Experts slam contention 'Islam created Europe'
Instead, issue warning that Muslims will 'destroy' societies they're invading
Published: 8 hours ago
The German government arrests critics of Islam and even its own citizens who mock foreign Muslim heads of state.
In the Netherlands, police monitor social media for any criticism of settling Muslim refugees in the country and visit citizens to tell them to hold their tongues.
A taxpayer funded public agency in Sweden designed to promote the country’s image hands its Twitter account over to a Muslim immigrant, who taunts the country’s citizens for an entire week on their dime.
And yet Europeans are still being lectured they are not doing enough to integrate Islam and fight the supposed evils of nationalism.
Robert Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and contributing editor at The Atlantic, recently argued, “Europe must now find some other way to dynamically incorporate the world of Islam without diluting its devotion to the rule-of-law based system that arose in Europe’s north, a system in which individual rights and agency are uppermost in a hierarchy of needs.”
Kaplan explained Islam actually defined Europe by giving it something to organize itself against. After Muslims were essentially able to extinguish Christianity in the Middle East and North Africa, the Mediterranean world which defined classical civilization ceased to exist. In response, the idea of “Christendom” replaced the older idea of the Roman Empire. In time, Kaplan alleges this became a vision of a European civilization which held itself to be both distinct and superior to the Muslim world.
However, Kaplan now argues Europe can no longer hold itself apart from the Muslim world.
Instead, he accuses Europe of desiring an unrealistic “cultural purity” which is “impossible in a world of increasing human interactions.”
Thus, the West, if it is not simply to be a geographic expression, must manifest “a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism.”
In a civilizational sense, he says, something must “replace Rome” to govern vast multiethnic spaces.
Indeed, Kaplan simply takes it as a given Europe must not “retreat into nationalism” and is instead required to somehow incorporate a seemingly unlimited number of Muslims.
However, from Sweden to Italy, Britain to Belgium, no European nation has seemingly been able to successfully incorporate and assimilate a large Islamic population.
Even boasts about temporary success seem foolish in hindsight.
For example, Syrian born Osama Krayem holds a Swedish passport and was once featured in a documentary about the Nordic country’s supposed success in integrating immigrants. Today, he is accused of murder and of participating in the March 22 terrorist attacks in Brussels, Belgium, the “capital of Europe.”
Kaplan is now being criticized for claiming Europe must pursue a seemingly impossible strategy in order to survive.
G.M. Davis, a PhD from Stanford who produced the documentary “Islam: What the West Needs to Know” and was the author of “House of War: Islam’s Jihad Against the World,” slammed Kaplan for writing a “hit piece on Western Christian Europe.”
“According to Kaplan, far from having defined itself over the centuries through its own achievements and hard-won victories, Europe owes its identity to Islam, which expended so much energy on destroying it,” Davis told WND. “Kaplan argues that Western Europe has been in ‘inevitable opposition’ to Islam, i.e., that ‘Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against.’ He raises an interesting point even though he begs the question. Namely, Europe was opposing the system of jihad and dhimmitude, which had brought slaughter and death to so much of Christian North Africa, the Middle East, Anatolia, and Europe itself. ‘Inevitable opposition’ was a concept hard-wired into Islam, not Christendom; it is Islam that to this day divides the world into two opposing realms: dar-al Islam, the House of Peace, and dar-al Harb, the House of War.”
Pamela Geller, an internationally known activist against Islamic extremism and the author of “Stop the Islamization of America,” accused Kaplan of distorting history in order to encourage more Islamic immigration to Europe.
“This is just one of many modern exercises in historical revisionism that are designed to make us accept the massive Muslim migrant influx,” she told WND. “It is ridiculous and ahistorical. Christianity predates Islam, and so does Christian Europe: The Roman Empire, which comprised modern Western Europe, Southern Europe and more, was officially Christian several hundred years before the advent of Islam. In reality, opposition to Christianity and Judaism defines Islam, and it is Islam that is obsessed with hating and defeating unbelievers, not Judaism or Christianity.”
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Kaplan admits Europe’s elites “used idealistic rhetoric to deny the forces of religion and ethnicity…[even though] those were the very forces that provided European states with their own internal cohesion.”
However, Kaplan suggests Europe must now deny religion and ethnicity as relevant forces in determining its identity, and instead fall back on liberal principles.
Davis argues this is nonsense.
“Europe had been defined by her Christianity far before the world had ever heard of Islam, a convenient fact for Mr. Kaplan to ignore when he later moves on to Europe’s contemporary plight and what to do about it,” he argued. “The key to neo-liberal bromides such as Mr. Kaplan’s is never to allow Christianity back in the door. While the rising tide of Islam is by now too obvious to ignore, by puffing up straw-men like the ‘dementia of ideologies and coarse nationalisms’ that supposedly threaten Europe today, Mr. Kaplan can frighten away secular-minded but still reasonable people from supporting a general civilizational regeneration – which must necessarily include Christianity.”
Davis notes the almost embarrassing efforts by European governments to coddle and cater to Muslim immigrants, only to be rewarded with terrorism, spreading extremism, and “no go zones” where European authorities have essentially lost control.
“If Kaplan somehow believes Europe is acting in defense of ‘cultural purity,’ then how much more inclusive is the West supposed to become?” he asked. “What else could it possibly do?”
The answer, Davis suggests, is nothing. Both Geller and Davis argue Kaplan’s suggestion is practically designed to fail, as decades of Muslim immigration to Europe show the Continent’s liberal values have been unable to assimilate Islam.
Instead, it appears Muslims are essentially colonizing Europe, spreading their own values and form of society instead of integrating to European life.
Geller says it is obvious Islam and classical liberalism are mutually incompatible.
“Islam plainly denies freedom of speech and equal rights to women and non-Muslims,” she charged. “Attempts to incorporate Islam into Europe will destroy Europe.”
And Davis argues Kaplan actually knows his supposed advice to Europeans is doomed.
“What if Kaplan’s supposed ‘dynamic incorporation’ is impossible?” he asked. “Well, Kaplan actually hinted at it earlier in the piece when he asked rhetorically, ‘What, in a civilizational sense, will replace Rome?’ Brussels seems the obvious answer: another city-state ruling a sprawling, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, heavily bureaucratized, increasingly militarized empire, more and more inclined to wash its hands of the genuine concerns of its various populations. And events only last month show us Islamic extremism’s impact on that city.”
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/experts-slam-contention-islam-created-europe/#rVqSeLXeRX2zR86j.99
