Spain Battles Illegal Muslim Immigration

Wednesday, November 24, 2004,   by Steve Harrigan

TANGIER, Morocco — The bodies are anonymous, rotting in the shallows of the Straits of Gibraltar. The fortunate ones are dragged out for a hasty burial. They are Africans trying to make it to Europe, betting their lives on a nine-mile ride, thousands losing that bet each year.

Spain used to be an open door for illegal immigrants. An estimated one-quarter of all smuggled immigrants into Europe came through the Southern coast of Spain, most setting off from Morocco.

The sticks and stones of frustrated border guards had little effect against a rising tide of human traffic.

But all that changed on March 11. Most of the terrorists who killed 190 people on commuter trains in Madrid were Moroccan. Suddenly, the immigrant problem was a security problem.

Under pressure at home and from other European nations, rubber batons at the border were replaced by speedboats but success, so far, is limited.

"The numbers are down here by 50 percent," said Lt. David Oliva of the Spanish Border Guard. "But the smugglers are just moving to other parts of the coast."

Although only nine miles separate Africa from Europe, that stretch contains some of the most dangerous currents in the world. Now, some people in Africa are so desperate, they are ready to pay $1,000 a head just to get across, and they'll take their chances on anything that floats.

Seventy-five people from the Moroccan village of Tangier drowned trying to cross the waters last month. When FOX News approached families of the victims, they started to cry. One man lost 21 relatives.

With no electricity, jobs, education, or running water, there is nothing to do but wait for someone to get them out of the area. "These people are so desperate they are ready to die," said Khalil Jemmah, a Moroccan aid worker. "It's just a question of who gets here first, the smugglers or the terrorists."

More often than not, it's the terrorists who are getting there first.

It was a Moroccan who is accused of killing filmmaker Theo Van Gogh  in the Netherlands this month. The murder set off weeks of ethnic and religious clashes and skirmishes in Spain in what may eventually become a pan-European battle, fueled by the failure to integrate a new, illegal Muslim population.

 Swedes Reach Muslim Breaking Point

Thursday, November 25, 2004,  by Steve Harrigan

MALMO, Sweden — Swedish authorities in the southern city of Malmo  have been busy with a sudden influx of Muslim immigrants — 90 percent of whom are unemployed and many who are angry and taking it out on the country that took them in.

"If we park our car it will be damaged — so we have to go very often in two vehicles, one just to protect the other vehicle," said Rolf Landgren, a Malmo police officer.

Fear of violence has changed the way police, firemen and emergency workers do their jobs.

There are some neighborhoods Swedish ambulance drivers will not go to without a police escort. Angry crowds have threatened them, telling them which patient to take and which ones to leave behind.

Because Sweden has some of the most liberal asylum laws in Europe, one quarter of Malmo's 250,000 population is now Muslim, changing the face and the idea of what it means to be Swedish. Asylum seekers may bring spouses, brothers and grandparents with them. Civil servants say the city is swamped.

"You have 1,000 students in a Swedish school. How many are Swedes? Two," said Lars Birgersson, principal of the Rosengrad School.

Students arrive at age 10 or 12 from countries like Iraq, Iran and Lebanon with no knowledge of Swedish; some have never been to school at all and many classes require interpreters.

Still, more than half won't graduate.

"They are not a part of Swedish society, so to speak. It is difficult for them to get inside society," said Torsten Elofsson of the Malmo Police Department.

However, they are the most rapidly growing segment of Swedish society — outsiders who are already inside, posing a challenge to legendary Swedish tolerance that has now been stretched to the breaking point.

Malmo's main mosque was recently set ablaze by arsonists. When firefighters arrived on the scene, they were attacked by stone throwers.

Islamic Recruiters Target Potential Jihadees

Friday, November 26, 2004,  by Steve Harrigan

PARIS — In a Paris suburb, four young men watch a video where a man is about to get his throat cut.

It takes his killers two minutes and five seconds to saw off his head. In the small, dark living room where it's being watched, no one even flinches.

This is a recruitment video screened by a French convert to Islam who is looking to bring holy warriors into the fold.

It's a scene increasingly common across Europe — young Muslims being tapped to fight U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, a secretive process that can take months.

"It's definitely conditioning people slowly, over a long period of time for war, for holy war" said political scientist Asiem El Difraoui.

In France, with more Muslims than any other European nation — nearly 6 million — that recruitment often starts in the mosque and the ethnic ghettos that ring the capital.

The battle over Islam, some scholars say, will not be fought in Iraq or Ramallah but right here, in the suburbs of London or Paris. And the failure to integrate second-generation immigrations into European society could have deadly consequences.

"Radical Islamist movements want to use the presence of young people from Muslim descent in Europe in order to make out of them soldiers of jihads," said Gilles Keppel of the Institute d'etude Politique.

Imam Halima is a self-taught recruiter. He says he does not advocate violence but that Americans are bandits and holy war is a natural reaction for young Muslims.

"They are revolted and they want to kill as much as they can and die," Halima said.

On Fridays before prayers, the imam trolls the housing projects, looking for followers among the weak who may some day be ready to kill in the name of jihad.

Muslim Extremists Preach Violence in Europe

Monday, November 29, 2004,  by Steve Harrigan

LONDON — He's called Sheik Terra.

With a Koran in one hand and pistol in the other, the British rapper calls for the murder of non-Muslims, including several world leaders, on a videotape.

The video is well known in one London mosque, whose imam — or leader — is accused of setting up a terrorist training camp in Oregon and whose followers don't like Western media.

Abu Hamza, who lost two hands and an eye in Afghanistan, is in jail now but other extremists from among Britain's two million Muslims continue to preach violence, veiling the message to take advantage of some of Europe's most liberal freedom-of-speech laws.

"We cannot tolerate a crocodile in our bedroom," said Sheik Omar Bakri. "U.S. forces in Muslim countries are crocodiles in our bedrooms. So we are not going to give them ice cream."

Bakri says the terrorists who staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States are magnificent and Westerners in Arab lands need to be killed by any means necessary. He makes the threats with a smile.

"If we use violence, you will forget the name of your mother and father," he said.

The drawing power of the extremists, especially among the youth, has posed a challenge for mainstream Muslim leaders across Europe.

Part of Britain's problem is that it can't provide native-trained imams; more than 90 percent are foreigners with very limited training or, some like Hamza, have none at all.

To prevent more mosques from being hijacked, London's Muslim college is trying to educate home-grown British imams but the voices of moderation struggle to be heard over media-savvy terrorists.

When a hostage gets beheaded in Iraq, the images spread through this community almost instantly. It is a real mix of barbarity and technology.

The beheading of British engineer Kenneth Bigley in Iraq went from videotape to the Internet, then from cell phone to cell phone, bringing a smile from one young British Muslim who says he knows who the real killers are.

"They are not Muslims. They are Jews," the young man said.

An old message of hatred for a new generation of consumers who can spread murder across a continent with the push of a button, or a song and a laugh.

As the video reports of this series were called 'Eurabia'... I did a search on this subject, and read the article below.  I've since remembered that I had seen this report before, and the Lord brought it back to me again

Eurabia - The road to Munich...

By Bat Yeor

September 11, 2001 was for millions worldwide a day of sorrow, pain, and profound sadness; a day of solemn solidarity, self-sacrifice, and prayer.   For others it was a day of rejoicing, a revengeful exultation, a long-awaited triumphalism born from the death and suffering of thousands of innocent victims.   They were saying: That'll teach them!   America deserves it and must repent!   And many were asking maliciously: Don't you have remorse for your wrongs?   Why don't you ask yourself why you are hated?   If we hate you, it can only be your own fault.   Emerging from the ruin and distress which they had endured, Americans asked themselves: What have we done?   We have been vilely attacked, yet we are accused.   Why do they hate us?

And that's the snare.   For iniquity engulfs those who hate, who kill — and not the hated victim.   It is those who hate who are sick: sick from envy; sick from the frustration of having failed to achieve an absolute, pathological domination; sick from a schizophrenic lust for power.   To heal these societies one must first diagnose the evil and not mask it under the excuse of "poverty" and "underdevelopment."   Terrorism is not a consequence of poverty.   Many societies are poor, yet they do not produce an organized criminality of terror.   To subsidize societies which nourish ideologies of hate will not suppress terrorism, rather such pusillanimity will reinforce it.

America should not choose European ways: the road back to Munich via appeasement, collaboration, and dhimmitude. For decades at the instigation of France, Europe backed Arafat — the godfather of modern terrorism — as the champion of liberty, and their hero.

After the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil blackmail in 1973, the then-European Community (EC) created a structure of Cooperation and Dialogue with the Arab League.   The Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) began as a French initiative composed of representatives from the EC and Arab League countries. From the outset the EAD was considered as a vast transaction: The EC agreed to support the Arab anti-Israeli policy in exchange for wide commercial agreements.  The EAD had a supplementary function: the shifting of Europe into the Arab-Islamic sphere of influence, thus breaking the traditional trans-Atlantic solidarity.   The EAD operated at the highest political level, with foreign ministers on both sides, and the presidents of the EC — later the European Union (EU) — with the secretary general of the Arab League.   The central body of the Dialogue, the General Commission, was responsible for planning its objectives in the political, cultural, social, economic, and technological domains; it met in private, without summary records, a common practice for European meetings.

Over the years, Euro-Arab collaboration developed at all levels: political, economic, religious and in the transfer of technologies, education, universities, radio, television, press, publishers, and writers unions.  This structure became the channel for Arab immigration into Europe, of anti-Americanism, and of Judeophobia, which — linked with a general hatred of the West and its denigration — constituted a pseudo-culture imported from Arab countries.  The interpenetration of European and Arab policies determined Europe's relentless anti-Israel policy and its anti-Americanism.   This politico-economic edifice, with minute details, is rooted in a multiform European symbiosis with the Arab world.

German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher expressed the aims clearly in his opening speech to the Hamburg Symposium's Euro-Arab Dialogue of April 11-13, 1983 (at a time when West Germany held the presidency of the European Community) :

The Euro-Arab Dialogue would indeed remain incomplete if the political side were to be ignored or not taken seriously. Both parties to the Dialogue, both partners, should always remind themselves of the joint Memorandum issued in Cairo in 1975, the Charter of the Dialogue.   The Memorandum contains the following quote: "The Euro-Arab Dialogue is the outcome of the common political will which strives for the creation of a special relationship between the two groups."   We Europeans spoke out in a clear and convinced manner for a revival of the Euro-Arab Dialogue in the Vienna Declaration of June 13, 1980.   Since then, the various working groups within the Dialogue have become more active and the prospects for the future are more promising.

Our Arab partners in the Dialogue have also indicated that they are in favour of continuing and intensifying this Dialogue.  Both in the course of this joint venture, our Symposium, and through its outcome, it will become clear that we are determined to give the Euro-Arab Dialogue a new and long-lease of life.

Europe's economic greed was instrumentalized by Arab League policy in a long-term political strategy targeting Israel, Europe, and America.   Arab economical ascendancy over the EC influenced the latter's policy toward Israel.   The EAD was the vehicle for legitimizing the propaganda of the PLO, procuring it international diplomatic recognition, and conferring on Arafat's terrorist movement honor and international stature by supporting Arafat's address to the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 13, 1974 .   Through the labyrinth of the EAD system, a policy of Israel's delegitimization was planned at both the EC's national and international levels.   Approved instructions from the highest political, religious, and academic authorities functioned within the EAD's multiple commissions, implicating the media, universities, and diverse cultural activities.   The EAD was the mouthpiece which diffused and popularized throughout Europe the defamation of Israel. France, Belgium, and Luxembourg were then the most active agents of the EAD.

Strategically, the Euro-Arab Cooperation was a political instrument for anti-Americanism in Europe, whose aim was to separate and weaken the two continents by an incitement to hostility and the permanent denigration of American policy in the Middle East .  The cultural infrastructure of the EAD allowed the traditional cultural baggage of Arab societies, with its anti-Christian and anti-Jewish prejudices and its hostility against Israel and the West, to be imported into Europe.  The discredit heaped on the infidel Judeo-Christian culture was expressed by the claim of the superiority of the Islamic civilization, at which source European scholars, over the centuries — it was said — had humbly slaked their thirst for knowledge.  Drowned in this wave of Arab cultural and religious expansionism that was integrated into the cultural activities of the EAD, Europeans adopted the Arab-Islamic conception of history.  The obsequiousness of certain academics, subjected to a political power dominated by economic materialism, is reminiscent of the worst periods of the decline of civilizations.   The suppression of intellectual freedom imported from undemocratic Muslim countries, attached to a culture of hate against Israel, has recently led to the exclusion and boycott of Israeli academics by some of their European colleagues.

The cogs created by the EAD led the EC (later the European Union) to tolerate Palestinian terrorism on its own territory, to justify it, and finally to finance Palestinian infrastructure — later to become the Palestinian Authority — and hate-mongering educational system.   The ministers and intellectuals who have created Eurabia deny the current wave of criminal attacks against European Jews, which they, themselves, have inspired.   They deny the antisemitism, as they have neglected the attacks against the fundamental rights of their own citizens by delinquency and the terrorist threats, which they have allowed to develop with impunity in their countries, in exchange for financial profits.   The silence and the negligence of the public authorities faced with this wave of antisemitic aggressions is but the tip of the emerged iceberg of a global policy.   The EAD, which had tied Arab strategic policies for the destruction of Israel to the European economy was the Trojan horse for Europe's inclusion into the orbit of Arab-Muslim influence.

With the support of parliaments and ministries, the EAD concealed behind the Arab-Israel conflict the global jihad being perpetrated on all continents.   Europe's subservience to Arab policy led the EU to give an artificial and absolute priority to the Arab-Israel conflict in international affairs.   It could have been solved from the start by the integration of about 500,000 Arab-Palestinian refugees into the Arab League countries, foremost into the Emirate of Trans-Jordan — created by Great Britain in 1922 from 78 percent of the total League of Nation mandated area of Palestine, the historical Holy Land on both sides of the Jordan river.   After the 1947-49 Arab League war against Israel, this territory was increased to 83 percent of Palestine with the occupation of what became the "West Bank" of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Europe's pathological obsession with the Arab-Palestinian conflict, has obscured the criminal ongoing persecution of Christians and other minorities in Muslim lands worldwide, and the sufferings and slavery of millions from jihad wars in Africa and Asia.

The sudden collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers, the recent threat of an American boycott of what was perceived as an antisemitic Europe, President Bush's ironic criticism of Europe's moral haughtiness, and especially the rise of extreme right parties, brought responsible politicians to their senses.   They had been blinded by a Palestinian fantasy ("Jenin-grad"); by racist, genocidal accusations; massive media disinformation arousing hatred on their radios and televisions against small, vulnerable Jewish communities, tracked, aggressed, criminalized, and terrorized — while the leaders of their countries looked the other way and pretended that Israel was responsible for the violent aggressions against Jews in Europe by Arab-Muslim immigrants.   Then they saw criminal bands terrorizing their city suburbs, as well as the terrorist networks and rampant fanaticism, which they had overlooked for decades.   Today, the likely war against Iraq has caused shivers throughout Europe, which is trembling at the possible collapse of its Arab alliances, built on foundations that implied a rupture with America and the demise of Israel.   Europe had tied its Arab-Muslim friendly alliances and prosperity to a cooperation with Middle East tyrants, and by supporting Yasser Arafat's criminal policies.

Hence, the desperate move to save Arafat recently, backed by a widespread and slanderous antisemitic media campaign, together with criminal acts in Europe against Jews, that were neither checked nor condemned.   Over 50 years ago the Shoah (Holocaust) was the response to Zionism.   Today, diaspora Jews and Israel would do well to foresee a possible vengeful reckoning after Saddam Hussein falls and Arafat is marginalized — an Arafat, who was courted by the EU, which greatly increased its funding to the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo Accords of 1993, without adequate controls.   The recent anti-Jewish hysteria in Europe was an advertisement to neutralize diaspora Jews, and the Israeli self-defense mechanism against Palestinian terror, which is why it was so superbly overlooked by the highest authorities.   This complacent attitude has scandalized many European friends of Israel, who are much more numerous than the EAD censorship organs and the Euro-Arab terrorist networks would have us believe.   Yet the majority of Europeans, who are not antisemitic, are totally unaware of most of the EAD's policy, since its key deliberations are unrecorded.   More research and publications are needed in this field.

The cracks between Europe and America reveal the divergences between the choice of liberty and the road back to Munich on which the European Union continues to caper to new Arab-Islamic tunes, now called "occupation," "peace and justice," and "immigrants' rights" — themes which were composed for Israel's burial. And for Europe's demise.

— Bat Yeor, born in Egypt. A British citizen living in Switzerland since 1960, she is the author of The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide.

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