Every day, people send me the most worrisome and surreal newspaper accounts about Islamic gender and religious apartheid and the Islamification of Europe. To me, these clippings are prescient warnings; they describe patterns and the gathering storm. My informants live on five continents. Here’s a quick round-up of some of today’s clippings.
On June 5th, the GVB bus company in Amsterdam cancelled its annual Christmas party because too many of its workers do not celebrate Christian holidays. Employees union VTN were told that “the multicultural representation of the colleagues in the Christmas party is too one-sided.” Given budgetary restriction and multicultural sensibility, the union opted to gather their drivers together on a holiday all may celebrate, such as New Years.
Hopefully, national, secular, even pagan holidays will continue to be celebrated in Holland –but somehow, I rather doubt it.
Also on June 5th, Al-Qaeda threatened more attacks against anyone “who had dared publish the Mohammed cartoons.” The Danish Embassy was bombed in Pakistan for this reason and the Norwegian Embassy is next on the list. Al-Qaeda’s leaders in Afghanistan took responsibility for having attacked the Danish Embassy in Islamabad on June 2nd killing eight people and injuring 35.
In Bradford, England, a new campaign is underway to teach Muslim children to floss their teeth. What better way to do so than a campaign entitled: “Smile with the Prophet?” The Daily Mail journalist asks whether there is an “equivalent program tailored to the individual oral hygiene challenges faced by Anglicans, Catholics, Hindus, Sikhs, or Seventh Day Adventists?”
On June 3rd, eleven Danes were summoned to appear before the Jordanian public prosecutor on charges of “blasphemy” in connection with the publication of the Danish cartoons and related offenses. If they do not appear, the Jordanian prosecutor has told the Danish newspaper, Politiken, that Interpol will be informed and asked to arrest the Danes. Apparently, the cartoonist himself was accused of “violating Jordanian law (electronically, by means of the internet) which (law) prohibits the ridicule of a prophet.”
A creative use of international law, yes? By people who do not effectively prosecute honor murders or arranged marriage–and whose Pakistani brethren use fifteen child brides, between the ages of three and ten, to settle a tribal feud in which 19 people, including five women, were killed. The feud began over a dog. Enough–you may read about this HERE.
For my part–the rest is silence (only in terms of this post). I will leave the summing up to Dutchman Geert Wilders, who recently addressed the Danish Parliament. He described the incredible attempt on the part of various Dutch organizations to suppress his film Fitna. Wilders said:
“It became known in November of last year that I was working on a film about the Koran and Islam. From that day onwards the Netherlands – its politicians in particular – was in uproar. A prominent member of the Dutch Christian Democratic Party, the largest government party, said I was an evil person that should be stopped. An extreme left-wing group tried to stage a mass demonstration against me in Amsterdam. A spokesperson for the Dutch branch of the Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir cried out that the Netherlands was due for an attack. A Dutch Islamic organisation went to court trying to prevent Fitna from being shown, but fortunately did not get its way. Significantly, not a single Dutch broadcasting organisation had the courage to broadcast Fitna in its entirety.”
After the fifteen minute film was finally shown–riots broke out in various Muslim countries around the world. Wilders himself was accused of being a fascist and a racist–despite the fact that he strongly favors granting political asylum to those Muslims, such as homosexuals and women whose lives are threatened by various Islamic regimes.
Wilders notes that “wherever Islam arrives, decline sets in and elementary rights are threatened. Freedom and democracy lose ground as Islam advances…Some may ask, is the Netherlands still a free country? It is not free when the Minister of Foreign Affairs calls on a film-maker not to show a film. It is not free when a democratically chosen people’s representative runs the risk of being politically persecuted. It is not free when the Minister of Justice announces more stringent measures against blasphemy. It is not free when an opinion poll reveals that many citizens do not dare to speak out in public about Islam, immigration and similar issues. It is not free when a cartoonist is arrested by ten policemen for producing drawings.”
And, he concludes by saying: “I am afraid that the Netherlands is becoming less and less a country of freedom and increasingly a country of fear under the guise of tolerance. And I am convinced that this problem arises not only in the Netherlands, but in the whole of Europe, and indeed in the whole of the Western world.”
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