Europe and the Coming Caliphate: The Political-Cultural Scenario

Hans-Peter Raddatz is a well-known German author and scholar who specializes in Islamic issues. An interview with him was featured here in translation last year.

The following post is the first part of a four-part translation of an article by Dr. Raddatz that was published in issue Nr. 5/2012 October of Die Neue Ordnung (pdf; table of contents here). It concerns most recent book by Bat Ye’or, and its significance as the Islamization of Europe continues to accelerate.

We owe a great debt to JLH for undertaking the translation of this important work.

Hans-Peter Raddatz

Europe and the Coming Caliphate
The Systemic Background of an Important Book

1. The Political-Cultural Scenario

In the last two editions of this journal, a book (Bat Ye’or, Europe, Globalization and the Coming Caliphate — Plymouth, 2011) was cited, which describes in detail the manifold Islamic activities in service of the installation and securing of a dependably growing Muslim society in Europe. As an established historian, the author presents far-reaching connections to the discussion, highly relevant to the future of Europe and supported by documents that either have been long ignored or completely unknown. Her work casts an informative light on the relationship of the Euro elites to both state and society, and is worth a closer look. Universally supported by he Europeans themselves, the unchecked growth in European territory of the Umma — the Muslim community — under its own law, is a project of historic dimensions into which Islamic world organizations have been investing billions of dollars for decades and harnessing the entire ruling class of the EU.

In this context there developed among the representatives of the so-called Islam Dialogue a supra-institutional movement, which — already with the beginnings of semi-totalitarian characteristics of a dogmatically prescribed “tolerance” — qualifies for affiliation with the radical tradition of the old extremist right and left. At the very least, a clear majority of its protagonists — represented by appropriate “officials” and “experts” in all the institutions of the EU and its member states — is distinguished by the same hostility to the civil state and the Judaeo-Chrisitian culture which was displayed, especially in Germany, by their predecessors in the socialist and/or fascist systems. “Precisely we Germans” became the wingèd cliché which signaled, and still does, that they will not, on the basis of past experience, keep a skeptical distance, but rather show a special readiness to be subjugated to whatever conformity or “mainstream” is called up.

The Coming Caliphate documents why and by what methods the ideological advocacy for Jew- and Christian-hostile Islam is reviving ant-Semitism and is sharpening the hostility to the Church which arose in the Enlightenment until it is a hate-filled anti-Christianity. So it is not astonishing that the bogeyman, Israel, caused the formation of a cult surrounding the Palestinian “folk victims” and — 60 years after the Holocaust — placards are again being carried through German cities with the old/new demand, “Jews out”. And since Islam is not only shooting rockets at the Jews, but is also persecuting Christians throughout the Middle East — killing more than 100,000 annually according to Vatican internal statistics; OSCE: “one every 5 minutes” — it strikes not only a good tone, but an interculturally profitable one, to assume an increasingly aggressive attitude toward the Church and include its representatives — especially the bishops. It s understood in this process that the protagonists — the greatest exponents of world Christianity — be defamed in the crudest way; also measures taken against persons like Bar Ye’or, who do not describe Islam according to intercultural instructions, but according to historically verified understanding. Beyond this, Muslims can become the victims in the past by making Christians responsible for the violence of the Crusades. While the syndrome of modern short-term thinking becomes operable here, blurring our sense of time and forcing a persistent acceleration, we can deduce from the “quality” of the violence the retrogression of modern time to the pre-modern.

As described in the article on Islamophobia, and also as is current among the rightist and leftist extremists, who in their hostility to our culture are as one with the anti-West jihad, any existence which is not a part of the “movement” or even opposed to it is a nihilistic existence which must be undone, a life that must be extinguished, in order to “eradicate” the danger of an example for imitators. Tolerance, especially in favor of pre-modern cultures, is an open-handed virtue which, in suitable circumstances, can become as deadly a cure as the left-right extremist dogmas. Coupled with the self-reflexive, socially proper malleability of the person in a communicative mass state, it provides the elites a power whose potential for programmed worldly salvation — ergo destruction — by far exceeds the potential of its predecessors in use of class and race.

“For precisely that reason,” says Helmut Plessner, a leading mind in philosophical anthropology, “parliamentary democracy in its functional, international connections is threatened by the continuing change to a totalitarian state which — within the system of open pluralism — tends to bind the anonymous violence of command to a hierarchical pyramid and therefore to a legitimate group of persons.”

Anyone who is seeking explanations for the feudalization of European politics and the insistence on a dogmatic privileging of Islam and its immigrating masses, can find in Bat Ye’or plenteous material a testimony of the collaboration of the Euro- and Islam-elites and the purposeful deception of the Western population. When institutions say monotonously and increasingly since the “Arab Spring” that “Islam is on the path to democracy,” what is meant is a state which is in the process of radicalizing and anonymizing the elites.

There are many examples of the fact that not only are immeasurable conflicts accepted as a part of the bargain, but also that even the active organs of the society are often well-intentioned, politically or religiously motivated offenders — the professional “respectable ones” that every ruling system needs. After the US ambassador to Libya (with three co-workers) had been killed in a long-planned assassination plot, and dragged through the streets of Benghazi by fanatical Muslims, publicly regulated German television maintained — with no regard for the truth — that this had been provoked spontaneously by a filmed insult to the Prophet; but they declined to show the two month-old video “so as not to participate in the racist persecution” (ZDF “Today” September 11, 2012). The authors of this presentation were not the only ones who neglected to give further details about the ambassador, which would have brought out something worth knowing, because his career exemplified irreconcilable cultural conflict.

From the grassroots phase working on his own at the community level in Morocco, to station chief in the US administration, to contributing strategist in the NATO bombardment, to enforcement of the Islamic regime which succeeded Ghadaffi, his career illustrated the narcissistic-schizophrenic blend of the Islam/West constellation. For it did the ambassador no good to persistently praise the advantages of Islamic civilization. Although (or because) he had helped to bring them to power (cf. www.eussner.net September, 9, 2012), the jihad fighters killed him, and his homosexuality drove them to extraordinary cruelty.

In the criss-cross axis between elites and mass, thinking and acting, perpetrators and victims, the person of the ambassador is shown as a grotesque product of a quasi-chemical, inhumane structural change, which — along with propaganda as the print medium of “public opinion” — occupies a prominent place in Hannah Arendt’s list of the Elements of Totalitarian Rule (Frankfurt, 1958). The value of The Coming Caliphate results essentially from the connection of the main aspects of the book with the incentives of the contemporary form of democracy and its intercultural requirements for humility. It was preached by Jürgen Habermas for an entire scholarly career as radical democracy, and with worldwide success. Central to his concept is the “procedural gestalt” as a disguised discipline of obedience, which — with decades of pluralization — metamorphosed into “voluntary obedience” and emerged as communicative action, correctness, excellence and self-reflection as well as other deceptive concepts.

So much more strictly is it held by the multiple pseudo-freedoms of the engineered system, i.e., the nomad society, which has as many names as code terms. Risk society, work society, consumer society, envy society, contingency society, control society, pleasure society are only some of the current variants, of which the most important is the tolerance society. As is known, Niklas Luhmann* expanded this to the theory of a decrease in alternate ways of thinking, which reduces the human being to a cog in the self-perpetuating society. It is based on the paradox of complexity as an endless cycle, which requires a “necessarily diabolical” self-observing observer. Luhmann — who commands enormous authority and the freedom of culturally incorrect but scientifically correct plain speaking — calls him Iblis,* the Islamic Devil. To the extent that the diminution of thinking replaces the older culture as interculturally evil, its place can be taken by the Islamic Devil, who appears not as an alternative to Allah, but as his competition in the realm of intrigue, deception and manipulation. Since he is also the lord of the magical, occult and demonic, Iblis quite logically embodies the functional principle of modernity. Accelerating it strengthens virtuality, and therewith both self-deception and obscurantism and this channels Allah’s chief opponent. The more modern thought is fragmented, the more compatible with the Western power process does Allah become, not only as the “best schemer” but as a time lord, who is incessantly involved in creating a new world against the Jews and Christians (cf. Islamophobia, 1, NO 3/12).

Next: European Mufti-ism

Note

*

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist known in the second half of the 20th century for his System Theory, in which systems are characterized by their communication and “coding.” When communication breaks down, the system disappears. Considered very difficult to read, which, when speaking of a German scholarly writer, implies a nearly impenetrable prose.