Convergence of Catastrophes, page 7
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Let us not deceive ourselves. The United States, and probably Europe in the coming decade, are once again going to be the target of giga-terrorist operations. Here are the reasons: 1) The presence of millions of Muslims in Europe forms an extraordinary breeding ground for Islamists. We shall discuss this question later on. 2) The ineffectiveness of security measures like the Vigipirate system,[53] which are only for show and intended to reassure the population. 3) The material impossibility of observing everything, checking everything 24 hours out of 24. How is it possible to guard against suicide trucks that attack inside a city, crammed with explosives? How to check day and night every kilometre of the TGV railroad network?[54] How is it possible to comb one by one through the suitcases loaded into airplanes’ storage holds? 4) We should also remember the incredible porosity of the borders between the states of the European Union, as well as the moral objection to ‘racial profiling’.
The only effective strategy against terrorism is upstream prevention to frustrate its assaults (as it was possible to foil the attacks planned against Strasbourg Cathedral and the American embassy in Paris). This will, however, prove more and more difficult because of two factors: first, Muslim immigration, which allows some of them to mount their attacks protected from any European police investigation and to send commandos into Europe; and second, the extreme difficulty of infiltrating Islamist networks. The Israelis, although equipped with excellent intelligence services and agents who speak Arabic perfectly, have not succeeded in effectively infiltrating the Palestinian terrorist networks on their own soil . . . Even when it does not reach the level of action, Islamist terrorism allows them to exercise an intolerable pressure on European countries through implicit blackmail. Out of fear of attacks, there is a discrete modification of foreign policy, and mosques and Qur’anic schools are supported — the politics of the ostrich and of ‘moving back to be able to jump better’.
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Some imams admit that they want ‘to conquer Rome and Europe’. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradhawi,[55] one of the Arab world’s most influential Sunni religious leaders, in a sermon delivered Friday, 13 December 2003, which was retransmitted by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera channel, proclaimed, ‘Islam will return to Europe as a victorious conqueror after having been expelled twice.’ Then, on the Internet, he explained, ‘The Prophet Muhammad predicted that Constantinople, the city of Hercules, would be conquered before Rome. Constantinople was conquered in 1453 by Muhammad bin Murad. We shall rebaptise Rome, the capital of Italy, Romiyya, for we hope and believe that we are going to conquer it in its turn.’[56] The Saudi imam Muhammad bin Abd al-Ramanal-‘Arifi of the mosque of the King Fahd Defence Academy, announced, ‘We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it.’
In a sermon delivered in November 2003 at the Al-Nour mosque in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Naser Mohammed Al-Naser, announced that after the conquest of Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, would come the conquest of Rome. ‘The “Second Conquest” [of Rome] will be carried out, Allah willing, and it is inevitable.’[57] He went on to assert that it will be necessary to conquer Constantinople a second time by re-Islamicising Turkey. Is this not what we see happening? Al-Naser thinks so: ‘There are signs that it will again be conquered and will return to the hands of the Islamic state.’
In a sermon preached in the great Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the Deputy Minister for Faith and Islamic Affairs of the Palestinian Authority, Yusuf Juma’a Salameh, said that those who believe that Islam’s expansion stopped with the capture of Constantinople are mistaken. Affirming, in agreement with the Qur’an, that the expansion of Islam has no limits and that the next stage was the conquest of Europe, Salameh concluded, like a good orthodox Muslim, ‘Islam had not reached its end in the world, because on the day it reaches its end, there will be no world: the sun will be extinguished, the stars will go out.’[58] Imam Mohammed Abd El-Karim also preached in April 2004 in the grand mosque of Khartoum in the Sudan that ‘The Prophet told us of the conquest of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine state, and of the conquest of Rome, where the Vatican is situated… The Muslims attacked India and Allah conquered it for us, until they reached the borders of China. The Muslims conquered Constantinople, where Eastern Christianity is situated, and in the future, a mighty king will arise for the Muslims; through him, Islam will spread and Rome will be conquered…’[59]
These words do not come from marginal and extremist ‘Islamists’, but from respected international authorities in the Muslim world, often with reputations as ‘moderates’. What do the friends of ‘secular and tolerant Islam’ and Catholic prelates, who are often accomplices of this development, think of them?
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Commenting on the French translation of the book, The Rage and the Pride,[60] written by the celebrated Left-wing Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci,[61] Elizabeth Schemla, essayist and editor of the Web site Proche-Orient.info wrote in Le Figaro (8 and 9 June 2003): ‘The profoundly disturbing element in her work is that she dares to be angry at Islam. This is the taboo subject par excellence in Europe, although no one knows why, unless it is the visceral fear inspired by a billion Muslims. . . Fallaci presents Islam as an untiring expansionist quest for sacred territory. Therefore, she refuses to differentiate between Muslim countries — of which she notes emphatically that not one is a democracy — and Muslims installed on European soil. This is very clear in reading her text. It does not matter whether they are Arabs, Africans, or Turks; Sunni, Shi’ite, secular, agnostics or atheists — whether they want to be or not, immigrants are the scouting parties of a military force that will be activated one day (i.e., a fifth column). For Fallaci, in these times of war declared all over the Earth by one part of the Muslim world, in order to convert all societies definitively to Islam, the distinction between moderates and extremists is already the sign of apostasy, a cop-out before the necessary confrontation . . . People who oppose Fallaci lack the courage to open this important debate for the future of all Judaeo-Christian and Asian societies. . . Oriana Fallaci’s scathing attack, far from being a symptom of any sort of populism, which it is helping us to understand, is rather an unbearable scream against the perversions of decadence.’
Ms. Fallaci’s book does not distinguish between the violent Islamic combatant and the ordinary Muslim, and she is right to do so. On the other hand, her attacks on ‘Arabs’ are inappropriate. Ms. Fallaci defends an absolute philo-Americanism and the most extreme Zionist position with a militant extremism. If we must applaud the courage and lucidity of her denunciation of Islam as a serious threat, especially because of the reality of a colonising immigration into Europe, her presentation would have been more persuasive if she had avoided a passionate and vindictive tone, which always rouses suspicions of ‘ressentiment’.[62]
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Are there really plans to conquer and Islamicise Europe? Up until now, immigration for permanent settlement and the multiplication of Muslims seemed to be happening naturally. Only very lucid minds uncovered a concerted project for conquest. In a recently published book, En el nombre de Alà,[63] two Spanish authors, Enrique Montánchez and Pedro Canales (Montánchez is an investigative reporter for the journal La Razòn; Canales is a correspondent in the Maghreb for several Spanish magazines), claim there is a secret plan to re-Islamicise Europe, beginning with the reconquest of Andalusia by immigration, a plan directed by Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is supposed to have set up a massive system to finance mosques in Andalusia (from which the Muslims were driven in the Fifteenth century), while Morocco is to be in charge of furnishing the battalions of immigrants and sending them into, first, Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s ‘Achilles’ heels’.
Two other pieces of news: 30,000 Spaniards have already converted to Islam; and the terrorist networks — linked to Saudi Arabia — especially Al Qaeda, ‘are using Spain as the logistical staging ground for launching attacks against targets in Europe’. Isabella the Catholic,[64] who liberated Spain from the Muslim yoke, must be turning in her grave . . .
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The response to all those who dream of a secular and moderate Islam, who believe that the fundamentalists are a minority and that Islam is not trying to conquer Europe, is the confession of an eminent Muslim doctor, Muhammad Ibn-Guadi, an Islamic scholar at the University of Strasbourg, in a provocative article with the warning, ‘Islam has always been political!’ (Le Figaro, 17 June 2003). The general message of his article is that France has to convert to Islam, and that the ideal of republican secularism and assimilation are both impossible. ‘Negotiating’ with the real Islam is not a practical option.
He writes, ‘There can be no “secular Muslims”, there can be no reform in Islam simply because the advent of Islam is itself a reform. . . What those who desire dialogue between Muslims and Christians seem to forget is that Islam does indeed confirm earlier revelations, but that its objective is to correct those revelations. . . The notion found in Reformed Christianity of the separation of church and state is completely unknown to Islam. Religious institutions are not separate from civil institutions. The spiritual is inseparable from the temporal.’ The Muslim professor explains correctly that Islam is first and foremost a political and social doctrine. ‘Islam has always been political. The only form of political organisation known to Muslims is the Islamic state.’ The author adds that Arab nationalism, an ephemeral form imported from the West, is dead.
Sarkozy should think seriously about these honest and lucid statements: ‘Whether it shocks people or not, the fact that Muslims can declare that the Qur’an overrides the laws of the French Republic is perfectly correct in Islam. The efforts of Muslims who hope to reconcile Islam and secularism are futile.’ And now the confession of the will to conquer Europe: ‘Muslims cannot find themselves in non-Muslim countries without apprehending it as a territory where Islamic laws ought to prevail. There is France’s problem in a nutshell.’ Let us mention also this extraordinary passage, where our learned professor associates himself with Bin Laden and so wrings the neck of the absurd thesis of the ‘two Islams’, one moderate, the other fanatical: ‘On 3 November 2001, Bin Laden declared to the Al Jazeera network, “Under no circumstances should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels, for the enmity is based on creed.” Unfortunately he was right.’
Ibn-Guadi is neither a terrorist nor an extremist, but a respected professor with a salary from the French state. He is putting his cards on the table. Let us thank him for admitting to us that that his ‘faith’ has declared war on us.
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Our Islamophile intellectuals and politicians are going to be really annoyed once more. The daily Sydney Morning Herald[65] got hold of a secret 44-page manual published by Jemaah Islamiyah (a Southeast Asian Islamist network based in Indonesia) entitled General Guide to the Struggle. There we read: ‘[We have] love of jihad (holy war) in the path of God and love of dying as a martyr… [Our enemies are] satanic demons and satanic humans.’ The objective is to carry Islam ‘to the four corners of the Earth’. There is no question here of ‘defending’ poor Muslims ‘under attack by the Judaeo-Crusaders’.
The manual describes a worldwide organisation of terrorist combat structures, and explains how to plan attacks and communicate secretly. It insists on the necessity of political and religious instruction and military training for all the Muslim volunteers in the world. One member of Jemaah Islamiyah, a ‘witness’ of the bloody attack in Bali, assures us that ‘this manual is the most important text after the Qur’an’. The terrorists in Bali followed the manual to the letter.[66]
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Is ‘secular Islam’ making progress? Contrary to the dreams of the European political class who want to deal with a ‘secular and moderate Islam’, which has never existed except in their imaginations, Islamist organisations are raising their heads in France and Belgium and now talk openly of applying shariah (Islamic law) in a Europe on the road to being conquered.
The fundamentalists of the Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF), which has been gaining influence, declared in the course of their recent conference in Bourget that their members would never vote for candidates who would reject the application of Muslim law (mosques, Qur’anic schools, innumerable exemptions from the secularism of the French Republic) in areas with a large Muslim population.
This is the logic of Islam: to remove the mask of ‘moderation’ as soon as they feel they are sufficiently numerous.
In Belgium there is the same pressure from fundamentalists. The new President of the Belgian Muslim Executive (a converted Flemish university instructor, Omar Van den Broeck), in his book L’islam occidentalement? (Islam in the Western Way?), has expounded a fanatical vision of the conquest of Europe by Islam, one in perfect agreement with the Qur’an. He writes, ‘The point of departure consists of the unconditional application of basic Islamic principles. . . This lived faith automatically implies individual obedience to divine law, to shariah and therefore to the Qur’an’s commands.’ Then this Flemish convert, who is now the head of an influential Islamic organisation, praises the veil, criticises race-mixing in the name of a (morbid) Muslim puritanism and explains that Islam ‘cannot accept the division of the world into nations’. In other words, here is a frank profession of faith in the final objective of Islam, the Universal Caliphate, that is, the worldwide Islamic state. Arab Muslims have understood very well that there are no worse fanatics than European converts, who are animated by the ‘zeal of the convert’ – collaborators, who are often recruited by extremist movements.
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A report of Renseignements Généraux[67] of 5 August 2003 indicates that the department[68] of Essonne is a hotbed of fanatic Muslim pietism, the Tablighi Jamaat movement. This group is supposed to promote conversion, but also propagate Islamist vocations, i.e., terrorists, and is very well represented at the Fleury-Mérogis prison. Of the prison’s 3,600 male prisoners, 1,000 are foreigners who have emigrated from Muslim countries and 80 are Islamists incarcerated for terrorism, who devote themselves to proselytising and recruiting. It is also reported that in this department (and therefore also elsewhere) ‘converts represent a worrying phenomenon that is rapidly expanding’ and are fertile ground for growing extremism. ‘If one refers to the national studies estimating about 30,000 to 50,000 converts in the whole territory’, there would be 2,000 in Essonne alone. The Islamic Centre of Évry-Courcouronnes ‘claims two to three conversions a week’. The figures come to one a day for the province (20 times the number of Muslim conversions to Christianity), and these converts for the most part ‘have been immersed in Christian culture and education’. Are they dangerous? The answer is, ‘converts, already thoroughly immersed in the Tablighi’s religious fanaticism, constitute a breeding pond where Islamist jihadists come to fish . . . conversion to Islam of fragile individuals undoubtedly involves a risk of terrorist drift’. Are they potential ‘bagmen’?[69] ‘Converts are all the more appreciated by radicals because their French nationality makes it easier for them to cross borders, to serve as puppets and to supply logistical support.’ Converts were acting inside the Beghal terrorist network, which was fortunately dismantled just in time before it could commit a suicide attack against American interests in Paris.[70]
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Many European mosques are really propaganda centres for civil war and holy war aimed at conquering Europe, as well as diffusing a constant defence of Islamic terrorism. And they are authorised, with the most complete blindness, by the European authorities.
In Great Britain, the bastion of Islamism in Europe, a figure of ‘British Islam’, Abu Hamza al-Masri,[71] who, according to the Americans, is linked to terrorist networks, is the guru of the Grand Mosque (with a seating capacity of 1,500) in Finsbury Park in north-central London. He openly preaches jihad, and his Friday sermons are sold on cassettes and transmitted into every Muslim country through the Internet. Here are examples of some of his remarks: ‘It is the duty of every Muslim to fight every law that is not inspired by God [therefore only shariah is valid, not European law]; we must fight every kuffar [non-Muslim], without distinction, and there will be a special reward and a privileged place in paradise for those who volunteer to fight, while Muslims who stay at home without fighting will have only a small place.’ This information, which is in perfect agreement with the Qur’an, pulverises the belief in a difference between a ‘peaceful’ Islam and an ‘aggressive Islamism’.
The following comes from other speeches by Abu Hamza: ‘I do not preach Islam as the West would like it to be, but as God wants it to be. Some imams want to “moderate” Islam in order to please the West, but not me. I expound Islam as it is, that is, fighting against the West. . . . I do not belong to Bin Laden’s networks, but I share some of their views. My sympathies and my prayers go to the Taliban and that is not a crime.’[72]
Some Muslim regimes (which are treated as impious tyrannies by Abu Hamza) have asked the British authorities to forbid Abu Hamza from preaching. Obviously in vain . . . At the same time, the British simultaneously support Bush’s crusade against the ‘axis of evil’ and authorise activities on their soil of the advance guard of the worldwide jihad. This is suicidal.
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Samuel P. Huntington, a Professor at Harvard and former member of the White House’s National Security Council, has predicted an ethno-political conflict of civilisations in the Twenty-first century in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.[73] His thesis is that ideological conflicts (like Communism against capitalism) are going to be replaced by ethno-cultural conflicts, the exact reverse of globalist theories of planetary unification. He declared in an interview: ‘[There is] a serious conflict between Muslim societies and non-Muslim societies. If one looks at the borders of a great block (sic) of Muslim countries stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, one sees along the borders of the Muslim world continuous fighting. Bosnians versus Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats in the Balkans, Greeks versus Turks, Armenians versus Azerbaijanis, Russians versus Chechens, Russians versus Central Asian Muslims, India versus Pakistan. More generally, there are also conflicts between Muslims and Catholics in the Philippines and Indonesia, and between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, and between Christians and Muslims in Sudan.’[74] He could have added confrontations in Nigeria and the Ivory Coast and also . . . Europe. At Roubaix, Marseilles, Birmingham, Brussels, and Frankfurt, the front line has advanced deep into the heart of Europe.
