Coulter: Boston suspect’s widow ‘ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab’

Appearing on Fox News Republican talk show “Hannity” Monday night, right-wing columnist Ann Coulter said she’s sad that not only does she think the Boston bombing should shut down the nation’s immigration reform debate, she would like to see the alleged bomber’s widow in jail too, not for committing a crime but for “wearing a hijab.”

“I don’t care if she knew about this,” Coulter said. “She ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab. This immigration policy of us, you know, assimilating immigrants into our culture isn’t really working. They’re assimilating us into their culture. Did she get a clitorectomy too?”

Hannity seemed momentarily puzzled at the sudden citation of female genital mutilation, stammering his reply. “I, uh, I don’t know the answer to that,” he said before confidently adding: “But your point is well taken.”

Hannity went on to say that he believes people who immigrated “from countries where perhaps they grew up under Sharia law” are definitely a threat and “I think we can make a safe assumption that they have been radicalized.” He added that even foreign students should be subjected to greater scrutiny, lest they too pose a threat.

“Our immigration policy has nothing to do with helping America,” Coulter insisted. “It has to do with solving the internal problems of other countries. We’ll take Russia’s radicals. We’ll take the illiterate, unskilled, low-skill workers from all these countries. We’ll take their old people and put them on our supplemental security and Medicare. No, immigration policies are supposed to make your country better, not to make it worse and to create all these problems.”

“Lindsey Graham was on some show this week saying this shows we need better tracking,” she continued. “I’m thinking this means we need better immigrants.”

Coulter and Hannity are just the latest conservatives to jump on the idea that because the Boston bombing suspects were born overseas, the nation’s whole immigration reform debate must shift gears into more regressive policy proposals, or just shut down in Congress altogether, as it did on Monday.

Fellow Republican talker Laura Ingraham said as much on Monday afternoon, suggesting that the U.S. shut down all immigration from majority Muslim nations. “I would submit that people shouldn’t be coming here as tourists from Chechnya after 9/11,” she said. “Dagistan, Checnya, Kergystan, uh-uh. As George Bush would say, ‘None of them stans.’”

Both Boston bombing suspects came to the U.S. legally as children. Authorities say there is not yet any evidence linking them to any foreign terrorist organizations, but an investigation is still ongoing.

Additionally, the Partnership for a New American Economy said last year that about one in 10 Americans worked for an immigrant-owned business in 2012, which contributed more than $775 billion to the U.S. economy and over $125 billion in payroll.

This video is from Fox News’s “Hannity,” aired Monday, April 22, 2013.

Gohmert: Radical Muslims ‘being trained to come in and act like Hispanics’

(RawStory)

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R) on Wednesday connected the Monday bombings in Boston to the immigration debate and warned that “radical Islamists” were “being trained to come in and act like Hispanics.”

During an interview on C-SPAN, host Greta Wodele Brawner asked the Texas Republican about a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” proposal in the Senate that would increase funding for border security by $5.5 billion over ten years and establish a 13-year pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

“What I first thought after my prayers went for the victims and the families in Boston is, ‘My gosh, we’ve seen this in Israel,’” Gohmert recalled. “And after Israel had to suffer the slings and arrows and the deaths and the maimings… Finally the Israeli people said, ‘You know what? Enough.’ They built, over 70 percent of it is just a fence, and the rest is a wall, prevents snipers from knocking off their kids. And they finally stopped the domestic violence from people that wanted to destroy them.”

“And I’m concerned we need to do that as well,” he insited.

Pressing Gohmert, the C-SPAN host noted that Rep. Steve King (-R-IA) had speculated that the Boston bombings were perpetrated by a “foreign national” and that Congress should proceed with caution on immigration reform.

“We know that al Qaeda has camps with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border,” Gohmert agreed. “We know that people are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanics when they’re radical Islamists. We know these things are happening, and it’s just insane to not protect ourselves and make sure that people come in — as most people do, they want the freedoms we have.”

Watch the video below video from C-SPAN, broadcast April 17, 2013.

A little known history about the early immigration and assimilation of Bengal Muslims in the United States.

A fascinating read.(h/t: Fred A.):

Bengali Harlem: Author documents a lost history of immigration in America

By Moni Basu, CNN

(CNN) – In the next few weeks, Fatima Shaik, an African-American, Christian woman, will travel “home” from New York to Kolkata, India.

It will be a journey steeped in a history that has remained unknown until the publication last month of a revelatory book by Vivek Bald. And it will be a journey of contemplation as Shaik, 60, meets for the first time ancestors with whom she has little in common.

“I want to go back because I want to find some sort of closure for my family, said Shaik, an author and scholar of the Afro-Creole experience.

That Americans like Shaik, who identify as black, are linked by blood to a people on the Indian subcontinent seems, at first, improbable.

South Asian immigration boomed in this country after the passage of landmark immigration legislation in 1965. But long before that, there were smaller waves of new Americans who hailed from India under the British Empire.

The first group, to which Shaik’s grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, belonged, consisted of peddlers who came to these shores in the 1890s, according to Bald. They sold embroidered silks and cottons and other “exotic” wares from the East on the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Atlantic City, New Jersey. They eventually made their way south to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta and even farther to Central America.

The second wave came in the 1920s and ‘30s. They were seamen, some merchant marines.

Most were Muslim men from what was then the Indian province of Bengal and in many ways, they were the opposite of the stereotype of today’s well-heeled, highly educated South Asians.

South Asian immigration was illegal then – the 1917 Immigration Act barred all idiots, imbeciles, criminals and people from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.”

The Bengalis got off ships with little to their name.

They were mostly illiterate and worked as cooks, dishwashers, merchants, subway laborers. In New York, they gradually formed a small community of sorts in Spanish Harlem. They occupied apartments and tenement housing on streets in the 100s. They worked hard.

And they did all they could do to become American in a nation of segregation and prejudice.

A huge part of that meant marrying Latino and African-American women – there were no Bengali women around – and letting go of the world they left behind.

Unlike other immigrants of the time, they didn’t settle in their own enclaves. Rather, they began life anew in established neighborhoods of color: Harlem, West Baltimore and in New Orleans, Treme.

By doing so, they also became a part of black and Latino heritage in America.

“One of the most important things I took from the research is the fact that in the years of Asian exclusion, African-American and Puerto Rican communities actually gave (the Bengali men) the possibilities and the shelter to rebuild their lives,” said Bald, a documentarian who teaches writing and digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Those communities lived up to the promise of the nation when the nation failed to do so … because they were equally marginalized and equally deprived of full membership.”

Musa married Tennie Ford, a black Catholic woman. They raised their children near New Orleans’ Congo Square, where slaves once gathered. Ford took her children to church on Sundays while Musa knelt on a prayer rug and faced Mecca.

Musa died when Ford was pregnant with her son. Ford raised her children with African-American traditions; the ties to Bengal faded.

Shaik was aware of her Indian roots. Her name was the first obvious hint.

When she was little, in the 1950s and ‘60s, she rushed to the porch when phone books arrived with a thud. Her family was the only Shaik. She longed to find another name that was similar.

In India, the history of Bengali peoples evolved and was documented in print as India gained independence in 1947 and the nation was partitioned. East Bengal became East Pakistan and later, in 1971, Bangladesh.

But the sons of that land who came to America seeking a better life remained invisible. Until Bald began digging around.

Last month, he published  “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America.”

The book has generated palpable excitement among the descendants of the Bengali immigrants. 

“I just said, ‘wow,’” said Nurul Amin, 62, whose father once sold hotdogs from a Harlem pushcart.

“This put a stamp on our world,” he said.

Shaik, an author and scholar of the Afro-Creole experience, said she was finally learning her grandfather’s history. It dispelled notions of a monolithic black identity and connected her to a faraway land.

‘Dishwasher dreams’

California native Vivek Bald grew up with a strong sense of connection to India. He heard stories from his Indian immigrant mother that made a mark when he began making movies about the diaspora.

He’d produced a documentary about taxi drivers and was struck by the class divide in South Asian communities in America. The people who came in the wake of 1965 had taken the reins of community representation. Yet, they had little in common with newer waves of working-class immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh.

n his exploration of the diaspora, he met actor and stand-up comic Aladdin Ullah, 44, one of the sons of Habib Ullah, who’d arrived by ship from what is now Bangladesh in the 1920s. Bald was fascinated with Ullah’s story. He’d never imagined such a history.

“This was a population who came to the United States at a time when this country had erected quite draconian race-based immigration laws,” Bald said. “They came during that time but were able to build networks in order to access jobs all over the United States.

“The story,” said Bald, “was so completely different than what I had heard about South Asian immigration in the United States.”

Their memories had survived in the African-American and Latino families into which they married.

Bald began researching their history. It took him nine years to meticulously comb through marriage and death records, other court documents, newspaper stories and archival treasures.

He is now in the process of making a documentary film.

The project became a series of astonishments for Bald.

“I think the revelations I had along the way had to do with how resourceful both of these groups of men were in dealing with a home country that was under the rule of the British and on the other hand, another country that was closing its doors to them and passing increasingly more restrictive and racist immigration laws,” Bald said.

Aladdin Ullah, whose one-man act “Dishwasher Dreams” explores his father’s experiences, imagined how difficult life must have been for the Bengalis.

“These were illiterate men who came to America with hopes of a better life. That’s like me going to Sweden to start a Mexican restaurant,” he said.

“They learned the American hustle, not the American Dream.”

Ullah was young when his father died.

“I rejected my culture. I was a hip-hop kid, a kid from Harlem. I listen to rap. I didn’t have any connection to Bengalis.”

But it was an acting role that led Ullah to reconsider his father’s identity.

He was preparing to play the part of a stereotypical Middle Eastern prince in a Hollywood movie. “Death to America,” he shouted at the mirror, practicing his line.

He reflected on his father. He was not a king; he was a dishwasher.

“I felt my father’s presence in that hotel room.”

Ullah wanted to know more.

Banglarican

Habib Ullah and Ibrahim Chowdry likely arrived in New York City some time in the 1920s.

Chowdry had been a student leader back home in East Bengal and fled after British authorities were alerted to his activities. He rose to prominence in New York as a Bengali community leader.

Ullah left East Bengal’s rural Noakhali district at the young age of 14, traveled to Calcutta and found a job on an outgoing ship.

Bald’s book documents Ullah’s arrival in Boston, where he either jumped ship or fell ill. His son, Habib Ullah Jr., always thought his father had gotten lost.

Either way, he ended up in New York, married a Puerto Rican woman, Victoria Echevarria, and moved to East Harlem.

South Asian immigrants today tend to be a more insulated community. Many parents urge their children to marry other “desis,” people of the Indian diaspora.

But back then, it was different. The Bengali Muslim men knew they had to do all they could to make it in America.

Echevarria died in 1952 and left her husband to raise the children. Ullah Jr. remembers his sister being sent off to his aunt’s house in New Jersey. He did the rest of his growing up with his father in an apartment on East 102nd Street.

His father worked as a cook at the Silver Palms restaurant on Sixth Avenue and 44th Street. He left the house at the crack of dawn for the subway ride. He came home tired, took a nap and then cooked dinner. Rice and curry. Later he and Chowdry opened their own restaurant, The Bengal Garden.

Occasionally they’d head down to the Indian seamen’s club in the Lower East Side and after 1947, to the Pakistan League of America, an organization Chowdry and Ullah co-founded.

Ullah Jr. called his father’s friends “Chacha,” the Bengali Muslim word for uncle. Some of them changed their Bengali names to Charlie and Harry and in the case of Ibrahim – Abraham.

Ullah Jr. even asked his father once to teach him Bengali. The answer was no.

“He wanted me to be an American boy,” Ullah Jr. said, trying to mimic a Bengali accent.

He remembered his father asking a literate friend to pen letters in Bengali to his mother and brother back in Noakhali.

“He would bring them home and I would address them and send them out,” he said.

Ullah Jr. grew up playing on the rooftops and hanging out on the streets.

The Puerto Ricans embraced each other, the blacks high-fived. And the Bengalis? They asked: “How was school?”

Ullah Jr. grew up speaking English and Spanish. The Bengali or Bangla side of him diminished but never went away.

“I’m a Banglarican,” said Ullah Jr. of his identity. “We assimilated into the neighborhood. I’m immersed in both cultures.”

In the late 1960s, his father, then ailing from asthma, returned to Noakhali to remarry. He returned with Moheama, a traditional Bengali woman who was much younger than her husband. Aladdin Ullah is her son.

Ullah Jr. wishes he had accompanied his father on that long trek home. He is 70 now and doesn’t think he will ever step foot on his father’s homeland.

“I have a whole family I have never met, and will never meet,” he said. “Now my father has passed away. His brother is gone. The lines of communication are gone.”

Curry on the stove

Chowdry became a key figure in New York. He lobbied Congress to change naturalization laws of the 1940s, connected with African-American Muslim groups in Harlem as well as Jewish and Christian leaders.

At age 32, he married Catherine, a 17-year-old woman who was born in Cuba to Puerto Rican parents, and had two children, Laily and Noor.

Both Laily and Noor recalled a father who was busy; that he became the guy to call in the Bengali community. He was always rushing out of the house.

Except one day when Noor Chowdry had gone to the Bronx Zoo and come back with a 15-inch catfish he’d caught in the lake. His father was about to leave the house, but when he saw that fish, he took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and got a knife out.

Bengalis are known as fish lovers and Ibrahim Chowdry could not give up the thought of a spicy fish curry.

John Ali Jr. also remembers that Bengali food was the one constant from the homeland.

His father, Mustafa “John” Ali, like Chowdry, also came to play an important role for Bengali men in the industrial towns where he worked, including Chester, Pennsylvania, home to a Ford car factory and the Sun Shipbuilding plant along the Delaware River.

Ali learned English from listening to the radio and helped “anchor the broader network of escaped seamen in a series of key locations,” Bald wrote.

Ali Jr., 83, remembers his father always having a pot of curry and rice on the stove’s back burner. Just in case any of the Bengalis stopped by.

Ali Jr., who wrote on the last census that he was a “black Bangladeshi,” moved to Atlanta almost three decades ago, where he settled in the mostly black southwest neighborhood of Cascade. He married a black woman, as had his father, and never saw himself as anything else. In his tenure in the Army, he’d always been colored.

In his youth, he read a lot of Indian history, about independence and the infamous, 18th-century Black Hole of Calcutta incident in which prisoners suffocated in a dungeon.

He recalled his father listening to news about India on the radio and translating it for his fellow Bengalis who did not know English.

“I thought I would see Bangladesh one day,” he said. But he never did.

His father returned to his hometown of Sylhet in the 1960s after his wife’s death. “I was surprised he went back,” Ali Jr. said. “He got homesick.”

Shortly after, his father died on his way back from Haj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage, in Saudi Arabia.

Read the rest…

Sweden Democrats politician was expelled from party after saying ‘a mosque is just a building’

Radio Sweden reports that since the last general election in 2010, when the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats were elected to parliament for the first time, 30 members have been forced to leave the party.

Some of these have been high-profile individuals, such as Erik Almqvist, the MP who came under fire after a video emerged of him engaging in drunken racist abuse. As a result, Almqvist was forced to resign both his parliamentary seat and his party membership – and was then promptly rehired by the Sweden Democrats as a media consultant.

Other Sweden Democrats politicians who embarrassed the party leadership have been treated rather less kindly. Radio Sweden spoke to Lennart Carlström, who was elected as a Sweden Democrats representative to the local council in Härnösand in 2010. He was expelled from the party last year.

Carlström says that he agreed with tough controls over immigration but fell out with the party over his view that migrants already living in Sweden should be treated fairly, along with his rejection of the anti-Muslim hysteria that characterises the Sweden Democrats’ propaganda.

Carlström publicly stated that it he had nothing against children of migrant families receiving lessons in their mother tongue. “Young people shouldn’t lose their language just because they are immigrants,” he explains. “People maybe thought that my views were too liberal on this issue.”

A comment he made about mosques also contributed to his expulsion from the party. “I said that a mosque was just a building,” says Carlström.

If you’re a Sweden Democrats politician you can state that Muslims have no right to practise their faith in your town, or call for Islam to be banned and its adherents deported, and you won’t have a problem with the party leadership. But suggest that a mosque is an ordinary place of worship and you’re out.

Joseph Farah editor of that bastion of paranoia, the WorldNetDaily wants us to “rethink” our immigration laws. (h/t:JD)

Farah: Curtail Muslim Immigration

(h/t:Razainc.)

France’s Le Pen battles Islamonazi occupation

by Belen Fernandez (AlJazeera English)

In a recent interview with Al Jazeera in which she expounds on the alleged threat France faces from radical Islam, Marine Le Pen – president of the far-right National Front party and member of the European Parliament – seeks international validation for her anti-immigrant views:

No country in the world… would accept to go through the fast and sizeable immigration of people who, without a doubt, have a different religion and culture.

It would seem, of course, that many places in the world have already gone through this very process – including, for example, certain former French colonial possessions, which were also treated to military invasions, widespread killing, torture and expropriation of resources.

Now the tables have turned, however, prompting right-wing hallucinations of an Islamic empire under construction in Europe.

According to prominent neo-conservative propaganda, the imperialist strategy rests on a number of subtle subversive manoeuvers such as “the demonisation of courageous opponents of Islamic imperialism”.

Though Le Pen refrains from referencing the empire, she does hint in her interview at possible additional tactics such as the surreptitious force-feeding of halal meat to non-Muslims:

[M]illions of French people eat halal food every day without realising it… [I]t’s a problem because it breaks our law on secularism. This is because making people who are not religious consume halal food is contributing, due to this consumption which lacks transparency, to financing a cult… If in a Muslim country[,] Muslims were made to eat consecrated bread, they would scream.

That the majority of the French population has not been screaming about the threat of unwitting ingestion of halalmeat was suggested in a March 2012 article in the British Guardian, which reported “surveys showing that [French] voters were less concerned about halal meat than they were about the weather and football”.

Undeterred, Le Pen reiterates France’s unique torment: “[T]here is no reason to ask the French to accept things that no other people in the world would accept.”

When in doubt, bring up the Nazis 

As if the halal plot weren’t bad enough, Muslims have also engaged in more visible assertions of control over French territory, prompting Le Pen’s December 2010 comparison of Muslim street prayers to the Nazi occupation of France.

Read the rest…

A timely new book that should be required reading all across the looniverse.

10 Myths About Muslims in the West

by  Doug Saunders, Huffington Post

In my new book The Myth of the Muslim Tide, I chronicle the widespread misunderstanding of Muslim immigration to the West. As with Jews and Catholics before, I discuss that Muslims are being seen as an impossible-to-integrate, fast-reproducing invasion force who follow a religion that’s more an ideology of conquest than a faith. Using the latest facts and figures, I illustrate the far less alarming truth about these new arrivals.

Here are 10 common myths about Muslims in the West:

1. Muslims have a higher birth rate than other religions, and will take over the world by population

Two generations ago, it seemed as if Islamic countries were destined for out-of-control population growth. People spoke of an “Islamic fertility rate” – - more than 5 children per family, on average – - and predicted minaret spires foresting the Earth. Today, it is readily apparent that Islam is not connected with population growth. Just look at Iran, the world’s only Islamic theocracy, where the average family had around 7 children in the 1980s – - and has 1.7 today, a lower rate than France or Britain. Or look at the United Arab Emirates, with 1.9 children per family. Or Turkey, ruled by an elected party of devout Muslims for a decade, which now has 2.15 children per family. Or Lebanon, where, despite Hezbollah’s rise, has only 1.86 children per family (so that its population will be shrinking). Around the world, the average Muslim family size has fallen from 4.3 children per family in 1995 to 2.9 in 2010, and is expected to fall below the population-growth rate, and converge with Western family sizes, by mid-century. This is a crucial sign that Muslim societies are undergoing a major modernizing, secularizing wave – - even if they elect Islamist parties while doing so.

2. Immigrants from Muslim countries are going to swamp us

People look at the huge families of many new Muslim immigrants and imagine them multiplying at exponential rates. But this is a bit of an illusion – -as are many of the figures suggesting that Muslim immigrants have fertility rates higher than in their homelands. This is because most new immigrants have most of their children in the years immediately after their arrival. The way we calculate Total Fertility Rate – - the measure of average family size – - is by taking the total number of births a woman has had and extrapolating it across her fertile life. As a result, immigrants appear to have more children than they really do. In reality, the family sizes of Muslim immigrant groups are converging fast with those of average Westerners – - faster, it seems, than either Jewish or Catholic immigrants did in their time. Muslims in France and Germany are now having only 2.2 children per family, barely above the national average. And while Pakistani immigrants in Britain have 3.5 children each, their British-born daughers have only 2.5. Across Europe, the difference between the Muslim and non-Muslim fertility rate has fallen from 0.7 to 0.4, and is headed toward a continent-wide convergence.

3. Muslims will become a majority in European countries

In fact, we now have several large-scale projections based on population-growth trends and immigration rates which show that the Muslim populations of Europe are growing increasingly slowly and that by the middle of this century – - even if immigration rates are not reduced – - the proportion of Muslims in Europe will probably peak somewhere short of 10% (it is currently around 7%). By that point, Muslims will have family sizes and age profiles not that different from Europe in general.

4. Muslims will become a dominant group of cultural outsiders in the United States

Despite the hysterical rhetoric coming from Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann and their ilk, Muslims there are not only a very tiny group, but they are also one of the most integrated groups in the country – - especially if you consider that 69% of American Muslims are first-generation immigrants, and 71% of those immigrants arrived after 1990. There are only 2.6 million Muslims in the United States today. By 2030, that number is likely to rise to 6.2 million (because Muslims are young and fertile) – - at which point Muslim will be 1.7% of the population, almost as numerous as Jews and Episcopalians. Even though they’re new, American Muslims tend to be economically successful and highly educated. With 40% of them holding a college degree, they’re the second most educated group after Jews – - and far more educated than Americans in general, only 29% of whom have a degree.

5. Muslim immigrants in the West hold the same backward views that Muslims do in the Middle East and Pakistan

Actually, Muslims change their cultural views dramatically when they emigrate. For example, 62% of American Muslims say that “a way can be found for the state of Israel to exist so that the rights of Palestinians are addressed” – - a rate barely lower than that of average Americans (67%), and vastly ahead of the miniscule response among Middle Eastern Muslims – - for whom between 20% and 40% agreed with that statement. Similarly, 39% of American Muslims and 47% of German Muslims say they tolerate homosexuality, compared to single-figure responses in most Islamic countries – and those rates are rising with each immigrant generation. On these important questions, Muslim immigrants are converging with Western values fast.

6. Muslims in America are more loyal to their faith than their country

True, 49% of Americans from Muslim backgrounds say they consider themselves “Muslim first and American second” and 47% claim to attend a mosque on Friday. But you have to compare that to American Christians, 46% of whom say they identify themselves as “Christian first and American second” (that number rises to 70% among Evangelicals). And 45% of American Christians attend a church service every Sunday. In other words, Muslims have adopted exactly the same rate of religious observance as the people around them in their host country. We see this just as strongly in France, where a fifth of Muslims are atheist and only 5% attend a mosque regularly – almost the same rate as French Christians.

7. Poor Muslims are flooding out of overpopulated countries into the West

In fact, the poorest most overpopulated Muslim countries are producing the least emigration – - and very little of it is to the West. Immigration tends to come from the countries with the lowest population-growth rates, and it’s rarely to the closest countries. Muslims are far from the largest immigrant group – - even in countries that immediately adjoin the Islamic world. In Spain, which lies across a narrow state from poor Arab countries, only 13% of immigrants are Muslim: Most have come from Spanish-speaking countries across the Atlantic. In Britain, only 28% of immigrants are Muslim. And those numbers do not seem poised to increase.

8. Muslim immigrants are angry at the society around them

In fact, Muslim immigrants appear to be MORE satisfied with the world around them, and its secular institutions, than the general population. Muslim immigrants in the United States are more likely to say they are “satisfied with their lives” (84%) than average Americans are (75%) – - and that number rises to 90% for American-born Muslims. Even among Muslims in neighourhoods where the community mosque has been vandalized – - an increasingly frequent occurrence – - fully 76% say that their community is an “excellent” or “good” place to live. This usually extends into pride in national institutions. For example, 83% of British Muslims say they are “proud to be a British citizen,” versus only 79% of Britons in general – - and only 31% of Muslims agree that “Britain’s best days are behind her,” versus 45% of Britons in general.

9. Muslims in the West cheer for terrorist violence

While it might seem chilling to learn that 8% of American Muslims feel that violence against civilian targets is “often or sometimes justified” if the cause is right, you have to compare that to the response given by non-Muslim Americans, 24% of whom said that such attacks are “often or sometimes justified.” This is reflected in most major surveys. When a large-scale survey asked if “attacks on civilians are morally justified,” 1% of the French public, 1% of the German public and 3% of the British public answered yes; among Muslims, the responses were 2%, 0.5%, and 2%. Asked if it is “justifiable to use violence for a noble cause,” 7% of the French public agreed, along with 8% of French Muslims; 10% of the German public and fewer than 2% of German Muslims; 10% of the British public and 8% of British Muslims. This may well be because 85% of the victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslims.

10. Muslims have become so populous that the most common baby name in Britain is now Mohammed.

This is true – - but it means far less than you’d think. In 2010, if you combined all 12 spelling variants of the Islamic prophet’s name, “Mohammed” was more popular than any other name given to new babies. But that’s more a consequence of naming trends than anything else. In a great many Muslim cultures, ALL male babies are given “Mohammed” as an official first name. But among many Westerners – especially white Anglo-Saxons and black Christians – - there has been an explosion in unorthodox baby names – - as of 2011, these groups are 50% more likely than they were a generation ago to give their children uncommon baby names. As a result, Mohammed manages to reach the Number 1 spot without being all that common – - when combined, babies named after the Islamic prophet made up only 1% of British newborns in 2010.

Follow Doug Saunders on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DougSaunders

Members of Greece’s ‘Golden Dawn’ Party shout slogans and celebrate election results outside their headquarters. (AP File Photo)

Vicious Neo-Nazi attacks on immigrant vendors are cause for celebration for some anti-Muslim bigots.

The Christian [sic] Defence League:

Greece: Golden Dawn smashes illegal Muslim stalls

BRAVO! Pro-Greece, Anti-Islamization party members take illegal immigration into their own hands

ATHENS: Golden Dawn patriots go through an open air market and smash the stalls being run by illegal aliens (the vast majority of whom are Muslims).

Islam vs Europe Footage posted on the party’s official website from the day shows about 40 Golden Dawn supporters, clad in black t-shirts and with many carrying Greek flags, requesting that migrant vendors outside the Panaghia Pantovasilissa Church show them their residence permits. Members are seen violently pulling apart one of the stalls and smashing the merchandise. The two deputies, who joined the procession, said they felt it was their duty to step in where the police had failed to do so by rooting out illegal vendors.

Read more at Bare Naked Islam

Shocking Vid: Greek Neo-Nazis Attack Immigrant Vendors Outside Athens,  Bystanders Keep Walking 

by Erica Ritz, The Blaze

Not surprisingly, Greece’s neo-nazi political party “Golden Dawn” has become increasingly violent since winning a shocking number of the country’s parliament seats earlier this year.

Running on an anti-immigrant platform, international reports indicate the group has become less of a political party and more of an organized gang.

The U.K. Guardian writes:

…they are not a party at all: they are acting like a gang of criminal thugs, and it should not be beyond the pale to declare their organisation as such.

“We feel disgusted in the parliament,” said their leader, Nikos Mihaloliakos, in a speech to his followers on 25 August. “If they want us to, we can abandon it at any given moment and take to the streets. There, they shall see what the Golden Dawn is really about, they will see what battle means, they will see what struggle means, they will see what bayonets sharpened every night mean“.  Holding torches, they shouted “blood, honour, Golden Dawn” – a direct translation from the German “Blut und Ehre”, the motto once carried by the Nazi SA.“It’s you who are our Storm Detachments (Sturmabteilung). Let them come after you!” he continued, in his usual Nazi-inspired terms. Singing their official hymn “Raise the flags high” – again, a direct translation of the Nazi stormtroopers hymn “Die fachne hoch” – young men and women call for open, violent conflict both with the state and with any opponents on the ground. [Emphasis added]

In the most recent example of Golden Dawn’s brazen violence, the party released a video of its members destroying the stands of immigrant workers in the city of Rafina, near Athens, Friday night.  It didn’t appear that they waited until the area was deserted– rather, they simply appeared to be unchallenged, and marched through the streets in a symbol of power after the attack.

To be fair, however, the neo-Nazis appeared to descend en masse, and it is unlikely that a solitary protester could have prevented the damage.

Apparently the subsequent march was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and at least two police deputies joined in, saying they felt it was their duty to step in where the rest of the police force failed.

Greek media relates:

According to ministry sources, the deputies could be charged with usurping authority and damaging property.

Meanwhile, the party vowed to continue raids targeting migrant street traders without permits. A statement posted on the Golden Dawn website said raids would continue across the country, until authorities “decide to do their job and stop encouraging illegality.”

Business Insider simply writes: “Welcome to a society that’s been pushed to its breaking point.”

Original Guest article

by Torbjörn Jerlerup

An international paper, published by counterjihad activists that believe that islam is “like the nazi ideology” and that muslims “are like nazis”?

A new paper, Dispatch International, was launched last month. The founders, and current editors, are Lars Hedegaard and Ingrid Carlqvist of the so called “Free Press Societies” of Denmark and Sweden. The founders plan to make it a regular weekly newspaper. They plan to publish the first regular issue in January next year, in several languages, including English.

The paper was presented at the “2012 International Conference for Free Speech and Human Rights in Brussels” (a european counterjihad conference where Fjordman, among others, participated) on July 9 this year:

We didn’t settle for running one Free Press Society each; since we both have a solid background as journalists we decided to start a newspaper. A good old, old-fashioned printed newspaper. We decided to call it Dispatch International because our vision is that this newspaper will become worldwide one day. But first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. Or rather – first we take Scandinavia and then we take the world! (…) We will let the facts talk, the facts that mainstream journalists hide from people.

What “facts” do they want to focus on? A closer look at the sample issue shows what they belive are “facts”: the claim that both multiculturalism and “muslims” threaten the world today.

As you can see on the frontpage, they have a picture of women dressed in Niqabs, and their kids, on it. Next to it is an article about Muslim demography. “Islam” is stronger than ever, it is claimed, and the number of “Muslims” are increasing more and more in Europe and outside Europe. Another article below the picture claims that their religion is based on a belief in a violent “warlord,” the prophet Mohammed.

If you open the paper and look at page 4, the slanders continue.

Lars Hedegaard writes about the “Truth”. The “Truth” according to Hedegaard is that Islam can be compared to Nazi ideology.

We consider Islam the most dangerous challenge to the Nordic countries and the entire West since the democracies succeeded in crushing Nazism and Fascism and beat back the third totalitarian ideology of the 20th Century, Communism.

That is why we will write a lot about Islam and Muslim immigration. Similarly, the politicians and authorities whose obligation it was to defend democracy and our Western civil liberties, but who chose to close their eyes to Islamization, are going to hear from us.

Dispatch International will be accused of hysteria and of being overly concerned with a problem that most journalists, politicians and experts consider trivial. During the 1930s the same accusation was leveled at the few newspapers that provided systematic coverage of Nazism and Nazi Germany’s aggressive plans. So we are in good company.

As if this was not enough there is an article by Paul Weston, of the nationalistic British Freedom Party, on the same page as the article by Hedegaard. In it he writes about “multiculturalism” and the “drawbacks of mass Islamic immigration.”

“Multiculturalism is a state-sanctioned tool used to encourage division to an extent that amounts to Apartheid; to destroy the Nation State; to politically and mentally disarm the native and indigenous populations and to ensure the total breakdown of civil society. Such an inevitable and anarchic situation could only then be countered by more and more rules and regulations, leading eventually to full totalitarian rule of a socialist bent – a slow-motion revolution as it were.

We can certainly expose multiculturalism as a totalitarian ideology of racial and cultural genocide. Only once this is accepted by the electoral majority can we reclaim Western Civilisation.”

The Muslims threaten the West with “racial and cultural genocide”…’Western Civilization is threatened’… That sounds like a seriuos paper, right? Or, not!

Lars Hedegaard and Ingrid Carlqvist

Who are Lars Hedegaard and Ingrid Carlqvist?

Hedegaard won international fame as an “expert” on islamization during the Danish Mohammed-cartoon affair. He created the “International Free Press Society” in 2009, modelled upon the Danish Free Press Society he founded back in 2004. It is an integrated part of the international counterjihad movement.

The irony is that the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who wants to ban the quran, is in the advisory board of the IFPS. So much for this “freedom” to publish anything. Freedom for all – except Muslims, it seems!

The other founder is Ingrid Carlqvist, a Swedish journalist.

Carlqvist and the political worldview of Breivik

Lets take a closer look at the worldview Carlqvist has. It is shows us what we can expect in the future from this new paper.

Carlqvist has a worldview which is typical of the counterjihad movement. It is a worldview similar to the view of the Norwegian terrorist Breivik, who murdered 77 people last year in Oslo and Utoya.

Breivik believes in the myth of “Eurabia,” the clam that Muslims are conspiring to occupy Western nations. According to him Europe is occupied by evil people that are “like the nazis,” that is the Muslims, and run by “Quislings” that cooperate with these new Nazis. (The term “quisling” was coined during WWII. Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian who collaborated with the Nazis.)

On his Facebook page Breivik described himself as the “Max Manus” of 2011. Max Manus was a famous resistance fighter during World War 2 who fought the Nazis and the Quislings, and murdered several Nazis during the war. Breivik compared himself to Max Manus and believed that the people he murdered were as evil as the Nazis and the Quislings in the ’40s.

The Leftist youth at Utöya were “quislings,” representatives of an occupying power, that had to be murdered, as he viewed it.

Breivik got this rhetoric from the counterjihad movement. Counterjihad likens the Muslims to the Nazis and Islam to Nazi ideology all the time.

Carlqvist shares this worldview. All of it, except perhaps, the belief in violence.

In a recent conversation with her on twitter I asked her what she meant by a tweet she made about the need to expose “dangerous ideologies.” “Do you mean that islam is a dangerous ideology?” I asked. “Yes, it is as dangerous as National Socialism, or more”, she answered.

In another exchange on facebook she stated:  In english this is: “Yes islam is dangerous, even if not all muslims are dangerous. Exactly like National Socialism is dangerous even if not all nazis are dangerous” (“Ja, islam är farlig även om inte alla muslimer är det. Precis som nazism är farligt även om inte alla nazister är det.”)

“Nazis” and “Quislings”

At a forum on Facebook called Free Press Forum, she has previously written similar things. She wrote a lot about Bruce Bawer, another European counterjihadist that Breivik admired.

Bruce published a book, The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate About Islam, 2012, that Carlqvist recommended at the forum with the words: “Bruce Bawer compares the leftists with Vidkun Quisling, he is a brave man.”

She also compared Islam to Nazi ideology at the forum and the opponents were compared to quislings.

When confronted with the fact that Breivik too descibed the leftists that he murdered as “quislings”, she said: “you reason the way you do because you are one of the quislings…you are seeking to slander those of us who are critizising the islamization, by comparing us to Breivik”.

The threat, as she views it, is not only cultural, it is racial too. Europe is treathened by immigrants that have a lower IQ, she claims. Not surprisingly she believes that they are coming from MENA, that is, that they are Muslims.

Despite her frequent rants about Muslims and IQ, Carlqvist claims that she is not a racist and that Dispatch International is not racist because “the paper is critical to islam.”

Athens: thousands protest against racism and Islamophobia

ATHENS — Thousands of immigrants in Greece have taken to the streets to protest anti-Muslim sentiments and racist attacks against foreigners in a country plagued by a huge debt crisis.

“This is a first action against the racist pogroms of the police which encourage the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn to come out in neighborhoods and murder and attack people,” Tasos Anastasiou of the “Expel Racism” movement told Euronews.

Thousands of immigrants took to the streets in the capital Athens on Friday, August 25, to protest rising attacks against immigrants. “No to fascist attacks,” read a banner carried by protestors in front of parliament in Athens. “No Islamophobia” and “Neo Nazis out!” read other banners carried by the protestors.

Protestors complain of rising sentiments against immigrants, particularly from Muslim countries. They cited the death earlier this month of a young Iraqi in a hate attack, and recent “blasphemous” graffiti on walls in a Muslim area in the poor Athens suburb of Renti.

On Islam, 25 August 2012