A Must Read New Report By Gatestones Institute: "Death of Democracy?- Part I"
Few Quotes From It:
"For many complex reasons, Europe is in an advanced state of decline. In recent years, several important studies of this condition have appeared, advancing a variety of reasons for it: Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, James Kirchik's The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, as well as Christopher Caldwell's ground-breaking 2010 study, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. Soeren Kern at Gatestone Institute has also been detailing the steady impact of immigration from Muslim regions on countries such as Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
It is clear that something serious is happening on the continent in which I live.
The threat is not restricted to Europe, but has a global dimension. Michael J. Abramowitz, President of Freedom House, writes in his introduction to the organization's 2018 report:
A quarter-century ago, at the end of the Cold War, it appeared that totalitarianism had at last been vanquished and liberal democracy had won the great ideological battle of the 20th century.
Today, it is democracy that finds itself battered and weakened. For the 12th consecutive year, according to Freedom in the World, countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains. States that a decade ago seemed like promising success stories—Turkey and Hungary, for example—are sliding into authoritarian rule."
"Certainly, Europe's current state of decline owes much to the widely recognized fact that Muslims are the first newcomers to Europe who, over several generations, are resistant to integrating into the societies of which they now form a part. This rejection of Europe's humanitarian, Judeo-Christian values applies, not just to the successive waves of refugees and economic migrants who have washed up on the shores of Greece, Italy and Spain since the start of the Syrian civil war, but to generations of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in the UK, North Africans in France, and Turkish "guest workers" in Germany.
A former Muslim extremist, Ed Husain, writes in his book, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, what I Saw Inside and why I Left:
The result of 25 years of multiculturalism has not been multicultural communities. It has been mono-cultural communities.... Islamic communities are segregated. Many Muslims want to live apart from mainstream British society; official government policy has helped them do so. I grew up without any white friends. My school was almost entirely Muslim. I had almost no direct experience of 'British life' or 'British institutions'. So it was easy for the extremists to say to me: 'You see? You're not part of British society. You never will be. You can only be part of an Islamic society.' The first part of what they said was true. I wasn't part of British society: nothing in my life overlapped with it."
"Countless polls and investigations reveal that refusal to integrate is no figment of the supposedly "Islamophobic" political "right". A 2006 poll carried out by ICM Research on behalf of the Sunday Telegraph, for example, presented worrying findings: 40% of British Muslims polled said they backed introducing shari'a law in parts of Britain, and only 41% opposed it, leaving another 20% unclear. Sadiq Khan, the Labour MP involved with the official task force set up after the July 2005 attacks, said the findings were "alarming". Since then, similar findings have shown that the younger generation of Muslims is more conservative, even radical, than their parents or grandparents:
Commenting on a major 2016 ICM poll of Muslim opinion, Trevor Phillips, who had been Britain's foremost advocate of multiculturalism, said that, with respect to the Muslim community, he had made a 180° turn:
"for a long time, I too thought that Europe's Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain's diverse identity landscape. I should have known better."
Finally, "Those are only one half of a more complicated and disturbing picture. While Muslims find it hard to abandon the prejudices, doctrines, and outright hatreds (for Jews, for example) that they have imported from their home countries -- or developed as young men and women while living in European states where they were born and raised -- vast numbers of non-Muslims, including politicians, church leaders, civil servants, policemen and women, and many well-meaning people bend over backwards to accommodate them and the demands they make on their host societies.
It would take a book to summarize all the episodes in which Western officialdom, notably in Europe, has abandoned its own historical values in order to protect Islam and radical Muslims from criticism and rebuke. We are not speaking of the proper interventions of the police, courts, and social agencies to safeguard ordinary Muslims from physical attacks, vituperative insults, assaults on mosques, or basic denials of the rights they are entitled to enjoy as citizens of Western countries – much as we expect them to protect Jews, ethnic minorities, or vulnerable women from similar expressions of physical and verbal bigotry. Providing such support for the victims of prejudice should be applauded as an essential expression of post-Enlightenment liberal democratic values. Legislating and acting against outright discrimination is, perhaps, best exemplified in the way post-World War II German governments have criminalized anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial."
To read more and to share the entire report, please click "Death of Democracy?-Part One
"For many complex reasons, Europe is in an advanced state of decline. In recent years, several important studies of this condition have appeared, advancing a variety of reasons for it: Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, James Kirchik's The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, as well as Christopher Caldwell's ground-breaking 2010 study, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. Soeren Kern at Gatestone Institute has also been detailing the steady impact of immigration from Muslim regions on countries such as Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
It is clear that something serious is happening on the continent in which I live.
The threat is not restricted to Europe, but has a global dimension. Michael J. Abramowitz, President of Freedom House, writes in his introduction to the organization's 2018 report:
A quarter-century ago, at the end of the Cold War, it appeared that totalitarianism had at last been vanquished and liberal democracy had won the great ideological battle of the 20th century.
Today, it is democracy that finds itself battered and weakened. For the 12th consecutive year, according to Freedom in the World, countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains. States that a decade ago seemed like promising success stories—Turkey and Hungary, for example—are sliding into authoritarian rule."
"Certainly, Europe's current state of decline owes much to the widely recognized fact that Muslims are the first newcomers to Europe who, over several generations, are resistant to integrating into the societies of which they now form a part. This rejection of Europe's humanitarian, Judeo-Christian values applies, not just to the successive waves of refugees and economic migrants who have washed up on the shores of Greece, Italy and Spain since the start of the Syrian civil war, but to generations of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in the UK, North Africans in France, and Turkish "guest workers" in Germany.
A former Muslim extremist, Ed Husain, writes in his book, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, what I Saw Inside and why I Left:
The result of 25 years of multiculturalism has not been multicultural communities. It has been mono-cultural communities.... Islamic communities are segregated. Many Muslims want to live apart from mainstream British society; official government policy has helped them do so. I grew up without any white friends. My school was almost entirely Muslim. I had almost no direct experience of 'British life' or 'British institutions'. So it was easy for the extremists to say to me: 'You see? You're not part of British society. You never will be. You can only be part of an Islamic society.' The first part of what they said was true. I wasn't part of British society: nothing in my life overlapped with it."
"Countless polls and investigations reveal that refusal to integrate is no figment of the supposedly "Islamophobic" political "right". A 2006 poll carried out by ICM Research on behalf of the Sunday Telegraph, for example, presented worrying findings: 40% of British Muslims polled said they backed introducing shari'a law in parts of Britain, and only 41% opposed it, leaving another 20% unclear. Sadiq Khan, the Labour MP involved with the official task force set up after the July 2005 attacks, said the findings were "alarming". Since then, similar findings have shown that the younger generation of Muslims is more conservative, even radical, than their parents or grandparents:
Commenting on a major 2016 ICM poll of Muslim opinion, Trevor Phillips, who had been Britain's foremost advocate of multiculturalism, said that, with respect to the Muslim community, he had made a 180° turn:
"for a long time, I too thought that Europe's Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain's diverse identity landscape. I should have known better."
Finally, "Those are only one half of a more complicated and disturbing picture. While Muslims find it hard to abandon the prejudices, doctrines, and outright hatreds (for Jews, for example) that they have imported from their home countries -- or developed as young men and women while living in European states where they were born and raised -- vast numbers of non-Muslims, including politicians, church leaders, civil servants, policemen and women, and many well-meaning people bend over backwards to accommodate them and the demands they make on their host societies.
It would take a book to summarize all the episodes in which Western officialdom, notably in Europe, has abandoned its own historical values in order to protect Islam and radical Muslims from criticism and rebuke. We are not speaking of the proper interventions of the police, courts, and social agencies to safeguard ordinary Muslims from physical attacks, vituperative insults, assaults on mosques, or basic denials of the rights they are entitled to enjoy as citizens of Western countries – much as we expect them to protect Jews, ethnic minorities, or vulnerable women from similar expressions of physical and verbal bigotry. Providing such support for the victims of prejudice should be applauded as an essential expression of post-Enlightenment liberal democratic values. Legislating and acting against outright discrimination is, perhaps, best exemplified in the way post-World War II German governments have criminalized anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial."
To read more and to share the entire report, please click "Death of Democracy?-Part One