Roger’s Rules

September 27th, 2008 12:27 am

“assimilation is a crime against humanity”

Yes, that’s right: “assimilation is a crime against humanity.” According, that it is, to the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who spoke these words to a cheering crowd of 20,000 Turkish expatriates in Cologne, Germany, earlier this year.

Wikipedia tells us that Erdogan is a major representative of “the moderate Islamist movement” in Turkey.

Moderate? I guess that means he is against steering stolen 767s into skyscrapers.

But Erdogan is by no means moderate when it comes to his ambitions for Islam in Europe. His remark about assimilation is one sign of that. Another is his observation, in 1998, that

“The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”

I thank Erdogan for his forthrightness. It was, frankly, what I have thought all along, it is is one reason I look askance at building mosques in the West. In my view, they are para-military structures masquerading as religious buildings.

Were it up to me, I would make a deal: for every mosque erected in the West, we get a church or synagogue of equal size in Mecca or some other Islamic hot spot. The word for this bargain “reciprocity,” an idea that is a sine qua non for any religious freedom worthy of the name “free.” (Query: why should we allow Muslims to exploit our religious freedom to further the cause of Islamic absolutism, i.e., why should we let them employ the tolerance we extend to them to enforce intolerance against us? Just asking . . .)

But I digress. Prime Minister Erdogan was on my mind after reading Diana West’s account of what just happened in Cologne, Germany’s fourth largest city.

Cologne is home to some 120,000 Turkish Muslims, more than 10 percent of the city’s population. It is also the proposed site of yet another “mega-Mosque,” construction of which was narrowly approved last month by city officials. It was understandable, then, that Cologne should be selected as an appropriate venue for an event at which politicians and others cconcerned about the Islamicization of Europe would congregate to discuss the spread of Islamic law (Sharia) in what used to be Christian Europe. Some 1500 people were expected to participate. But, as West reports, “it was not to be.” As the crowd assembled to listen to the speeches last weekend,

many more thousands of counter-demonstrators converged on the city specifically to deny rally supporters their right to assemble, and the politicians’ right to speak. And yes, by whatever means necessary.

Like what?

The thugs among the counter-demonstrators mounted a rock-and-bottle attack that shattered windows on a river boat plying the Rhine where the politicians attempted to hold a pre-rally meeting. They blocked urban trains in order to keep rally participants away. They ringed the city center with barricades (tolerated by German police), hurled paint bombs, lit fires and launched violent attacks on some of the participants who managed to draw near the rally location. One would-be rally participant, a Jewish man, sent in an account of his ordeal to Gates of Vienna, writing: “I was wearing my kippah and readily identifiable as a Jew; however, they (the leftist counter-demonstrators) screamed at me ‘Nazi Raus.’” He reported they also shoved him, spit on him, and called him a fascist pig. “I was pummeled in the head several times and then shoved to the ground where I was beaten and kicked with steel toe boots in plain sight of police who did nothing.” He later discovered he had a broken rib.

The mayor of Cologne, Fritz Schramma, described this act of suppression as “a victory for the city of Cologne and a victory by the democratic forces of the city.” Thanks for that, Fritz!

How was all this reported in “the mainstream press”? Mostly, it was ignored. And where it was reported? “[T]he consensus narrative,” West writes, “dutifully repeated in the mainstream European media, is that it is the silenced and hounded politicians and their supporters who are the ‘fascists’; while it is the silencers and hounders who are the ‘anti-fascists.’”

Sound familiar? How do you spell “1938″?

I am writing this in London, city that every time I come is a little less English. Women wearing burqas used to be an exotic anomaly, sightings of which were confined to a few certifiably Muslim neighborhoods. Nowadays, you’ll see them on Kensington High Street, St. James’s, and the Strand. London has its own “mega-mosque” planned for the 2012 Olympic Games, which are to be held here. (Since we’re spelling things, how about “pretext”: how many Muslims participate in the Olympic Games?) The Islamicization of London has not progressed as far as the Islamicization of Cologne. And in the United States its progress is even more incipient. So should we worry? As West points out,

As in Europe, huge mosque complexes are opening across the States — one very recently in Boston and another in Atlanta. Do they portend the extension and entrenchment of Islamic law in the United States? One difference between the United States and Europe is that we don’t have street thugs enforcing a code of silence on the subject. That’s because of the other difference: We don’t have any political parties willing, or even able to discuss it.

Not very encouraging, is it?

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15 Comments

1. John N. Frary:

The “moderate” Left appears to have collapsed into feeble, fetid mush. What little energy remains is aroused only by hatred for “fascist” phantoms and stimuli communcated from the hydrophobic Left.

Sep 27, 2008 - 2:20 am 2. srlucado:

“In my view, they are para-military structures masquerading as religious buildings.”

No argument there – just as Islam is totalitarianism masquerading as religion.

Scott

Sep 27, 2008 - 4:07 am 3. Mary Jackson:

“Nazi” stood for “National Socialist”. Everyone knows that, but the “Socialist” part is all too readily forgotten. The Fascist left aligns with Islam. First they come for the Jews. The rest is history.

Sep 27, 2008 - 8:49 am 4. Alo Kievalar:

Readers interested in keeping abreast of the advance of “Islamic Weltangschauung” (excuse the oxymoron) in the West and specifically in the US, can hardly do better than to refer to the excellent articles appearing at least weekly in the indefatigable Middle East Forum and its subsidiary web pages.

One very recent piece which is a must read can be found at:

http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/5689

“Soft Jihad”, the infiltration of Islamic values, laws and customs by legal means into Western societies is, of course, less obtrusive and less headline-making than “explosions” of one sort or another.

But it is by far the most insidious and ultimately dangerous of the Jihads.

Sep 27, 2008 - 12:23 pm 5. Steynian 256 « Free Mark Steyn!:

[...] ROGER KIMBALL– “Yes, that’s right: “assimilation is a crime against humanity.” According, that [...]

Sep 27, 2008 - 3:41 pm 6. 11B40:

Greetings:

I recently read Samuel Huntigton’s “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” and I was amazed at how much of what he posited in 1996 has come to pass.

One of his contentions was that the Islamic civilization did not have a “core state” like the other major civilizations. It seems to me that Turkey has a European Union aspiration as Plan A and an Islamic core state aspiration as Plan B. As Plan A seems to be slipping out of Turkey’s grasp, Plan B gets geared up.

Plan Islam, however, is always and above all operational.

Sep 27, 2008 - 6:15 pm 7. Matthew:

Is there anything more absurd than a “moderate” religion? I have in my hands the law of Almighty God, but I am willing to compromise? Fanatics of false religions make much more sense than “moderates” of true religion.

Sep 28, 2008 - 11:03 am 8. Confronting a Mendacious Bully:

[...] heading. And the next day (9/27/08) when social critic Roger Kimball (of The New Criterion, and Pajamas Media) had a lengthy, favorable discussion of West’s 9/26/08 column, with the subject line title, “Oh [...]

Sep 28, 2008 - 12:09 pm 9. Yankee Doodle:

I have had more of a focus on how the Balkans are being used to gain an Islamist foothold in Europe — first with Bosnia-Herzegovina, now with Kosovo.

Soon, Albanian-Muslim majority areas in Montenegro and Macedonia will go, too, as both Senator McCain, the Republican candidate for President, and Senator Biden, the Democrat running-mate and foreign affairs expert of Senator Obama, are on the payroll of the same Albanian organized crime faction, which traffics in heroin from Afghanistan, arms, and women (mostly from Slavic countries) for forced prostitution. This Albanian cartel is tied in with Islamic extremists, including with Sheikh Osama bin Laden, and has a goal of establishing a “Greater Albania” — Islamist, and under the control of organized crime. I document all of this extensively in posts at my blog.

As I have pointed out, numerous countries in Western Europe are now developing Muslim enclaves, and the effect of Saudi and other influence is to radicalize Islam in those places, as has been done in the Balkans, making those places enclaves of militant Islamism and the most oppressive and barbaric forms of Islam. This trend is so advanced in France that there has been nationwide rioting there, and there are now enclaves which are no-go areas for French police.

Where this will eventually lead is to the Islamic Republic of France and the Islamic Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (assuming these countries don’t dissolve — the UK has some fissures showing) eventually being hostile to the United States, which, together with Russia and China, may find itself on the defensive, with Americans regretting US intervention against Serbia in the Balkans.

As we contemplate the changes in Western Europe, it is worth recalling that the UK and France are nuclear-armed permanent members of the UN Security Council.

This is not paranoia or inflammatory commentary — these are the facts.

Sep 28, 2008 - 4:29 pm 10. Peter Laverick:

Matthew

Bollocks

Sep 28, 2008 - 4:47 pm 11. meleager:

Matthew

True that.
Peter : Obvious moderate willing to submit

Sep 28, 2008 - 5:05 pm 12. ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK ……. | Atlas Shrugs:

Sep 28, 2008 - 5:07 pm 13. Tom G.:

Hehe…I hired a Turk w/ IT expertise – good guy and good at his work – weak in his history though…pride in his country, and aware of how we seek to destroy ourselves from within, but I don’t think he understands his own Islam as well as he might…interesting conversations as I explain Bush is not an Emperor in the sense Turks understand it. He has lots he can give back, but I think he has no idea of the dynamics…or does he? (-*

Sep 28, 2008 - 6:59 pm 14. Carter:

Mr. Kimball recognizes the presence of a sizeable and hostile alien population in Germany, he notices London “is a little less English” with every visit, and yet he never says anything about restricting immigration.

Sep 28, 2008 - 10:23 pm 15. Duke of Sharon:

I can think of one more difference between the U.S. and Europe as to why there may be less thuggary here–we have a codified right to bear arms which supports our codified right to speak. The steel toe (deadly force) attempting to silence an American’s protest may be met with a .40 hollowpoint. Not every time, put the posibility tends to reduce religious fervor to a more theoretical level. All rights are meaningless without the right to self defense.

Oct 1, 2008 - 11:05 am