Angela Merkel has stepped up the rhetoric against Pegida, a political movement against the Islamisation of Europe, accusing its supporters of being motivated by “prejudice” and “hate”, demonstrating her to be blind to the fact that if Pegida’s message is ignored by Europe’s elite, the continent’s liberalism and tolerance will be forever lost.
Progressive Europe, which has sought to protect minorities, has seen in recent years Sharia zones where people are handed fliers warning that homosexuality will not be tolerated, women attacked for wearing un-Islamic dress, and people physically assaulted for drinking alcohol.
Several anti-Semitic atrocities have taken place on European soil over the last few years, “Jewish patrols” have been increased in London amid fears of attacks, and Jews have been fleeing European countries such as Sweden in droves, leaving for Israel due to waves of violent anti-Semitic crime perpetrated by Muslims. Haaretz says of the situation for Jews in Sweden that the political climate of “self-righteousness” has been a key aspect in the enabling of anti-Semitism in the country. Self-righteousness is said to be a trait in pathological altruism, which seems to be an ingredient in Europe’s recent gradual self-destructive behaviour.
Pathological altruism has been defined by psychologists to describe those whose good intentions, acting on others’ behalf, end up harming themselves and others. Descriptions of pathological altruism often sound eerily like left wingers, explaining Germany and Sweden’s willingness to take huge numbers of refugees from Muslim countries – they “falsely believe that they have the means to relieve people’s suffering,” they have an “unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs” and that pathological altruism usually manifests in “impulsive and ineffective efforts to level the playing field.”
Rather than helping the vulnerable, by sacrificing their own values and encouraging multiculturalism and immigration from very illiberal countries, Europe’s left are in danger of harming minorities, liberal Muslims and, most importantly, dispensing with the continent’s traditions and values of liberalism in a world where freedom is becoming more and more scarce.
In the initial aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, media responses were promising and the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie went viral on Twitter. But this was not to last, and it wasn’t long before the English speaking press started punctuating its initial solidarity with Charlie Hebdo with ifs and buts.
Commentators crawled out of the woodwork to bleat that “free speech has its limits” and that disrespecting the Prophet was an example of this. British author and journalist Will Self made an appearance on Channel 4 to say that Charlie Hebdo missed the point of satire – that it should “punch up, not down.”
The left, in their reflexive response to view outraged Muslims as poor put-upon victims, the downtrodden, as Will Self implied, neglect the people who are truly oppressed – secularists living in Muslim majority countries and unbelievers in countries like Nigeria, killed in their thousands by Islamists on a near daily basis. These are the people who should be their natural allies but the left no longer sees them as such, having nailed their colours to hard-line Muslims.
Feminists, socialists and human rights activists living in Muslim majority countries signed their names to a letter entitled “After the Charlie Hebdo Massacre, Support those Fighting the Religious Right”, urging Westerners not to kowtow to demands of blasphemy laws and privilege of Islam. Why does the political establishment ignore their voices?
In Saudi Arabia, a man has been jailed for 10 years and will be receiving weekly floggings, for insulting Islam. His wife, Ensaf Haider, has claimed political asylum in Canada along with her three chldren. If the West dispenses with its own values of liberalism in order to placate Muslims, where will people like Ensaf Haider have to go when the whole world plays by the rules of the Islamic bullies?
If Angela Merkel and other European leaders are averse to “hate” and “prejudice” in their countries, they would do well to examine where it is coming from. 45 percent of Muslims living in Europe agreed with the statement “Jews cannot be trusted”, and almost 60 percent with “I don’t want to have homosexuals as friends.” While the study noted that around one in five native Christians was “Islamophobic”, agreeing with the statement “Muslims aim to destroy Western culture”, this figure was dwarfed by what the report dubs “Occidentophobia” – 54 percent of the Muslims polled believed “Western countries are out to destroy Islam.”
Ed West noted in the Spectator that the Europe’s establishment is “overwhelmingly universalist”, believing that “people have no moral right to discriminate between in-groups and out-groups”. West observes that this sort of thinking is only present in lands populated with Europeans and is especially incompatible with Islam which divides people into “believer” and “non-believer”.
Studies all show that younger generations of Muslims are significantly more wedded to Islamic views than their parents and grandparents, 18-30 year olds in all surveys being significantly more conservative on every issue, from Sharia law, the legal status of homosexuality and whether or not a Muslim can marry a non-Muslim, to death to apostates. This strongly supports the view, as West says, that Islam “will not be disintegrated in Europe’s lukewarm melting pot”.
With more calls than ever before from British Muslims that “free speech does not include the right to insult other religions”, headlines about Oxford University Press banning pigs and pork from mention in school books and general religious objections to free speech and our way of life, Europe must question whether it wants to abandon its long tradition of liberalism, and instead succumb to cultural imperialism from the East.
Muslim leaders keep mounting challenges to the UN demanding blasphemy laws be extended to every country in the world, and that insults or depictions of the Prophet are “not free speech”. Representing countries that (often violently) repress secularists and followers of other religions, what message are we sending out by acquiescing to their demands?
Members of outfit “The Sharia Project”, linked to “Muslim patrols”, groups of Muslims who have attacked drinkers, gay people and women not dressed in an Islamically approved way in the streets, marched through the Brick Lane area in London, handing out fliers to Muslim-owned shops selling alcohol, threatening them with lashings if they refused to stop selling the “haram” products.
A French Muslim coffee shop owner operating in London received death threats for displaying a “Je Suis Charlie” sign outside his cafe last week. Multiculturalism in Europe has led to liberal Muslims being victimised by Islamists just as they would be in Muslim majority countries, because our milquetoast establishment is too afraid of offending and now too unsure of itself to assert its own values.
If we are to retain our character as a continent and as a nation, the cries of Pegida to resist the Islamisation of Europe must not be ignored. British commentators seem to think it a reasonable demand that the UK not “insult Islam”, but by acquiescing we are sending a signal to some of the world’s most oppressed, and giving special privileges to a religion that already controls large parts of the world and all the people therein, whether they like it or not. We must not make any concessions to Islam, because if there are Muslims in Europe who don’t like it, there are plenty of countries where they can go and enjoy life under Islamic rule.
For the rest of us, and for the many liberal Muslims in Europe who don’t want to be harassed for selling alcohol, don’t want to be subjected to honour killings for being “too Westernised” and don’t want to have speech and thoughts curtailed by self styled “community leaders”, we want to live in freedom and peace.
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