The New York Times published a piece Thursday, “Can Islamic and European Civilizations Coexist?” and it is incredible (as in beyond belief, hard to believe, far-fetched, implausible).
The headline leads you to believe that, finally, maybe there might be a discussion of this existential question with a (sadly) obvious answer, but that would be delusional. In reality, the Times is not asking the question. It mocks you into thinking the question is a legitimate one. The real title should be: “Muslim Grievances, Why We Are Right to Whine After Jihadis Attack.”
The piece is not written by a legitimate, reasoned, and brilliant scholar of Islam like, say, Ibn Waraq, Bat Ye’or, or Robert Spencer. No, this absurd propaganda is by one of the Times’ resident shills for Islam, Atossa Araxia Abrahmian, coming in form of a review of Journey Into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity, the latest installment in Islamic studies professor Akbar Ahmed’s series on Muslims around the world.
The finger-pointing at the infidel for the violence and holy wars of devout Muslims is at its apex in this indictment of Western compassion and open borders. And Muslims, of course, are the real victims:
The bulk of Ahmed’s research comes from a listening tour he embarked on with a team of researchers between 2013 and 2017. They interviewed imams, community leaders, activists and ordinary people across the continent about the challenges European Muslims face today. Their findings are predictably grim. Across the board, interviewees reported feeling marginalized, stereotyped and prevented from professional advancement because of their background. Despite their multitude of experiences, they ended up lumped into the crude categories that conflate terrorists, Muslims and refugees; Arabs, Persians and Africans; recent immigrants with no facility in the local language and second-generation doctoral students fluent at the highest level.
“Many patterns of discrimination,” Ahmed notes, “are rooted in colonial legacies that vary by country[.]”
Ah, yes colonial legacies – nothing about Islamic imperialism and annihilationism. Nothing about the centuries of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations, and enslavements. Robert Spencer’s much anticipated tome on Islamic history, The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS, details this very thing and should be part of every school curriculum in the country.
This whole piece is an extraordinary lie, and the Left’s relentless promotion of the big lies have rendered us ill-prepared for what’s coming.
In this “book review,” Abrahamian tells us that the author was invited to speak at a mosque in Athens.
What he saw there took him aback. The facility was less a house of God than an underground parking lot “of a particularly sinister aspect[.]”
“These men had nothing to lose, and I could imagine the most desperate among them prepared to lash out in an unpredictable and even murderous manner,” Ahmed writes in Journey Into Europe. “This, I felt, was Europe’s ticking time bomb.”
Oh yes, because the mosque in Athens, Greece — a country whose suffering at the hands of Muslim invaders is incalculable and little spoken of (like the Armenians) — is not pretty, it only makes sense that the Muslims destroy Europe. Are we to believe that if the Greeks built shrines to their executioners, all would be well?
So the jihad in Europe is the Greeks’ fault, but Christians in Muslim countries who can’t pray and whose houses of worship are systematically destroyed have no recourse, no voice, no New York Times article that speaks the truth of their oppression and destruction. On the contrary, in the view of the New York Times, the Christians are the problem.
The complaining and the whining continues. Ahmed, in this book, says:
Pakistanis in Britain are better integrated than, say, French citizens of Algerian and Moroccan descent. But even absent empire, many of the Muslims he speaks to find it hard, if not impossible, to fit in. “In Denmark they strangle you slowly, slowly,” one interviewee proclaims.
Pakistanis in the UK are better integrated? Thousands of English girls are groomed by Muslim rape gangs which the police never pursued for fear of being perceived as “islamophobic.” Daily acts of jihad written off as some generic form of extremism. This passes for integration?
Ahmed “hopes Europeans can form new, hybrid identities that broaden the criteria for who belongs.” Where have Muslim societies ever allowed a hybrid of identity? What he is saying is, he hopes that Europeans will go quietly into the cold Islamic night.
Using Islamic historic lies, Abrahmian bolsters his argument:
Europe happens to have a homegrown example of this philosophy in medieval Andalusia, when people of multiple faiths in parts of modern-day Portugal and Spain enjoyed convivencia, a state of relative pluralism, peace and prosperity under Muslim rule. “The answer to the violence and tensions between religions in Europe today and the sense of alienation and confusion in Muslim youth is to revive and strengthen the Andalusian model as an alternative to that of a monolithic tribal society,” Ahmed writes.
Andalusia was hardly golden for the Christians and Jews living under Islamic rule:
Islamic Spain was far from being a paradise. Cordoba was no “ornament of the world.” Maimonides had to flee the city because of the persecution of the Almohads, but even before the Alhomads the treatment of non-Muslims was dismal. When the Jewish viziers Samuel ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph were both murdered, and then the entire Jewish community of Grenada was massacred as well – yes, in Grenada, home of the “Alhambra” of which Washington Irving sung — it was not something without deep Islamic roots. (more here)
Abrahmian closes with this pearl:
The fundamental message of “Journey Into Europe” is that throughout history, Islamic and European civilizations have often been not just compatible, but complementary. It’s crucial to acknowledge their shared past to reject today’s resurgent tribalism. The stakes, as Ahmed puts it, are “Andalusia or dystopia.”
Intellectually, his conclusion is hard to argue with. But since 9/11, popular perceptions of Islam in the West have been informed by emotion, not facts or reason.
That’s true. And this New York Times article is more of that emotional, fact-free propaganda.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.