Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (26 page)

Erdogan is often upheld in the West as a moderate, but he himself rejects that term, claiming it is “very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam, Islam is Islam and that’s it.”
¹⁷
Ironically, Erdogan’s sentiments are close to those of the late Italian writer Oriana Fallaci, a fierce critic of Islam who argued, “A moderate Islam does not exist. It does not exist because there is no difference between Good Islam and Bad Islam. There is Islam and that is the end of it. Islam is the Koran, and nothing other than the Koran. And the Koran is the
Mein Kampf
of a religion that desires to eliminate others—non—Muslims—who are called infidel dogs, and inferior creatures.”
¹⁸

Indeed, there are many moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. “There is, to put it another way, no such beverage as Islam Lite,” says David Solway. “One drinks in the real thing or nothing; there is no substitute.”
¹⁹

Today, for the third time in history, Islam is waging an offensive to conquer Europe. For the first time, however, it is threatening the continent from within. The doctrine of immigration is Islam’s Trojan horse, paving the way for jihad. From the inside, Islam is now eating its way out while many Westerners look on helplessly.

With the arrival of millions of Islamic immigrants over recent decades, Sharia-based Islamic customs have spread throughout Europe. Some of these practices such as honor killings, female genital mutilation, and forced marriages are crimes in our legal system. A second category of Sharia traditions including polygyny and instant divorce for men are unlawful but increasingly open for debate in societies hobbled by moral relativism. A third group of Sharia-imposed practices such as dietary restrictions and Sharia-compliant banking do not violate Western law and are not considered problematic in the pluralistic West.

The spread of Sharia-based crimes is obviously an assault on Western society, but the more innocuous-seeming practices are also dangerous, part of a stealth process of Islamization. Solomon and Al Maqdisi refer to Islamic clothing as an example. “Implementation of the
hijab
[an Islamic female outfit that covers everything except the face and hands] has always been gradual,” they write. “It would start as a headscarf and then move to a full garment with a headscarf. Then it would become the wearing of the
hijab
and finally the wearing of the [
burka
or]
neqab.
(
Neqab
is fully covering the face with only two little holes for the eyes). By the time they reach the state of wearing the
neqab,
the society would have become so conditioned by it that no one would give it a second look or thought.”
²⁰

The first thing Islam tells its immigrants to do when they settle in the new Yathribs in the West is to build a mosque—the same thing Muhammad did in Yathrib in 622. Subsequently, the immigrants gradually acquaint the host society with innocent-looking Sharia practices such as
halal
food, special Islamic rules in the workplace and schools, and Islamic family law. “While the
halal
meat is insidious, the
hijab
is overt and an ‘in your face’ part of Islamic society,” write Solomon and Al Maqdisi.
²¹

Like the original Yathrib fourteen centuries ago, Europe welcomes Islam and goes to extreme lengths to accommodate it. Windsor Castle, home of the English monarchy since the days of William the Conqueror, created an Islamic prayer room in September 2006, when Queen Elizabeth II set the room aside at the request of Nagina Chaudhry, a 19-year-old employee of the Castle’s gift shop who said she needed a place to pray during Ramadan.
²²
It was the first time in history that the British monarch set aside a room of the royal castle at the request of a single, non-royal individual. We have to wonder if a Sikh, Buddhist, Shinto, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, Scientologist, or Wiccan teenager would get her own religious space in Windsor Castle if she asked for it. If not, then we may wonder why Islam is so privileged.

Meanwhile, the West is forced to confront entirely new social problems, such as male Muslims preventing, sometimes violently, male doctors from treating their wives and daughters.
²³
This relates to Sharia’s maxim that a man may only touch a woman if she is his slave, his wife, or a close blood relative. The Hadith states that Muhammad “never touched the hand of any women.”
²⁴

As Islam constantly challenges Western norms, Western countries have come to tolerate practices that were hitherto unlawful, such as polygyny. Today, municipal authorities in Amsterdam and Rotterdam officially register polygynous marriages.
²⁵
Officials in Antwerp do the same.
²⁶
In Italy, there are an estimated 20,000 polygynous marriages.
²⁷
In France, authorities estimated in 2005 there are 30,000 men in the country who have more than one wife,
²⁸
with estimates of the total number of people in polygynous households reaching as high as 400,000.
²⁹

We began by accommodating seemingly minor Sharia demands such as women covering their hair, and before we knew it we were tolerating polygyny. Europe is on a slippery slope toward full Islamization and the replacement of our secular legal system by Sharia law. This process of “creeping Sharia” is a non-violent infiltration of our institutions, a stealth jihad. As Solomon and Al Maqdisi warn, Western governments must stop this ever-expanding accommodation of Islam—before it’s too late.

Yathrib was a tolerant, pluralist, multicultural oasis where Jewish, Christian, and pagan tribes lived together peacefully. The city’s fate was sealed on September 9, 622, the day of the
hijra
and the first day of the Islamic calendar. Will Europe, today’s Yathrib, still exist in 2022—the 1,400
^th
anniversary of Muhammad’s
hijra
—or will it be transformed beyond recognition into a new Medina?

Europe’s accommodations of Islam range from the banal to the ludicrous:

• Some Muslims insist their meat be
halal
—that is, the animal is slaughtered according to Islamic law. To accommodate this demand, many European supermarkets and factory and school cafeterias provide
halal
meat to
everyone.
“We have many French customers who don’t even know we’re totally halal,” says the owner of a trendy Paris restaurant. “To us, that is what integration is about.”
³⁰

• Some Muslims refuse to go swimming in the presence of the opposite sex. To accommodate this demand, pools and beaches across Europe—from Finland in the far north to Italy in the deep south—have introduced gender apartheid, providing separate swimming locations for women where male lifeguards are no longer allowed.
³¹
Some public pools in Britain require even non-Muslim women to wear so-called
burkinis
—Islamic-style swimwear that covers a woman’s entire body.
³²

• Some Muslims refuse to defecate in the direction of Mecca. To accommodate this demand, toilets in some British prisons and bathrooms in public housing blocs, as well as some toilets in London’s 2012 Olympic Park, are being built with the bowls facing away from Islam’s holy city.
³³

One accommodation that is spreading especially rapidly in the West is Sharia banking, which some Muslims demand due to the Koran’s ban on charging interest.
³⁴
(Islamic banks also charge interest, of course, but they undertake various financial machinations to make it look like something else.)
³⁵
Islamic banks are now establishing branches all across Europe, while Western banks are offering Sharia-compliant financial services. Those services are supervised by a board of Islamic scholars tasked with ensuring that the infidel banks properly comply with Islamic law.

Five-hundred thousand Muslims in France and over 75 percent of Britain’s 2 million Muslims reportedly want Islamic banking products, while some Westerners are even parroting the Islamic claim that Sharia banking is more ethical than traditional Western banking.
³⁶
Even the Vatican newspaper
L’Osservatore Romano
has expressed approval of Sharia banking. “The ethical principles on which Islamic finance is based may bring banks closer to... the true spirit which should mark every financial service,” the paper wrote.
³⁷

Meanwhile, European governments are trying to out-do each other in encouraging Sharia-compliant banking because of the huge sums it attracts from Sharia-adherent immigrants, “ethically”-driven non-Muslims, and investors from Islamic countries. The British and French governments are competing to make London and Paris, respectively, the hub for Islamic banking.
³⁸
Likewise, former Dutch Finance Minister and Labour leader Wouter Bos argues that “Islamic banking meets a demand from the Muslims living in the Netherlands” and also provides “an opportunity here for the Dutch financial sector.”
³⁹
Switzerland also wants a piece of what is, according to one Swiss banker, “the rich prize: which today is worth hundreds of billions, but in the future will be trillions of dollars of Islamic wealth.”
⁴⁰

Sharia-compliant banking is antithetical to Western norms, but those who want to ban it typically encounter the same objections I did when I tried to prohibit the practice in the Netherlands. “Banning Islamic banking from the perspective of fighting terrorism will have a counterproductive effect,” Wouter Bos wrote. “Denial of an actual need can lead to money-flows running via alternative channels out of sight of the government.”
⁴¹

Eating
halal,
banking Islamic, and refusing to touch the opposite sex are all examples of Sharia compliance. Fortunately, the Sharia command to kill blasphemers is not followed as widely. However, as far back as 1990, in a poll that coincided with Iran’s pronouncement of its death
fatwa
against British author Salman Rushdie, a staggering 42 percent of British Muslims supported the death sentence and only 37 percent opposed it, while 21 percent were undecided.
⁴²
Decades later, the problem remains. A 2006 Pew Research Center survey revealed that around one-third of French Muslims and a quarter of those in Britain and Spain agree that suicide bombings against civilians could be justified in defense of Islam.
⁴³

Similarly, a survey by the British Centre for Social Cohesion found that one-third of British Islamic students support a worldwide Caliphate, 32 percent find killing in the name of religion justified, and 40 percent favor introducing Sharia law into British law.
⁴⁴
Another study showed that 48 percent of Dutch Muslims “sympathized with” and 5.6 percent “approved” the 9/11 attacks.
⁴⁵