The Danger of Censorship About Islam

In the comments on one of yesterday’s posts, commenter FluffResponse left the following message:

Last night, I started a thread in the Discuss section of the Swedish site The Local; the thread was called “The Danger of Censorship about Islam”. A poster named Cyberfluff was a bit exasperated at my writings about the dangers of Islamic immigration and asked what I wanted HER to do. I told her I’d be back; and I was, with a multiparagraph essay that seems to have resulted in my being banned from the site. (Note the name of the thread I started!)

Could someone (a) see if the thread and my response is still there; and if not (b) find Cyberfluff (who posts here and there on that site) and ask her to see my response below. Gates of Vienna is a new kind of Radio Free Europe. Thanks.

I went to the thread at The Local mentioned by FluffResponse, and his or her response is indeed still there, but the reader has to click the link and go to page two to see it.

However, to save readers the trouble of doing the extra clicking, FluffResponse’s message is reproduced here in its entirety (being an old fuddy-duddy, I took the liberty of capitalizing certain proper nouns and the personal pronoun):

In response to your request, here are the four things that I want you to do:

(a) Read the anti-jihadi works: the web sites listed earlier (to which you can add Wolfgang Bruno) and an increasing number of books (authors include Spencer, Bawer, Bostom, Bat Ye'or, Fallaci, Ibn Warraq, Trifkovic, and Karsh).

(b) Rediscover what is being lost (and which Islam is threatening to replace, to our detriment). C.S. Lewis and a local church might re-introduce you to Christianity, for example, and with it a desire to take the radical step that native Europeans are not doing: having children and raising them in a stable family, which implies caring about what is happening to your society today and what is likely to happen in future generations.

(c) Find a way to contribute to the anti-jihadi movement. I gather that some of the books that speak to the European experience (from Bawer, Bat Ye’or, and Fallaci) are not always available in Europe, either because they have not been translated or because… well, in Italy, they want to ARREST Fallaci! it would be good if you could militate against those kind of restrictions and help get the word out, perhaps as a translator, perhaps as a columnist; whatever your skills, help the cause of the West.

(d) Support a political party that stands up to Islam. Fjordman (whose writings are here and here) tells a story of horror for Sweden, a country of increasing rape and robbery. (Why do you shrug off the worsening situation for women, as caused by young immigrant males who consider themselves — in keeping with the model for Muslim behavior — to be waging a war?) Fjordman suggests that there is no political party in Sweden that is worthy of support — in France, there is Mouvement Pour La France, for example — but maybe you can help force a debate about immigration. (Alas, you are already in a situation where fulfilling that request will put you in physical danger; but of course, the continued immigration and acceptance of Islam as an equal of Christianity will only make the horror worse.)

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In closing, let me report to you how Fjordman sees it:

“Sweden is a semi-totalitarian country. It’s all about façade. On the surface, Sweden is a tolerant nation and peaceful democracy. In reality, there is massive media censorship by a closed elite that is scared of having a debate about immigration. There are even physical attacks on critics of immigration by Leftist extremists, something which has been largely ignored and thus quietly approved by the establishment, until it now even targets parties in Parliament. No dissent is tolerated. Opinion polls have revealed that two out of three Swedes doubt whether Islam can be combined with Swedish society, and a very significant proportion of the population have for years wanted more limitations in immigration. Yet not one party represented in the Swedish Parliament is genuinely critical of the Multicultural society or the current immigration policies. The Swedish elite congratulate themselves that they have managed to keep ‘xenophobic’ parties from gaining a foothold while the country is sinking underneath their feet. No, Mr. Jagland, we have nothing to learn from Sweden except hypocrisy to perfection. We should study them only in trying to avoid letting them drag us down with them when they fall, which they will.”

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[Another poster (Mahmood) then asked why the Europeans don’t take action; and I answered as follows.]

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Mahmood, that’s a good question. Let me quote from Fjordman again:

“It’s getting urgent. When enough people feel that the system isn’t working anymore and that the social contract has been breached, the entire fabric of the democratic society could unravel. What happens when the welfare state system breaks down, and there is no longer enough money to “grease” the increasing tensions between immigrants and native Europeans? And what happens when people discover that their own leaders, through the EU networks and the Euro-Arab Dialogue described by Bat Ye’or in her book “Eurabia,” have been encouraging all these Muslims to settle here in the first place? There will be massive unemployment, and tens of millions of people will feel angry, scared and humiliated, betrayed by the system, by society and by their own democratic leaders. This is a situation in some ways similar to the Great Depression that led to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Is this where we’re heading once again, with fear, rising Fascism and political assassinations? The difference is that the “Jewish threat” in the 1930s was entirely fictional, whereas the “Islamic threat” now is very real. However, precisely the trauma caused by the events 70 years ago is clouding our judgment this time, since any talk at all about the threat posed by Muslim immigration or about preserving our own culture is being dismissed as “just like the rhetoric used against Jews by the Nazis.” Europeans have been taught to be so scared of our own shadow that we are incapable of seeing that darkness can come from the outside, too. Maybe Europe will burn again, in part as a belated reaction to the horrors of Auschwitz.”