Is Islam Compatible With Democracy? 4 страница

He sums up with the conclusion that “Islam is incompatible with democracy.” Yet in another essay, Amir Taheri wants Europeans to revive the Roman Empire[74]:

“North Africa, which has the most beautiful beaches of the Mediterranean, could become a kind of Florida for the old-age pensioners of western and northern Europe. In exchange, millions of young people could move north from the south to provide the labour force needed to keep the modern European economies going. (...) A judicious mix of wealth and technology from the north and manpower from the south could turn the Euro-Mediterranean region into the biggest and most prosperous economy the world has ever seen.”

This idea is called “Eurabia” and is already being implemented, as Bat Ye’or[75] can testify. And it wasn’t a very good idea. If he is correct that Islam is incompatible with democracy, what impact will it have on democracies if they get flooded with people who have an Islamic mentality? Amir Taheri is often brilliant in his writings about Islam, but in this case his ideas aren’t logically consistent.

According to the website Islam Online[76], “Islam is not a religion in the common, distorted meaning of the word, confining its scope only to the private life of man. By saying that it is a complete way of life, we mean that it caters for all the fields of human existence. In fact, Islam provides guidance for all walks of life - individual and social, material and moral, economic and political, legal and cultural, national and international.”

A common phrase is that Islam is Din wa Dawlah, religion and State. In 2005, after parliamentary elections, Younus Qanooni[77], a senior member of the Afghan Northern Alliance which helped the US overthrow the Taliban regime in 2001, stated that the country could never become a secular democracy. “Afghans will never agree on any secular or liberal system. Islam is the modern system and Afghanistan’s future is tied with Islam.” Yet Western soldiers are supposed to risk their lives, and Western taxpayers pay for, establishing just such a system.

This rather naï ve view of democracy is unfortunately the rule rather than the exception. In a memo, the US State Department[78] told its embassy in Cairo to launch a dialogue with religious groups because clashes with them would only incite more attacks against US interests. They also advised Washington to pressure the Egyptian government into allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to play a larger role in Egypt’s political landscape. This despite the fact that many of the worst terrorist groups today are offshoots of the MB. Dr. Ahmad Al-Rab’i[79], former Kuwaiti minister of education, warned that “The founders of the violent groups were raised on the Muslim Brotherhood, and those who worked with Bin Laden and Al-Qa’ida went out under the mantle of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Author Tarek Heggy, too, warns that: “The Brotherhood opposes the notion of a state based on democratic institutions, calling instead for an Islamic government based on the Shura (consultative assembly) system, veneration of the leader and the investiture of a Supreme Guide. In this, they are close to the model established by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran. (…) The Brotherhood calls for a constitutional and legal system based on the principles of Shari’a, including cruel corporal punishments in the penal code (stoning, lashing, cutting off the hands of thieves, etc.).”

Actually, the only place where there has been any movement toward a democratic Islam is in Denmark. Of all the Western nations, Denmark has mounted the strongest popular resistance against Islamisation. Syrian-born MP Naser Khader[80] has launched a network called Democratic Muslims. New members are required to sign a declaration that they oppose Sharia laws. “Freedom of speech is the breath of democracy - and if you take that away, then democracy dies, ” said Khader.

Mr. Khader appears to be sincere about these efforts. So, apparently, are his Muslim opponents, which is why he has received numerous threats against his life. A French documentary used a hidden camera[81] to capture an imam suggesting that Khader could attract suicide bombers if he became minister of integration affairs. The imam in question, Ahmed Akkari, later said he meant the comment as a joke.

The ideas behind the network are positive. They have defined the Ten Commandments of Democracy[82], among them:

1. We must all separate politics and religion, and we must never place religion above the laws of democracy.

2. We must all respect that all people have equal rights regardless of sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation or religious beliefs.

3. No person must ever incite to hatred, and we must never allow hatred to enter our hearts.

4. No person must ever use or encourage violence - no matter how frustrated or wronged we feel, or how just our cause.

5. We must all show respect for the freedom of expression, also of those with whom we disagree the most.

The problem is, only a small minority[83] of the members Democratic Muslims are actually Muslims. The vast majority are non-Muslim supporters.

In addition, Muslims in Denmark seem far more interested in exploiting the democratic system than in supporting it. According to the Copenhagen Post[84], Wallait Khan was elected councillor for the Liberal Party in Copenhagen, only to defect to join the Socialist People’s Party, which allowed them to establish a left-wing coalition. But Khan had also been on the campaign trail in Pakistan. Khan said six people had been elected in Pakistan despite their Danish residencies. “We Pakistanis in Europe have a competition between ourselves, ” he said. “We in Denmark compete with Pakistanis living in Norway and England about who holds most mayor posts.”

The European Council for Fatwa and Research, whose leader is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, are working on a Muslim Constitution for Europe[85] that will be above national legislation. According to Tina Magaard from the University of Aarhus, behind these ambitions “lies decades of work.” Islamic groups have for years aimed at establishing their control of the Muslim immigrant communities, and in some cases have won official recognition from government bodies. According to Magaard, “The Imams and Islamists consider the cooperation with the state institutions a transfer of power. Now it is them who rule.”

Even without Islam, a pure democracy with no restraints would not always be a good thing. For example, one could win the support of a majority of the people, largely by promising them access to other people’s money. Once in power, one could begin to dissolve whatever restraints exist in order to secure permanent re-election. In February 2007, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez[86] was granted the right to rule by presidential decree in his efforts to build a Socialist state, a move critics say propels Venezuela toward dictatorship. National Assembly President Cilia Flores applauded with the words “Fatherland, socialism or death, ” while hundreds of Chavez supporters outside waved signs reading “Socialism is democracy.”

Bruce Bawer[87], the author of the book While Europe Slept, noted that the title of world’s most democratic country was awarded to Sweden in 2006 by The Economist Intelligence Unit. According to Bawer, “For many observers, this is not only wrong - it’s staggeringly, outrageously misinformed. Though two-thirds of Swedes question whether Islam is compatible with Western society, this issue is simply not open for public discussion.” To quote observer Jonathan Friedman, “no debate about immigration policies is possible” because Sweden’s “political class, ” which controls public debate, simply avoids the topic.

According to Bawer, the city of Stockholm “carried out a survey of ninth-grade boys in the predominantly Muslim suburb of Rinkeby. The survey showed that in the last year, 17% of the boys had forced someone to have sex, 31% had hurt someone so badly that the victim required medical care, and 24% had committed burglary or broken into a car. Sensational statistics - but in all of Sweden, they appear to have been published only in a daily newssheet that is distributed free on the subways. Sweden is the only major Western European country whose legislature contains not a single representative of a party critical of its immigration policies.”

Members of the small party, the Sweden Democrats, are critical of the country’s extremely open immigration policies. Seldom can they hold meetings without being hassled or physically attacked. This has happened regularly for years with the tacit approval of the Swedish elites. Swedish newspaper Expressen warned against the “low-intensity terrorism” conducted by extreme Leftists and neo-Nazis.

Political scientist Peter Esaiasson has done research into every election movement in Sweden since 1866. According to him, the organised attempts at disrupting meetings during the 2006 elections have no parallels in modern history.

Added to this censorship on a national level, important decisions are made by unelected EU bureaucrats. If democracy is supposed to mean that citizens vote to decide their future, then Sweden is not a democracy; it is a multicultural dictatorship. One can vote for a variety of parties, but all of them support the same multiculturalism and mass immigration. Ordinary Swedes have little influence over their own future, and freedom of speech is non-existent. But the country still has the formal aspects of democracy: regular multiparty elections take place. This should remind us once again that elections do not automatically lead to a free society.

Famed historian Bernard Lewis[88], who reputedly had an important influence on the American policy to bring “democracy” to Iraq, in 2007 told The Jerusalem Post that Islam could soon be the dominant force[89] in Europe. He ironically warned that this Islamisation could be assisted by “immigration and democracy.”

In Vienna, Austria[90] in December 2006, Santa Claus was removed from kindergartens. Municipal officials insisted that the sight of a strange bearded figure at the door would evoke fear in kids, but many observers accused them of kowtowing to a growing Muslim population.

The Battle of Vienna in 1683, where the Ottoman Turks were beaten by a force led by King Jan III Sobieski of Poland, was the last time Muslims managed to threaten the West in traditional warfare. They gradually fell further and further behind due to their technological ineptness, which again is caused by their hostility towards freethinking as the basis of science. This suppression of curiosity is their Achilles’ heel. Perhaps they have finally found ours. This time they are already inside Vienna.

In the end, Muslims have been more successful at peacefully infiltrating the democratic West than they ever were in challenging the pre-democratic West in open warfare.

Ibn Warraq warns that the Islamists view our open society as a means for infiltrating Western societies. He fears that we risk ending up with an Islamisation of democracy instead of a democratisation of Islam.

Walid al-Kubaisi[91], a Norwegian of Iraqi origins and a critic of sharia supporters, believes Yusuf al-Qaradawi is more dangerous than terrorist leader Osama bin Laden:

“In Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood discovered a unique opportunity: Democracy. The democratic system leaves room for freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and finances religious communities and religious organisations. This has been utilised by the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate the Muslim communities, recruit members and build the Islamist networks that have become so visible lately.” Whereas bin Laden uses bombs, al-Qaradawi exploits democracy as a Trojan horse. The Brotherhood gets their activities financed from Germany, England etc. They gain recognition and infiltrate the democratic system.

Patrick Poole[92] describes the discussion of a document entitled “The Project”, which so far has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities. It was only through the work of an intrepid Swiss journalist, Sylvain Besson, that information regarding The Project was finally been made public. It was found in a raid of a villa in Campione, Switzerland on November 7, 2001.

Included in the documents seized was a fourteen-page plan dated December 1, 1982, outlined a twelve-point strategy for a flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the “cultural invasion” of the West. Among the strategies recommended were the following:

· involving ideologically committed Muslims throughout institutions on all levels in the West;

· including government, NGOs, private organisations;

· utilising existing Western institutions until they can be put into service of Islam; and

· instituting alliances with Western “progressive” organisations that share similar goals.

Sylvain Besson and Scott Burgess provide extensive comparisons between Qaradawi’s publication, Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase from 1990, and The Project. They note striking similarities between the two documents.

Meanwhile, Yusuf al-Qaradawi has been hailed as a “moderate” by people such as London’s mayor Ken Livingstone, who welcomed him to a conference in Britain. This despite the fact that Qaradawi has supported suicide bombers, brags about how Islam will conquer Europe and was the most important figure in whipping up hatred during the Danish Cartoon Jihad in 2006. The current official leader of the international Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammad Mahdi Akef, has declared that he has “complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America.”

According to Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen, the Brotherhood and its offspring organisations employ the Flexibility strategy:

“This strategy calls for a minority group of Muslims to use all ‘legal’ means to infiltrate majority-dominated, non-Muslim secular and religious institutions, starting with its universities. As a result, ‘Islamised’ Muslim and non-Muslim university graduates enter the nation’s workforce, including its government and civil service sectors, where they are poised to subvert law enforcement agencies, intelligence communities, military branches, foreign services, and financial institutions.”

Lorenzo Vidino writes about The Muslim Brotherhood’s Conquest of Europe: “Since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathisers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organised network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organisations.” According to Vidino, “The ultimate irony is that Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna dreamed of spreading Islamism throughout Egypt and the Muslim world. He would have never dreamed that his vision might also become a reality in Europe.”

Douglas Farah has noted the largely successful efforts by Islamic groups in the West to buy large amounts of real estate. “We do not have a plan. They do. History shows that those that plan, anticipate and have a coherent strategy usually win. We are not winning.”

In early 2006[93], a tiny Norwegian Christian newspaper, Magazinet, had reprinted the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. After the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, indirectly triggered attacks on the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Syria in February that year by whipping up anger in Arab television, Norway’s Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion Bjarne Hå kon Hanssen called a press conference at a government office building in Oslo. There Velbjø rn Selbekk, the editor of Magazinet, issued an abject apology for reprinting the cartoons. At his side, accepting his act of contrition and asking that all threats now be withdrawn, was Muhammad Hamdan, the then-head of Norway’s Islamic Council. As author Bruce Bawer[94] wrote, it was exactly like a scene from a sharia court.

Trond Giske, Minister of Culture and Church Affairs, met with Mr. Muhammad Hamdan a few months later and announced that government subsidies for the Islamic Council would be raised from 60, 000 kroner a year to half a million. That’s more than a 700% increase in a single year, and was undoubtedly viewed by Muslims as jizya. Thus it was in reality a formal recognition by Norwegian authorities that the country was now under Islamic rule.

Later in 2006, Minister Bjarne Hå kon Hanssen from the Labour Party called for increased immigration to Norway from Pakistan because this would be “good for the economy.” The majority of Muslims in Norway voted for the Labour Party in 2005, and 83% for Leftist parties in general. Samira Munir[95], a member of the city council in the capital city of Oslo, warned that there was widespread cooperation between the Socialist parties and Muslim communities during that year’s elections. “The heads of families and the mosques would decide how entire groups of immigrants would vote. They made deals such as ‘How much money will we get if we get our people to vote for you?, ’ and the deals were always made with the Socialist parties.”

Norway is an unusually naï ve nation. While it may not be the best yardstick to measure Islamic infiltration, the challenges Norway faces can be found in many democratic countries, and not just Western ones.

Perhaps the greatest idea of the Leftist factions after the Cold War was to re-invent themselves as Multicultural parties and begin to import voters[96] from abroad. There is nothing new about buying “clients” by promising them access to other people’s money. However, this defect becomes more dangerous when combined with massive immigration. In Europe, Muslim immigration may turn democracy into a self-defeating system that will eventually break down because native Europeans no longer believe that it serves their interests.

The Turkish government tried to influence the Dutch general elections in 2006 through e-mails sent to thousands of ethnic Turks in the Netherlands. According to Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal[97], “This has created a situation where the immigrants in Western democracies become Trojan horses of foreign nationalism and religious fanaticism.”

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Sikh, in 2007 stated that minorities, particularly Muslims, must have the first claim on resources so that the benefits of India’s economic development would reach them equitably. He failed to state that this was probably also for the electoral benefit of his own Congress Party, which has been courting Muslims in India since the time of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru. Muslims are lagging behind non-Muslims in economic development everywhere, from Western Europe to Malaysia, which strongly indicates that their backwardness has something do with Islamic culture.

Muslims in India can partially follow sharia law[98], with official recognition. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board has gone to the High Court to lower the legal age of marriage[99], and insists that in family matters India’s Muslims should be subject only to sharia. In January 2007, the government informed the Supreme Court that Muslims under their personal law have a right to establish sharia courts to settle disputes between two people and that fatwas issued by these courts are not in conflict with the Indian justice system.

Scholar K.S. Lal[100] analyzed Indian demography for the period between 1000-1525. Lal estimates that the numbers of Hindus who perished as a result of these campaigns was approximately 80 million.

According to historian N.S. Rajaram[101], “India, where the wounds inflicted by centuries of Islamic rule on a large segment of the Indian intelligentsia and the political class have been so debilitating that they continue to live in a state of constant fear. (...) Political freedom in India has not brought about spiritual freedom; politicians and the intelligentsia still act like oppressed colonial subjects when asked to face the truth about their country’s Islamic past.”

In Foreign Affairs[102] magazine, F. Gregory Gause III, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont claims that there is no evidence that democracy reduces terrorism, and points out the number of terrorist incidents in India:

“It is fair to assume that groups based in Pakistan carried out a number of those attacks, particularly in Kashmir, but clearly not all the perpetrators were foreigners. A significant number of terrorist events in India took place far from Kashmir, reflecting other local grievances against the central government.”

Despite the fact that Muslims have massacred tens of millions of non-Muslims in India for more than one thousand years, Muslims in the Republic of India don’t merely have equal rights with non-Muslims, they have special rights and can follow sharia for family matters in what is supposedly a secular country. India was also one of the first countries to ban Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his death sentence in 1989, thus restricting the freedom of speech for almost one billion non-Muslims out of fear of Muslim violence.

Former Prime Minister of Thailand Thaksin Shinawatra was controversial for several reasons, but there is no doubt that his clash with the Islamic Jihad in Thailand’s south greatly contributed to his removal through a military coup in 2006. Most of Thailand’s inhabitants are Buddhists, but the southern provinces close to Malaysia have Muslim majorities, where a Muslim insurgency has prompted many Buddhists to flee their homes. Monks have been beheaded and teachers slain. Almost one thousand public schools[103] have been closed in the south due to a wave of arson attacks against schools and the murders of dozens of teachers.

A leaflet[104] which was distributed in the region stated that “This land must be liberated and ruled by Islamic Law. This land does not belong to Thailand, this is a land of war that is no different from Palestine and Afghanistan... Muslims and non-believers have to live separately.”

Chulanont Surayud, Thai military officer, interim Prime Minister and head of a military junta that had overthrown the elected government in the fall of 2006, publicly apologised[105] for the former government’s hard-line policies and said that he would urge the limited use of Islamic law in the south, especially over family affairs.

Judging from the experiences of India, there is little reason to believe that granting limited sharia to Muslims would end violence against non-Muslims. Most likely, the Buddhists of southern Thailand[106] will end up being refugees in their own country, just like the Hindus of Kashmir, while their government appeases Muslims with sharia.

Certain observers mistakenly claim that “once Muslims become a majority, we will get sharia through elections.” On the contrary, sharia will arrive much sooner. Observe that relatively small percentages of Muslims can squeeze concessions out of democracies. Sharia has already been partially implemented in India, Thailand, the Philippines, and Britain. Islam’s inherent aggressiveness elicits appeasement from non-Muslims in order to avoid bringing down the democratic system through civil war.

In Policy Review, Lee Harris reviews Andrew G. Bostom’s excellent book The Legacy of Jihad. Harris warns against those who dismiss the idea that Jihad constitutes a serious Islamic threat to the West because we are technologically superior to the Islamic world:

“The jihadists are not interested in winning in our sense of the word. They can succeed simply by making the present world order unworkable, by creating conditions in which politics-as-usual is no longer an option, forcing upon the West the option either of giving in to their demands or descending into anarchy and chaos. It is tempting to call this approach the crash of civilisation.”

Accordingly, says Harris, “In the crash-of-civilisation paradigm - contrary to Clausewitzian warfare - the enemy of a particular established order does not need to match it in organisational strength and effectiveness. It needs only to make the established order reluctant to use its great strength out of the understandable fear that by plunging into civil war it will itself be jeopardised. This fear of anarchy - the ultimate fear for those who embrace the politics of reason - can be used to paralyze the political process to the point at which the established order is helpless to control events through normal political channels and power is no longer in the hands of the establishment but lies perilously in the streets.”

In September 2006, French high-school philosophy teacher Robert Redeker published an op-ed article stating that unlike Christianity and Judaism, “Islam is a religion that, in its own sacred text, as well as in its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred.” For the crime of stating that Islam was violent, Redeker received numerous death threats and had to go into hiding with his family and give up his teaching profession.

According to writer Christian Delacampagne[107], “large sectors of the French intellectual and political establishment have carved out an exception to this hard-won tradition of open discussion: when it comes to Islam (as opposed to Christianity or Judaism), freedom of speech must respect definite limits.”

Seyran Ates, who for a generation had endured threats from Turkish men in Germany, including being shot and badly wounded, as she represented the wives who accused them of abuse, had to give up her Berlin law practice because it had become too dangerous. Italian conservative MP Daniela Santanche has received death threats over her opposition to the Islamic veil. In Spain, author Gustavo de Arí stegui[108], Foreign Affairs Spokesman for Spain’s conservative Partido Popular, has received police protection after being branded an enemy of Islam.

With Muslim immigration, a culture of threats, legal and social harassment as well as physical intimidation is gradually spreading in non-Muslim countries. What Muslims cannot yet achieve by the sword, they will try to achieve by lawyers backed by Arab oil money. The fear of an expensive court battle is an effective weapon that can be used to silence critics of Islam.

In Canada, Mark Harding[109] was sentenced to 340 hours of community service - that is, indoctrination - under the direction of Mohammad Ashraf, general secretary of the Islamic Society of North America in Mississauga, Ontario. Judge Sidney B. Linden’s 1998 decision was based on Canada’s hate-crimes law. The judge determined Harding was guilty of “false allegations about the adherents of Islam calculated to arouse fear and hatred of them in all non-Muslim people.”

Harding’s crime was to distribute pamphlets outside a public high school. His materials listed atrocities committed by Muslims in foreign lands. The pamphlet said: “The Muslims who commit these crimes are no different than the Muslim believers living here” and that “Toronto is definitely on their hit list.”

In 2006, Canadian police arrested a group of Muslim men suspected of planning terror attacks against various targets including the Toronto subway. An intelligence study warned that a “high percentage” of Canadian Muslims involved in extremist activities were born in Canada.

Harding’s case demonstrates that it is now a criminal act in several Western nations to tell the truth about the dangers posed by Muslim immigration. Hate speech laws amount to “sharia lite”: they are used to silence infidels such as Harding for criticising Islam, which again corresponds to the workings of sharia. The sharia lite of political correctness is thus paving the way for the gradual implementation of full sharia in the West.

Hate crime legislation, too, is legalised political correctness and constitutes a radical departure from the ideal of equality before the law. You will be punished differently for assaulting a black Muslim than for the same crime against a white Christian, a Hindu woman or a Jewish man etc. Some would argue that this already happens in real life. However, the point here is that this de facto inequality has now become de jure. This formal change constitutes a gross perversion of justice. It mirrors Islamic law, which mandates different punishments for the same crime, depending upon the religious background and the sex of both the perpetrator and the victim.

Islam has always valued individual life inequitably. But now there is a creeping tendency within the West toward the same view. In the case of assault or murder, an additional sentence is added if the act is viewed as a “hate crime.”

Murder is murder, and all human life is to be valued equally. However, according to multiculturalism we are required to treat all cultures and religions as equally valid, which they obviously are not. This perversion of reality indicates that the Western system of justice is regressing. As it does so, justice becomes vulnerable to exploitation and infiltration by Islamic law.

Zachariah Anani, a former jihadist and a convert to Christianity, gave a lecture in Windsor, Ontario on “the dangers of radical extremism.” Muslim interest groups, including CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) Canada, charged him with “spreading hatred in the community.” Former Muslim Walid Shoebat[110] believes that silencing Anani is a dangerous trend with far-reaching implications for the future of Canadian and eventually US freedoms.