From: "Losing to Islamism"

An interview with Abigail R. Esman, an award-winning author-journalist and columnist in World Defense Review, whose work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Salon.com, Esquire, Vogue, Town & Country, The Christian Science Monitor, The New Republic and many others. She is currently working on a book about how Islamism is winning over democracy.

Among the many topics discussed is the problem of estranged and radicalized youth which are found in all modern societies, including our own. Adding Islam and Jihad to the mix creates an added lethality:

FP: Can you talk a bit about the impact that Muslim immigration is having on Europe?


Esman: That's a sweeping question - and maybe no longer even relevant in all cases. I can really only speak for Holland and Belgium, though, where I would say that immigration itself is far less of a problem than is integration: where honor killings take place in immigrant communities, for instance, Europeans are not affected (though I wish they'd take it upon themselves as if they were). What does affect Europe is the radicalization of the second- and third-generation -- the ones who were born and raised here.


FP: Tell us about how the second -- and third-generation - of Muslims, who were born and raised in Holland and Belgium, are radicalized. Why does this process occur and why do these societies allow it? What can be done about it?


Esman: We could probably talk about this for hours, but I'll try to condense my thoughts on the subject as best I can.  Because the thing to bear in mind is that there is no single reason for any of it. 


Recently, I gave a talk at the University of Leiden, where I was asked a similar question. And what struck me was that the people I spoke to there seemed to be looking for a kind of magic bullet, a swift program that could or would change the course of Muslim radicalism in the Netherlands.  But there is no magic bullet -- just as there is no single cause. It's more a kind of intermingling of various potent poisons in a single cauldron, and as such, takes more than one simple spell to break it. 


So how are they radicalized? You have a combination of adolescent rebellion and adolescent rage, you have children and teenagers who are growing up in violent homes, in a culture where what they learn is that the way to solve problems or exert your will or express your needs is through violence, not words.  Add to that radical imams in local mosques that are often funded by the Saudis, radical Islamicist propaganda that circulates in various Islamic "Sunday schools," satellite dishes feeding propaganda from the Arab world into their homes -- and these shows are turned on all day most days, especially in homes where the parents have not yet learned to speak or understand Dutch.


And then you have the Internet, and web fora, and misinformation, and the kinds of elements that can contribute to any sort of immersion in a trend, a cult, a way of life.  But unlike dressing Punk or Gothic, becoming a radicalized Muslim overtakes your entire way of life: you are reading the Koran and listening to your radical peers and hearing the words of your heroes, you are mentored. And every step into that world leads to another, further and further in.


Why do the societies allow it? In some ways, I think for the same reasons that it happened to begin with: they just close their eyes. They don't want to see. They don't want to talk about things that are politically incorrect, or that indicate a form of intolerance.  Holland has especially been traumatized by the Holocaust. Their guilt is tremendous.  So they hesitate to discriminate against a religious group, or do anything that even gives the appearance of doing so.

Read it all.

The same process, cause and effect, connected with Islam is at work here in the United States. Change the name from Islam to Atzlan or Hip Hop generation, or anything to do with disaffected, radicalized youth, the result will be the same. Thus, the commonality is the disaffection, the anger, and raging hormones of youth that are not constructively channeled.

However, who's to say whether the channeling is constructive as "one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist." Oh, but that's "relativistic thinking."

Moving to down under where Islamism is Rolling Over Australia.

Before discussing the effect of Islam on Australia, author Sharon Lapkin adds a few bits of information about Europe:

And so it unfolds. This war. Based on cultural infiltration rather than traditional warfare, the Islamists exploit the democratic spaces within our society and insert their religious dogma via our own societal modes. And when Islam oversteps and the ignorant Westerners protest, Islam screams, “Racism, Xenophobia”, and the gatekeepers of Western culture rollover and go back to sleep.

In France – where in some parts of the country the Islamic population has increased to 20 or 30 per cent – the inequities of Islam are altering the social landscape of a country steeped in age-old Christian traditions. Recently, Fallaci says, a “Catholic farmer was ordered to remove the cross” he kept in his own cornfield, because “the sight of that religious symbol caused tension with the Muslims.” And at the Collége Edgard Quinet, where 95 per cent of students are Muslim, a “fifteen year-old girl was savagely beaten by her classmates and thrown into a garbage-bin because she was wearing blue jeans.” The school Principal rescued the girl as her fellow students were about to set fire to her. He was stabbed twice.

And then she adds:

"In Australia, where 300,000 Muslims live within a melting pot of 20 million citizens, the warning bells out to be waking the cultural gatekeepers from their slumber. But, here too, they are weeping for the Muslims...Late in 2005, ten Muslim men were arrested by authorities on alleged terrorism offences. Despite the nature of the crimes the men were allegedly planning to commit against Australian civilians, two of the country’s largest newspapers reported sympathetically. The men, they claimed, were in “solitary confinement, dressed in ‘Guantanamo Bay orange’ and banned from touching loved ones.”

The Sydney Morning Herald was weeping so hard for the alleged terrorists that in a story entitled “Terror Suspects: Christmas in Solitary” it reported the men were near breaking point because the conditions were hard, and the Muslim prisoners were not permitted to spend Christmas with their families. The Australian media machine stretched Islam all the way to a nativity scene in order to appease it.

It seems that turning every incident into Islamophobia or discrimination against Muslims is a useful tool!

In 2000, gangs of Lebanese Muslims in Sydney hunted down young Australian girls on the basis of their ethnicity and raped and tortured them while calling them “sluts” and “Aussie pigs”. One of the convicted rapists, Bilal Skaf, sent a text message on his mobile phone, “When you are feeling down ... bash a Christian or Catholic and lift up.” Despite this, the mainstream media painted the crimes as run-of-the-mill rapes and deleted ethnicity from the crime scene. When the Premier of NSW publicly acknowledged the ethnic background of the rapists, the politically correct thundered its disdain.

Asylum and refugee status has been granted to members of known terrorist groups, books sold in Islamic bookshops spouting jihadism "are not in breach of the country's anti-terror laws, the Commonwealth Criminal code or the NSW Crimes Act of 1900.

Role reversal is planted in the minds of the public: rapists are victims, rape victims are the aggressors; the police are "rapists" who based young boys, and politicians were conspiring against to turn Muslims into drug addicts...complete idiocy!

The sixteeth century-invader Hernán Cortés was successful in his invasion because the Aztecs did not understand the Conquistadores and did not see the danger much in the same way that the West has not been able to see the danger to them caused by Islam: That does not make it any less real.

There’s an old saying that “Democracy, like love, can survive almost anything except neglect and indifference. And the West, it appears, is determined to sleep through the invasion. Just as in Europe, Australia is appeasing and ignoring. It is censoring its own freedoms and democratic principles to assuage Islamic cultural sensitivities. It is turning a blind eye to Islamic racism against Australian citizens and succumbing to the bullying tactics of those who attempt to frighten anyone who dares to name it.

We in America are beginning "to see" the dangers to us by a variety of stealth invaders. Let's hope that we take action sooner rather than later.