The Problem With a European Islam

Fr Portella looks at the chimeric dream of the European elites of a 'European Islam' 'reformed' and integrated into European society.

From The European Conservative

By Fr Mario Alexis Portella

A major dilemma in Europe has become more acute with the substantial increase of Muslim asylum seekers from impoverished or devastated countries.

In a recent article in The American Conservative, entitled “Victor Orban Was Right” author and senior editor Rob Dreher spoke of the outbursts of violent anti-Semitic attacks on the streets of American and European cities, including Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and Berlin, by Arabs who sought to punish American and European Jews for the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Dreher went onto say that while in Paris he had a conversation with a senior French journalist, telling him:

“You know one Western capital where this isn’t happening? Budapest. I live next to the Jewish quarter and walk through it to get to my office every day. When the violence started, I expected to see police guarding the synagogues and Jewish businesses. None showed up. I saw men wearing kippahs —a small cap generally worn by Jewish men—walking down the street looking unworried. Then it hit me: it doesn’t happen here.”

This is in part due to the fact that the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán refused, in 2015, to allow Muslim refugees into his country during the mass migration sparked by the Syrian civil war. He argued that it was the prerogative to defend his nation’s borders from a potential Islamic infiltration that would threaten the exercise of Hungarians’ Christians and subsequently Hungary’s stability. In a commentary for the German newspaper Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, Orbán justified his actions saying:

“Those arriving have been raised in another religion and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity. Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.”

Orbán was heavily criticized by the international community, the European Union (EU) in particular, for his “inhumane” rejection of “well-intentioned” Muslim refugees. His actions have, to say the least, preserved Hungary from today’s Islamic jihad that has ripped Christian Europe apart.

A major dilemma in Europe has become more acute with the substantial increase of Muslim asylum seekers from impoverished or devastated countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iraq, and even the Gaza Strip. While the Middle East has been transformed into a morgue of tarnished hope, European countries continue to debate about the cost-sharing of land borders and coastline policing, let alone the distributing asylum seekers among European states.

In accepting the Muslim migrants, the European continent has become an epicenter of Islamic terrorism replete with alarming levels of migrant crime, including Muslim sex slave gangs and sharia-controlled “no-go” zones. In addition, the Muslim migrant influx has overwhelmed the infrastructure and security of European countries, subsequently tearing the very fabric of the Judeo-Christian society.

This is perhaps because, as journalist Ralph Sidway put it in 2016, most Muslims seeking refuge or asylum were not women and children, but as the “United Nations itself [stated], 75% of the migrants are ‘young, fit males’.” Hungarian intelligence discovered that 95% of the migrants were military-age men in military-style group movements; few were innocent women and children who suddenly appeared at the Hungarian border when the media were present. In the words of Canadian conservative author Mark Steyn: “That’s not the demographics of a civilian population displaced by war, that’s the demographics of an army.”

This, nevertheless, falls right into with what most EU member states continue to promote: a “European Islam.”

European Islam is a notion or a movement that calls for Muslim migrants and their offspring in Europe to gradually develop a new interpretation of Islam, specifically to (sharia) law and its prescriptions of daily living that would be culturally compatible with Western democracy.

This endeavor began in 1990, when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees established a liaison with the EU and its executive branch, the European Commission (EC), to monitor the asylum and migration process. Nearly three decades later, in 2015, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Council—a collegiate body that defines the overall political directions and priorities of the EU—proposed to redistribute Muslim refugees flooding Europe to all EU member-states, thereby giving them not the privilege but the right to settle in the EU member states.

The projected thesis of European Islam, as the fourteen-hundred-year history of Islam has taught us, is practically impossible.

As Political Science Professor Gökhan Bacık at Palacky University—the second-oldest in the Czech Republic—said:

“Muslims in Europe are more interested in transmitting and protecting their own interpretation of Islam. This generates two interrelated complications. Firstly, the interpretation of Islam they brought from various Middle Eastern countries has no chance of success in Europe. Secondly and worse, it is this religious interpretation that plays a key role, indeed along with many others, in the formation of Muslim ghettos. The standard interpretation of Islam among European Muslims, which usually has its origin in a typical Middle Eastern country, such as Turkey or Morocco, has a limited capacity to foster daily life level interaction with other Europeans.”

Faced with the reality of this unprecedented inundation of Muslim migrants in Europe, in addition to Hungary, the Central European countries of Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia have adamantly refused to accept Muslim refugees, enduring criticism from the European community, as well as, prosecution by the European Court of Justice.

What else is to be expected from patriots who love their homeland and wish to defend it against a hostile theocratic movement like Islam?

Like Orbán, Polish politician and Member of the European Parliament Dominik Tarczynski adamantly declared that Poland would not accept a single Muslim illegal migrant. Referring to his country’s record of safety, there has yet to be an Islamic terrorist attack unlike in Austria, Sweden, United Kingdom, etc., where Muslims have been able to pitch their tents. In fact, Tarczynski was clear when he said that “zero Poles” have blown themselves up, unlike Muslims, in any country for their religion or out of hatred.

Many today mistakenly see Islam as an abstract religion that is composed of 1.8 billion devotees. That may be the case with Buddhists or Hindus, who do not have an organized and unifying structure to govern them, let alone an objective doctrinal point of unity. To the curious eye, Islam, which means “submission,” may seem a mere assent of the individual Muslim to God expressed at times in a most simple cult.

Islam, since its inception, has always been transnational as it spread across the world. The doctrine of Hijra (immigration), patterned by Muhammad’s migration to Medina in 622, compels Muslims to leave their homeland in order to campaign in the way of Allah. This has impelled many Muslims, regardless of their views of democracy, to utilize the democratic instruments of pluralism and freedom of expression to insert themselves in society with the goal of propagating Islam at the expense of others. A key strategy to arrive at this—even if Islamists know it may take some centuries—is immigration, which encompasses political refuge. Islamists follow up on this by employing ethnic separatism and acquiring special status and privileges within the host country.

Was Victor Orbán right, as Dreher indicated? It depends of which side of the fence one finds himself—never mind about women since they are considered less than a male in the Islamic world.

Bacık is quite adamant in saying that a “European Islam is only possible [if there is] an exchange of ideas between Muslims and Europeans, [yet] most religious Muslims seem to be in a delusional state of mind in which their interpretation of religion has the capacity to help solve all the problems of Europe.”

Germany’s health minister and the premier of Schleswig-Holstein Jens Spahn and Daniel Günther, in their efforts to sustain the incursion of a European Islam, stated: “Instead of tolerating symbols of a reactionary, misogynistic form of Islam, we must promote the development of a European Islam, which shares our values, in order to preserve our free European way of life…. When women and girls appear fully veiled at universities and schools, then we do not just have the option to resist, we must resist.”

And this, regrettably, applies to all levels of European life so long as sharia-minded Muslims continue to gain a foothold in our European society.