where you belong. Nothing is more human.
Whichever condition you choose (and we will make you choose), understand that the West is the homeland of the free, the creative and the happy. A slave will always be foreign here.
D, LDN.
