Death of Democracy? - Part I

by Denis MacEoin, Gatestone Institute:

• “The result of 25 years of multiculturalism has not been multicultural communities. It has been mono-cultural communities… Islamic communities are segregated.” – Ed Husain, former Muslim extremist.

• This approach, giving social-services, is based on the belief — oft-refuted — that Muslim extremists (both Muslims-by-birth and converts) have suffered from deprivation. It also greatly rests on the naïve assumption that rewarding them with benefits — for which genuinely deprived citizens generally need to wait in line — will turn them into grateful patriots, prepared to stand for the national anthem and hold hands with Christians and Jews.

• The British government has shown itself incapable of enforcing its own laws when it comes to its Muslim citizens or new immigrants. Rather than stand up to our enemies, both external and internal, are we so afraid of being called “Islamophobes” that we will sacrifice even our own cultural, political, and religious strengths and aspirations?

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.

For Douglas Murray, immigration and the problems it is throwing up are the key topic. He is uncompromising in his negative response to the social change that has been brought about by the excessive and barely controlled immigration of people who, for the most part, do not share the most basic values of the countries in which they now live.

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.

In July 2015, arguing for an anti-extremism bill in parliament, Britain’s prime minister at the time, David Cameron, admitted:

“For all our successes as a multi-racial, multi-faith democracy, we have to confront a tragic truth that there are people born and raised in this country who don’t really identify with Britain – and who feel little or no attachment to other people here. Indeed, there is a danger in some of our communities that you can go your whole life and have little to do with people from other faiths and backgrounds.”

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.”

Another major 2016 review on social equality carried out on behalf of the British government by Dame Louise Casey, found Muslims the least well integrated community. In summarizing her work for the National Secular Society, Benjamin Jones wrote:

“Despite decades of failures, it is worth noting that problems integrating Muslim minorities are hardly rare around the world, and this is not a problem unique to the United Kingdom. That brings us to the final unsayable thing – well known to most British people but unmentionable to officials and politicians: Islam is a special case.”

Polls carried out in other countries across Europe showed similar or worse results.

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.

Read More @ GatestoneInstitute.com