Giulio Meotti : Liberal Submission: Protect Islam, Defame Christianity

Liberal Submission: Protect Islam, Defame Christianity

by Giulio Meotti
October 23, 2016 at 6:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9131/protect-islam-defame-christianity

• If an imam violently protests something, the liberal elite always supports the false charge of "Islamophobia." If a peaceful protest is led by a Catholic bishop, the same elite always rejects it under the name of "freedom of expression."
• The "Caliph" of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ridiculed by Charlie Hebdo, triggered self-censorship because of "hate speech," while the work of Chris Ofili "The Holy Virgin Mary," in which the mother of Jesus is covered with feces and images of genitalia, was defended by the New York Times as "free speech." Does this now mean that some religions are more equal than others?
• On Halloween night, only the "Sexy Nun" is available, while "Caliph" Baghdadi can rape his Yazidi and Christian sex slaves with impunity.

The world's biggest shopping portal, Amazon, sells many Halloween costumes. One of the novelties in 2016 has been the "Sexy Burka", the typical obscurantist cloak that the Taliban and the Islamic State impose on women. But the sexy burqa, which on Amazon UK was priced at £18.99, did not last long.

The commercial colossus of Jeff Bezos removed the item from the website, after Amazon had been swamped with accusations of "racism", "Islamophobia," of marketing an Islamic garment with the white face of a model and using "a religious garment for commercial purposes". "You are disgusting, my culture is not your costume", wrote many users of the Islamic faith. Others used a less adorable tone: "Whoever you are, you should fear Allah. This is not a joke."

A spokesman for Amazon promptly responded: "All Marketplace sellers must follow our selling guidelines and those who don't will be subject to action including potential removal of their account. The product in question is no longer available".
So that Halloween parody of the global symbol of female oppression has been censored. It is because Islamic veils contradict Western values of freedom, equality and human dignity so totally that this relativistic progressive mentality defends these Islamic veils, as it does the burkini, with loyalty.
But here also lies a double standard. What about the "Sexy Nun" Halloween costume that mocks the Catholic Church? Despite the protests of many Catholics customers, the "Sexy Nun" is still on sale at Amazon. Is it not a form of "Christianophobia"? Also, a nun is a religious figure, while a burqa is mere cloth.

Spot the offensive costume -- or the hypocrisy. Online retailer Amazon removed the "Sexy Burka" costume (left) after accusations of "Islamophobia." But despite the protests of many Catholics customers, the "Sexy Nun" (right) is still on sale at Amazon.

Take The Guardian, the most famous British liberal-left newspaper. When the Pussy Riot performers put on their supposedly offensive 3-minute show in Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral, for which two of the three performers served jail time rather than repudiate the text (the third apologized to avoid jail), the paper defended them as "pure protest poetry." When the political group PEGIDA called to protest against Islamization in Germany, the same media blasted it as "a vampire we must slay." The same double standard also emerged during the battle to build a mosque near Ground Zero, when the liberal media sided with the Muslim community.

In January 2006, Norway's most famous cartoonist, Finn Graff, announced that he was censoring himself over Mohammed. Graff never had a problem in making fun of Christians, whom he depicted as wearing brown shirts and swastikas. Graff had also penned a number of controversial drawings against Israel, one of which showed the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin as the commander of a Nazi concentration camp.

The same happened with German-American filmmaker Roland Emmerich, director of many disaster movies. He abandoned a plan to obliterate Islam's holiest site on the big screen for fear of attracting a fatwa (religious opinion) calling for his death. For his movie, "2012", Emmerich wanted to demolish the Kaaba, the iconic cube-shaped structure in the Grand Mosque in Mecca. "You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa", Emmerich said. At least he was honest.

After the massacre of most of the staff at the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, all major Western liberal newspapers, television networks and photo agencies, starting with the "Big Three" (MSNBC, CNN and AP), competed in justifying their shameful decision to censor the cover of Charlie Hebdo, in which the Islamic Prophet Mohammed says "all is forgiven." CNN said it might offend "the sensitivities of a Muslim audience." One year later, when Charlie Hebdo published a new cover depicting a Judeo-Christian "killer God" rather than the Islamic Prophet, CNN showed it.

In 2015, the BBC described the Charlie Hebdo's cover but did not show it, a choice that the British network did not repeat a year later when Charlie Hebdo released the new anti-Christian cover. The same double standard came from the British conservative paper the Daily Telegraph, which cut the cover with the caricature of Mohammed but published one with an Abrahamic God.

The Associated Press in 2015 censored the Islamic cartoons of Charlie Hebdo as well. The reason? "Deliberately provocative." In 2016, the agency had no trouble in showing the new cover depicting not Mohammed but the Judeo-Christian God.
This double standard of the liberal elite had also emerged at the New York Times, which out of "respect" towards the Muslim faith censored the Mohammed caricatures of Charlie Hebdo -- only to decide, in total disrespect, that the Gray Lady could and should publish the work "Eggs Benedict" by Nikki Johnson, exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum, in which condoms of various colors form the face of Pope Benedict XVI.

The "Caliph" of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ridiculed by Charlie Hebdo, triggered self-censorship because of "hate speech," while the work of Chris Ofili "The Holy Virgin Mary," in which the mother of Jesus is covered with feces and images of genitalia, was defended by the New York Times as "free speech." Does this now mean that some religions are more equal than others?

If an imam violently protests something, the liberal elite always supports the false charge of "Islamophobia." If a peaceful protest is led by a Catholic bishop, the same elite always rejects it under the name of "freedom of expression."

Forget the "Sexy Burqa." On Halloween night, only the "Sexy Nun" is available, while "Caliph" Baghdadi can rape his Yazidi and Christian sex slaves with impunity.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

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Yves Mamou : France: The Ticking Time Bomb of Islamization

France: The Ticking Time Bomb of Islamization

by Yves Mamou
October 3, 2016 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9058/france-islamization

• The last group, defined as the "Ultras", represent 28% of Muslims polled, and the most authoritarian profile. They say they prefer to live apart from Republican values. For them, Islamic values and Islamic law, or sharia, come first, before the common law of the Republic. They approve of polygamy and of wearing the niqab or the burqa.
• "These 28% adhere to Islam in its most retrograde version, which has become for them a kind of identity. Islam is the mainstay of their revolt; and this revolt is embodied in an Islam of rupture, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism," according to Hamid el Karoui in an interview with Journal du Dimanche.
• More importantly, these 28% exist predominantly among the young (50% are under 25). In other words, one out of every two young French Muslims is a Salafist of the most radical type, even if he does not belong to a mosque.
• It is unbelievable that the only tools at our disposal are inadequate opinion polls. Without knowledge, no political action -- or any other action -- is possible. It is a situation that immeasurably benefits aggressive political Islamists.
• Willful blindness is the mother of the civil war to come -- unless the French people choose to submit to Islam without a fight.

Recently, two important studies about French Muslims were released in France. The first one, optimistically entitled, "A French Islam is Possible," was published under the auspices of Institut Montaigne, an independent French think tank.

The second study, entitled, "Work, the Company and the Religious Question," is the fourth annual joint study between the Randstad Institute (a recruiting company) and the Observatory of Religious Experience at Work (Observatoire du fait religieux en entreprise, OFRE), a research company.

Both studies, filling a huge knowledge-deficit on religious and ethnic demography, were widely reported in the media. France is a country well-equipped with demographers, scholars, professors and research institutes, but any official data or statistics based on race, origin or religion are prohibited by law.

France has 66.6 million inhabitants, according to a report dated January 1, 2016 from the National Institute of Statistics (Insee). But census questionnaires prohibit any question about race, origin or religion. So in France, it is impossible to know how many Muslims, black people, white people, Catholics, Arabs, Jews, etc. live in the country.

This prohibition is based on an old and once-healthy principle to avoid any discrimination in a country where "assimilation" is the rule. Assimilation, French-style, means that any foreigner who wants to live in the country has to copy the behavioral code of local population and marry a native quickly. This assimilation model worked perfectly for people of Spanish, Portuguese or Polish descent. But with Arabs and Muslims, it stopped.

Now, however, despite all good intentions, the rule prohibiting collection of data that might lead to discrimination, has become a national security handicap.
When any group of people, outspokenly acting on the basis of their religion or ethnicity, begin violently fighting the fundamentals of the society where you live, it becomes necessary -- in fact urgent -- to know what religions and ethnicities these are, and how many people they represent.

The two studies in question, therefore, are not based on census data but on polls. The Institut Montaigne study, for example, writes that Muslims represent 5.6% of the metropolitan population of France, or exactly three million. However, Michèle Tribalat, a demographer specializing in immigration problems, wrote that the five million mark had been crossed in around 2014. The Pew Research Center estimated the Muslim population in France in mid-2010 to be 4.7 million. Other scholars, such as Azouz Begag, former Minister of Equality (he left the government in 2007) estimates the number of Muslims in France to be closer to 15 million.

Institut Montaigne Study: The Secession of French Muslims

The study by Institut Montaigne, released on September 18, is based on a poll conducted by Ifop (French Institute of Public Opinion), which surveyed 1,029 Muslims. The author of the study is Hakim el Karoui, a consultant who was an adviser to then Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin (2002-2005).

Three main Muslim profiles were highlighted:

==First were the so-called "secular" (46%). These people said they were "totally secular, even when religion occupies an important place in their lives." Although they claim to be secular, many of them also belong to the group that favors all Muslim women wearing a hijab (58% of men and 70% of women). They also overlap with the group (60%) that supports wearing a hijab at school, although the hijab has been prohibited in schools since 2004. Many of these "seculars" also belong to the 70% of Muslims who "always" buy halal meat (only 6% never buy it).
According to the study, wearing a hijab and eating only halal meat are considered by Muslims themselves as significant "markers" of Muslim identity.

== A second group of Muslims, the "Islamic Pride Group" represent a quarter (25%) of the roughly thousand people polled. They defined themselves primarily as Muslims and claim their right to observe their faith (mainly reduced to hijab and halal) in public. They reject, however, the niqab and polygamy. They say they respect secularism and the laws of the Republic, but most of them say they do not accept prohibiting the hijab at school.

== The last group, defined as the "Ultras", represent 28% of those polled, and the most authoritarian profile. They say they prefer to live apart from Republican values. For them, Islamic values and Islamic law, or sharia, come first, before the common law of the Republic. They approve of polygamy and of wearing the niqab or the burqa.
"These 28% adhere to Islam in its most retrograde version, which has become for them a kind of identity. Islam is the mainstay of their revolt; and this revolt is embodied in an Islam of rupture, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism," according to Hamid el Karoui in an interview with Journal du Dimanche.

Hamid el Karoui, speaking of the opinions of French Muslims in an interview with Journal du Dimanche, said: "These 28% adhere to Islam in its most retrograde version, which has become for them a kind of identity. Islam is the mainstay of their revolt; and this revolt is embodied in an Islam of rupture, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism."

More importantly, these 28% exist predominantly among the young (50% are under 
25). In other words, one out of every two young French Muslims is a Salafist of the most radical type, even if he does not belong to a mosque.
The question is: how many will they be in five years, ten years, twenty years? It is important to ask, because polls always present a point in time, a freeze-frame of a situation. When we know that the veil and halal food restrictions are imposed on the whole family by "big brothers," we have to understand that a process is taking place, a secession process due to the re-Islamization of the whole Muslim community by the young.

Journalist and author Elisabeth Schemla wrote in Le Figaro:

To understand what re-Islamization means a definition of Islamism must be given. The most accurate is the definition given by one of his very fervent supporters, State Advisor Thierry Tuot, one of three judges chosen this summer to decide not to ban the burkini at the beach (...). Islamism, he writes, is the "public claim of a social behavior presented as a divine requirement and bursting into the public and political arena." In light of this definition, the Al Karoui report shows that Islamism is unalterably spreading.

Islam at Work; Islamism on the Move

This ticking time bomb is silently working... at work.
A poll, conducted between April and June 2016 by the Randstad Institute and Observatory of the Religious Experience at Work (OFRE), surveying 1,405 managers in different companies, revealed that two managers out of every three (65%) were reporting that "religious behavior" is a regular manifestation in the workplace -- up from 50% in 2015.

Professor Lyonel Honoré, Director of OFRE and author of the study, recognizes quietly that "in 95% of cases," the "religious behavior at work is related to Muslims."
To understand the importance of this "visible Islam" in French factories and offices today, we have to know that traditionally, the workplace was considered neutral space. The law did not prohibit any type of religious or political expression in the workplace, but by tradition, employees and employers considered that restraint must be shown by all in exercising their freedom of belief.

The 2016 Ranstad study shows that this old tradition is over. Religious symbols are proliferating in the workplace, and 95% of these visible symbols are Islamic. Overt expressions and symbols of Christianity or Judaism at work do exist, of course, but are minimal compared to Islam.

The survey considered two types of the expression of religious beliefs:

1. Personal practices, such as the right to be missing for religious holidays, flexible working hours, the right to pray during work breaks, and the right to wear symbols of religious belief.
2. Disturbances at work or breaches of rules, such as the refusal of men to work with a woman or take orders from a female manager, refusal to work with people who are not co-religionists, refusal to perform specific tasks, and proselytizing during work time.

"In 2016," states the survey, "the wearing of religious symbols [hijab] became the top expression of religious belief (21% of cases, up from 17% in 2015 and 10% in 2014). The request to be absent because of religious holidays remains stable (18%) but now ranks in second place."

Under "disturbances at work", this politically correct study notes that conflicts between employee and employer on religious grounds are few: a "minority event" and "only" 9% of religious disturbances in 2016. But figures for conflicts have nevertheless risen by 50%, up from 6% in 2015. Conflicts have also tripled since 2014 (3%) and nearly quintupled since 2013 (2%).

Eric Manca, a lawyer in the law firm August & Debouzy who specializes in labor law and was assisting at the press conference, said that when a conflict on religious ground turns to litigation, "it is always a problem with Islam. Christians and Jews never turn to the court against their employer because of religion." When Islamists sue their employer, jurisprudence shows that the accusation is always based on "racism", and "discrimination" -- charges that can only make employers regret having hired them in the first place.

Sources of conflict listed include proselytizing (6%), and refusing to perform tasks (6%) -- for instance, a delivery man declining to deliver alcohol to customers; refusing to work with a woman or under the direction of a woman (5%), and requesting to work only with Muslims (1%). These cases are concentrated in business sectors "such as automotive suppliers, construction, waste processing, supermarkets... and are located in peri-urban regions."

Conclusions

The French model of assimilation is over. As noted, it worked for everyone except French Muslims; and public schools seem unable today to transmit republican values, especially among young Muslims. According to Hakim el Karoui:

"Muslims of France are living in the heart of multiple crises. Syria, of course, which shakes the spirit. But also the transformation of Arab societies where women take a new place: female students outnumber male students, girls are better educated than their fathers. Religion, in its authoritarian version, is a weapon of reaction against these evolutions. .... And finally, there is the social crisis: Muslims, two-thirds of child laborers and employees, are the first victims of deindustrialization."

Islamization is growing everywhere. In city centers, most Arab women wear a veil, and in the suburbs, burqas and niqabs are increasingly common. At work, where non-religious behavior was usually the rule, managers try to learn how to deal with Islamist demands. In big corporations, such as Orange (telecom), a "director of diversity" was appointed to manage demands and conflicts. In small companies, managers are in disarray. Conflicts and litigation are escalating.
Silence of the politicians. Despite the wide media coverage around these two studies, an astounding silence was the only thing heard from politicians. This is disturbing because Institut Montaigne's study also included some proposals to build an "Islam of France," such as putting an end to foreign funding of mosques, and local training religious and civil leaders. Other ideas, such as teaching Arabic in secular schools "to prevent parents from sending their children in Koranic schools" are quite strange because they would perpetuate the failed strategy of integrating Islamism through institutions. Young French Muslims, even those born in France, have difficulty speaking and writing proper French. That is why they need to speak and write French correctly before anything else.

These two studies, although a start, are staggeringly insufficient. Politicians, journalists, and every citizen needs to learn more about Islam, its tenets and its goals in the country. It is unbelievable that the only tools at our disposal are inadequate opinion polls. Without knowledge, no political action -- or any other action -- is possible. It is a situation that immeasurably benefits aggressive political Islamists.

Without more knowledge, the denial of Islamization, and an immobility in addressing it, will continue. Willful blindness is the mother of the civil war to come -- unless the people and their politicians choose to submit to Islam without a fight.

Yves Mamou, based in France, worked for two decades as a journalist for Le Monde.

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Soeren Kern : Germany Imports Child Marriage

Germany Imports Child Marriage

by Soeren Kern
October 6, 2016 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9078/germany-child-marriage

• The true number of child marriages in Germany is believed to be much higher than the official statistics suggest because many are being concealed.
• In May, an appeals court in Bamberg recognized the marriage of a 15-year-old Syrian girl to her 21-year-old cousin. The ruling effectively legalized Sharia child marriages in Germany.
• "Religious or cultural justifications obscure the simple fact that older, perverse men are abusing young girls." — Rainer Wendt, head of the German police union.
• "This is not a question of tolerance and openness, but a question of the protection of children and minors. We therefore need a clear rule: Assessing the marriageable age of a person ... will in the future always be determined by German law." — Bavarian Justice Minister Winfried Bausback.

German authorities are debating the contours of a new law that would crack down on child marriages after it emerged that some 1,500 underage brides are now living in the country.
The married minors are among the more than one million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who entered Germany in 2015.
The German Interior Ministry, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, recently revealed that 1,475 married children are known to be living in Germany as of July 31, 2016 — including 361 children who are under the age of 14.
Most of the married children are from Syria (664), Afghanistan (157) and Iraq (100). Nearly 80% (1,152) are girls. The true number of child marriages in Germany is believed to be much higher than the official statistics suggest because many are being concealed.
German law currently allows minors aged 16 or over to get married if their partner is of legal age and the parents or guardians consent. Germany does not recognize marriages contracted abroad if a partner is under 14, but German family courts have discretion to determine the validity of marriages concluded abroad by minors who are 14 or older.

Zeinab, a married 14-year-old girl refugee from Syria, lives in a tent-camp in Lebanon. Germany hosts many thousands of migrants and refugees from Syria, among whom are at least 664 married children. Under current law, German family courts have discretion to determine the validity of marriages concluded abroad by minors who are 14 or older. (Image source: World Vision UK video screenshot)

In May, an appeals court in Bamberg recognized the marriage of a 15-year-old Syrian girl to her 21-year-old cousin. The court ruled that the marriage was valid because it was contracted in Syria, where such marriages are allowed according to Islamic Sharia law, which does not set any age limit to marriage. The ruling effectively legalized Sharia child marriages in Germany.

The case came about after the couple arrived at a refugee shelter in Aschaffenburg in August 2015. The Youth Welfare Office (Jugendamt) refused to recognize their marriage and separated the girl from her husband. The couple filed a lawsuit and a family court ruled in favor of the Youth Welfare Office, which claimed to be the girl's legal guardian.

The court in Bamberg overturned that ruling. It determined that, according to Sharia law, the marriage is valid because it has already been consummated, and therefore the Youth Welfare Office has no legal authority to separate the couple.
The ruling — which has been described as a "crash course in Syrian Islamic marriage law" — ignited a firestorm of criticism. Some accused the court in Bamberg of applying Sharia law over German law to legalize a practice that is banned in Germany.

"Religious or cultural justifications obscure the simple fact that older, perverse men are abusing young girls," said Rainer Wendt, head of the German police union.
Monika Michell of Terre des Femmes, a women's rights group that campaigns against child marriage, said: "A husband cannot be the legal guardian of a child bride because he is involved in a sexual relationship with her — a very obvious conflict of interest."

The Justice Minister of Hesse, Eva Kühne-Hörmann, asked: "If underage persons — quite rightly — are not allowed to buy a beer, why should the lawmakers allow children to make such profound decisions related to marriage?"

Others said the ruling would open the floodgates of cultural conflict in Germany, as Muslims would view it as a precedent to push for the legalization of other Islamic practices, including polygamy, in the country.

Child marriage is a Germany-wide problem: 559 married children are living in Bavaria; 188 in North-Rhine Westphalia; more than 100 in Lower Saxony; and at least 100 in Berlin

In Baden-Württemberg, the number of known child marriages jumped seven-fold in the past two years, from 26 in 2013 to 181 at the end of 2015. Of those, 162 are girls, and 18 are younger than 15 years of age.

The exact number of child marriages in Germany is unknown, partly because German authorities appear to have lost track of the identities or whereabouts of potentially hundreds of thousands of migrants. Of the 1.1 million migrants who entered Germany in 2015, only 477,000 have applied for asylum. The German government blames the discrepancy on an accounting problem, but others say that many migrants have gone underground to avoid being deported because they are not legitimate refugees fleeing war zones but economic migrants seeking a better life in Germany.

The Justice Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Guido Wolf, said foreign marriages should only be recognized if one partner is at least 16 years old and the other is 18, in line with existing German marriage law. Wolf described marriages contracted at 14 or 15 years of age as forced marriages. "I find it hard to believe that someone who is younger than 16 would decide autonomously and self-determinedly for marriage," he said. Wolf has called for raising the legal age for all marriages in Germany to 18.

Members of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and their Bavarian allies in the Christian Social Union have called for outlawing child marriage. A strategy paper states:

"An 11-, 13- or 15-year-old girl belongs not in marriage but in school. In the future, the principle must be the annulment of child marriages contracted abroad. The primacy of the child's welfare and the equal treatment of men and women are pillars of our society and of our understanding of values. Child marriage is therefore absolutely incompatible."

A proposed law, which will be submitted to the German parliament in November, would require all Youth Welfare Offices (Jugendämter) in Germany to report child marriages as soon as they become aware of them, and to bring all such cases before family courts so that they can be annulled. Judges would be allowed discretion to make exceptions only in cases where the wife is already close to the age of majority.

Bavarian Justice Minister Winfried Bausback said:

"This is not a question of tolerance and openness, but a question of the protection of children and minors. We therefore need a clear rule: To assess the marriageable age of a person — that is, the question of the age at which marriage can be contracted — will in the future always be determined by German law."

Stephan Harbarth of the Christian Democratic Union called for child marriage to be abolished in Germany by the end of 2016. "According to our cultural perspective, child marriage is unacceptable," he said. "The suffering of those affected requires quick action. Our proposals are on the table. We can immediately legislate. For us, family clans do not decide about a marriage. Rather, each individual does. We will not tolerate illegal Islamic parallel justice — not even in marriage."

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.

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