Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Shari’a law in Europe

"Allah's Socialists," my latest article, was published today in FrontPage Magazine.

For those people who think I'm exaggerating the worrisome situation in Europe, I'd remind them that the examples of appeasement that I cite do not come from your average Juan on the streets of Barcelona. The Dutch Justice Minister and Spanish Foreign Minister are pretty important people. Plus, I've been to Spain (among other European countries) about a dozen times since 1998. The majority of the people I talk to there couldn't agree more with Donner and Moratinos. Come to think of it, maybe I should have included a Juan or two in the piece.

Update: There are plenty more examples of politicans like Donner and Moratinos. Mark Steyn writes:

Kinky as this is, it has nothing on Fallaci’s next circle of cultural diversity – the weirdly masochistic pleasure European leaders get out of talking themselves down and talking Islam up. Beginning with the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at the 1983 “Hamburg Symposium for the Euro-Arab Dialogue”, Signora Fallaci rounds up a quarter-century’s worth of westerners who’ve insisted that everything you know was invented by Islam: Paper, medicine, sherbet, artichokes, on and on and on…

"Always clever, the Muslims. Always at the top. Always ingenious. In philosophy, in mathematics, in gastronomy, in literature, in architecture, in medicine, in music, in law, in hydraulics, in cooking. And always stupid, we westerners. Always inadequate, always inferior. Therefore obliged to thank some son of Allah who preceded us. Who enlightened us. Who acted as a schoolteacher guiding dimwitted pupils."

This, it seems to me, is the most valuable contribution of Oriana Fallaci’s work. I enjoy the don’t-eat-your-sexual-partner stuff as much as the next infidel, but the challenge presented by Islam is not that the cities of the western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers. If I had to choose, I’d rather Mohammed Atta was down river in Egypt hitting on the livestock than flying through the window of Manhattan skyscrapers. But he’s not. And one reason why westernized Muslims seem so confident is that Europeans like Herr Genscher, in positing a choice between a generalized “Islam” and “the west”, have inadvertently promoted a globalized pan-Islamism that’s become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

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