Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (23 page)

No wonder the elderly couple felt the police had abandoned them—they had. The couple had no choice but to join the ranks of the thousands of Dutch, including so many of my own former neighbors in Kanaleneiland, who have practically become fugitives in their own country.

Tragically, history is repeating itself. What happened to the native Dutch in Slotervaart, Kanaleneiland, and dozens of other boroughs also happened to the Jewish tribes of Yathrib after 622. By foolishly welcoming Muhammad and his Meccan followers into their town, the Yathribians guaranteed their own extinction and the transformation of their land into Medina, the “City of the Prophet,” which it has remained ever since. Today, Kanaleneiland is one of many “cities of the prophet” found in the Netherlands.

In August 2011, the Dutch newspaper
De Pers
sent Arnold Karskens, its war correspondent, to the Dutch city of Helmond to investigate reports that Islamic thugs were harassing local residents. Karskens’ article details the terrible abuse suffered by the non-Muslim population, including the months-long sexual intimidation of a 9-year-old Dutch girl, a couple whose front door had been attacked with a fireworks bomb, newcomers to the area who already want to leave, and complaints that the police are afraid of the lawless thugs who are terrorizing the peaceful population.
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Two weeks after Karskens’ article appeared, I went to Helmond to speak with the locals at the neighborhood center. When I left the building, Moroccan schoolchildren shouted curses at me.
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In light of the serious crimes being perpetrated against so many people in the city, I felt lucky that all I suffered was insults.

In March 2007, Ella Vogelaar, the Dutch Minister of Integration and Housing, published a list of forty areas now known as “Vogelaar neighborhoods.”
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Vogelaar, a Labour politician, announced she wanted to address the huge problems in these neighborhoods through poverty-fighting schemes like stimulating economic investment and sending in an army of state-subsidized “community workers.” The root cause of the problem—Islam—was not addressed, of course, since Vogelaar, like most of the political establishment, refuses to acknowledge Islam’s many pathologies.

The Vogelaar neighborhoods resemble the 751
zones urbaines sensibles
(sensitive urban areas, or ZUS) listed by the French government.
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The ZUS, which are dominated by Islamic immigrants and include many suburbs of Paris, were designated as early as 1996, and have since degenerated further into no-go areas where people are advised not to enter, where ambulances and firetrucks do not go without police protection, and where even the police themselves are afraid to venture. The ZUS are the “lost territories” of the French Republic, even though a staggering 5 million people, or 8 percent of the total French population, live in them.

In these parts of France, Shariah law is enforced by street criminals, who especially target women who go on dates, wear makeup, or offend Islam by acting Western in other ways. According to a 2007 CBS report, “It’s gotten so bad that, today, most of the young women only feel safe if they are covered up, or if they stay at home. Girls who want to look just like other French girls are considered provocative, asking for trouble.” Indeed, the article cites the plight of Samira Bellil, a French woman of Algerian descent who wrote a book revealing she’d been repeatedly gang-raped in a Paris ZUS. Bellil became an advocate for other victims, one of whom was a 13-year-old girl from Lille who was gang-raped by eighty men. In another horrific case, a 17-year-old girl named Sohane Benziane was burned alive by a gang leader in the basement of an apartment complex. CBS reported, “When the young man accused of killing Sohane returned with police to show how he had doused her with gasoline, the highrise he had controlled broke out in cries of support.”
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Every so often, French politicians talk tough and promise to restore law and order in the lost territories—the “cities of the prophet” on French soil. In April 2010, authorities decided to have the police escort public buses that traverse through the ZUS around Paris. Bus drivers had demanded protection after local youths set several buses ablaze in retaliation for a police swoop on drug dealers—the buses’ passengers narrowly escaped being incinerated.
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that “no part of our territory can remove itself from the rule of the laws of the Republic and that an unabating battle will now be conducted against the drug dealers, wherever they may be.”
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Note how the French president, like most Dutch politicians, refuses to see Islam as part of the problem.

Unfortunately, passengers do not always escape unharmed from torched buses. On October 28, 2006, a public bus was set on fire in a predominantly Muslim area of Marseille. Mama Galledou, a 26-year-old student from Senegal, sustained severe burns over 70 percent of her body.
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Similarly, as buses were being attacked during the massive riots of November 2005—riots that resulted in the declaration of a state of emergency—a handicapped female bus passenger in Sevran suffered third degree burns over 30 percent of her body.
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The French riots of 2005—which was the first event to draw international media attention to the collapse of Europe’s urban areas—resulted in the destruction of 10,000 cars and more than 300 buildings, including churches, synagogues, schools, hospitals, and police and fire stations. One hundred thirty police officers and countless civilians were wounded, and two French dhimmis were beaten to death.

Further bouts of French rioting in 2006 and 2007 were hardly covered in the press, indicating the conspiracy of silence that surrounds this issue. Much like the media, France’s leadership is uncomfortable discussing these problems, which raise inconvenient questions about Islam and multiculturalism. In some cases, this results in outright censorship. “To discourage more violence, France 3 will no longer publish or present figures on vehicle arson,” French state television channel France 3 announced in November 2005.
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More recently, during yet another riot on July 14, 2009, the Sarkozy administration declared a total news blackout and forbade the police and the firefighters from divulging any information to the press.
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Even private media outlets find it difficult simply to report the truth; a leading executive of the private television channel TF1 admitted censoring riot coverage “to avoid encouraging the resurgence of extreme rightwing views.”
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Many European nations with a large Islamic presence have suffered these problems. Take Britain; in January 2008, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, declared that “the ideology of Islamic extremism” had succeeded in “turn[ing] already separate communities into ‘no-go’ areas where adherence to this ideology has become a mark of acceptability. Those of a different faith or race may find it difficult to live or work there because of hostility to them and even the risk of violence.”
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Bishop Nazir-Ali, the son of a Pakistani Christian convert, had the rare courage to name Islam as the cause of the problem. Unsurprisingly, after he published his piece, he received death threats and was placed under police protection. “I do not wish to cause offence to anyone, let alone my Muslim friends,” the Bishop explained. “But unless we diagnose the malaise from which we all suffer we shall not be able to discover the remedy.”
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Shiraz Maher, a British journalist with an Islamic background, applauded the bishop’s bravery. “Perhaps it had to be someone like Michael Nazir-Ali, the first Asian bishop in the Church of England, who would break with convention and finally point out the elephant in the room,” he wrote.
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The British military tacitly acknowledges that some areas of Britain are off-limits to the nation’s own soldiers. In March 2008, the Royal Air Force advised its personnel not to wear military attire in certain areas of the town of Peterborough in order not to “offend minorities.”
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This kind of deep hostility toward Western militaries pervades many Islamic communities in Britain and throughout the West. In a widely publicized event, in March 2009, a parade in Luton for British soldiers returning from Iraq was disrupted by Islamic youths who waved signs denouncing the soldiers as “butchers,” “cowards,” and “killers.”
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Five Muslims were prosecuted over the incident and each was fined £500. Since all of them were on welfare, they defiantly declared, “The taxpayer paid for this court case. The taxpayer will pay for the fines too out of benefits.” During the trial, the defendants refused to stand when the judge entered and left the court, but the judge said she did not want to “set a precedent” by charging them with contempt of court.
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When a state cannot deploy its policemen and soldiers in certain areas or command basic respect for its judicial system, it no longer fully controls its own territory. “Asian Muslims account for about 1 in 50 of British citizens, yet they dominate entire districts in the vicinities of their more than 1,350 mosques: 10 of them in Luton alone,” historian John Cornwell observed in a 2008 essay in the
Sunday Times
.
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Germany faces similar problems. In July 2008, the newspaper
Die Welt
reported that “in several German cities the police barely dare to enter certain districts because they are immediately attacked.” The paper described how police officers in Essen are struggling to prevent the town’s predominantly Islamic districts from degenerating, as one police officer said, into “a lawless area” where “narcotics are dealt and stolen goods received with impunity.”
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In August 2011, Chief Police Commissioner Bernhard Witthaut admitted that no-go zones outside police authority are proliferating in Germany. “Every police commissioner and interior minister will deny it,” Witthaut declared, adding, “We know that these areas exist. Even worse: in these areas crimes no longer result in charges. . . . The power of the state is completely out of the picture.”
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The population of Brussels, the Belgian capital and seat of NATO and the European Union, is over 25 percent Muslim,
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and the city has several predominantly Islamic districts. In early 2010, immigrant youths in one such district, Kuregem, shot a policeman in the legs with a Kalashnikov. Following the incident, Jan Schonkeren of the Belgian police union VSOA acknowledged there are boroughs in Brussels “which officers do not dare enter in uniform.”
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Though Europe has far more Islamic immigrants than the rest of the Western world, Australia, Canada, and the United States have not been entirely spared these sorts of conflicts. Cities of the prophet—where traditional Western freedoms and state authority have been replaced by Sharia law—exist there, too. Consider Dearborn, Michigan, where more than one-third of the city’s 100,000 residents are Arab, mostly Muslim. In the 1970s, the Dearborn Mosque was the site of a bitter factional dispute resulting in the ousting of a Wahhabi imam from Yemen who had molested a 12-year-old girl. Today, the mosque uses loudspeakers to broadcast the
azaan,
the Islamic call to prayer, which can be heard blocks away. Annoyed city officials tried to stop the broadcasts but were thwarted by a court ruling that found the
azaan
is the “Muslim equivalent of church bells.”
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Another Dearborn mosque, the Islamic Center of America, is the largest mosque on the American continent, boasting two towering, 10-story minarets. Dearborn’s Walmart caters especially to Muslims, featuring an Arabic-speaking staff,
hijab
-clad female employees, and “ethnic-sensitivity” training courses for non-Muslim employees.
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As Western cities become more Islamic, authorities tend to bow deeper to Islamic demands—and Dearborn is no exception. This was evident in 2009 at the Dearborn Arab International Festival, an annual street event that is free and open to the public. At that festival, city authorities prevented a group of Arab Christians from proselytizing to passers-by on the street, a ban that was later upheld by a U.S. district court judge. “The police and city officials are cowards,” declared Yousif Salem, a Christian activist. “I am an American citizen and my rights were stripped away because they are afraid.... Five times a day through loud speakers from Islamic Mosques, prayers to Allah are freely allowed and tolerated. But you let a Christian hand out literature to a Muslim and they threaten with riot.”
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The following year, police arrested four Christian missionaries for proselytizing at the festival. A jury later acquitted all four of the defendants, who have filed a civil rights claim against the city of Dearborn. The shameful ban against proselytizing at the festival was later overturned on appeal.
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