Emerging
Islamist Political Clout Accelerates Europe's Self-Islamization
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
April 17, 2018
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 Forget the beheading
videos, the ISIS propaganda on social media, even the terrorist attacks
themselves. Europe, says
counterterrorism expert Afshin Ellian, is Islamizing itself, and in the
process, the Western values on which its democracies are built are
increasingly put at risk.
Take, for instance, Belgium's ISLAM Party, which now hopes to participate in the country's October local
elections in 28 regions. (Its name serves as an acronym for "Integrité, Solidarité, Liberté, Authenticité, Moralité.)
Its ultimate aim: transforming Belgium into an Islamic state. Items high
on its agenda include separating men and women on public transportation,
and the incorporation of sharia law – as long as this does not conflict
with current laws –according to the party's founder, Redouane Ahrouch. His
own behavior, however, suggests that his respect for "current
laws" and mores has its bounds: He reportedly
refuses to shake hands with women, and in 2003, he received a six-month
sentence for beating and threatening his wife. Currently, the Islam Party
has two elected representatives in office – one in Anderlecht, the other in
Molenbeek – both regions that happen to be known as hotbeds of extremism.
Or consider DENK,
Holland's pro-Islam party founded in 2015 by Turkish-Dutch politicians
Selçuk Ozturk and Tunahan Kuzu. The party platform, which supports boycotts
and sanctions against Israel, also discourages assimilation, calling
instead for "mutual acceptance" of multiple cultures. Non-Muslims,
for instance, would apparently be required to "accept" the Muslim
extremist father who beats his daughter for refusing an arranged marriage,
or for becoming too "Westernized" for his taste. It's his
culture, after all.
DENK also calls for a "racism police force" to monitor
allegedly racist comments and actions. Those found guilty would be placed
in a government "racism register," and banned from government
jobs and other employment.
So far, such pro-Islamist views have served the party well. In local
Dutch elections last month, DENK (which means "think" in Dutch)
gained three seats in Rotterdam, totaling four seats among 45 total and
edging out Geert Wilders' far-right Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), which fell from three
seats to one. In Amsterdam, which also has 45 seats, a full 50 percent of
Dutch-Moroccans and about two-thirds of Dutch-Turks gave the party a three-seat win in its first election
there, as well. Many of these voters, according to post-election analyses, moved to DENK from the
center-left Labor Party (PvdA), clearly feeling more at home with a more
overtly pro-Muslim politic.
Similarly, France's Union of Muslim Democrats (UDMF) has taken a number of voters from the Green Party by
promising to defend Muslims. UDMF's online program statement
condemns burqa and headscarf bans. What's more, in its pretense of
supporting what it calls the "sweet dream of Democracy, Union and
Human Rights," the party loudly (though rightly) condemns
"anti-Muslim speeches" that "lead the most psychologically
fragile people to commit acts of unprecedented violence." Examples of
such "unprecedented violence" follow: a German white supremacist,
who killed an Egyptian woman wearing a veil in 2009, and
the stabbing of a French Muslim in Vaucluse. "Heavy weapons attacks
have exploded in Europe since the beginning of the year against Muslim
places of worship," the statement reads.
What the party statement does not mention anywhere are the attacks by
Muslims in Paris and Nice that together killed 240 people between January
2015 and July 2016; the attack by a Muslim extremist on a Jewish school in
Toulouse in 2012; and the kidnapping and heinous torture of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jew, in
2006. These are among other acts of "unprecedented violence" by
Islamists.
UDMF also calls for protection of the family and its "essential
role in the education of children," while citing Article 14 of the
International Convention on the Rights of the Child which calls for
respecting "the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience,
and religion." From here, the party demands the "right and duty
of parents....to guide the child in the exercise of the above-mentioned
right." Implied here is the demand that parents be allowed to treat
their children as they see fit according to their religious beliefs –
including to beat daughters who refuse an arranged marriage, becoming
"too Westernized," and so on.
Most disturbing are the large numbers of Muslims who have all flocked to
parties like DENK and UDMF throughout Europe. Rather than moving towards
more secular, traditionally democratic political movements, Europe's
Muslims are apparently increasingly distancing themselves from the
"European" side of their identity and identifying more with Islam
and the Muslim community. And this, too, is part of Europe's
"self-Islamizing," the result of taking too unsure a hand, too
ambivalent a position, on the issue of assimilation.
Indeed, as Ellian points out, European institutions have enabled this
cultural separation. Photographs taken last November during a meeting of
the Muslim student union at Amsterdam's Vrije Universiteit revealed that men
and women sat on opposite sides of the auditorium aisle. Such events are
common, according to journalist Carel Brendel, who first reported on the
incident. "Yet the administrations [of these schools] do little or
nothing about it, despite the fact that their own rules forbid" such
gender separation," he told the Investigative Project. Brendel has
also exposed links between the Amsterdam police and Abdelilah el Amran, a
Muslim Brotherhood-connected imam invited by the police department to lead last
year's annual Iftar dinner marking the end of a day's fast during Ramadan.
Amran, Brendel said, also oversees a group of interconnected organizations,
including an Islamic school that came under investigation last year for having separate
entrances for boys and girls.
Worth noting about the event, according to Brendel, is that no other
government body sponsors a religious ceremony. Nor does any Dutch
government agency, let alone the police, host a Passover Seder or observe
any other religious event with the public.
In addition, and perhaps more alarming, a spokesperson for the Rotterdam
police posted to Twitter that day that "police will be
difficult to reach tonight, due to various Iftar meals." City security
and the safety of citizens, in other words, was being compromised in the
name of a religious celebration.
Elsewhere, other signs of self-Islamization can be found in the rise of
other Muslim parties in Austria
as well as a failed effort in Sweden; a proposed ban on the British press against identifying terrorists
as Muslim; the proliferation of sharia courts in the UK; and the repeated efforts by
some Canadian officials to legalize sharia – a debate that recently has been revived.
While all of this involves political movements, it stands as a reminder
of what the ideology behind the "war on terrorism" is really all
about: an attack against our culture. We need to do better at protecting
it.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates.
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