How Western Democracies are inviting their own destruction

Robert Spencer (of the excellent Jihad Watch website) has written a report of the speech by Oriana Fallaci in New York this week. As usual Fallaci provides a brilliant analysis of the Jihad threat and the way the Western democracies are succumbing to it. Fallaci, a veteren ant-fascist campaigner, has been vilified by both the right and left, and has also of course been subject to the usual death threats from muslims. Here is an extract from the report about the threat to Europe:

“I do not see Islamic terrorism as the main weapon of the war that the sons of Allah have unleashed upon us. It is the bloodiest, but not the most pernicious or catastrophic aspect of this war.” Far more dangerous to the West in the long run is unrestricted Muslim immigration, which already has brought at least 25 million Muslims to Europe (not counting, Fallaci said, the huge numbers of illegal aliens). That number will double by 2016 and, as Bernard Lewis and others have predicted, almost certainly create a Muslim Europe by 2100.

Yet all this immigration has not been accompanied by integration and assimilation – not because of European racism, but by the Muslims’ own choice. Fallaci noted that many other groups have assimilated into European societies, but Muslims have not. “They dont even care to learn our language. They only obey the rules and laws of Sharia.” They do not want to learn European ways; rather, “they want to impose on us their own habits and way of life. They have no intention of integrating with us. On the contrary, they demand that we integrate with them.” Today’s Islamic expansionism, therefore, does not need the armies and fleets with which the Ottoman Empire once terrorized Europe. It only needs the immigrants, whom short-sighted politicians and befuddled multiculturalists continue to welcome. Fallaci said that Europeans – French, Dutch, Germans, English, Italians – are about to reach the status of the Comanches, Cherokees, and Sioux: “We will end up on their reservation.” She noted that some Muslim spokesmen, confident of their imminent supremacy, already refer to non-Muslim Europeans as “indigenous people” or “aboriginals.”

What to do about all this? Establish dialogue with Muslim leaders? Try to strengthen moderate Islam? Fallaci was dismissive of both options. Muslims have no intention of entering into genuine dialogue with non-Muslims, she said, and “I do not believe in moderate Islam. What moderate Islam? Is it enough not to cut heads off? Moderate Islam is another invention of ours.” Adopting Western dress, she said, was easy; adopting Western values was not.

Then Fallaci threw down the gauntlet to the multicultural, politically correct, and fearful. “There is not,” she asserted, “good Islam or bad Islam. There is just Islam. And Islam is the Qur’an. And the Qur’an is the Mein Kampf of this movement. The Qur’an demands the annihilation or subjugation of the other, and wants to substitute totalitarianism for democracy. Read it over, that Mein Kampf. In whatever version, you will find that all the evil that the sons of Allah commit against themselves and against others is in it.” As jarring as such language is to contemporary sensibilities, Fallaci here made a statement of fact that can be verified or disproved. And indeed: Islamic terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi, and others have never hesitated to quote the Qur’an copiously to justify their actions. It remains for those who identify themselves as moderate Muslims to convince violent Muslims that they are misusing the Qur’an – if indeed they are – and should lay down their arms. They have had no notable success in this so far.