Part 1.
Part 2.
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
"The Swedish are tired of walking around in their own neighborhoods and feeling like they're in Saudi Arabia"
Anti-Muslim feelings propel right wing
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
STOCKHOLM - On the heels of elections that stunned many in this famously progressive land, Kent Ekeroth and his peers marched through the castle-like parliament doors this month on a mission to combat what they call Sweden's greatest problem: Muslim immigration.
The 20 Swedish Democrats - the first national lawmakers from a party initially spawned in the 1980s by white supremacists - are working to impose a moratorium on new mosques, ban the shroud-like coverings worn by some conservative Muslim women and largely halt immigration from predominantly Muslim nations.
Alarm over the anti-immigrant wave intensified recently as authorities warned "dark-skinned" residents in the southern city of Malmo that one or more snipers are targeting immigrants, killing one and wounding eight in 15 separate shootings this year.
The rise to office of the Swedish Democrats in September's elections touched off a heated debate in this country, home of the Nobel Prize and known as the "conscience of the world" for aiding refugees and pioneering laws for women's equality and gay rights. Yet even here, the Swedish Democrats made it into the Rikstag by tapping into a surge of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment sweeping across many nations in Western Europe, propelling right-wing and nationalist parties to their biggest gains in years.
"The Swedish are tired of walking around in their own neighborhoods and feeling like they're in Saudi Arabia," said Ekeroth, an intense 30-year-old and founder of the new Anti-Islamic Fund, which promotes criticism of radical Islam. "It is time for the Swedish to be comfortable again in their own country."
At the same time, resentment is brewing in nations like Sweden over a rising tide of Muslim immigrants and the reluctance of some to adopt local customs, testing the limits of tolerance in some of the world's most open-minded societies.
Unlike in the United States, where Latinos dominate the immigration debate, European angst is increasingly focused on waves of Muslims - Turks, Iraqis, Somalis and others - who have become the hottest-button issue in recent elections. In Austria this month, the far-right Freedom Party made massive gains in regional elections after an anti-immigrant campaign that included a "Bye Bye Mosque" Internet game. It allowed players to target virtual minarets in elegant Vienna and pastoral Alpine villages with a single word: "stop."
With climbing unemployment rates and painful spending cuts in the aftermath of the economic crisis, even mainstream leaders of the center right, including France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, are noting the growing anti-immigration undercurrent. Through measures including a ban on the full-length veils worn by conservative Muslim women, critics say, Sarkozy is seeking the support of the far-right backers of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French nationalist who made a strong presidential bid in 2002.
Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued her toughest line yet on immigrants. For weeks, Merkel has condemned Thilo Sarrazin, a former Central Bank board member turned folk hero in Germany who penned a shocking bestseller arguing that Turkish and Kurdish immigrants are genetically inferior.
But the book also ignited a debate in Germany over the unwillingness of many immigrants - particularly Muslims - to integrate. Merkel last week appeared to side with immigration critics, saying at a party conference that Germany's experiment to build a "multicultural" nation had "failed, absolutely failed."
The long-liberal lands of Scandinavia and the Netherlands are also seeing a nationalist party renaissance. Last week, a conservative Dutch government came to power with the support of the anti-Islamic party of Geert Wilders, who is standing trial on a charge of inciting racial hatred against Muslims. In exchange for his support, Wilders extracted promises that the new government would take dramatic steps to curb immigration and follow the French in banning full-length Muslim veils.
In recent months, right-wing and nationalist parties have also consolidated or are now poised to expand their power in Denmark, Norway and Finland.
Farther south, Italy's Northern League - which is already part of the government's ruling coalition and has opposed the construction of a mosque in Milan - won key victories in Venice and Piedmont last March.
"In many parts of Europe, the debate over immigration and Islam are now the same thing," said Lisa Bjurwald, an author and journalist based in Stockholm who has written about Muslim immigration.
Influx touches nerve
The number of immigrants in Sweden rose from 58,000 in 2000 to 102,000 last year, including refugees from Somalia and Iraq. Last year, 1.3 million people out of Sweden's population of 9.3 million were foreign-born.
The influx has touched a nerve in communities like Almgarden, a blue-collar suburb of cement-block apartment buildings and well-tended green parks outside Malmo in the Swedish south.
Tensions are running high in this traditionally more-conservative part of Sweden. Police are more frequently clashing with Muslim youths in one immigrant neighborhood; during a riot last year, dozens of angry teens torched cars and broke shop windows.
After the shootings in Malmo, authories warned immigrants to be extra vigilant. Police have not revealed details about suspects, saying only that they are looking for at least one male and that the crimes appear to be racially motivated.
The case has echoes of the "Laser Man" shootings here in the 1990s that took place around the time another far-right party briefly managed to enter the Swedish parliament. Starting in summer 1991, John Ausonius - known as Laser Man for his rifle's red-laser targeting system - shot 11 immigrants, killing one, before being caught and sentenced to life in prison in 1994.
The Swedish Democrats earned only 2 percent of the vote in liberal Stockholm but 35 percent in Almgarden.
"It isn't racist to want to preserve your culture," said Leif Johansson, a 64-year-old carpenter. "I'm open to immigration, but these people come without a thought to integration, no interest in learning Swedish or being part of Swedish society."
Indeed, the Swedish Democrats, like more and more nationalist parties in Europe, have tried to go mainstream, purging former white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Ekeroth, for instance, has a Jewish mother and strongly backs Israel. In addition, he said the Swedish Democrats no longer oppose gay rights, and he cites instances of gay-bashing committed by Muslims in Sweden to bolster his party's position on immigration. The party doubled its support from the last elections to almost 6 percent of the vote in September, allowing it to sit in parliament for the first time.
The Swedish Democrats are denounced as xenophobes by the ruling center-right coalition, which has vowed not to cooperate with their agenda. Nevertheless, even the government is rethinking parts of Sweden's immigration policy, among the most liberal in the world.
Voting from fear
While there have long been vocal anti-immigrant groups in Sweden, most Swedes in recent decades have embraced "multiculturalism," or the notion that immigrants have the right to preserve their language, customs and values.
But with a recent poll showing that 73 percent of Swedes consider the lack of integration a problem, the government is set to announce a new measure in December that would compel more immigrants to learn Swedish.
In addition, one of the major coalition parties is supporting a more limited ban on full-length Muslim veils in schools and this month came out against a panel recommendation that all major religions should be given equal time in lesson plans, saying Christianity should maintain a special status in Swedish schools.
In Stockholm's predominantly immigrant neighborhood of Rinkeby, the mood in the kebab houses and coffee shops is still one of shock at the success of the Swedish Democrats.
But Alma Adan, a 32-year-old Somali immigrant and youth counselor, said the Muslim community should also look inward. New immigrants, she said, should settle across Sweden, not just in neighborhoods like Rinkeby, and learn Swedish. Through workshops and counseling, she is trying to help young Muslims - including those who rioted in her neighborhood this summer, burning down a school building and setting cars on fire - feel more at home in their adopted homeland.
"That vote was about fear," she said, referring to support for the Swedish Democrats. "Fear among Swedes that their country is being taken away from them. But it is up to us to show them that this is not the case."
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
STOCKHOLM - On the heels of elections that stunned many in this famously progressive land, Kent Ekeroth and his peers marched through the castle-like parliament doors this month on a mission to combat what they call Sweden's greatest problem: Muslim immigration.
The 20 Swedish Democrats - the first national lawmakers from a party initially spawned in the 1980s by white supremacists - are working to impose a moratorium on new mosques, ban the shroud-like coverings worn by some conservative Muslim women and largely halt immigration from predominantly Muslim nations.
Alarm over the anti-immigrant wave intensified recently as authorities warned "dark-skinned" residents in the southern city of Malmo that one or more snipers are targeting immigrants, killing one and wounding eight in 15 separate shootings this year.
The rise to office of the Swedish Democrats in September's elections touched off a heated debate in this country, home of the Nobel Prize and known as the "conscience of the world" for aiding refugees and pioneering laws for women's equality and gay rights. Yet even here, the Swedish Democrats made it into the Rikstag by tapping into a surge of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment sweeping across many nations in Western Europe, propelling right-wing and nationalist parties to their biggest gains in years.
"The Swedish are tired of walking around in their own neighborhoods and feeling like they're in Saudi Arabia," said Ekeroth, an intense 30-year-old and founder of the new Anti-Islamic Fund, which promotes criticism of radical Islam. "It is time for the Swedish to be comfortable again in their own country."
At the same time, resentment is brewing in nations like Sweden over a rising tide of Muslim immigrants and the reluctance of some to adopt local customs, testing the limits of tolerance in some of the world's most open-minded societies.
Unlike in the United States, where Latinos dominate the immigration debate, European angst is increasingly focused on waves of Muslims - Turks, Iraqis, Somalis and others - who have become the hottest-button issue in recent elections. In Austria this month, the far-right Freedom Party made massive gains in regional elections after an anti-immigrant campaign that included a "Bye Bye Mosque" Internet game. It allowed players to target virtual minarets in elegant Vienna and pastoral Alpine villages with a single word: "stop."
With climbing unemployment rates and painful spending cuts in the aftermath of the economic crisis, even mainstream leaders of the center right, including France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, are noting the growing anti-immigration undercurrent. Through measures including a ban on the full-length veils worn by conservative Muslim women, critics say, Sarkozy is seeking the support of the far-right backers of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French nationalist who made a strong presidential bid in 2002.
Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued her toughest line yet on immigrants. For weeks, Merkel has condemned Thilo Sarrazin, a former Central Bank board member turned folk hero in Germany who penned a shocking bestseller arguing that Turkish and Kurdish immigrants are genetically inferior.
But the book also ignited a debate in Germany over the unwillingness of many immigrants - particularly Muslims - to integrate. Merkel last week appeared to side with immigration critics, saying at a party conference that Germany's experiment to build a "multicultural" nation had "failed, absolutely failed."
The long-liberal lands of Scandinavia and the Netherlands are also seeing a nationalist party renaissance. Last week, a conservative Dutch government came to power with the support of the anti-Islamic party of Geert Wilders, who is standing trial on a charge of inciting racial hatred against Muslims. In exchange for his support, Wilders extracted promises that the new government would take dramatic steps to curb immigration and follow the French in banning full-length Muslim veils.
In recent months, right-wing and nationalist parties have also consolidated or are now poised to expand their power in Denmark, Norway and Finland.
Farther south, Italy's Northern League - which is already part of the government's ruling coalition and has opposed the construction of a mosque in Milan - won key victories in Venice and Piedmont last March.
"In many parts of Europe, the debate over immigration and Islam are now the same thing," said Lisa Bjurwald, an author and journalist based in Stockholm who has written about Muslim immigration.
Influx touches nerve
The number of immigrants in Sweden rose from 58,000 in 2000 to 102,000 last year, including refugees from Somalia and Iraq. Last year, 1.3 million people out of Sweden's population of 9.3 million were foreign-born.
The influx has touched a nerve in communities like Almgarden, a blue-collar suburb of cement-block apartment buildings and well-tended green parks outside Malmo in the Swedish south.
Tensions are running high in this traditionally more-conservative part of Sweden. Police are more frequently clashing with Muslim youths in one immigrant neighborhood; during a riot last year, dozens of angry teens torched cars and broke shop windows.
After the shootings in Malmo, authories warned immigrants to be extra vigilant. Police have not revealed details about suspects, saying only that they are looking for at least one male and that the crimes appear to be racially motivated.
The case has echoes of the "Laser Man" shootings here in the 1990s that took place around the time another far-right party briefly managed to enter the Swedish parliament. Starting in summer 1991, John Ausonius - known as Laser Man for his rifle's red-laser targeting system - shot 11 immigrants, killing one, before being caught and sentenced to life in prison in 1994.
The Swedish Democrats earned only 2 percent of the vote in liberal Stockholm but 35 percent in Almgarden.
"It isn't racist to want to preserve your culture," said Leif Johansson, a 64-year-old carpenter. "I'm open to immigration, but these people come without a thought to integration, no interest in learning Swedish or being part of Swedish society."
Indeed, the Swedish Democrats, like more and more nationalist parties in Europe, have tried to go mainstream, purging former white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Ekeroth, for instance, has a Jewish mother and strongly backs Israel. In addition, he said the Swedish Democrats no longer oppose gay rights, and he cites instances of gay-bashing committed by Muslims in Sweden to bolster his party's position on immigration. The party doubled its support from the last elections to almost 6 percent of the vote in September, allowing it to sit in parliament for the first time.
The Swedish Democrats are denounced as xenophobes by the ruling center-right coalition, which has vowed not to cooperate with their agenda. Nevertheless, even the government is rethinking parts of Sweden's immigration policy, among the most liberal in the world.
Voting from fear
While there have long been vocal anti-immigrant groups in Sweden, most Swedes in recent decades have embraced "multiculturalism," or the notion that immigrants have the right to preserve their language, customs and values.
But with a recent poll showing that 73 percent of Swedes consider the lack of integration a problem, the government is set to announce a new measure in December that would compel more immigrants to learn Swedish.
In addition, one of the major coalition parties is supporting a more limited ban on full-length Muslim veils in schools and this month came out against a panel recommendation that all major religions should be given equal time in lesson plans, saying Christianity should maintain a special status in Swedish schools.
In Stockholm's predominantly immigrant neighborhood of Rinkeby, the mood in the kebab houses and coffee shops is still one of shock at the success of the Swedish Democrats.
But Alma Adan, a 32-year-old Somali immigrant and youth counselor, said the Muslim community should also look inward. New immigrants, she said, should settle across Sweden, not just in neighborhoods like Rinkeby, and learn Swedish. Through workshops and counseling, she is trying to help young Muslims - including those who rioted in her neighborhood this summer, burning down a school building and setting cars on fire - feel more at home in their adopted homeland.
"That vote was about fear," she said, referring to support for the Swedish Democrats. "Fear among Swedes that their country is being taken away from them. But it is up to us to show them that this is not the case."
Sunday, October 17, 2010
The struggle against jihad
While Muslim parents pack public meetings with pronouncements that 'Islam is a religion of peace,' their sons and daughters are being taught something else
By Tarek Fatah and Salma Siddiqui,
Citizen Special
August 31, 2010
Relatives and supporters of men charged with planning terrorist attacks in the Toronto area arrive for a bail hearing in 2006. Community leaders often decry bad 'behaviour' and denounce 'terrorism,' but fail to take on the jihadist ideology that is poisoning Muslim youth.
Relatives and supporters of men charged with planning terrorist attacks in the Toronto area arrive for a bail hearing in 2006. Community leaders often decry bad 'behaviour' and denounce 'terrorism,' but fail to take on the jihadist ideology that is poisoning Muslim youth.
Photograph by: J.F. Moczulski, Reuters
No sooner did news of the Ottawa Terror Plot unfold on national TV, than one could predict the response of Canada's Islamists and their organizations.
Across Canada, apologists of the terror suspects repeated the same mantra. The three men arrested were portrayed as "innocent" and the wider Muslim community was positioned as the real victims of the episode. It was as if the Islamist leadership had dusted off the speaking notes from the days of the Toronto 18 trials when leader after leader stood up to claim the young men arrested were framed, not real terrorists.
As Muslim Canadians, both of us, while asking for the due judicial process to take its course, had no hesitation in condemning the rising tide of jihadi radicalism that is sweeping like a contagious disease among Muslim youth, especially of Pakistani ancestry, across Canada. However, by and large the leadership of traditional Islamist organizations and the mosque establishment repeated the now tired and cliché-ridden depiction of Muslims as the real victims.
Not a single imam that we have heard has mustered the courage to say, "The doctrine of armed jihad is defunct and inapplicable in the 21st century." Instead the same tired old clichés were repeated about Islam being a religion of peace and denouncing terrorism, while keeping mum about jihad.
Saira Rahman, a filmmaker, told the Winnipeg Free Press, "It's so very frustrating. It's very unfair -- you're demonizing communities again and creating a situation where everyone's guilty till proven innocent." She was not alone in being in denial.
From Ottawa, the epicentre of the latest terror threat, Nazira Tareen of the Ottawa Muslim Women's Organization wrote, "99.9 per cent of them (Muslims) are law abiding, hardworking, peace loving, caring and contributing citizens of Canada. ... I personally know all the imams of all the mosques in the Nation's Capital Region and all of them are totally against this type of behaviour. We are unanimous in condemning this type of behaviour." Again condemning "behaviour," but has nothing useful to say about the underlying jihadi ideology.
Obviously Tareen was not aware of the Environics Poll of 2007 that found 12 per cent of Canada's Muslims having a favourable disposition towards the Toronto 18 terrorists and 14 per cent who identified themselves with "extremists" within the Muslim community.
This means there could be as many as 100,000 Muslim Canadians who are hostile to Canada and western civilization. A scary number by any measure.
If individual Muslim Canadians were pushing the victimhood agenda, their organizations were doing no better. The Canadian Islamic Congress, which supported the introduction of Shariah law in Canada, issued a statement saying:
"Canadian Muslims, more than other citizens, are deeply concerned and disturbed ... especially about the psychological, social and emotional impact of these arrests on the wellbeing of Canadian Muslims." One was left scratching one's head: What about non-Muslim Canadians who were allegedly the real targets of these suspected terrorists? The CIC statement went further. It expressed concern about "how these arrests would be managed in Canada and what kind of impact the media reports will have on Canadian citizens of Muslim faith." Added to the spin was the accusation of journalistic "sensationalism, prejudgment, or speculation."
Unfortunately, the Muslim victimhood agenda was helped by the leader of the Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff, who stepped into the fray by claiming that the terror suspects need to be treated as innocent. He then made this outrageous remark: "It's important for Canadians to realize in the Toronto case, the courts acquitted many people."
Not true, Mr. Ignatieff. While charges were dropped in some cases, not a single member of the Toronto terror plot tried by the courts was acquitted. Everyone who was tried before the court was either convicted or confessed. As card-carrying Liberals, we were shocked to read how our leader was buying in to the Islamist agenda.
The Ottawa arrests have links to a Montreal Mosque, another hotbed of Islamist activity. Two of the suspects attended the Islamic Community Centre Mosque in Brossard. At the mosque too the men in charge were on the defensive, claiming no knowledge of any extremist activity.
Faisal Shahabuddin, a member of the mosque's board when asked to explain how two members of the congregation had allegedly gotten themselves involved in the terror plot, stated, "Why should I explain if we don't know it's true?"
However, this Montreal suburban mosque has had a history of Islamist activity. In September 2005, the leadership of the same mosque targeted fellow Muslim Fatima Houda-Pepin, member of the Quebec National Assembly, because she had dared to oppose Shariah law and was instrumental in moving a unanimous resolution against introducing Islamic law in Quebec.
She was intimidated and told the congregation would work to defeat her in the next elections. She won hands down. Responding to the bullying by the mosque, Fatima Houda-Pepin said, "We must not underestimate the threat posed by fundamentalists on women and the justice system."
Muslims of Ottawa are not new to the involvement of their sons in terrorism. Most are aware of the conviction of Momin Khawaja, yet continue to treat him as a victim and martyr.
The jihad that Momin Khawaja talked about in his musings is the armed jihad of warfare as clearly enunciated by such 20th-century Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood as Syed Qutb and Hassan al-Banna and Pakistan's Syed Maudoodi. It is this triad who are the ideological gurus of the world Islamist movements whose works are fanning the flames of armed jihad around the world.
As you read this column, young Islamists in campuses across Canada are distributing free booklets titled Towards Understanding Islam, written by Maudoodi. In the booklet, Maudoodi exhorts ordinary Muslims to launch jihad, as in armed struggle, against non-Muslims.
"Jihad is part of this overall defence of Islam," he writes. In case the reader is left with any doubt about the meaning of the word "jihad," Maudoodi clarifies: "In the language of the Divine Law, this word (jihad) is used specifically for the war that is waged solely in the name of God against those who perpetrate oppression as enemies of Islam. This supreme sacrifice is the responsibility of all Muslims."
Maudoodi goes on to label Muslims who refuse the call to armed jihad as apostates:
"Jihad is as much a primary duty as are daily prayers or fasting. One who avoids it is a sinner. His every claim to being a Muslim is doubtful. He is plainly a hypocrite who fails in the test of sincerity and all his acts of worship are a sham, a worthless, hollow show of deception." If Muslim countries do not go to war against the enemies of Islam, Maudoodi says a worldwide uprising by ordinary Muslims is the answer. He writes: "Muslims of the whole world must fight the common enemy."
If Maudoodi's exhortations to jihad are not enough, we have the words of the late Hassan al-Banna being distributed in our schools and universities. Al-Banna makes it quite clear that the word "jihad" means armed conflict. He mocks those who claim jihad is merely an internal struggle; al-Banna says this redefinition of the term "jihad" is a conspiracy so that "Muslims should become negligent."
While their parents pack public meetings with pronouncements that "Islam is a religion of peace," their sons and daughters are being taught something else.
Here is what Qutb, another Egyptian stalwart of the Islamist movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, writes in his seminal work on Islam and its relationship with the West, Milestones:
"Any place where Islamic Shariah is not enforced and where Islam is not dominant becomes the Home of Hostility (Dar-ul-Harb or the West). ... A Muslim will remain prepared to fight against it, whether it be his birthplace or a place where his relatives reside or where his property or any other material interests are located."
Unless the leaders of Canadian mosques as well as the Islamic organizations denounce the doctrine of jihad as pronounced by the Muslim Brotherhood, and distance themselves from the ideology of Qutb, al-Banna and Maudoodi, their chant that "Islam means peace" will fall on deaf ears.
It will merely reinforce the suspicions of many Canadians who feel some overseas groups are pulling the strings in this carefully staged puppet show.
Tarek Fatah is the author of The Jew is Not My Enemy (McClelland & Stewart) and a host on NewsTalk 1010 Radio in Toronto. Salma Siddiqui is vice-president of the Muslim Canadian Congress and is a businesswoman in Ottawa.
By Tarek Fatah and Salma Siddiqui,
Citizen Special
August 31, 2010
Relatives and supporters of men charged with planning terrorist attacks in the Toronto area arrive for a bail hearing in 2006. Community leaders often decry bad 'behaviour' and denounce 'terrorism,' but fail to take on the jihadist ideology that is poisoning Muslim youth.
Relatives and supporters of men charged with planning terrorist attacks in the Toronto area arrive for a bail hearing in 2006. Community leaders often decry bad 'behaviour' and denounce 'terrorism,' but fail to take on the jihadist ideology that is poisoning Muslim youth.
Photograph by: J.F. Moczulski, Reuters
No sooner did news of the Ottawa Terror Plot unfold on national TV, than one could predict the response of Canada's Islamists and their organizations.
Across Canada, apologists of the terror suspects repeated the same mantra. The three men arrested were portrayed as "innocent" and the wider Muslim community was positioned as the real victims of the episode. It was as if the Islamist leadership had dusted off the speaking notes from the days of the Toronto 18 trials when leader after leader stood up to claim the young men arrested were framed, not real terrorists.
As Muslim Canadians, both of us, while asking for the due judicial process to take its course, had no hesitation in condemning the rising tide of jihadi radicalism that is sweeping like a contagious disease among Muslim youth, especially of Pakistani ancestry, across Canada. However, by and large the leadership of traditional Islamist organizations and the mosque establishment repeated the now tired and cliché-ridden depiction of Muslims as the real victims.
Not a single imam that we have heard has mustered the courage to say, "The doctrine of armed jihad is defunct and inapplicable in the 21st century." Instead the same tired old clichés were repeated about Islam being a religion of peace and denouncing terrorism, while keeping mum about jihad.
Saira Rahman, a filmmaker, told the Winnipeg Free Press, "It's so very frustrating. It's very unfair -- you're demonizing communities again and creating a situation where everyone's guilty till proven innocent." She was not alone in being in denial.
From Ottawa, the epicentre of the latest terror threat, Nazira Tareen of the Ottawa Muslim Women's Organization wrote, "99.9 per cent of them (Muslims) are law abiding, hardworking, peace loving, caring and contributing citizens of Canada. ... I personally know all the imams of all the mosques in the Nation's Capital Region and all of them are totally against this type of behaviour. We are unanimous in condemning this type of behaviour." Again condemning "behaviour," but has nothing useful to say about the underlying jihadi ideology.
Obviously Tareen was not aware of the Environics Poll of 2007 that found 12 per cent of Canada's Muslims having a favourable disposition towards the Toronto 18 terrorists and 14 per cent who identified themselves with "extremists" within the Muslim community.
This means there could be as many as 100,000 Muslim Canadians who are hostile to Canada and western civilization. A scary number by any measure.
If individual Muslim Canadians were pushing the victimhood agenda, their organizations were doing no better. The Canadian Islamic Congress, which supported the introduction of Shariah law in Canada, issued a statement saying:
"Canadian Muslims, more than other citizens, are deeply concerned and disturbed ... especially about the psychological, social and emotional impact of these arrests on the wellbeing of Canadian Muslims." One was left scratching one's head: What about non-Muslim Canadians who were allegedly the real targets of these suspected terrorists? The CIC statement went further. It expressed concern about "how these arrests would be managed in Canada and what kind of impact the media reports will have on Canadian citizens of Muslim faith." Added to the spin was the accusation of journalistic "sensationalism, prejudgment, or speculation."
Unfortunately, the Muslim victimhood agenda was helped by the leader of the Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff, who stepped into the fray by claiming that the terror suspects need to be treated as innocent. He then made this outrageous remark: "It's important for Canadians to realize in the Toronto case, the courts acquitted many people."
Not true, Mr. Ignatieff. While charges were dropped in some cases, not a single member of the Toronto terror plot tried by the courts was acquitted. Everyone who was tried before the court was either convicted or confessed. As card-carrying Liberals, we were shocked to read how our leader was buying in to the Islamist agenda.
The Ottawa arrests have links to a Montreal Mosque, another hotbed of Islamist activity. Two of the suspects attended the Islamic Community Centre Mosque in Brossard. At the mosque too the men in charge were on the defensive, claiming no knowledge of any extremist activity.
Faisal Shahabuddin, a member of the mosque's board when asked to explain how two members of the congregation had allegedly gotten themselves involved in the terror plot, stated, "Why should I explain if we don't know it's true?"
However, this Montreal suburban mosque has had a history of Islamist activity. In September 2005, the leadership of the same mosque targeted fellow Muslim Fatima Houda-Pepin, member of the Quebec National Assembly, because she had dared to oppose Shariah law and was instrumental in moving a unanimous resolution against introducing Islamic law in Quebec.
She was intimidated and told the congregation would work to defeat her in the next elections. She won hands down. Responding to the bullying by the mosque, Fatima Houda-Pepin said, "We must not underestimate the threat posed by fundamentalists on women and the justice system."
Muslims of Ottawa are not new to the involvement of their sons in terrorism. Most are aware of the conviction of Momin Khawaja, yet continue to treat him as a victim and martyr.
The jihad that Momin Khawaja talked about in his musings is the armed jihad of warfare as clearly enunciated by such 20th-century Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood as Syed Qutb and Hassan al-Banna and Pakistan's Syed Maudoodi. It is this triad who are the ideological gurus of the world Islamist movements whose works are fanning the flames of armed jihad around the world.
As you read this column, young Islamists in campuses across Canada are distributing free booklets titled Towards Understanding Islam, written by Maudoodi. In the booklet, Maudoodi exhorts ordinary Muslims to launch jihad, as in armed struggle, against non-Muslims.
"Jihad is part of this overall defence of Islam," he writes. In case the reader is left with any doubt about the meaning of the word "jihad," Maudoodi clarifies: "In the language of the Divine Law, this word (jihad) is used specifically for the war that is waged solely in the name of God against those who perpetrate oppression as enemies of Islam. This supreme sacrifice is the responsibility of all Muslims."
Maudoodi goes on to label Muslims who refuse the call to armed jihad as apostates:
"Jihad is as much a primary duty as are daily prayers or fasting. One who avoids it is a sinner. His every claim to being a Muslim is doubtful. He is plainly a hypocrite who fails in the test of sincerity and all his acts of worship are a sham, a worthless, hollow show of deception." If Muslim countries do not go to war against the enemies of Islam, Maudoodi says a worldwide uprising by ordinary Muslims is the answer. He writes: "Muslims of the whole world must fight the common enemy."
If Maudoodi's exhortations to jihad are not enough, we have the words of the late Hassan al-Banna being distributed in our schools and universities. Al-Banna makes it quite clear that the word "jihad" means armed conflict. He mocks those who claim jihad is merely an internal struggle; al-Banna says this redefinition of the term "jihad" is a conspiracy so that "Muslims should become negligent."
While their parents pack public meetings with pronouncements that "Islam is a religion of peace," their sons and daughters are being taught something else.
Here is what Qutb, another Egyptian stalwart of the Islamist movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, writes in his seminal work on Islam and its relationship with the West, Milestones:
"Any place where Islamic Shariah is not enforced and where Islam is not dominant becomes the Home of Hostility (Dar-ul-Harb or the West). ... A Muslim will remain prepared to fight against it, whether it be his birthplace or a place where his relatives reside or where his property or any other material interests are located."
Unless the leaders of Canadian mosques as well as the Islamic organizations denounce the doctrine of jihad as pronounced by the Muslim Brotherhood, and distance themselves from the ideology of Qutb, al-Banna and Maudoodi, their chant that "Islam means peace" will fall on deaf ears.
It will merely reinforce the suspicions of many Canadians who feel some overseas groups are pulling the strings in this carefully staged puppet show.
Tarek Fatah is the author of The Jew is Not My Enemy (McClelland & Stewart) and a host on NewsTalk 1010 Radio in Toronto. Salma Siddiqui is vice-president of the Muslim Canadian Congress and is a businesswoman in Ottawa.
Friday, May 29, 2009
British in Sri Lanka
May 22, 2009
When Pigs Fly–and Scold: Brits Lecturing Sri Lanka!
By Gary Brecher
Key fact: in Sri Lanka heroes were allowed to get fat, another reason to like the place.
You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just read something sicker than any Congo cannibal buffet. It’s an article by a posh little limey named Jeremey Brown condemning the Sri Lankan government for being too messy in putting down the LTTE, and demanding that we stop buying the cheap textiles the poor Sinhalese make their living churning out.
What’s sick about this is that the British establishment destroyed the Sinhalese people completely. Completely and purposely, sadistically. Stole their land, humiliated and massacred their government, made it Imperial policy to erase every shred of self-respect the Sinhalese had left. You can talk about the Nazis all day long, but for my money nothing they did was as gross as what you find out when you actually look into the history of British-Sinhalese relations. If you can even call them “relations”; I guess a murder-rape is a relation, sort of.
But nobody knows about it. Weird, huh? Nothing weirds me out more than the total news blackout the Brits have managed to put on all the sick shit they did to brown and black people all over the world. They had a system, and it worked. They’d grab some paradise island in the tropics, use the Royal Navy to wall it off from the rest of the world, and crush the local tribe. If the locals resisted, the Brits would starve them to death, shoot them down, infect them with smallpox or get them addicted to opium–whatever they had to do to gang-rape the locals so bad that they’d lose the will to resist.
And to this day, they don’t catch even a little bit of Hell for it. Everybody thinks the Brits are all cute and harmless. You’re all a bunch of suckers for those suave accents, you suckers! The truth is that compared to the Brits, the Nazis you’re always yammering about were a gang of eighth-grade stoners who ran around spraypainting swastikas on school property. The Nazis lasted one decade; the Brits quietly ran their extermination programs for three hundred years, and to this day they wouldn’t even think of feeling guilty about it. Wouldn’t cross their minds.
That’s what made me want to puke battery acid when I read Mister Jeremy Brown’s sermon on the naughty Sinhalese: this pig Brown has no clue about why Sri Lanka is so fucked up, no hint at all that it’s the result of British Imperial policy. Not “mistakes” or “a few bad apples” or “regrettable excesses” but clear, cold, ruthless British policy.
One of the funniest bits in Brown’s little Anglican sermon to the Sinhalese is when he mentions Arthur C. Clarke, the Brit sci-fi writer who moved to Sri Lanka. The reason that’s funny is that a few years back, when he was too senile and drunk to watch his tongue, Clarke admitted in an interview that the whole reason he moved to Sri Lanka is “for the boys.” As in, he liked to rape little boys, and they were cheap and pretty in the dear old ex-colony. The fucking Brits wouldn’t stop raping the Sinhalese even after their troops were forced off the island.
Jeremy Brown wouldn’t know that, of course. To him, Clarke is a wonderful example of all the wonderful things British people have done for po’ little Sri Lanka:
“Britain has…helped to rebuild Sri Lanka’s tourist industry: Britons accounted for 18.5 per cent of the foreigners who visited the former colony’s famous beaches, wildlife parks, tea plantations and Buddhist temples last year. Only India sends more tourists. Many Britons also own property there, especially around the southern city of Galle, not far from where Arthur C.Clarke, the British science fiction writer who settled in Sri Lanka, used to love to scuba dive. [Is that what they’re callin’ it these days? GB]
So the question facing British shoppers and holidaymakers is this: should they continue to support Sri Lanka’s garment and tourist industries?
Don’t you love that last sentence: “Sadly, the answer must be no.” Anybody who can write a sentence like that without blowing his brains out at the monitor is a hopeless twit anyway, but let’s help Jeremy out a little bit, folks, let’s go back in time and take a quick look at all the wonderful things the Brits did for these rotten, ungrateful Sinhalese.
The pattern you see in the colonizing of Sri Lanka is a real familiar one, if you study the European naval empires: the Portugese, the greatest sailors and explorers, came to Sri Lanka long before the Brits, claimed the place, but couldn’t hold on to it. The Portugese lost the island to the Dutch, those up’n’coming Protestant go-getters, in the mid-1600s. That’s another pattern you see everywhere, the old Papist powers losing out to the Protestants, who were just faster and smarter.
The next stage was also totally by the book: the Brits, the canopy tree if you know what I mean, come along and force the Dutch out. There were times the Brits sort of liked the Dutch; they were Protestant, at least, and blonde/blue-eyed. But business was business, and the Brits realized, by the end of the 1700s, that Sri Lanka was worth taking. Of course they didn’t say that in public; the official reason was that they had to boot the Dutch to guard the island from the nasty radical Frenchies.
That way of stealing islands, making it sound like you had to take them for the greater good–that was classic Brit strategy. They always made it look like they were forced, against their will, to grab this or that colony. I dunno if y’all ever saw a movie called Erik the Viking, but it has a great scene with John Cleese playing this insane bloodthirsty warlord who orders people tortured to death in this tired, disappointed upper-class voice, and then whines, “It’s the stress that gets you”–all put upon and harrassed, like Attila the Hun meets The Office. That’s a perfect image for the way the Brits booted the Dutch out of Ceylon, tsk-tsking while they stole every shed, cannon and bale of tea on the island.
With the Dutch trade rivals gone, the Brits had only one problem left: the damned natives, the Sinhala, or “Kandyans” as they were called back then. That dumb name, “Kandyans,” came from the fact that their main city was Kandy, up in the highlands in the south of the island, the fat part of the teardrop. The Sinhala lived in the highlands for the simple reason that it was a little cooler, not as totally malarial, up there compared to the stinking coastal marshes.
By all accounts, the Sinhala/Kandyans were harmless slackers, who didn’t need or want much from the outside world. All they asked was for people to leave them alone up on their big rocky highlands to do their Buddhist thing. Unfortunately that wasn’t British policy. It irked the redcoats that Kandy still had a king, an army, all this impudent baggage that went with independence. The British decided to break the Sinhalese completely, crush the whole society.
You have to remember that by this time, the early 1800s, the Brits have perfected their techniques in little experiments all over the world. Those Clockwork Orange shrinks were amateurs compared to the Imperial Civil Service. They had dozens of ways of undermining native kingdoms.
British administrators were trained to do a kind of rough, quick sociological sketch of the natives, get a sense of the fault lines and then figure out how to exploit them. The Brits saw fast that the Kandyans were a sluggish bunch of people divided into rigid castes in the classic subcontinent pattern. That made it easy: the Brits made two big castes their official pets and shunned the others, setting up a violent hate between different parts of Sinhalese society. That guaranteed that if the diehard Sinhalese/Kandyan nationalists ever revolted, the teacher’s-pet castes would have a good selfish reason to help massacre them.
Then there was the Kandyan king himself. The Brits weren’t dumb in the way Paul Bremer was dumb, “de-Baathifying” Iraq. They loved corrupt local rulers. Much easier and cheaper to bribe one fat old degenerate on a throne than negotiate with all the commoners. So the Brits started playing with the nervous, dumb-ass Kandyan royals, scaring them with the threat of losing everything and then teasing them with the possibility of the safe, soft life of a Brit puppet.
This was the major leagues of Colonialism. To give you an idea of how important Ceylon/Sri Lanka was back then, try this on: in 1802, when French armies were kicking British and Prussian and Italian and Russian ass all over Europe (weird how nobody remembers that, huh?), the Brits were so terrified they tried to give Napoleon all their colonies except Sri Lanka and Trinidad. Those were the two they needed to keep.
img-68
The Kandy Men: no match for the Brit Vampire Lords
And this is where another standard Brit policy came into play–a real smart one that we ought to be imitating: use native auxiliaries, not homeland troops, as much as possible. For all kinds of reasons, but here are the main ones:
1. If you bring in troops from some remote part of the Empire to do your dirty work, it’s those troops, those faces and accents, the locals will remember, and hate, for generations. So you, the sly little pink Brit administrator, can stroll in later and commiserate with the locals as they show you around their burned huts, bayoneted kids, etc., and even say with a straight face, “Oh my, those auxiliaries from wherever, what ruddy heathens, eh? Outrageous, I shall certainly let Whitehall know about these abuses!” Then, of course, you get in your sedan chair, close the curtains and chuckle all the way home to where your little bum-boy is waiting.
2. Nobody back in London counts casualties as long as it’s Malay mercs dying. You can lose a lot of them–and a lot of Malays did die fighting the Sinhala, especially in the total rout of a malaria-sapped Brit/Malay force at the Mahaveli River in 1803–but nobody is going to make a fuss in the Times of London (Mister Jeremy Brown’s paper, as you may recall). If you’re lucky they’ll pop off before payday and you can keep their payroll for that estate in Shropshire.
3. Dropping hot-blooded feisty Malay muslims with guns far from home and making them fight Sinhalese bleeds Malay society as well as Sinhalese. Left in peace, Malays could be trouble–a proud, warlike people. So by sending them to die in Sri Lanka, you’re diverting all that young, angry Malay blood away from SE Asia and using it to bleed Kandy (bleed Kandy–I like that!). Two birds, one bloodsoaked stone.
You see why I get impatient with you gullible suckers yammering about the fucking Nazis? The Nazis were retards, a white-trash tantrum, an eighth-grade chem-class pipe bomb, a quick-fizzle flash in the pan, compared to the Brits, the scariest motherfuckers ever to butt-fuck the planet.
The mercenaries the Brits sent to crush the Kandyans were Malays, muslims from SE Asia who didn’t need a lot of pep talks to slaughter South Asian Buddhists (and steal their chickens). That was life for the Brits back then, at the top of their game: picking up pieces from one part of the world and dropping them where they’d do the most harm, half the world away. “Ah yes, let’s ferry some Malay mercs to Kandy, that should give the bloody idol-worshippers something to think about!”
Destroying Buddhism was a big part of Brit policy. The Buddhist routine, the temples, begging monks, long boring prayers–it was the glue that kept Kandy together. So the Brits decided to destroy it. They even said so, in private memos to each other. They weren’t shy in them days. Here’s the Brit governor in 1807: “Reliance on Buddhism must be destroyed. Make sure all [village] chiefs are Christian.”
Up to 1818, the Brits had a blast messing with doomed Sinhala rebellions, trying out CI recipes like Frankenstein guesting on Rachael Ray. A good time was had by all, except the Sinhalese. They had a very, very bad time, and it was about to get worse.
See, another constant you’ll find in Brit imperial policy is that although they’re very sly and patient, they have a very good sense of when to cut the crap and just wipe out a tribe that’s been annoying them for too long. They were getting sick of the Sinhalese, with all their bickering and intrigues; the redcoats just weren’t enjoying the Col. Kurtz game the way they used to. So boom: the “kill’em all” era begins.
But they did it smart, not like the idiot boastful Nazis y’all love to obsess on. I bet every one on the planet can name the Nazi death camps, but I’d be surprised if more than, say, a half dozen people outside Sri Lanka can name the policy the Brits used to destroy the Sinhala for good.
Anybody? Didn’t think so. See, here’s another little tip for up’n’coming genocidaires out there: always pick the most boring name possible. Those fucking Nazis, with their heavy-metal jewelry and titles! Dopes! You want extermination programs with names that put everybody to sleep.
And that’s why in 1818 Britain brought “the wasteland policy” to Kandy. They could have called it what that Liberian wacko called his campaign: “Operation No Living Thing.” That’s what it meant: Brit-led troops “draining the sea” the Sinhala irregulars swam in by burning every hut, every field, and killing every animal in every village they suspected of harboring “rebels.”
Hey, that’s another key Brit CI techniques: that word “rebels.” Blows me away: how can a Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, fighting for the country his people have owned for a hundred generations, be a “rebel”? And the pipsqueak redcoat officer hunting him down, who was born and raised in fucking London–he’s not the “rebel,” he’s the forces of law and order, the rightful authorities. Quite a racket if you have the sheer, sociopathic nerve to say it with a straight face. (I’m talking to you, Mister Jeremy Brown!)
What does “rebel” mean, anyway? I’ve noticed that in English press it’s a bad word. Here it’s different, because we were the rebels in 1775 and proud of it. But see, people who know the American revolution think that the Brit policy against the Yankees, where (give or take a Banastre Tarlteton or two), the redcoats tried to avoid killing civvies, was normal Imperial policy.
Bullshit. The reason the Brits let us go, didn’t try scorched-earth on us, was that we WERE Brits, as far as they could tell: white protestant English-speaking humans. If you weren’t all of the above, you weren’t human. The only other war where English troops had the same restraint was–take a guess. Right: the English Civil War. In England, they fought clean. But when Cromwell marched up to subdue the Scots, who were Protestant (good) but non-English (bad), a lot of POWs never made it back to the holding pens, and a lot of crofts were torched, and a lot of girls were raped. When he moved from Scotland to Ireland, where the filthy locals were filthy Papist as well as non-English, well, you don’t want to know what happened there.
So in places like Sri Lanka, full of brown heathens, Brit policy had nothing to do with fucking Yorktown. More like Dresden, only lower-tech.
The “Wasteland” policy was smart and mean at the same time–another sure mark of the Brit Imperial Touch. It was designed to deny the “rebels” support in the short term, but in the long term it was pure punishment, taking away the land, livestock and other assets of all the Sinhalese who were even suspected of being “rebel”-lovers.
And it worked. To this day, 200 years later, the Sinhalese castes who backed the rebels are dirt poor, and worse: they’re hated by everybody around them and they even hate themselves. And nobody even remembers who did it to them, poor lab rats. They think it’s their own fault, that there’s something wrong with them.
There’s more, and worse, but to tell the truth, this is making me sick. I’ve tried to tell this story a dozen times and nobody wants to know. You just end up vomiting battery acid all night, and pigs like Mister Jeremy Brown of the Times of London never lose one second of sleep over all those bodies, and all those lies and sheer nastiness. What’s the use? I’ll just fastforward through a couple of highlight shots. Take reprisals. You know, like those bad ol’ Nazis used to do after a “rebel” attack? The Brits were there way before the Nazis. They took revenge for a half-assed Kandyan revolt by killing one out of every hundred Sinhalese. Like, at random. To keep it fair, you know, not play favorites.
And then the nastiest CI weapon of all, the demographic bomb. This was a Brit specialty all over the world (see Fiji for a weirdly similar case). The Brits ran India, so they had total control over millions of obedient Tamil peasants who were starving, desperate, and ready to go anywhere, just pile into the hold of a ship and get out to cut cane or plant rice in some place that may as well have been on the Moon for all they knew.
So along with the massacre/reprisals, the Brits came up with one of their classic two-birds-one-stone plans: to neutralize the Sinhalese, let’s import huge hordes of Tamils from India! They’re cheap and docile and they’ll give the Sinhala something to keep them busy even after we have to leave the island, haw! And meanwhile they’ll drive the price of labor down even further! Brilliant, chaps, absolutely brilliant!
And they did it. Worked so well it’s still working today. And when they were done totally destroying the poor Sinhalese, the Brits did what they do best, better than any other murder gang on the planet: they took that amnesia zapper from Men in Black and zapped everyone in Sri Lanka, then turned it on themselves and were suddenly so innocent, so damn virtuous and clean, that a pig like Mister Jeremy Brown can actually sit down at a computer and boast about all the wonderful times England has raped Sri Lanka, from olden times right down to Arthur C. Clarke buggering every little boy on the island. Heckuva job, Brownie! Satan himself is shaking his head, muttering, “Gotta give it to the fuckin’ limeys, damn it….they got no shame at all, ya gotta admire that. Damn, even I wouldn’t have had the gall to talk like that Jeremy Brown. I’m putting him down for CEO of the Hell Propagandastaffel the minute his liver packs up and he lands down here.”
OK, done. Now you can all pass around that amnesia gun.
When Pigs Fly–and Scold: Brits Lecturing Sri Lanka!
By Gary Brecher
Key fact: in Sri Lanka heroes were allowed to get fat, another reason to like the place.
You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just read something sicker than any Congo cannibal buffet. It’s an article by a posh little limey named Jeremey Brown condemning the Sri Lankan government for being too messy in putting down the LTTE, and demanding that we stop buying the cheap textiles the poor Sinhalese make their living churning out.
What’s sick about this is that the British establishment destroyed the Sinhalese people completely. Completely and purposely, sadistically. Stole their land, humiliated and massacred their government, made it Imperial policy to erase every shred of self-respect the Sinhalese had left. You can talk about the Nazis all day long, but for my money nothing they did was as gross as what you find out when you actually look into the history of British-Sinhalese relations. If you can even call them “relations”; I guess a murder-rape is a relation, sort of.
But nobody knows about it. Weird, huh? Nothing weirds me out more than the total news blackout the Brits have managed to put on all the sick shit they did to brown and black people all over the world. They had a system, and it worked. They’d grab some paradise island in the tropics, use the Royal Navy to wall it off from the rest of the world, and crush the local tribe. If the locals resisted, the Brits would starve them to death, shoot them down, infect them with smallpox or get them addicted to opium–whatever they had to do to gang-rape the locals so bad that they’d lose the will to resist.
And to this day, they don’t catch even a little bit of Hell for it. Everybody thinks the Brits are all cute and harmless. You’re all a bunch of suckers for those suave accents, you suckers! The truth is that compared to the Brits, the Nazis you’re always yammering about were a gang of eighth-grade stoners who ran around spraypainting swastikas on school property. The Nazis lasted one decade; the Brits quietly ran their extermination programs for three hundred years, and to this day they wouldn’t even think of feeling guilty about it. Wouldn’t cross their minds.
That’s what made me want to puke battery acid when I read Mister Jeremy Brown’s sermon on the naughty Sinhalese: this pig Brown has no clue about why Sri Lanka is so fucked up, no hint at all that it’s the result of British Imperial policy. Not “mistakes” or “a few bad apples” or “regrettable excesses” but clear, cold, ruthless British policy.
One of the funniest bits in Brown’s little Anglican sermon to the Sinhalese is when he mentions Arthur C. Clarke, the Brit sci-fi writer who moved to Sri Lanka. The reason that’s funny is that a few years back, when he was too senile and drunk to watch his tongue, Clarke admitted in an interview that the whole reason he moved to Sri Lanka is “for the boys.” As in, he liked to rape little boys, and they were cheap and pretty in the dear old ex-colony. The fucking Brits wouldn’t stop raping the Sinhalese even after their troops were forced off the island.
Jeremy Brown wouldn’t know that, of course. To him, Clarke is a wonderful example of all the wonderful things British people have done for po’ little Sri Lanka:
“Britain has…helped to rebuild Sri Lanka’s tourist industry: Britons accounted for 18.5 per cent of the foreigners who visited the former colony’s famous beaches, wildlife parks, tea plantations and Buddhist temples last year. Only India sends more tourists. Many Britons also own property there, especially around the southern city of Galle, not far from where Arthur C.Clarke, the British science fiction writer who settled in Sri Lanka, used to love to scuba dive. [Is that what they’re callin’ it these days? GB]
So the question facing British shoppers and holidaymakers is this: should they continue to support Sri Lanka’s garment and tourist industries?
Don’t you love that last sentence: “Sadly, the answer must be no.” Anybody who can write a sentence like that without blowing his brains out at the monitor is a hopeless twit anyway, but let’s help Jeremy out a little bit, folks, let’s go back in time and take a quick look at all the wonderful things the Brits did for these rotten, ungrateful Sinhalese.
The pattern you see in the colonizing of Sri Lanka is a real familiar one, if you study the European naval empires: the Portugese, the greatest sailors and explorers, came to Sri Lanka long before the Brits, claimed the place, but couldn’t hold on to it. The Portugese lost the island to the Dutch, those up’n’coming Protestant go-getters, in the mid-1600s. That’s another pattern you see everywhere, the old Papist powers losing out to the Protestants, who were just faster and smarter.
The next stage was also totally by the book: the Brits, the canopy tree if you know what I mean, come along and force the Dutch out. There were times the Brits sort of liked the Dutch; they were Protestant, at least, and blonde/blue-eyed. But business was business, and the Brits realized, by the end of the 1700s, that Sri Lanka was worth taking. Of course they didn’t say that in public; the official reason was that they had to boot the Dutch to guard the island from the nasty radical Frenchies.
That way of stealing islands, making it sound like you had to take them for the greater good–that was classic Brit strategy. They always made it look like they were forced, against their will, to grab this or that colony. I dunno if y’all ever saw a movie called Erik the Viking, but it has a great scene with John Cleese playing this insane bloodthirsty warlord who orders people tortured to death in this tired, disappointed upper-class voice, and then whines, “It’s the stress that gets you”–all put upon and harrassed, like Attila the Hun meets The Office. That’s a perfect image for the way the Brits booted the Dutch out of Ceylon, tsk-tsking while they stole every shed, cannon and bale of tea on the island.
With the Dutch trade rivals gone, the Brits had only one problem left: the damned natives, the Sinhala, or “Kandyans” as they were called back then. That dumb name, “Kandyans,” came from the fact that their main city was Kandy, up in the highlands in the south of the island, the fat part of the teardrop. The Sinhala lived in the highlands for the simple reason that it was a little cooler, not as totally malarial, up there compared to the stinking coastal marshes.
By all accounts, the Sinhala/Kandyans were harmless slackers, who didn’t need or want much from the outside world. All they asked was for people to leave them alone up on their big rocky highlands to do their Buddhist thing. Unfortunately that wasn’t British policy. It irked the redcoats that Kandy still had a king, an army, all this impudent baggage that went with independence. The British decided to break the Sinhalese completely, crush the whole society.
You have to remember that by this time, the early 1800s, the Brits have perfected their techniques in little experiments all over the world. Those Clockwork Orange shrinks were amateurs compared to the Imperial Civil Service. They had dozens of ways of undermining native kingdoms.
British administrators were trained to do a kind of rough, quick sociological sketch of the natives, get a sense of the fault lines and then figure out how to exploit them. The Brits saw fast that the Kandyans were a sluggish bunch of people divided into rigid castes in the classic subcontinent pattern. That made it easy: the Brits made two big castes their official pets and shunned the others, setting up a violent hate between different parts of Sinhalese society. That guaranteed that if the diehard Sinhalese/Kandyan nationalists ever revolted, the teacher’s-pet castes would have a good selfish reason to help massacre them.
Then there was the Kandyan king himself. The Brits weren’t dumb in the way Paul Bremer was dumb, “de-Baathifying” Iraq. They loved corrupt local rulers. Much easier and cheaper to bribe one fat old degenerate on a throne than negotiate with all the commoners. So the Brits started playing with the nervous, dumb-ass Kandyan royals, scaring them with the threat of losing everything and then teasing them with the possibility of the safe, soft life of a Brit puppet.
This was the major leagues of Colonialism. To give you an idea of how important Ceylon/Sri Lanka was back then, try this on: in 1802, when French armies were kicking British and Prussian and Italian and Russian ass all over Europe (weird how nobody remembers that, huh?), the Brits were so terrified they tried to give Napoleon all their colonies except Sri Lanka and Trinidad. Those were the two they needed to keep.
img-68
The Kandy Men: no match for the Brit Vampire Lords
And this is where another standard Brit policy came into play–a real smart one that we ought to be imitating: use native auxiliaries, not homeland troops, as much as possible. For all kinds of reasons, but here are the main ones:
1. If you bring in troops from some remote part of the Empire to do your dirty work, it’s those troops, those faces and accents, the locals will remember, and hate, for generations. So you, the sly little pink Brit administrator, can stroll in later and commiserate with the locals as they show you around their burned huts, bayoneted kids, etc., and even say with a straight face, “Oh my, those auxiliaries from wherever, what ruddy heathens, eh? Outrageous, I shall certainly let Whitehall know about these abuses!” Then, of course, you get in your sedan chair, close the curtains and chuckle all the way home to where your little bum-boy is waiting.
2. Nobody back in London counts casualties as long as it’s Malay mercs dying. You can lose a lot of them–and a lot of Malays did die fighting the Sinhala, especially in the total rout of a malaria-sapped Brit/Malay force at the Mahaveli River in 1803–but nobody is going to make a fuss in the Times of London (Mister Jeremy Brown’s paper, as you may recall). If you’re lucky they’ll pop off before payday and you can keep their payroll for that estate in Shropshire.
3. Dropping hot-blooded feisty Malay muslims with guns far from home and making them fight Sinhalese bleeds Malay society as well as Sinhalese. Left in peace, Malays could be trouble–a proud, warlike people. So by sending them to die in Sri Lanka, you’re diverting all that young, angry Malay blood away from SE Asia and using it to bleed Kandy (bleed Kandy–I like that!). Two birds, one bloodsoaked stone.
You see why I get impatient with you gullible suckers yammering about the fucking Nazis? The Nazis were retards, a white-trash tantrum, an eighth-grade chem-class pipe bomb, a quick-fizzle flash in the pan, compared to the Brits, the scariest motherfuckers ever to butt-fuck the planet.
The mercenaries the Brits sent to crush the Kandyans were Malays, muslims from SE Asia who didn’t need a lot of pep talks to slaughter South Asian Buddhists (and steal their chickens). That was life for the Brits back then, at the top of their game: picking up pieces from one part of the world and dropping them where they’d do the most harm, half the world away. “Ah yes, let’s ferry some Malay mercs to Kandy, that should give the bloody idol-worshippers something to think about!”
Destroying Buddhism was a big part of Brit policy. The Buddhist routine, the temples, begging monks, long boring prayers–it was the glue that kept Kandy together. So the Brits decided to destroy it. They even said so, in private memos to each other. They weren’t shy in them days. Here’s the Brit governor in 1807: “Reliance on Buddhism must be destroyed. Make sure all [village] chiefs are Christian.”
Up to 1818, the Brits had a blast messing with doomed Sinhala rebellions, trying out CI recipes like Frankenstein guesting on Rachael Ray. A good time was had by all, except the Sinhalese. They had a very, very bad time, and it was about to get worse.
See, another constant you’ll find in Brit imperial policy is that although they’re very sly and patient, they have a very good sense of when to cut the crap and just wipe out a tribe that’s been annoying them for too long. They were getting sick of the Sinhalese, with all their bickering and intrigues; the redcoats just weren’t enjoying the Col. Kurtz game the way they used to. So boom: the “kill’em all” era begins.
But they did it smart, not like the idiot boastful Nazis y’all love to obsess on. I bet every one on the planet can name the Nazi death camps, but I’d be surprised if more than, say, a half dozen people outside Sri Lanka can name the policy the Brits used to destroy the Sinhala for good.
Anybody? Didn’t think so. See, here’s another little tip for up’n’coming genocidaires out there: always pick the most boring name possible. Those fucking Nazis, with their heavy-metal jewelry and titles! Dopes! You want extermination programs with names that put everybody to sleep.
And that’s why in 1818 Britain brought “the wasteland policy” to Kandy. They could have called it what that Liberian wacko called his campaign: “Operation No Living Thing.” That’s what it meant: Brit-led troops “draining the sea” the Sinhala irregulars swam in by burning every hut, every field, and killing every animal in every village they suspected of harboring “rebels.”
Hey, that’s another key Brit CI techniques: that word “rebels.” Blows me away: how can a Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, fighting for the country his people have owned for a hundred generations, be a “rebel”? And the pipsqueak redcoat officer hunting him down, who was born and raised in fucking London–he’s not the “rebel,” he’s the forces of law and order, the rightful authorities. Quite a racket if you have the sheer, sociopathic nerve to say it with a straight face. (I’m talking to you, Mister Jeremy Brown!)
What does “rebel” mean, anyway? I’ve noticed that in English press it’s a bad word. Here it’s different, because we were the rebels in 1775 and proud of it. But see, people who know the American revolution think that the Brit policy against the Yankees, where (give or take a Banastre Tarlteton or two), the redcoats tried to avoid killing civvies, was normal Imperial policy.
Bullshit. The reason the Brits let us go, didn’t try scorched-earth on us, was that we WERE Brits, as far as they could tell: white protestant English-speaking humans. If you weren’t all of the above, you weren’t human. The only other war where English troops had the same restraint was–take a guess. Right: the English Civil War. In England, they fought clean. But when Cromwell marched up to subdue the Scots, who were Protestant (good) but non-English (bad), a lot of POWs never made it back to the holding pens, and a lot of crofts were torched, and a lot of girls were raped. When he moved from Scotland to Ireland, where the filthy locals were filthy Papist as well as non-English, well, you don’t want to know what happened there.
So in places like Sri Lanka, full of brown heathens, Brit policy had nothing to do with fucking Yorktown. More like Dresden, only lower-tech.
The “Wasteland” policy was smart and mean at the same time–another sure mark of the Brit Imperial Touch. It was designed to deny the “rebels” support in the short term, but in the long term it was pure punishment, taking away the land, livestock and other assets of all the Sinhalese who were even suspected of being “rebel”-lovers.
And it worked. To this day, 200 years later, the Sinhalese castes who backed the rebels are dirt poor, and worse: they’re hated by everybody around them and they even hate themselves. And nobody even remembers who did it to them, poor lab rats. They think it’s their own fault, that there’s something wrong with them.
There’s more, and worse, but to tell the truth, this is making me sick. I’ve tried to tell this story a dozen times and nobody wants to know. You just end up vomiting battery acid all night, and pigs like Mister Jeremy Brown of the Times of London never lose one second of sleep over all those bodies, and all those lies and sheer nastiness. What’s the use? I’ll just fastforward through a couple of highlight shots. Take reprisals. You know, like those bad ol’ Nazis used to do after a “rebel” attack? The Brits were there way before the Nazis. They took revenge for a half-assed Kandyan revolt by killing one out of every hundred Sinhalese. Like, at random. To keep it fair, you know, not play favorites.
And then the nastiest CI weapon of all, the demographic bomb. This was a Brit specialty all over the world (see Fiji for a weirdly similar case). The Brits ran India, so they had total control over millions of obedient Tamil peasants who were starving, desperate, and ready to go anywhere, just pile into the hold of a ship and get out to cut cane or plant rice in some place that may as well have been on the Moon for all they knew.
So along with the massacre/reprisals, the Brits came up with one of their classic two-birds-one-stone plans: to neutralize the Sinhalese, let’s import huge hordes of Tamils from India! They’re cheap and docile and they’ll give the Sinhala something to keep them busy even after we have to leave the island, haw! And meanwhile they’ll drive the price of labor down even further! Brilliant, chaps, absolutely brilliant!
And they did it. Worked so well it’s still working today. And when they were done totally destroying the poor Sinhalese, the Brits did what they do best, better than any other murder gang on the planet: they took that amnesia zapper from Men in Black and zapped everyone in Sri Lanka, then turned it on themselves and were suddenly so innocent, so damn virtuous and clean, that a pig like Mister Jeremy Brown can actually sit down at a computer and boast about all the wonderful times England has raped Sri Lanka, from olden times right down to Arthur C. Clarke buggering every little boy on the island. Heckuva job, Brownie! Satan himself is shaking his head, muttering, “Gotta give it to the fuckin’ limeys, damn it….they got no shame at all, ya gotta admire that. Damn, even I wouldn’t have had the gall to talk like that Jeremy Brown. I’m putting him down for CEO of the Hell Propagandastaffel the minute his liver packs up and he lands down here.”
OK, done. Now you can all pass around that amnesia gun.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Islamic influence grows in Europe
The Rise of the Right: Europe’s Solution to Immigration
By Handan T. Satiroglu
Women’s International Perspective
January 7, 2009
A December Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project reports anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Muslim sentiments, to be growing steadily across [Europe]. Noting that the increase in Muslim prejudice has occurred over a period of decades, the report claims that nearly 52 percent of Spaniards expressed a negative opinion of Muslims - a view echoed by 50 percent of Germans, 46 percent of Poles, and 38 percent of French people. According to an April Georgetown University report, 67 percent of Dutch, and 80 percent of Danes agree with the statement, “the growing interaction between the Muslim world and the West is a menace to freedom.”
[…]
Once a welcoming multicultural haven, Denmark’s voters have given the Danish People’s Party its fourth consecutive hike in voting share, making it the third largest party in Europe. In Switzerland where the foreign-born population hovers around 20 percent, the nationalist Swiss People’s Party regularly receives 29 percent of the vote; in France, Nicolas Sarkozy grabbed the presidency after mimicking the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the unforgiving nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Netherlands, Sweden and Italy have all witnessed the rise of conservative discourse, while the second largest party in Norway runs on an anti-immigrant platform. And if there is anything that the Flemish and Walloons of Belgium can agree upon, it is the curtailment of the progressive Islamization of their society.
The term Islamization has gained much popularity in recent years, especially in the right-wing media. As European Muslims demand more mosques, state-funded Islamic schools, and even the implementation of Sharia (Islamic law) in their host countries, the term refers to the gradual process by which European society is becoming increasingly and visibly Muslim.
Unquestionably, an exploding Islamic population remains the driver behind changing voter patterns. […] In just three short decades, Islam has moved from essentially being a nonfactor to a religion that challenges the European identity. Perhaps nothing illustrates this change more graphically than the omnipresent symbols of Islam sprinkled across European cities and towns: state-funded Islamic schools, halal butcher shops, Arabic signs in store fronts, ladies in burqas and headscarves, Turkish or Moroccan flags fluttering over residential buildings. Sharia courts have already been adopted in many cities in the UK after persistent demands by British Muslims.
Indeed, the sheer number of Muslim immigrants sheds some light on the newfound fear of the “bewildering Islamic cacophony,” as Johann Hari in a Dissent magazine article sardonically put it. By varying estimates, the European Union is now home to 15-20 million Muslims, with France hosting the largest number. Annually, half a million migrants flood the gates of Europe in search of work and an additional 400,000 seek asylum, many of whom are from the Middle East. Added to this mix, is the influx of between 120,000 to 500,000 undocumented immigrants.
High immigration from Muslim nations, combined with fertility advantages, means that ethnic Europeans might lose their demographic counterpoise: a fact that touches a raw nerve with many. For almost a generation now, Europe’s birthrates have dipped far below the replacement level. According to 2005 statistics collected by the European Union, for instance, 30 percent of German women are childless, with the number rising to 40 percent among more educated women. With a Muslim population that is expected to grow to 40-50 million by 2050, the populations of major European cities would be half non-native within two generations.
Seizing on these numbers, Bernard Lewis, a leading historian on Islam, argues that Europe would complete its transformation into “Eurabia” by the end of the 21st century. Italy’s flamboyant and controversial journalist Oriana Fallaci once lamented that their province was falling prey to ‘a colony of Islam’ – whereby a sense of surrender of fundamental European values such as freedom of expression and democracy were being felt.
[….]
Though I don’t personally believe the far-right is a panacea to the continent's woes, I do believe the time has come for a new kind of politics, not necessarily far-left or far-right, but politics that genuinely represent the interests and concerns of citizens; politics that make the diversity of Europe work. Until then, Europe can expect votes for the radical right to come from the right and the left, the young and the old, the marginalized and privileged, the integrated and the alienated, the urban and the suburban for years to come. It is a phenomenon leftist or centrist parties can no longer ignore.
By Handan T. Satiroglu
Women’s International Perspective
January 7, 2009
A December Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project reports anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Muslim sentiments, to be growing steadily across [Europe]. Noting that the increase in Muslim prejudice has occurred over a period of decades, the report claims that nearly 52 percent of Spaniards expressed a negative opinion of Muslims - a view echoed by 50 percent of Germans, 46 percent of Poles, and 38 percent of French people. According to an April Georgetown University report, 67 percent of Dutch, and 80 percent of Danes agree with the statement, “the growing interaction between the Muslim world and the West is a menace to freedom.”
[…]
Once a welcoming multicultural haven, Denmark’s voters have given the Danish People’s Party its fourth consecutive hike in voting share, making it the third largest party in Europe. In Switzerland where the foreign-born population hovers around 20 percent, the nationalist Swiss People’s Party regularly receives 29 percent of the vote; in France, Nicolas Sarkozy grabbed the presidency after mimicking the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the unforgiving nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Netherlands, Sweden and Italy have all witnessed the rise of conservative discourse, while the second largest party in Norway runs on an anti-immigrant platform. And if there is anything that the Flemish and Walloons of Belgium can agree upon, it is the curtailment of the progressive Islamization of their society.
The term Islamization has gained much popularity in recent years, especially in the right-wing media. As European Muslims demand more mosques, state-funded Islamic schools, and even the implementation of Sharia (Islamic law) in their host countries, the term refers to the gradual process by which European society is becoming increasingly and visibly Muslim.
Unquestionably, an exploding Islamic population remains the driver behind changing voter patterns. […] In just three short decades, Islam has moved from essentially being a nonfactor to a religion that challenges the European identity. Perhaps nothing illustrates this change more graphically than the omnipresent symbols of Islam sprinkled across European cities and towns: state-funded Islamic schools, halal butcher shops, Arabic signs in store fronts, ladies in burqas and headscarves, Turkish or Moroccan flags fluttering over residential buildings. Sharia courts have already been adopted in many cities in the UK after persistent demands by British Muslims.
Indeed, the sheer number of Muslim immigrants sheds some light on the newfound fear of the “bewildering Islamic cacophony,” as Johann Hari in a Dissent magazine article sardonically put it. By varying estimates, the European Union is now home to 15-20 million Muslims, with France hosting the largest number. Annually, half a million migrants flood the gates of Europe in search of work and an additional 400,000 seek asylum, many of whom are from the Middle East. Added to this mix, is the influx of between 120,000 to 500,000 undocumented immigrants.
High immigration from Muslim nations, combined with fertility advantages, means that ethnic Europeans might lose their demographic counterpoise: a fact that touches a raw nerve with many. For almost a generation now, Europe’s birthrates have dipped far below the replacement level. According to 2005 statistics collected by the European Union, for instance, 30 percent of German women are childless, with the number rising to 40 percent among more educated women. With a Muslim population that is expected to grow to 40-50 million by 2050, the populations of major European cities would be half non-native within two generations.
Seizing on these numbers, Bernard Lewis, a leading historian on Islam, argues that Europe would complete its transformation into “Eurabia” by the end of the 21st century. Italy’s flamboyant and controversial journalist Oriana Fallaci once lamented that their province was falling prey to ‘a colony of Islam’ – whereby a sense of surrender of fundamental European values such as freedom of expression and democracy were being felt.
[….]
Though I don’t personally believe the far-right is a panacea to the continent's woes, I do believe the time has come for a new kind of politics, not necessarily far-left or far-right, but politics that genuinely represent the interests and concerns of citizens; politics that make the diversity of Europe work. Until then, Europe can expect votes for the radical right to come from the right and the left, the young and the old, the marginalized and privileged, the integrated and the alienated, the urban and the suburban for years to come. It is a phenomenon leftist or centrist parties can no longer ignore.
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