An Unlikely and Unwitting Source of Encouraging Good News

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a reposting of an article we just posted last week. Blogger did a major overhaul, and this article was the only one lost in the process.

IN AN ARTICLE entitled Europe's Rising Islamophobia, I found good news for counterjihadists in a most unlikely place. The article details the "frightening rise" of Islamophobia in Europe. Here's an example from the article:

In the Netherlands, previously renowned for its tolerance, Wilders’s party more than doubled its numbers last year, to 16 percent of the electorate, on a platform to stop the “Islamization of the Netherlands.” The party pledged to halt immigration from “Muslim countries,” to tax women wearing headscarves and to ban the Koran as well as the construction of mosques...Over the past two years [Wilders] has consistently polled as one of the country’s most popular politicians, despite being put on trial on charges of inciting hatred against Muslims (the case is ongoing).

Of course, all this "Islamophobia" must be simply racism. Or it must be coming out of the blue, motivated by who-knows-what nefarious intentions. Or could the popular support of Geert Wilders be based on what people are discovering about Islam's prime directive? Here's another excerpt from the article:

In both countries [Denmark and the Netherlands] the governments have caved in to Islamophobes by dramatically tightening immigration requirements for non-Westerners. The once proudly open-minded Denmark now has the strictest such laws in Europe. “I’m certain that soon many other countries will copy us,” boasted the People’s Party after the November passage of a law it co-wrote. The opposition Social Democrats, though fiercely split on the issue, ended up backing the bill as well. Their rationale: to stop forced marriages and protect ethnic minority women from family pressure, as if immigration restrictions would accomplish either. All such talk from centrist parties does is perpetuate prejudices: in this case, that forced marriage is the rule in Muslim European families, which is simply not true.

I love that last line. Yes, forced marriages are not the rule in Muslim European families. Maybe because it is illegal. Here's more good news from the article:

Even in EU countries that don’t have growing anti-Muslim parties, Islamophobic sentiment is potent. In Germany, for example, one survey after another attests to widening hostility directed at the Muslim population and Islam in general. One recent study showed 58 percent of Germans in favor of restricting religious freedom for Muslims. This included more than 75 percent of those in eastern Germany, where the Muslim population is negligible. Thirty-seven percent of Germans feel the Federal Republic would be better off “without Islam.” The surveys underscore the steady rise of these sentiments since 2004, with a significant jump from 2009 to 2010. They also show that while attitudes are particularly strong in traditional right-wing milieus, they have also become more pronounced in the middle and upper classes and among Germans with higher education. They also reveal that anti-Muslim feelings are far stronger than homophobia, classic racism, sexism or anti-Semitism — the latter long the measure for illiberal thinking in Germany.

Hmmm. This "Islamophobia" seems to be different than racism, and it is becoming more pronounced among people with higher education. Could it be this is not an irrational fear (phobia) but an educated reaction to the facts? Anyone who reads Islamic doctrine will find nothing for non-Muslims to like, and much that we will strongly and naturally dislike. Read more about that here. And now, more excerpts:

Others include French writer and activist Bernard-Henri Levy (“the veil is an invitation to rape”), British novelist and former New Statesman editor Martin Amis, Dutch intellectual and Labor Party member Paul Scheffer, and in Germany such figures as Ralph Giordano, Necla Kelek, Alice Schwarzer and Henryk Broder, all leftists or former leftists of one stripe or another. Schwarzer, for example, is the mother of Germany’s feminist movement, and with her flagship quarterly EMMA she has fought for women’s liberation since the early 1970s. She denounces Islam as misogynistic and misanthropic, accusing it — and those who defend it — of betraying the universality of human rights. For her, and for many other critics of Islam, “tolerating” the religion means tolerating forced marriages, honor killings, burqas, female genital mutilation and polygamy... Where the new right parties aren’t surging, centrist politicians take on much of the anti-Muslim baggage. It wasn’t, for example, right-wingers who passed the burqa bans in France and Belgium but liberal and mainstream conservative parties, backed by the left. In France, some Socialists and Communists joined President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling party in voting for the recent ban of the full veil in public, a law proposed by a Communist mayor from southern France (the Greens abstained, fearful of the repercussions of a no vote). Polls showed 80 percent of French voters in favor of the ban. In Germany the issue burst into the political sphere only last year, with the publication of “Germany Does Away With Itself” by Thilo Sarrazin, a Social Democrat, an economist on the board of Germany’s Central Bank and a former Berlin councilman. In it he argues that Muslims are “unwilling” and “unable” to integrate; that Muslim immigrants sponge off the welfare systems; that because of their higher birthrate they will soon outnumber indigenous Germans; and that immigration (from the wrong parts of the world) undermines Germany’s “cultural identity” and “national character.” He writes, “I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and great grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or that Turkish or Arabic will be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin.” Though Sarrazin’s book certainly wasn’t the first anti-Muslim tract published in Germany, it was the first by a mainstream politician. It unexpectedly surged to the top of the bestseller list, where it remains today. [Publicity and controversy about his book] made the sullen, gray-haired economist Germany’s favorite talk-show guest and a multimillionaire... The Sarrazin affair illustrated just how deep-seated Islamophobia has become in Germany. At first, the country’s leading politicians responded by roundly condemning the author. But once polls emerged showing that every party’s constituency believed that Sarrazin “gets some things right,” many critics backed off. The Social Democrats balked at expelling him (an investigation is under way), and party members as esteemed as former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, one of the fathers of the Federal Republic, praised Sarrazin’s candor. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Christian Democrat, said “the multiculturalism experiment” has “failed,” and the leader of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union said it was high time to stop immigration from alien cultures. Although Germany’s Left Party condemned the Sarrazin theses, one poll showed that 29 percent of the party’s voters would be sympathetic to a Sarrazin-led party, the highest result of all the parties (Left Party voters are overwhelmingly eastern German, secular and consider themselves socialists).

As orthodox Islam escalates its attempts to Islamize the West, those who want freedom are rising to meet the challenge. This is good news indeed. Thanks to grassroots efforts all over the world, freedom-loving people are finding ways to slow down, stop, and even reverse Islam's relentless encroachment.