Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (27 page)

In the Netherlands, only 15 percent of Dutch citizens of Moroccan origin and less than 20 percent of Dutch citizens of Turkish origin feel more connected to the Netherlands than to their country of origin.
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The Pew Research Center reported that only 13 percent of Germany’s 3.5 million Muslims see themselves as more German than Muslim. Seven out of ten Spanish Muslims consider themselves Muslims first, not Spaniards. Fully 81 percent of British Muslims self-identify with their religion rather than their British nationality. France has the best figures for assimilation, but even there, the percentage of French Muslims who consider themselves Muslims first (46 percent) is larger than those who primarily identify themselves as French (42 percent).
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Like so much of European life, Europe’s cultural and historical exhibits are now circumscribed by the need to avoid offending increasingly assertive Islamic populations. Exhibitions about World War II have been banned for mentioning Arab complicity in Nazi crimes;
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Islamic organizations have boycotted ceremonies marking the liberation of Auschwitz (because they were supposedly “not racially inclusive” and did not refer to the “Palestinian holocaust”);
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and opera houses have stopped performing Mozart’s
Idomeneo
because Muhammad figures in it.
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Instead of defending their national identities, Europe’s politicians ignore creeping Sharia or even actively facilitate it. These kinds of “leaders” have been around for a long time; they were described by nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as “cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own.”
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They do the opposite of what Margaret Thatcher once explained a politician should do: “People are . . . afraid that this country might be . . . swamped by people with a different culture.... We are not in politics to ignore peoples’ worries: we are in politics to deal with them.”
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One such cosmopolitan critic is former Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner. In 2006, he declared that it would be “the ultimate consequence of democracy” if Sharia law became the law of the land, so long as it was supported by a sufficiently large portion of the electorate.
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In 2008 another well-known Islam accommodationist, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, mused that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in Britain “seems unavoidable.”
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A few months later, the head of the English judiciary, Lord Chief Justice Nicholas Phillips, declared that Sharia law could be used to settle marital and financial disputes.
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And local courts in Britain have, in fact, been authorized to adjudicate some cases using Sharia. One of the first British Sharia rulings settled an inheritance dispute involving a man whose estate had to be divided between his three daughters and two sons. The Sharia court gave the sons twice as much as the daughters,
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in accordance with the Koranic pronouncement that a woman is only worth half a man.
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As Islam insists on accommodations in every aspect of life, it also demands that its Western host societies provide cash payments in the form of welfare benefits. In France, authorities tend to ignore how Islamic immigrants abuse the welfare system by collecting state benefits for several wives,
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a problem also found in Britain, where a 2009 government review found that an Islamic man with several wives can claim state support of more than £10,000 ($15,000) a year.
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This wealth transfer from Western taxpayers to Islamic immigrants is consistent with Islam’s history of raiding (
ghazwa
, or
razzia
), which resulted, as former Muslim Patrick Sookhdeo observes, in “a redistribution of wealth (e.g. livestock) or women from the losing tribe to the winning tribe.”
⁶⁰
Indeed, some imams in Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain have instructed the faithful to live on welfare and to refuse to work or pay taxes specifically as a means of harming the Western host state.
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These exhortations indicate that some Islamic activists regard welfare fraud as part of their deliberate campaign to undermine Western governments. Here’s another indication: in 2005, an undercover reporter from Britain’s
Sunday Times
posed as a follower of a Sharia-adherent Islamic group. He revealed how these groups “are so opposed to the British state that they see it as their duty to make no economic contribution to the nation.” His Islamic “brothers” warned him “against getting a job because it would be contributing to the kuffar (non-Muslim) system. Instead, the young follower, Nasser, who receives
£
44 job seekers’ allowance a week, said it was permissible to ‘live off benefits,’ just as the prophet Muhammad had lived off the state while attacking it at the same time. Even paying car insurance was seen as supporting the system. ‘All the brothers drive without insurance,’ he said.”
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Similarly, a Pakistani immigrant in Norway admitted in a Norwegian newspaper that he worked in a Pakistani shop, but “neither the boss nor I pay taxes to the Norwegian authorities. In addition to this, I receive 100 percent disability benefits and welfare. I have to be cunning to make as much money as possible, since this is my only objective with being in Norway.”
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In the Netherlands, non-Western immigrants comprise 11 percent of the population but nearly 44 percent of welfare recipients.
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In light of these types of findings, in 2009 I asked the Dutch government to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the effects of immigration. The cabinet refused—as a matter of principle, said Integration Minister Eberhard van der Laan. “We are not interested in what an individual costs, whether he be a Frisian, someone with blue eyes or a handicapped person,” he declared. Immigrants’ “presence cannot be reduced to a simple profit-loss calculation measured in euros.”
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With the government unwilling to even acknowledge, much less measure, the costs of immigration, I asked Nyfer, a prestigious, independent economic research institute, to calculate the net cost of the 25,000 non-Western immigrants and 25,000 children that settle in the Netherlands each year. Nyfer calculated the annual cost at €7.2 billion, or $9.5 billion.
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Estimates of the number of Islamic immigrants in Europe vary widely. The think tank Network of European Foundations estimates the number of Muslims in Western Europe at just over 16.5 million.
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The British magazine the
Economist
says the EU has “no more than 20m Muslims, or 4% of the union’s inhabitants.”
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The German Islamic organization Zentralinstitut Islam-Archiv Deutschland puts the number of Muslims in Europe at 53.7 million, including 15.9 million in the EU, 5.9 million in the European part of Turkey, and 25 million in Russia. According to the Zentralinstitut, of the 680 million Europeans, 7.9 percent are Muslims, including about 3.2 percent in the EU.
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In my native Netherlands, 6 percent of the 16.5 million inhabitants are Muslims, which is the highest percentage in Western Europe aside from France, whose 5.5 million Muslims comprise 8 percent of its population.
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Regardless of what the precise figures may be, Europe is undeniably Islamizing. This process is accelerating every year—and nearly everyone is afraid to talk about the implications.

On October 31, 2006, in the same monastery in Erfurt, Germany, where Martin Luther took his monastic vows in 1505, Roland Weisselberg, a 73-year-old Lutheran vicar, doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. “Jesus!” and “Oskar!” the burning Weisselberg cried out before he died. “Oskar” referred to Oskar Brüsewitz, a German Lutheran pastor who fatally immolated himself in 1976 to protest East Germany’s communist regime. Before Weisselberg committed suicide, he had regularly warned the Lutheran authorities in Germany about Islam. In a farewell letter, he wrote that he was sacrificing his life in protest against the Islamization of Europe.
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Weisselberg hoped his gruesome sacrifice would awaken his compatriots, but it did not. And sadly, his desperation seems to be spreading across the continent. A 2007 British survey shows that British adults have so little faith in the future that 15 percent of them are reluctant to have children and 27 percent are less inclined to make future plans. Asked what troubled them, 70 percent cited the rise of terrorism, 58 percent immigration, 38 percent climate change, and 23 percent the threat of natural disaster.
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Politicians are supposed to address people’s worries, as Thatcher noted, but Europe’s political establishment ignores the two major causes of unease because they don’t fit the political agenda of the cosmopolitan Left.

Ignored by the political class, the people are voting with their feet. Emigration has reached levels not seen since before World War I, with 200,000 British citizens leaving their native country every year. In 2007, a record 250,000 middle-class residents quit the British capital London, either for the countryside or to move abroad. This exodus, the
Daily Mail
wrote, was caused mainly by high immigration rates of foreigners into London.
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In his book
Time to Emigrate?
, George Walden, Thatcher’s Education Minister, leaves no doubt about the cause of Britain’s malaise: immigration has created unacceptable terrorist and crime risks, he says.
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As the
Daily Telegraph
explains simply, “Unchecked immigration over the past decade is creating a country many Britons no longer feel comfortable in.”
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This phenomenon is evident across Europe. In 2005, for the first time in recent history, more emigrants left Germany than immigrants moved in.
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Most of the emigrants were foreigners (primarily Poles and Romanians) returning home, but a considerable number of indigenous Germans also left.
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In the Netherlands, the murder of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 triggered what the
New York Times
called “a quickening flight of the white middle class.”
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The Dutch emigrants, mostly highly motivated and well-educated, are being replaced by immigrants who are mostly unskilled.
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Amidst this population shift, the sophisticates deny that the emergence of Eurabia is anything to worry about, accusing anyone who voices misgivings of spreading fear and hate. “Eurabian Follies” declares
Foreign Policy.
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“Fears of a Muslim takeover are all wrong,”
Newsweek
exclaims.
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“Scaremongering,” sniffs the
Economist,
adding that “for every depressing statistic about integration . . . there are several reassuring ones.... In 50 years’ time, Americans may be praising this generation of European Muslims for leading the enlightenment that Islam needed.”
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I believe it’s more likely that Americans will ruefully be recalling Benjamin Franklin’s warning that “he that lives upon Hope will die fasting.”
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The discomforting truth is that the U.S. political establishment, blinded by the same unquestionable multicultural assumptions as its European counterparts, simply does not comprehend the drastic implications of what is happening in Europe and the world with regard to Islam.