Heads turn away when it comes to the Islamisation of Europe
Once again, Hezbollah flags flew in London last weekend at the Iran-supporting “Al Quds” march in Britain’s capital city…writes Melanie Phillips/JNS.
Melanie Phillips
Hezbollah, the proxy army of the Iranian regime, is responsible for numerous murderous attacks around the world against Jews, Americans and other Western interests.
No matter. The march—an annual London fixture, no less—featured calls for Israel to be wiped from the map, and was led by a man who previously made the deranged claim that “Zionists” were behind an appalling London apartment block fire last year in which more than 70 people died.
In Germany last week, a Jewish teen, 14-year-old Susanna Maria Feldman, was raped and murdered. A failed Iraqi asylum-seeker with a long police record was subsequently arrested by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq at the request of the German police.
Mass Muslim immigration is taking a terrifying toll across swathes of Europe. A report published in April by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office revealed an increase of nearly 500 percent in migrant sex crimes during the past four years.
In Sweden, the number of gang-related shootings has surged by 43 percent in the last three years and reported rapes by 34 percent in the last 10 years. The police and others say this is due to hugely increased Muslim migration, and that the Swedish legal system is collapsing with Islamist extremists taking over whole areas.
Between 2012 and 2017, Muslim terrorists murdered 250 people in France. In March, four people were killed in the small town of Trèbes.
In the same month, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, who was murdered in her Paris apartment by a Muslim youth, became the 11th French Jew to have been murdered in an Islamist terror attack over the past 12 years. According to official figures, antisemitic violence in France increased last year by 26 percent.
A Hezbollah flag during “Al-Quds Day” demonstrations on the streets of London. Credit: Zionist Federation via Twitter.
Yet throughout Europe, there is a paralysis over attributing this cultural catastrophe to the Islamic world. Yes, it’s important to note that many Muslims refuse to subscribe to this, that millions lead unblemished lives in the West and that they are themselves targeted by Islamist extremists. But the silence over the specific religious roots of this widespread extremism is contributing to its acceleration.
In Britain, virtually no concern is expressed over the thousands of young white girls targeted by overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim-heritage rape and pimping gangs. Despite criminal trial after trial of such men, following years of total silence and cover-up, no one questions what this means for British society. A similar silence has descended over the national implications of proven attempts to infiltrate and i some Birmingham schools.
The reason the British government allows the Hezbollah marches is that, farcically, it claims the marchers support its political wing, which it deems legitimate because Hezbollah is involved in the Lebanese government, rather than its terrorist wing which Britain proscribes.
The fact that Hezbollah has effectively taken Lebanon hostage is disregarded. The fact that it has embedded among southern Lebanon’s civilian population 130,000 missiles pointing at Israel is disregarded.
In lockstep with this refusal to acknowledge that Islamic religious fanaticism is Islamic, antisemitism is once more openly stalking Britain and Europe. Put to one side the antisemitism of the left that hides behind hatred of Israel. There is almost total silence over Muslim antisemitism and its symbiotic role in Islamist terrorism.
Hezbollah is riddled with Jew-hatred. “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion,” stated its secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, “we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.”
Medieval and Nazi-style antisemitic texts and images pour out of the Muslim world. Many if not most Muslim migrants into Europe are bringing with them profound, paranoid and sometimes violent hatred of the Jews.
Yet Britain and Europe treat this as a marginal issue. They don’t get that Jew-hatred is a principal driver of the Islamists’ hatred of the West, which they believe is controlled by the Jews. They don’t get that the Muslim world doesn’t hate the Jews because it hates Israel; it hates Israel because it hates the Jews. And they don’t get that antisemitism is the signature motif of an eclipse of reason.
That should rule out treating any leader who subscribes to such lunacy as anything other than a pariah. Yet Britain and Europe continue to insist that the Iranian Supreme Leader, who is consumed by a genocidal obsession to wipe out the Jewish people, is someone they can do business with.
In France, the justice system persistently refused to regard as an antisemitic attack the murder last year of the elderly Jew Sarah Halimi, who was tortured and thrown from her Paris apartment window by a Muslim despite having vainly reported that she was the victim of his antisemitic threats.
In Britain, attacks on Jews by Muslims are disproportionate to their number in the population. The same is true of antisemitic comments by members of the Labour Party which, despite convulsing over the antisemitism in its ranks, never makes this point.
Indeed, anyone who brings up Muslim antisemitism is accused of Islamophobia.Worse still, this is equated with antisemitism—astonishingly, even by certain British Jewish leaders. Yet the comparison is odious.
Anti-Semitism is based entirely on lies and demonisation. It is paranoid and unhinged. It ascribes to the Jews a demonic power to control the world. It treats the Jews in ways applied to no other people, nation or cause.
It therefore has nothing at all in common with Islamophobia, a term constructed by Islamists to silence legitimate criticism of Islam—and of Muslim antisemitism.
Yet for so many in the West, the only people whose views are beyond the pale are those classified as “right-wing,” “nativist” or “Islamophobic.” This includes those who legitimately and necessarily defend Western culture and oppose Islamisation. People demonised by such labelling often defend Israel and the Jewish people far more robustly than so-called anti-fascists who, faced with Islamic cultural encroachment and Muslim antisemitism, look the other way.
This does not mean, though, that we should support all in this “populist” tide. Decent people should shun those who hate all Muslims, or really are neo-Nazis, or are thugs who may hide their contempt for the rule of law behind spurious claims of being martyred for the anti-Islamist cause.
But the threat from such unsavory types is minimal compared to the scale of the threat from Islamization and the desperate battle now underway to defend the West. And the only reason such types are gaining traction at all is that, when it comes to the defence of Western civilisation, just about the entire political establishment has given up.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a column for JNS every two weeks. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which has also published her first novel, “The Legacy,” released in April. Her work can be found at her website, www.melaniephillips.com.
The British organisation the Council Against Anti-Semitism is doing great work but it stands almost alone in a sea of hatred. This organisation is mainly staffed by volunteers and funded through donation. In the meantime the British, both Jewish, non and the Government have their heads in the sand and several countries in mainland Europe have been overrun by liberal pro Arab sentiment and general apathy. The surge of right wing sentiment in Austria, Germany and Poland is also very worrying. However Being so far from Europe is now becoming increasingly attractive, if it wasn’t already!