Anirban Ganguly
The growing immigrant Islamic population
in the West has failed to blend with the mainstream society of the nations it
has voluntarily made its home
This May, while Stockholm burnt, London seethed and Paris was reminded of the radical activism of Islamist extremists, the politically correct European media was busy looking for the social causes of these unsettling manifestations. Blinding themselves to the effects of a failed policy of multi-culturalism and to the greater spectre of an increasingly belligerent Islam in Europe, most European intellectuals, ostrich-like, are comfortable in burying their heads in the sands of secular jargon. Emulating their Indian counterparts, European secularists are occupied in drawing a curtain over Europe’s new ‘Weimar moment’.
The English media was quick to blame
Lee Rigby's hacking on some misguided youth with no definite religious
inspiration while the rioting in Stockholm, where masked Muslim immigrants went
on a rampage, was entirely under-reported. And reports which did come through,
blamed the Swedish system and the Swedes for the neglect and segregation of
Muslim immigrants who, of course, had once escaped their own countries —
Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Yemen, Iraq — unable to
survive in those religious hell holes.
Interestingly, the relatively poorer
districts of Stockholm that saw the heaviest rioting were the ones which were
cushioned by the Swedish welfare system, one of the best in the world. The
rioting which had parallels to the Paris riots of 2005 has turned the spotlight
on the liberal Swedish immigration policy which, many argue, has allowed the
“establishment of a parallel Muslim society in Sweden”. Aggressively espoused
multi-cultural policies seemed to have backfired with the creation of an
un-assimilable and increasingly violent minority. In Sweden, as in other
countries of Europe, that minority is now definitively expanding.
A majority of Europeans refuse to
recognise the reality of a growing Islamic population that is unable to blend
and coalesce with the civilisational identity and expressions of the
asylum-giving country and culture. The phenomenon that Bruce Bawer described in
his book While Europe Slept has now come to dominate much of the
European landscape, “Across the Continent, Islam was a huge and growing
presence...in metropolis after metropolis, the city centres were virtually 100
per cent European; the outskirts were increasingly Muslim”.
The immigrant communities that Bawer
described in Amsterdam have now rapidly replicated themselves in most major
European cities. Inhabiting these communities “were not only immigrants but the
adult children and grandchildren of immigrants. Though born in the Netherlands…
their cultural values… were still those of the Islamic world, and the people
whom they thought of as their leaders were not the elected members of
Parliament but the imams and the elders who ruled their communities like
tribal chieftains, enforcing traditional practices with uncompromising
authority and relentlessly reminding them of the evils of the West”.
A 2011 report by a French think-tank
which surveyed the Paris suburbs that had seen rioting in 2005, revealed that
the proud concept of the ‘République’ was absent from these areas. Instead, the
binding, driving and dominant force, regulating quotidian life here was Islam.
The best social security and social welfare systems and immigration policies
have largely failed to integrate Muslims in Europe. Having endured
civilisational clashes in the past, the present European mentality, however,
refuses to examine the effects and expressions of a world-view that is never at
peace with itself and with others. This non-understanding remains at the core
of the civilisational challenge facing Europe in the years ahead.
In November 2004, on the
Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam, a fatally attacked Theo Van Gogh had cried to his
attacker, the Muslim immigrant Muhammed Bouyeri, “Can't we talk about this?”
Van Gogh had not realised that for the mindset which Bouyeri symbolised, there
just was no space for dialogue; he was shot four more times and eventually
sawed over by a butcher's knife. What had then seemed an aberration is now
turning into the norm — the question is: Will Europe realise the coming of the
clash?
Courtesy : Daily Pioneer
No comments:
Post a Comment