Muslim Immigration

Bernard Lewis as an Academic Ethnic Activist

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In doing some research on Geert Wilders, I came across a recent article by Andrew G. Bostrom favorably describing Bernard Lewis’s views of Islam (“Geert Wilders and the Rise of Islamic Political Correctness,” Dec. 8, 2010). Bernard Lewis is the best known academic expert on the Muslim world, so his views carry quite a bit of weight. Bostrom quotes a 1954 essay of Lewis as follows:

I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition… There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law…For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is better than anarchy,” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.” Read more

Letter from Sweden

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Editor’s note: This was submitted as a comment but I thought it was of general interest and would get more visibility as a blog post. It is slightly edited from the original.

In Sweden the arguments from the elites are very similar.  Our elites claim that “structural racism” in the Swedish culture is a deep problem in our society.  At the same time our elite argue that Swedish culture and the Swedish people are social construction.

A very common argument is that “Swedish culture is the sum of all cultures”.  Often, our elite begin a debate with the rhetorical question: “Who is a Swede” when they argue for multiculturalism.   What they want to do is to tell us that we as Swedes do not exist. We, as Swedes can only exist when we discriminate against immigrants. This kind of argument was easy for the nationalist Swedish Democrats (SD) to reject. They just say, we exist as a people and as a people we have the right to decide who and how many people can come here to Sweden moreover, they should adopt our values.   In one debate, Congressman (SD) Matthias Karlsson just said “If we as a people do not exist, how can the Kurdish people exist, and how can you claim identity politics for them”. The journalist and his political opponent just gasp. Read more

Geert Wilders and the Growing Jewish Influence in Dutch politics

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The rise of Geert Wilders and the new Dutch government

The Dutchman Geert Wilders is a break-away parliamentarian from the Liberal Party who founded his own Freedom Party in 2004. Since his youth he has developed an emotional bond with the Jewish state and has visited Israel at least more than 40 times. As a youngster he went there to work in the Kibbutz, a socialist experiment of collective farming, and had an abortive relationship with a Jewish girl. His second wife is the Jewish-Hungarian diplomat Krisztina Marfaimarried.

The reason for his breakaway from the Liberal Party was their point of view about immigration in general and Muslims in particular. Wilders’ concern for Muslim immigration is because he believes that Israel and the West are confronted by the same enemy. He recently declared in an interview for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot that the Palestinians are not a puny guerrilla force fighting a last stand against dispossession by the settler movement backed by the Israeli military juggernaut. They are the first line of defense of the Western world:

The Palestinians believe – and this is the nature of Islam – that Israel is their country and that they are fighting the non-Muslims in the West through it. The struggle against Israel is a struggle against us. We are Israel. The reason Dutch parents can sleep calmly without having to worry about their kids is that Israeli parents stay awake at night because their children are in the army. This doesn’t mean Israel cannot be criticized, but I’m not ashamed to fight for Israel. Read more

Recent Jewish and Muslim pro-immigration activism

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Just in case there remained any doubt, non-White groups are leading the charge on legalizing the illegals and raising even further the numbers of legal immigrants. The latest things I’ve come across (in addition to Newsweek’s predictable puff piece on Rep. Luis Gutierrez (Dem, IL) “the most passionate, tireless, and nettlesome voice in Congress on immigration matters”) is a grant from the Ford Foundation to the American Jewish Committee:

The Ford Foundation has awarded a grant of $500,000, the second in two years, to support AJC programs to strengthen intergroup relations in the United States and mobilize for comprehensive immigration reform. Read more

Courting the Jews on the European “Far Right”

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The Guardian’s definition of “far right”, and mine, differ considerably, which is the reason why I have not rushed to its website to read a two-page article published a few of days ago about “the threat of the far right in Europe” which, I am told, made no mention of the BNP or the state of race relations in Britain.

Guardian caption: A Roma family leaves a camp in northern France. Far-right groups across Europe are nurturing an anti-immigrant backlash.

The Financial Times simultaneously published a similar one-page survey, but this included a brief post-script item about the failure of the BNP to mobilise the full potential of anti-immigration sentiment persisting amongst the British electorate. It begins as follows:

In a pub garden in Birkenhead, a blighted post-industrial suburb in England’s north-west, Nick Griffin told the Financial Times that his party had a “once in a lifetime” chance to escape its white supremacist roots and emerge as an alternative for millions scorned by the London elite.

Less than 18 months later – following this year’s disastrous national election campaign, a savage internal power struggle and a court battle with the country’s equality watchdog that threatens to bankrupt the party – his dream is over.

The impression I have gained in recent years is that the only “far right” parties in Europe who have been able (allowed) to flutter near to the flame of power are those that have been able to convince the Establishment, the media and Jewry that they are most definitely not anti-Jewish, not “racist”, not against all coloured immigration (but only against the immigration of Muslims!) and not against the multi-racial society (just so long as it doesn’t include Muslims!) The Jobbik Party in Hungary may be the only notable exception to this. Read more

Geert Wilders’ Unrequited Love

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Geert Wilders loves Israel. He lived there for two years in his youth and sees it as a bastion of the West in a sea of Muslim barbarism: For example:

“If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next. Thus, Jerusalem is the main front protecting the West. It is not a conflict over territory but rather an ideological battle, between the mentality of the liberated West and the ideology of Islamic barbarism. There has been an independent Palestinian state since 1946, and it is the kingdom of Jordan.” He called on the Dutch government to refer to Jordan as Palestine and move its embassy to Jerusalem.

Wilders also includes Judaism as part of the European cultural tradition, expressing his desire that “the European Judaeo-Christian tradition to be formally recognised as the dominating culture.”

Wilders also rejects certain elements of the right that are particularly offensive to Jews:

‘My allies are not Le Pen or Haider,’ he emphasises. ‘We’ll never join up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I’m very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.’ Dutch iconoclasm, Scandinavian insistence on free expression, the right to provoke are what drive him, he says.

One would think then that Wilders would be popular among Jews, but he is not. It’s one thing to support Israel, but the problem is that he has the outlandish idea that Europe should be for Europeans and that immigration from Muslim countries should be halted.  Read more