First of all, it features a couple of long-standing friends of Gates of Vienna, Lars Hedegaard and Ted Ekeroth.
Secondly, this story was reported by a major print and TV outlet, the Christian Broadcasting Network. Within the Counterjihad coalition, some people look askance at Christians, and regard their religious views with a certain distaste. But it’s important to remember that the strongest impetus in the West against the Great Jihad comes from traditional Christians. They are much more likely to be aware of the present danger, follow it closely, and mobilize resources against it than are their more secular brethren.
Thirdly, this story was compiled by an American outfit, and they got it right. They asked the right people the right questions and reported accurately about the situation in Malmö.
That’s an important milestone. This kind of thorough and accurate reporting isn’t likely to make it into the actual American MSM, but the influence of CBN is not to be sneezed at — it has many millions of readers and viewers:
Malmö, Sweden: Growing Muslim Influence- - - - - - - - -
By Dale HurdCBNNews.com — MALMO, Sweden — A few years ago, the London Guardian newspaper called Sweden the most successful society the world has ever known. But Sweden today is being transformed by a large influx of immigrants from the Middle East.
Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, sits just across the water from Copenhagen, Denmark. To visitors, Malmö seems quiet, nice, maybe a little boring; in other words, quintessentially Swedish. But under the surface, Malmö has serious problems.
On Saturday when Israel played Sweden in a Davis cup tennis match in Malmö, an estimated 6,000 Leftists, Arabs, Muslims and anarchists protested the Israeli presence in the city, and hundreds attacked police. Almost no fans were allowed inside to watch the tennis series, because authorities feared disruptions or possible violence against the Israeli team.
Swedish City’s Population One-Quarter Muslim
Massive immigration has made Malmö today one quarter Muslim, and stands to transform it into a Muslim majority city within just a few decades. One of the most popular baby names is not Sven, but Mohammed. Pork has been taken off some school menus. Want to learn to drive? You can attend Malmö’s own “Jihad Driving School.”
But despite Malmö’s usually placid appearance, this experiment in multiculturalism has not gone well. In the Rosengaard section of Malmö, a housing project made up primarily of immigrants, fire and emergency workers will no longer enter without police protection.
Unemployment in Rosengaard is reported to be 70 percent. An immigrant-fueled crime wave affects one of every three Malmö families each year. The number of rapes has tripled in 20 years.
But Malmö has been so accommodating toward immigrant Muslims that a local Muslim politician, Adly Abu Hajar, has declared that “The best Islamic state is Sweden!”
Jews Cannot Walk The Streets
Don’t ask Malmö’s Jews to give the city the same glowing assessment. Jews who dare walk the streets wearing their yarmulkes risk being beaten up.
“It’s true. Jews cannot walk the streets of Malmö and show that they’re Jews,” said Lars Hedegaard.
Hedegaard lives across the water from Malmö in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he was a columnist for one of Denmark’s largest newspapers. He says pro-Israel demonstrations in Malmö, like the ones during the fighting in Gaza earlier this year, were met with rocks, bottles and pipe bombs from Arabs and Leftists.
“I was there for demonstration; a pro-Israeli demonstration with about 400 or 500 people,” Hedegaard told CBN News. “Jews and non-Jews, and I came over to cover it. The police allowed, I’d say a hundred Palestinians or Arabs to shout and threaten and throw bombs and rockets at us. A homemade bomb landed about ten yards from me, and went off with a big bang. And now of course, I thought the police were going to jump these guys, get them out of the way. They didn’t. They just let them stand there.”
Swede Ted Ekeroth helped film the Arab-Left counter-demonstrations. He saw Arabs throwing rocks at a 90-year-old holocaust survivor.
“I filmed the police chief and asked him why are they not reacting to this,” Ekeroth said. “Why are they not doing anything? And he simply answered, ‘It’s their right according to the Swedish constitution.’ We apparently did not have the same right, because we were forced out of there. Our manifestation for Israel is always peaceful, and theirs is always the quite opposite — Death, hate and killing of Jews. They come and they shout different slogans,” he continued. “It can be everything from Arabic slogans inciting killing of Jews to in Swedish and Danish, ‘Kill the Jews.’
Political Alliance Against Israel
And like all over the Western world, some on the Left, along with Arabs and Muslims and anarchists, have formed a political alliance against Israel and Jews. They demonstrate together, and in Sweden, they vote together. Muslims are a core constituency of the Left.
The immigrant issue a big reason the right-wing Swedish Democrats are the fastest growing political party in the country.
Matthias Karlsson is the Swedish Democrats’ Press Secretary.
“In many parts of Sweden, people are, as I said, fed up,” Karlsson said. “And they’re being pushed too far and they want to make a stand.”
Fascist and Bigoted?
Swedish Democrats, who stand for traditional Christian values and limits on immigration, have been stigmatized by the Swedish media as fascist and bigoted.
Erik Almqvuist is national youth leader for the Swedish Democrats.
“The media has tried to portray us as extremists, racists,” he said. “People think we’re almost inhuman”
Almqvuist faces regular death threats, and was almost killed recently in a Left-wing knife attack.
“The multicultural model in Sweden has polarized society,” Almqvuist explained. “We have a political polarization. We have also an ethnic polarization. And the extremes are growing and it’s harder and harder to get to consensus.”
Hedegaard says as Malmö goes, so goes the rest of Sweden.
“I think the best prediction is that Sweden will have a Muslim majority by 2049, so we know where that country’s going,” he said.
CBN News was unable to get a response from Malmö’s mayor, Ilmar Reepalu. But he told a Swedish publication that he does not think anti-Semitism is greater in Malmö than in other Swedish cities, and said that harassment of Jews is “not good.”
CBN News also asked a number of Malmö Jewish leaders to appear on camera to discuss the climate of anti-Semitism. They all declined, with one saying it would only make the situation worse.
Hat tip: Steen.
7 comments:
"CBN News also asked a number of Malmö Jewish leaders to appear on camera to discuss the climate of anti-Semitism. They all declined, with one saying it would only make the situation worse."
One may easily understand and sympathize with the fear, but still, it is an early warning and symptom of impending dhimmitude. Tragic.
Quote: "Swede Ted Ekeroth helped film the Arab-Left counter-demonstrations. He saw Arabs throwing rocks at a 90-year-old holocaust survivor.
“I filmed the police chief and asked him why are they not reacting to this,” Ekeroth said. “Why are they not doing anything? And he simply answered, ‘It’s their right according to the Swedish constitution.’"
If I recall correctly, the pro-Israel side had arranged the legal gathering by securing the proper permit to legally gather at that square.
The Hamas demonstrators did not have any such permit.
The police chose to have the permit holders disperse an act which smacks of 1939 antisemitism.
But it’s important to remember that the strongest impetus in the West against the Great Jihad comes from traditional Christians.
BB
I agree. Once upon a time European society was held together by the glue of Christianity. That glue has been disolved by militant secularism, leaving behoind an atomised society of isolated and confused individuals. Yet the only organised institution that can still offer some challenge is the church. So far though it has gone along with the multiculturalism, even though it is the main reason for the collapse of cohesion of the community.
Roger Scruton has written a powerful article here
Islam and the West: Lines of Demarcation
It's not directly rleated, but C.S. Lewis identified a similar trend in his writings (I know I keep mentioning him a lot these days - I'm re-reading all of his essays at the moment and it strikes me just how prescient he was about a great many things that we're living through right now).
Professor Whitehead points out that centuries of beliuef in a god who combined 'the personal energy of jehova' with 'the rationality of a Greek philosopher' first produced that firm expectation of systematic order which rendered possible the birth of modern science. Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief had died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared - the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature and the surrender of the claim that science is true We may be living closer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific age.
(Miracles - CS Lewis
Western civilisation is built on the church, no matter how people may try to argue otherwise. The modern church is not the church that civilisation was built on, however, having lost itself in the 90s, dropping faith in God in favour of running churches like a business. Here Lewis has identified - in 1947 - the trend that would see us abandoning rationality in favour of a retrograde "religion" that has no internal logic, no uniform law The church, or something that holds the same principles, is our saviour but until the church returns to belief in the creator god, the personal god who does not merely express love and reason but is reason, who is love - as opposed to the nebulous disembodied, unfeeling, uninvolved spirit moderns seem to think is so superior to the personal god - the church will not be capable of taking on that role.
It will have a hard time returning to that life and vigour whilst there are people who claim to be on our side attacking any expression of faith in a creator god as "religious fundamentalism".
The long slow decline of the West can be attributed to the Catholic Church who erroneously taught that the logical syllogism is consistent with divine revelation. The Catholic church, being a Western church, has always contained that special feature of the Western mind: reliance on the logical syllogism. In the theology of the Catholic church they sort to unify the philosophy of Aristotle with the gospels. Having divinized human thought the decline was inevitable. In the scholastic Middle Ages, Christian theology became "systematised" and subordinated to logic. Logicalness becomes the first test of truth.
For this reason the Renaissance could only have happened in the West. Logic is a form of measurement performed by man, logically, man becomes the measure of all things, theology becomes "scientific method"; this follows to the "Enlightenment", with its profoundly naive optimism in the unlimited progress of man's reason. This logical "mechanicalness" also fired the ideas of mechanist thinkers like Newton and Descartes. Rationalism reached a dead end with Hume and Kant, who show that "pure reason" cannot exist by itself: all "truth" is subjective. Having dethroned God through the centuries and put reason in his place, Western man is now left with nothing--save himself. An infamous and disastrous attempt to regain order was attempted by Hegel, which Marx took and turned into "Dialectical Materialism" - a last attempt at trying to make the logical syllogism sympathetic with (material) objective reality-the "objective reality" that now serves as a God substitute (the divine true and beautiful higher future of humanity.). The pseudo-religiosity of Marxists, and the popularity of Marxism with lapsed Catholics (and vice versa) is well known and supports the above regard.
The impersonal emptiness of modern theology is the emptiness of the Western heart and mind left alone with itself. It parallels the Muslim spiritual state - desolation.
The glue of a civilisation consists of a haphazard union of the soul and the transcendent. This is then given expression in the form the civilisation takes i.e. In Mayan it was known that the universal is tumultuous and chaotic, they imagined this part of the universe was a person like themselves and made an idol of it before which they would appease with human sacrifice. In Christian civilisation the transcendent love of the undivided selfless god-man underpins all things. In gnosticism the universe is a prison designed to torture and entrap, this is the theological principle that underlies films like The Matrix. In Liberal civilisation there is no transcedent or universal truth, only desiring selfs inhabiting a pointless and impersonal universe. This is the spring of equality, relativism, and political correctness - trying to enforce harmony between selfs. It is anti-rational, seductive, and powerful. We live with it's effects today.
"But it’s important to remember that the strongest impetus in the West against the Great Jihad comes from traditional Christians."
Well, in america perhaps, but in Holland the christians are, in coalition with the left and other PC-forces, are the frontrunners of the islamization of the netherlands.
Furthermore, they are the driving force behind the attempts to clamp down on freedom of speech.
Their plan and motivation for this is quit obvious: Christians have been loosing power and influence in the decades after the war, and they desperately want it back. So they use the muslims to clamp dowm on "infidels" and get more priviliges for the "believers".
So i think that this maybe true for the US, but in europe, the christians are part of the problem.
(allthough i must admit that the SGP, a very small religious party in parlement, seem to sense the danger, in contrast to the governing christians, CU and CDA)
"BB
I agree. Once upon a time European society was held together by the glue of Christianity. That glue has been disolved by militant secularism, leaving behoind an atomised society of isolated and confused individuals."
Well, i think that the problem is not caused by secularism as such, but it is caused by this particular harmfull kind of secularism, called leftism.
Furthermore, it seems to me that you are impying that only christian morals and values can glue a society together (but i can well be wrong). And allthough i agree that something is needed to glue ones society together, and allthough i can subscribe to a lot of the christian morals and values, it seems utterly absurd to state that ONLY christian morals and values can do this glueing.
But maybe im misreading the comment.
DP111.
I understand your desire to remember the golden age, but, at least here in former Czechoslovakia, Christianity here used to be more divisive than anything else. At least when it still occupied a large part of the public conscience - this eroded fast in 1920s and 1930s
In the Czech part of the country, Catholics and Protestants (mainly Hussites, an ancient Czech reformist sect from the 15th century, preceding Lutherans by 100 years) seriously disliked one another, going to great lengths to, for example, hire only the people of the 'correct' sect to their businesses, even during the crisis of 1930s.
In the eastern part (Slovakia and Ruthenia), the relations between Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics and the Orthodox were much worse and actual street-level violence would happen, although it was limited to bodily harm without killing. Nevertheless, the Czech police had to intervene many times, to disperse the hotheads from all sects.
My own grandmother (85 years old now) was born there and her stories of rural sectarian clashes are quite incredible for a European in 2009. Of course, the most hated people were the Jews: that was the only platform upon which the rest of the people could unite.
She told me that the night that their Jewish neighbours were dragged into Auschwitz, some of the peasants actually celebrated, because that meant end of their debts to the Jews.
Not everyone was like that of course; actually, one of their neighbours saved a Jewish infant by hiding him in their Slovak home. Registry of population was far from perfect in eastern Slovakia, 1944, so it was feasible.
And today? By Jove, all the multiculti Kool-Aid drinkers here are active practicing Christians. I do not think that this is coincidence. When debating them, I can often see that they consider every human a 'brother', but believers of any kind, including Muslims, are 'closer brothers'. And here it begins. You better not ask them about the fate of Christians in Muslim countries.
IMHO, a lot of Christians are pre-emptively disarmed by their own attempt to be friendly and humane towards enemies. All the 'turn the other cheek' stuff. At least this is what I see.
Can you imagine, what a pagan Roman emperor like Hadrian would do, if he were confronted with Muslims like we currently are? Surely he would not set up multicultural committees. Decimation would be the response.
We need a bit of the Roman fighting spirit too, otherwise we end up like former Buddhists of Central Asia. Clashes of civilizations are not won by appeasement.
There were Christians like Sir Jean de la Vallette, who had this spirit. But I cannot see any single such person in modern elite Christian clergy of 2009, Europe. Maybe I am just ignorant; please show me one such person. Someone important, not a small, albeit courageous parish priest in an Irish village.
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