Muslim Minorities in Modern States

The Challenge of Assimilation

Raphael Israeli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351504065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Political leaders of the 1930s may be accused of blindness to danger in their failed attempts to appease totalitarian aggression, but no one doubts they believed they were doing so to preserve their way of life. In contrast, Raphael Israeli suggests that twenty-first century appeasement of Islamists, wherever it occurs, is different. Appeasement in the advanced modern states of this century - in Europe, Australia, Canada, and even in parts of Asia - is characterized by what amounts to a self-inflicted humiliation, in misguided efforts to slow the advance of a rising Islamist tide. Such appeasement surrenders core aspects of sovereignty, turning non-Muslim populations into second- and third-class citizens in their own countries.Disturbing warning signs first emerged in Europe, but were either not noticed or denied. They extended to the periphery of the Muslim world, but their development in Western countries were unnoticed or denied, until they hit also the peripheral areas of the Muslim world. Canada and Australia, and to some extent the countries of Asia, fell into a syndrome of denial, which persisted until they were forced to listen, often at a price in human lives and carnage. In Europe, the core of the Muslim presence developed in countries like Britain, France and Germany, which lacked law-enforcement against terrorists because the executive and judiciary emphasized human rights and apparent safety over defensive measures to protect their citizens and way of life.Both the United States and Great Britain needed a traumatic jolt before they moved to act. In the United States, it would be the watershed event of September 11, 2001; in London, the July 7, 2005 bombings. And there were events in other countries: in Spain, the March 2004 Madrid train bombings; in France, the violent riots of 2005; in Amsterdam, the van Gogh murder; in Asia, the Bali horror; and finally in Scandinavia, the Cartoon Affair. These jolts shattered the tranquility of populations who had believed in peaceful coexistence with Muslim immigrants and in the feasibility of their integration into national societies. This study fills a large void in the examination of the consequences of new migrations of Muslim populations into advanced and modern societies throughout the world.

1

Subversive Terminology and Lethal Rhetoric

Words have a meaning and are used to transmit messages, but they are also culture-bound, and when Muslims pronounce a word which we know in our western parlance to have a specific meaning – like democracy, tolerance, terrorism – they might comprehend it differently. Words that we consider abrasive and subversive might well be spoken where their under stood meanings are softer and not subversive. Nonetheless, there are words, phrases and slogans which are not ambiguous: for killing is killing, be it to punish a criminal, to eliminate an innocent person for the sake of an ideology or otherwise. Thus, though we may disagree on the purposes and justifications for killing, or on the value of human life, yet the end result is death. These are the distinctions we shall be making if we are to entertain any significant discourse with the world of Islam, our interlocutor. We have also to bear in mind that abuse and de-humanization of the enemy is a prerequisite to justify the battle; it makes the enemy a free prey (“permissible” in their jargon) for any Muslim, under circumstances of their own choosing, with the right to go unpunished for spilling blood of an enemy. For example, if one battles Muslims, or insults them or their Prophet or their Scripture, or humiliates them, one becomes “permissible” for punishment, regardless of what Muslims did to provoke, to attack, to invade or mutilate the enemy. Muslims alone hold the yardstick to measure who humiliates whom, who provokes whom, and who committed injustice, aggression or invasion against whom. The abrasive rhetoric does not always have to be verbal, but can also be expressed by body image or scenes of massive massacres which, far from evoking human sympathy for the victims, on the contrary arouse a mad thirst for more blood, not only among the killers but also amidst the Muslim masses who watch these scenes. For example, when bodies of Western or Israeli troops or civilians are mutilated in public, or decapitated live on television or lynched in a mad orgy of murder, Muslim masses in general play and replay these horrors to remind their constituencies of the “heroism” of the Muslim killers or incite the crowds to demonstrate their jubilation at the sight of their enemy’s suffering. Scenes of this sort took place after September 11, after acts of terror against Israeli buses and after executions of Westerners in Iraq and Afghanistan. This in itself in turn creates not only an ambiance of tolerance for such acts of bloodlust, but “educates” the Muslim younger generation to emulate these killings amidst blatant demonstrations of obtuseness, cruelty and inhumanity.

Brutalization of life under puritanical Islam, which in turn renders speech abusively vulgar and generates rhetorical excess, is expressed inter alia by the application of harsh, inhuman, physical punishment under shar-i’a Law. Public beheadings are commonplace in Saudi Arabia, as are hangings, even of minors, in Iran. Stonings are still administered to adulterers and crude amputation of thieves’ limbs is still common practice. Moreover, people commonly seen on the streets with missing limbs, not necessarily as a result of war wounds, but of punitive amputations, debases human life and tends to brutalize it. For if fellow Muslims can be treated worse than animals, it is not surprising that beheading enemies or mutilating their bodies after they are dead, seems to come naturally. The most gruesome state-sanctioned punishments, known to be carried out in the Taliban’s Afghanistan and more recently in Iran and Saudi Arabia, may even involve the surgical removal of eyes. An intrepid Canadian journalist, Jane Kokan, obtained a video filmed undercover of just such a procedure while on a trip to Iran, along with videos of botched attempts at finger amputations and the like. In her film a man was shown whimpering during the extraction of his eyes under local anesthetic, this, for viewing porno graphic magazines. The film was put together by Kokan (and shown on British television’s Channel 4 on December 2, 2003).¹ Raised in this atmosphere of worthlessness of human life and of the human body, Muslims grow to denigrate it and to use abusive language to dismiss it. Horrible scenes are described in detail in Islamic texts, about punishments meted out to transgressors of the law, corporal chastisement of the enemy, self-mutilation or even self-immolation, as in the case of the Islamikaze, coupled with the harsh, coarse language of threat and intimidation. As examples, it suffices to refer to mutilation of dead American GIs in Iraq in 2005-6, or to the beheading, alive, of western hostages in that same country together with the abusive language that accompanies such executions.

These abuses of what is generally considered basic human conduct are not only the fruit of “spontaneous” rage of uncontrollable crowds at the sight of “desecrations” of their Holy sites or their saintly leaders, but are routinely so often repeated in the Muslim streets and over the media that they become the acceptable norm of conduct, in which a new generation is brought up to despise human life, discard human rights, reject peace with their neighbors, show intolerance for different views, and actually seek confrontations. A leader of an Islamist movement in Iraq declared recently to a foreign correspondent: “We know that we have a bad reputation in the West due to the scenes of summary executions that are shown in the West about us. This is done not by village boys like us, but by foreigners coming from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Afghanistan, who are the most extremist.” Another said: “Slashing the throat of a hostage is not our style, but if he is a spy, we got to do it, but without filming the scene.”² So, even this “moderate village boy” who decries “foreign extremists”, uses his own discretion in determining who is a spy – and slashing this individual’s throat without due investigation or legal procedure – is justified ipso facto. Those who hesitate to perform such an act are yet urged to do so by the ideology of al-Qa’ida which proclaims without inhibition that “Jews and Christians must be killed” – a proclamation that finds wide appeal amidst young Muslims, especially converts to Islam among them, with their passion to demonstrate new religious zeal. No less important is that Europeans are made aware of Muslim words of hatred. A French weekly, Le Point, for example, made an in-depth investigative study of the mounting threat of Islam in Europe, collecting in the process many disturbing pronouncements of Muslim leaders.

❖

Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Muslim radical Sheikh in exile from his native Egypt and now living in Qatar, regularly appears on al-Jazeera network to expound his ideas and deliver fatwas (new decrees which become law) in Muslim fundamentalist circles. He is also President of the European Fatwa Council, namely the recognized authority of all European Muslims, “Islamist” or not, to deliberate on their problems, religious and otherwise, and to deliver verdicts that are seen by many as authoritative and enforce able. His friendship with the Lord Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who has repeatedly hosted him in the British capital, against the protests of many Britons, naturally lends legitimacy to both his Islamic theories and verdicts which are widely respected and heeded by Muslims. The French investigative report cited above recounts one of those pronouncements: “You must continue to battle the Jews. They will try to defend themselves, but you will get them ultimately. For the Jews will hide behind trees and rocks, who will announce out-loud: ‘a Jew is hiding behind me, come and kill him!’; this will be a prerequisite for the coming of the Resurrection.”³ This commandment is an oft-repeated tradition of the Prophet of Islam (hadith), recurring ad nauseam in Islamist writings, and cited in full in the Charter of the Hamas. But hardly anyone wonders how it is that the followers of this Prophet of Islam, who feel insulted every step of the way for whatever is said of him, are not incensed by his appeal to wanton and indiscriminate murder of the followers of another faith, by those who claim to represent a “religion of peace and tolerance”. Consequently, French Muslims manifest their hatred by attacking individual Jews on their way to synagogues, Jewish children on their way to school, or set fire to Jewish places of worship and cemeteries, and burn Israeli flags and effigies of Jewish leaders.⁴ In this culture of hatred and vengeance, fantasy is prolific and the spoken word or symbolic act go a long way to substitute for the real thing.

Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, whom Lord Mayor, Ken Livingstone, has termed “moderate”, and whose influence extends also to the most radical groups in contemporary Islam, has made some stunning disclosures that are true to Islam but hardly qualify the man or any of his followers (and there are many) as moderate.⁵ He said, inter alia, that:

[John] Kerry, who ran against Bush in the 2004 elections, was supported by homosexuals and nudists. But it was Bush who won, because he is Christian, right-wing, tenacious, and unyielding. In other words, the religious overcame the perverted. So we cannot blame all Americans and Westerners. But unfortunately, because the Westerners – Americans and others – want to flatter these people on account of the elections, a disaster occurs. In order to succeed and win the elections, he flatters these people, rather than saying to them: No, you are sinning against yourselves, against society, and against humanity. This is forbidden. Instead of leveling with them, people flatter them to win their votes. This is the disaster that has befallen humanity…. Lesbians and homosexuals should be punished the same punishment as any sexual pervert – the same as the fornicator. The schools of thought disagree about the punishment [disagree ment is not between moderate and radical but between bad and worse]. Some say they should be punished like fornicators, and then we distinguish between married and unmarried men, and between married and unmarried women. Some say both should be punished the same way. Some say we should throw them from a high place, like God did with the people of Sodom. Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement. The important thing is to treat this act as a crime…. Lesbianism is not as bad as homosexuality, in practical terms.⁶

Such abrasive statements were finally picked up, monitored and heeded by French police when they realized that words led to deeds. The French Le Point indeed reported that the General Intelligence Directorate (DCRG – Direction Centrale des Renseignements Generaux) collected extracts from the Friday sermons in radical mosques and, acting upon this intelligence 19 activists were expelled from France in 2005 alone, and more thereafter, including one imam and one preacher. The other expellees were “ideological operators” who led groups whose potential for subversion was detected by the authorities and whose rhetoric against Jews and Americans was among their chief targets. One of these expelled imams protested incessantly against the “West that was ruled under the boot of Zionists and their mercenaries” and vowed that “the land must burn from New York to Jerusalem”. He preached that “jihad must be waged everywhere on Allah’s land”, so that the “Holy Places should be cleansed from Jews, Christians and heretic Muslims”. Europe in general, and the French Republic in particular, also come under this all-encompassing definition of the enemies of Islam, for jihad ought to be launched against “the Great Americano-Zionist Satan and its undistinguishable petty allies of all sorts”. The rationale is chillingly simple: “secularism is a diabolical concept, a Zionist invention”, and Islam cannot accept democracy because “democracy means rule by the people while in Islam it is exclusively the domain of Allah”. One of those Muslim radical imams, who follows the Turkish Kaplan stream of worship, has called on his adepts to “never submit to French demands” and dubbed in 1994 the then Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua, “a poisonous snake who aspires for the death of Islam so that he can enslave the Muslims”. In 1997, this imam attacked France on account of its “corrupt politicians and its decadent society, which have to be brought back to reason one of these days”. He also voiced his opposition to the “Catholic idolaters” and to the “criminal and perfidious French language”. All of this amounted to a Muslim refusal “to acculturate into any society that is not Islamic”. He further castigated Believers who let their wives dress like “loose western women” and specifically attacked a young Muslim Turkish woman who in 2005 married a French man, for having “infected the blood of the True Faith”.⁷

Even though some of the provocative and inflamed rhetoric was toned down among Islamists in the West, who were desirous to lower their profile after 11 September, some, like the Kaplan Turkish radical movement in Europe, whose declared goal is to restore the Caliphate to their home country, did not relent. The above-mentioned hate-citations from the kaplangi Imam who was expelled from France have been repeated by others of the same conviction and indeed their preachers are regularly also expelled back to Turkey. But those who escape expulsion continue to propagate their horrific ideology. One of them declared on April 1, 2005 that “Jews are at the root cause of all problems of the Muslims”, and that “all media are controlled by Jews”. On May 27 thereafter, he entreated his followers to “be patient, for Allah, Islam and Muslims will emerge victorious ultimately”. When such public pronouncements are heard or monitored, the Paris Criminal Police (Brigade Criminelle) “reminds” them of the stringencies of the law. But these measures cannot prevent the incendiary discourse from spreading via the internet or private meetings of small groups of radicals. For example, the salafi movement in France, which aspires to return Islam to the days of the Prophet, and counts about 5,000 amongst its membership according to the General Intelligence Directorate, also controls some 40 mosques throughout the country. A French sociologist of Persian descent, Farhad Kosrokhavar, who prepared a report for General Intelligence on that group, came to the conclusion that those young Muslims who cultivate “social rancor” in their midst are preparing “to cross sabres with the Republic.” The young radical Muslim generation in France views negatively the large Muslim organizations in France which negotiated with the state the Constitution of the CFCM (the state-spon sored umbrella organization of the Muslims in France). For them, that constitution drawn up through the initiative of Nicholas Sarkozy, then Home Secretary but since elected President in May 2007, was a “sell out” to the French, as also believed the militant tablighis and fiery Tariq Ramadan.⁸

The hero of those diehard salafists is Abdelkader Bouziane, former imam of the mosque in Venissieux, who was expelled in 2004 for suggesting in public that “beating one’s wife was part of his marital duties”. When interrogated about this, he said that while the French penal code prohibited wife beating, the Qur’an allowed it. The Court of Law in Lyon convicted him to six months in prison. But salafists are not alone in their pursuit of applying literally the rules of their Qur’an. Yussuf Qaradawi, mentioned above as Head of the European Fatwa Council, is also the spiritual guide of the Union of the Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF – Union des Organizations Islamiques de France), and his fatwas are much heeded. A booklet containing a selection of such verdicts, prefaced by Tariq Ramadan, was published with a blue cover and yellow stars sprinkled on it so as to give it the appearance of an official European publication. In it Qaradawi specifies that a woman can cut her hair without her husband’s permission only if the cut is unnoticeable, but any change in appearance as a result requires the “agreement between the spouses prior to its implementation”; in other words the husband reserves the right of veto. Another preacher of the Muslim Brothers confirmed that “the husband has the right to proscribe to his wife the visit of any other woman, Muslim or otherwise, when he has reason to fear that the visit might hurt his wife, his children or their marital life”. This example of “equality” between the genders was sure to arouse the negative sentiment of the French regarding the application of shari’a in their own country. Much more alarming to the French, however, beyond the petty details that concern relations between men and women, were the diatribes against France itself, often uttered by Muslim radicals. For example, when France is accused by those fundamentalists of being “neither democratic nor the country of human rights” because “Truth does not reside in human rights but in Islam”, and they claim that “never was a church closed down in Turkey”, contrary to some mosques that were closed down in Europe, no history-conscious Frenchman can remain indifferent. For in fact, not only do the churches in Turkey and the rest of the Islamic world not incite against their countries and governments, unlike some mosques in Europe, but in a blatant denial of history, Muslims want to conveniently forget that they converted many churches (and synagogues) to mosques, the most famous of them being the Aya Sophia in Christian Constantinople, which became Istanbul under Muslim occupation since 1453.⁹

A salafi imam of the Paris region was cited as declaring that “France is an impious state that wishes the principles of Islam to dissipate gradually”, and that “western liberalism is the origin of all perversions”. Like the proponents of the radical Islamist theme of “al-Takfir wal-Hijra” (which declares others as Unbelievers and demands migration away from their midst), some of those Muslim preachers in Europe do indeed hint at the possibility of migrating from the corrupt and unjust societies where they live and failing that, at the very least, to cut themselves off from their sinful environment, into Muslim enclaves where they can apply their laws and customs, clear from the infections of western society, to which they have to resort only when it is absolutely necessary. In other words, while they “migrated” from their countries of origin, which had persecuted them due to their radicalism, in order to find freedom of worship and of political activity in the West, now that they realize that the West is not to their liking either, due to its “corruption”, “injustice” and “perversion”, where can they go? Since there are no signs that they wish to return en masse to their home countries, one can surmise that they would rather attempt to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The European and British Perspectives
• 1 Subversive Terminology and Lethal Rhetoric
• 2 Muslim Ambivalence Regarding World Terrorism
• 3 Down Under: The Land of the Fair Go
• 4 Under the US Shadow: The Canadian Case
• 5 The Land Shifts in Asia
• Summary: Muslim Rewriting of the Past and Charting of the Future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index