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As we say in Scandinavia, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. On September 30, 2005, in the wake of news reports about writers and artists who were engaging in self-censorship because Muslims considered their work to be offensive to Islamic sensibilities and in violation of sharia strictures, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten demonstrated its support for freedom of expression by publishing a dozen cartoons of Muhammed.
In reaction, Muslims around the world rioted, resulting in more than 250 deaths, and the ambassadors of several Islamic countries registered irate protests, calling on the Danish government to punish the cartoonists and demanding an emergency meeting with Denmark’s prime minister. In its reply to those ambassadors, the Danish government explained, quite admirably, that it had no authority to restrict Danish citizens’ freedom of expression and totally ignored the demand for a meeting.
The Norwegian government, alas, took the opposite stance. Two major Norwegian newspapers, Aftenposten and Dagbladet, had reprinted the Danish cartoons, but leading Norwegian politicians, loath to offend their comrades in the mainstream media, chose instead to focus attention on a small, obscure Christian periodical, Magazinet, that had also reprinted the cartoons. When those politicians publicly demonized Magazinet’s editor, Vebjørn Selbekk, the editors of Aftenposten and Dagbladet, in an act of world-class hypocrisy, joined in the pile-on.
Under pressure by almost the entire political and media class, plus Norway’s livid Muslim leaders, Velbekk finally succumbed, and, in a humiliating event at the press office of the government Ministry of Labor and Social Inclusion, issued a groveling apology to no fewer than fourteen Norwegian imams representing 46 Muslim organizations. Shortly thereafter, a delegation led by a bishop of the Church of Norway traveled to Qatar to apologize to the world’s foremost Islamic scholar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, author of such works as the essay “Our War with the Jews Is in the Name of Islam.”
That was nearly eighteen years ago. The intervening years have seen a continued increase in the Muslim population of Scandinavia, in the size and isolation of Muslim urban enclaves, and in the levels of serious Muslim crime. Car burnings and bomb explosions, once rare, have become commonplace; more and more schools and neighborhoods have become danger zones for non-Muslim children; and the quality and quantity of housing, health care, elder care, and other benefits supplied to native Scandinavians have declined as growing amounts of tax money have been spent on outlays to Muslim immigrants and their descendants.
In both Denmark and Sweden, a few critics of Islam have responded to these developments with actions that, when compared to the impact of Islam on these countries, can only be considered extremely modest and symbolic: they’ve publicly burned copies of the Koran. Interestingly, the man responsible for many of the burnings, Salwan Momika, isn’t even a native Scandinavian; he’s a political refugee from Iraq whose reason for burning Korans is that Scandinavia increasingly resembles the country he fled from. But negligible though his actions may be, they have, like the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, triggered outrage throughout the Muslim world, complaints by Muslim governments, and calls for censorship.
Alas, this time around, the Danish government has not chosen to be brave. In a July 30 statement, the Danish Foreign Ministry maintained that “[f]reedom of expression is one of the most important values in the Danish society” (I’m quoting, by the way, from the official English-language text, so don’t blame me for the translation) but was quick to add that this freedom isn’t Denmark’s only important value. “With a tense security situation in Europe,” the statement declares, “it is time to build partnerships; not sow discord among nations.” The statement continues (and note the reference to “the holy Quran”):
We are currently facing a situation where the burnings of the holy Quran in Denmark have reached a level where Denmark, in many parts of the world across continents, is being viewed as a country that facilitates insult and denigration of the cultures, religions, and traditions of other countries. 15 governments have issued condemnations of Denmark. Our ambassadors have been summoned for discussions. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is meeting on Monday in response to the burnings of the holy Quran in Denmark and Sweden.
The statement went on to declare that these Koran-burnings “could have significant consequences” for Denmark’s international relations and national security, and that the Danish government will therefore
explore the possibility of intervening in special situations where, for instance, other countries, cultures, and religions are being insulted, and where this could have significant negative consequences for Denmark, not least with regard to security. This must of course be done within the framework of the constitutionally protected freedom of expression and in a manner that does not change the fact that freedom of expression in Denmark has very broad scope.
It’s fascinating how when governments announce that they may well be on the verge of curbing freedom of expression, they always insist in the same breath that they’re not about to do anything of the kind.
Not to be outdone by their Danish counterparts, Sweden’s prime minister Ulf Kristersson and minister of justice Gunnar Strömmer held a press conference on August 1 to discuss the Koran burnings within their own borders. In addition to announcing new security measures and border controls, they mentioned the possibility of outright prohibitions on Koran burnings. The degree of doublethink about freedom that they displayed was impressive. While Strömmer insisted that freedom of expression in Sweden would not be restricted, Kristersson said that his government might in fact allow police to prevent Koran burnings if they were perceived as posing a security threat.
Kristersson also implored Swedish citizens to exercise their freedom of speech in a “responsible” and “respectful” manner. Calling for “responsible” and “respectful” behavior, of course, is also de rigueur when you’re a political leader who thinks he has the right to tell free people how to exercise their freedoms.
In addition, Kristersson took time to lament that “dangerous” people had been allowed into Sweden. He wasn’t referring to any of the million or so Muslims who now live in Sweden, a great many of whom have terrorized, raped, beaten, and killed native Swedes. He meant Salwan Momika, who came to Sweden from Iraq to live in freedom and who understands that a great many of those million-odd Muslims represent an existential threat to Swedish freedom.
There are always cowards. Sometimes, with any luck, there’s a hero or two. But there are always cowards.
Still, how much can you blame the leaders of these countries for failing to defend freedom of expression when so many of their own people don’t support it? During the cartoon crisis, most Scandinavians favored appeasing Muslims over defending freedom of expression. Judging by most of the comments I’ve read on various Scandinavians’ social-network pages, nothing has improved on that front. Rejecting the idea that burning a Koran can be considered a speech act, one Dane called it “pure provocation,” an “unnecessary stunt” that accomplishes nothing other than “causing division.” Another Dane lamented that he’d decided not to travel abroad this summer because the Koran-burning has made it dangerous to be a Dane in certain countries. Freedom? Who cares about freedom, I want a vacation on the Turkish Riviera!
Meanwhile, The Guardian’s Miranda Bryant, reporting from Stockholm, quoted several non-Muslim Swedes who support limits on freedom of expression and several Swedish Muslims – including an imam, Mahmoud Khalfi, whose mosque, as Bryant neglected to mention, is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Swedish headquarters – who raged against Swedish “Islamophobia.”
And what of Norway? As it happens, the current prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, was foreign minister at the time of the cartoon crisis. It was he who led the effort to force editor Selbekk to capitulate to the Muslims and who himself apologized to them on Norway’s behalf for Selbekk’s reprinting of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. What does this execrable figure have to say about the Koran burnings in Sweden and Denmark? He describes them as “hate crimes.” This is, note well, a man who seems to try his best not to comment on the increasingly frequent gang activity in Oslo, where on July 30 police at the main railroad station confiscated knives and axes from a gang of “youths,” 20 or so of whom engaged later that evening in brick-throwing and other violence, and where on August 1, at the site of the annual Norway Cup soccer tournament, fifty or so local “youths” set upon one another with guns, hammers, brass knuckles, and other weapons. Let it be clear that these sorts of incidents, which have become familiar news fare (with the ethnicity of the participants almost always carefully omitted), did not occur in pre-Muslim Oslo.
A brief postscript. Some Muslims in Sweden are so outraged by the Koran burnings – and by the Swedish government’s failure to punish the burners quickly and brutally enough, in accordance with sharia law – that they’ve threatened to leave the country. “Maybe it’s time to pack,” an affronted Abdillahi Osman told Swedish television. “We are not accepted here.” In other words: we are not yet fully accepted here as the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong.
Don’t worry, Mr. Osman. It’s coming. And it’s coming sooner than you think.
I remember reading the Jyllands-Posten as a kid one day in 1961, about a murder, which was the big story nationwide that day. There were only about 1 or 2 murders in 1961 in Denmark if I remember correctly, though I’ve never been able to find the exact statistics.
Something in Denmark has changed since then 🙂
Islam……is what changed it…….
Yeh but before Islam there was Elvis, Rock and Roll, LSD, and Jimi Hendrix, surely that imported American cultural decay prepared the ground for further imported Muslim decay into Denmark.
But the American decay of the Grateful Dead would not have been possible without the imported decay from Weimar Germany into America. Germany is the motherload of modern Western decay. The decay comes from Kant and Hegel.
“The Founding Fathers did not know that the era in which they lived and fought and planned was on the threshold of yielding to its antipode. They did not know that they had snatched a country from the jaws of history at the last possible moment. They did not know that, even as the struggled to bring the new nation into existence, its philosophic grave-diggers were already at work, cashing in on the period’s contradictions: in the very decade in which the Founding Fathers were publishing their momentous documents, Kant was publishing his.
Symbolically, this is America’s [and Denmark’s] philosophical conflict, running through all the years of its subsequent history. The conflict is: the Declaration of Independence, with everything it presupposes, against the Critique of Pure Reason, with everything to which it leads.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America”
The Marquis de Sade put it much more simply “ Islam is an idiot bastard religion”
Wait a minute. I thought Christianity heralded the onslaught of totalitarianism. Now it’s the Grateful Dead and Germany? Kant and Hegel? Who?
As you always say, you can’t have it both ways. Christianity or Rock and Roll. You can’t have both. In all seriousness, yes you can. And Christianity has been doing just fine since the 1950s in spite of all the losers like you who bag on it.
Oh yeah, you could have picked a better band than the Grateful Dead. But as the world’s pre-eminent “rock music critic” I guess they are the only band you know. Personally I would have picked Led Zeppelin. Way better musicians.
You are definitely your own paranoid clown show along with your near dead (if he isn’t already) familiar, Peikoff. I can’t imagine America without Rock and Roll. You would have us forever listening to 1940s big band and swing music with the occasional ballad by Sinatra.
Too bad. It ‘s almost the mid 21st C. Not the mid 20th C.
For the worse. Not for the better. May God Almighty protect us from Islam.
Hopefully Denmark and Sweden will not comply to the muslims.
Looks like they already have.
“ one Dane called it “pure provocation,” an “unnecessary stunt” that accomplishes nothing other than “causing division.”
It is divisive. I fully defend anyone burning the koran or the bible or Gaia or Pride and any other religious book.
But burning books is misguided, it prevents discussion about:
Muslim Grooming which is rape of young white girls.
Homosexual grooming which is rape of young boys.
Dog grooming is having a hair cut.
The book burning is preventing the discussion we need to have.
The sanitized Quran versions are sold to help mollify naive dupes. The actual Quran (printed in Arabic) is for the true believers in psychotic rage & intolerant hatred.
The invaluable Brigitte Gabriel exposed that fact in one of her substantive interviews..
So unless, it’s the real Quran that exposes islam, it’s good for nothing more than kindling for campfires, or emergency toilet paper.
I would prefer all Muslims to leave Europe. They have cause so much damage that their presence is bringing down those countries down to a Third World level. Muslims have killed so many Christians in Africa and Asia, and destroyed hundreds of Christian churches including burning ten of thousands of Christian bibles over the last 20 years. Burning a Koran is nothing compared to the crimes Muslims have committed in Europe.
It is my sincere hope the AfD political party keeps on winning in Germany. Other rising political parties in Europe who believe in saving the European culture are beginning to realize who the real enemy is.
Notre Dame was burned by islamic zealots. We know that because gutless politicians & media rushed in to blame it on contractors.
I’m more convinced by the fact that muslims burn churches habitually, and a muslim bitch parked a car bomb in front of the cathedral the day before it burned.
(It didn’t detonate, so the islamic pricks went with Plan B.)
The Islamic world is full of former churches, synagogues, Hindu and Buddhist temples that were converted to mosques. Islam treats dhimmis as beneath contempt, especially when they’re cringing in their obsequiousness toward Islam. In Sweden they had a Lutheran pastor (a lesbian, yet) who removed a cross from her church to avoid offending Muslims. Imagine what they’d do to her when they are empowered to do so.
Unfortunately, Pope Francis wouldn’t blame Islamic fanatics for arson at Notre Dame if Muhammad, Malik and Barack were caught in broad daylight with torches and cans of gasoline.
Steve:
Pope Francis has betrayed the Catholic Church. He has never to my knowledge spoken out about the Christians killed in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Nigeria, and many other countries in Africa and Asia.
If you want a list go to http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org scroll down to an article that mention what they have suffered and then go down to the end of the article and you will find a list of all the other articles how Christians have suffered. I’m not talking about a few hundreds incidents, I’m talking about ten of thousands that have been killed. Nigeria is the worse, more than 100,000 killed over the last 20 years and the government does not do a thing about it.
What’s a few dead Christians anyway? The Pope is sending them to meet Jesus and that’s a good thing. God did not make this life to be enjoyed in and of itself, he made this life merely as a preparation for the Christian to seek atonement and salvation from Original Sin and enter the Kingdom of Christ when he dies.
“When they discovered, from the admissions of some of them, that there were Catholics mingled with the heretics they said to the abbot “Sir, what shall we do, for we cannot distinguish between the faithful and the heretics.” The abbot, like the others, was afraid that many, in fear of death, would pretend to be Catholics, and after their departure, would return to their heresy, and is said to have replied “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius – Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His” (2 Tim. ii. 19) and so countless number in that town were slain.” – Caesarius of Heisterbach commenting on the moral correctness of the Massacre at Beziers
You have explained why they are there- to cause nations to fall to their idilogy.
NO!
Invite my mother’s ELCA “pastor” to your conference to share his his five week class on why we should welcome and support Muslims.
His dwindling congregation ignores the shut-ins. Like my mother. (I live too far away to assist her.)
But rah-rahs Islamic anti-Christian immigration.
Her “pastor” lives in a four BR home. Three BRs not used.
Maybe “pastor Jim” could invite a few to stay with him.
I was wondering, with all the USA/Ukrainian military hardware missing, is there any chance of that hardware winding up in the muslim no-go-zones of Europe?
That depends if Viktor Bout arranges the transfer.
Since Sleaze-bag Biden traded the “Merchant of Death” for a thankless bitch, and abandoning billions in military hardware (along with 1000s of allies & citizens) in Afghanistan, those No-go zones can certainly arrange a sale.
Oh, that reminded me of something. I tried to make friends with a “Palestinian” in Berkeley once. A physically magnificent fellow, he looked like a lion from the desert. But when I mentioned Lawrence of Arabia and his contribution to the Arab cause, he got very incensed and said that the Arabs didn’t need him, they could formulate their own strategy better than Lawrence could. Anyway he betrayed my trust at first opportunity, and that was the end of my one and only attempt to make friends with one of them.
Do not forget that they are allowed, nay required to lie to you infidels. This is from people with 3rd grade educations at best.
Capitulation often leads to decapitation. Let them pack. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Aamir. Celebrate the exodus annually with Danish ham.
Trebuchets & catapults would get them out faster.
We must destroy freedom to save freedom, this is a Platonic-Kantian-Hegelian-Marxist dialectic paradox if ever there was one.
Facts don’t matter when you’re morally right in the Platonic-Kantian noumenal realm, I learned that dialectic from AOC.
Plato seems to be the bogey man of the day for you.
You do realize that most people have zero idea who Plato, Kant and Hegel were or are. It’s just you trying to impress us with your elitist PhD-less NYC silly drivel.
Is THX really from NYC, NY, or do you just say mean things like that about people you don’t like?
He has left certain clues in his posts that strongly suggest he is a NYer. And he is an arrogant snob. Another big blue city trait. Most recently it was a post about him sleeping on a bench near Rockefeller Center because he had a back ache.
And yes. I say mean things about people who endlessly rewrite history to suit their needs by trashing Judaism and Christianity. Don’t like it. Tough!
if I were you I wouldn’t insult NYC. Its rather moronic.
People from NYC deserve to be insulted. Mostly for the way they vote. And for the Yankees and the Giants. It’s tough to insult an inanimate object like a city, because inanimate objects don’t know you are insulting them.
Fortunately for me, you are not me.
Ironically you are the one intent on destroying freedom by trying to impose your anti-Christian bias on this country along with your psychotic version of reason and reality.
You simply have no class or brain filter.
What’s a few dead Christians anyway? We can always say “What’s a few dead Objectivists anyway?”
And it would be much easier to accomplish that, what with only 20 or so in the world.
“We are currently facing a situation where the burnings of the holy Quran in Denmark have reached a level where Denmark, in many parts of the world across continents, is being viewed as a country that facilitates insult and denigration of the cultures, religions, and traditions of other countries.” Oh, denigrating other cultures, religions, and traditions like Islam does across the world, yes?
Only God is holy.
It has been said the arc of the universe bends toward justice. With the infiltration of Islam into Europe, and North America for that matter, the arc of the universe bends toward chaos.
Its a predatory Universe. The only escape is God. Otherwise it is predator vs predator vs predator. The best one can hope for in that case is to be a more successful predator for awhile, until the time comes when another predator eats you.
I was looking at a picture of a magnificent American Indian warrior yesterday. A face so hard, weatherbeaten, and a frown. Imagining the lifestyle they had, hunters preying on their prey, making their clothes out of buffalo hides, using everything from their prey. That lifestyle against the advanced weapons from Europe, they had no chance.
“Its a predatory Universe.”
That’s a very Schopenhauer kind of idea, the universe as mystical, blind, and irrational Will. But in fact the universe itself, as such, is not predatory, for it is not alive, it is not conscious, it is inert, indifferent, neutral; the universe simply IS.
Within the universe, on planet Earth at least, there are living organisms. Some of them are predatory, some are parasitical, some flourish through photosynthesis. But only one can flourish, if he discovers it, and chooses to, by REASON and PRODUCTIVITY. Man is the only species and the only animal that can escape the Zero-Sum Game and enter the Non-Zero Sum Game, but only if he so chooses.
“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason….
The key to what you so recklessly call “human nature,” the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness….
Consciousness—for those living organisms which possess it—is the basic means of survival. For man, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as “hunger”), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available—but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.” – Ayn Rand
Schopenhauer again…….your bogeyman of the week.
Do you think AA actually read this latest steaming pile of Randian B.S.?
For God’s sake, stop lecturing us. It’s just endless and so tiring. You have no idea what you are talking about.
There were so many flaws in his post that I gave up and just skimmed to the end, to find the usual ending with an Ayn Rand quote. That is one of his tricks, trying to get the reader to argue with Ayn Rand, which is a lot harder than finding flaws in thx’s original thoughts 🙂
I could argue with Ayn, but thx wouldn’t understand what I said anyways.
Thanks, good point. its not politically correct today to discuss how the more technologically advanced culture has been the one that wins. No matter if there are the worthy elements of the other culture – or not. We must call the victor “colonialist” or “supremacist” in an emotional value judgement.
So, those little green men in their saucer shaped flying machines they announced recently, what do they have in store for us? I hope they want to make America great again.
Thanks Cat, love your comments 🙂
I use quran pages to start my wood burning stove. there are about 100 sites that you mail you the trash for free so i request it to make the muhammads spend money on my infidel wood fire 🙂
it doesn’t take much to understand that the catholic church isn’t christian . a brief study of church history will confirm it . failing that a read of the two babylons will sink the ignorance of those that persist in referring to it as christian . islam is a cancer , once it has infiltrated the body of any democracy it will be a slow death . the left will facilitate its own demise , it is now too late to reverse the cancer .
It’s not too late. They can be deported. Even in the United States, we must recognize that Islam is not a religion and then deport.
Importing Muslims is akin to importing Nazis during WWII. Same sort of mentality, same sort of philosophy.
Scandinavia soon to become a Islamic caliphate, hastened with the impregnating of Scandinavian women by Muslim men! The blonde, blue eyed, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish woman, soon to be dark haired, brown eyed, olive complexion, Scandinavia to lose its physical identity! Unrestricted opening of borders does have consequences, this being only one!
I seem to recall there was this fellow about 400 years ago writing about the State of Denmark having something rotten therein. It would seem he was way ahead of his time.
The Nazi’s took most of Europe by force without consent of the conquered. The Muslims are now taking Europe with consent of Woke governments and their ignorant European subjects. Sadly, much of the same is happening here.
Why are they rescuing Koreans in Sweden?
Our number one enemy are not Muslims but the whites who enable them