October 29, 2003

YOUNG GERMANS EMBRACING ISLAM:
REICHSFUHRER HIMMLER DELIGHTED

by Srdja Trifkovic

According to a recent Agence France Presse report (October 25), Germans are converting to Islam in increasing numbers. They are also "getting younger and younger," according to Muhammad Herzog who runs a Muslim cultural center in Berlin. He is quoted by the AFP as saying that "many are looking for new lifestyles and some sense of direction." Herr Herzog converted to Islam as far back as 1979, when he realized that "the Qur’an gathered together everything I had ever believed in."

Islamic Institute archives now contain records of 12,400 people born in Germany to German parents who are now "certified" Muslims. The total Muslim population of Germany is approaching four million—most of them Turks—but it accounts for close to one-fifth of all newborn babies in the nation of 80 million.

The writing was on the wall over a decade ago, when the number of Muslims stood at three million and the number of mosque associations exceeded 2,000. By that time already the Turks in Berlin had entire sections of the city closed in on themselves. The trend of establishing and supporting the enclaves of a parallel culture, hostile to the host-country’s lifestyle and values, is by now well-established not only in Germany but also in France and Britain.

The fact that increasing numbers of young Germans want to join an alien and hostile ghetto within the country of their birth is unsurprising. Estranged from their parents, ignorant of their culture, ashamed of their history, those young converts are making a logical step on the path of alienation that alternatively leads to madness, drugs, or suicide. They accurately sense that "those who subscribe to Islam and its civilization are aliens, regardless of their clothes, their professions or their places of residence" (Sam Francis), and they choose to be aliens.

On present form the burgeoning Muslim population of Europe will never be "westernized," that is to say, made as willing as Christians to see their religion relativized, then mocked, and its commandments misrepresented or ignored. It is even less likely to be Christianized: that cannot happen unless there is a belated, massive, and unexpected recovery of Western spiritual and moral strength. Europe therefore faces two clear alternatives: defense—impossible under the current banner of multiculturalism—or submission and eventual acceptance of sacred Arab places as its own.

Islamic activists in Europe trust in the latter, and with good reason. They know that the host-societies have lost the capacity to define themselves vis-Ð-vis "the other." They also know that their own immigrant brethren have no kinship with the host-societies and no desire to establish any (except to partake in their wealth, know their women, and eventually take over their lands, while nurturing contempt for a society willing to grant them every indulgence without a fight).

Their utter disdain for the secular-democratic institutions of the host-countries notwithstanding, Muslims gladly invoke those institutions when they clamor for their "rights"—including the "right" of Algerian girls to have their heads properly covered in French state schools, or the "right" of a Muslim child not to face the effrontery of a cross on the wall of an Italian classroom (newswires, October 28). Like their Bolshevik predecessors they demand democratic privileges to organize and propagate their views while knowing that—given the power to do so—they would impose their own beliefs and customs, and eliminate all others, on the pain of death.

As I had predicted in The Sword of the Prophet (2002), extreme Islamic "peace and tolerance" manifested on 9-11 did not spell the end of another kind of extremism: the insistence of the ruling European elite that their countries are not based on ethnicity and on a cultural tradition rooted in Christianity. The rulers of Europe, their collective will recently visible among the founding fathers of the European Union’s Constitution, facilitate the advance of Islam by destroying the sense of community based on kinship, language, faith, and culture. They are promoting functional nihilism, thus ensuring an apparent paradox: the urge of young Germans to convert to Islam is stronger now than before 9-11. This confirms that Islam’s strategy of reliance on the spiritual "Death of the West" is sound. It also fits a pattern set by recent history; similar surges followed the outbreak of the Gulf War and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

It is befitting rather than ironic that Germany’s conversion to Islam was desired, six decades ago, by an anti-Christian par excellence, Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler. His hatred of "soft" Christianity was matched by his liking for Islam, which he saw as a masculine, martial religion based on the SS qualities of blind obedience, absence of compassion, and readiness for self-sacrifice. By creating an SS division composed of Bosnian Muslims Himmler was only taking the first step in the planned grand alliance between Nazi Germany and the Islamic world. One of his closest aides, Obergruppenfìhrer Gottlob Berger, boasted that "a link is created between Islam and National-Socialism on an open, honest basis."

To many young Germans Usama Bin Laden is as admirable a figure today as Adolf Hitler was to many of their grandparents in 1929: a charismatic and dangerous man with a cause for which people are ready to die. Millions of their forefathers did not grapple with the complexities of the Great Depression when it was easier and more satisfying to submerge one’s identity and suspend judgment in the scream of Sieg heil! Likewise the grandchildren, even when hungry for spiritual nourishment, refuse to solve mental puzzles. Tackling the meaning of Incarnation, Trinity, or Fall is not even an option when a readily available alternative offers simplicity and instant gratification. It is as easy to say "Allah is great; there is no Allah but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet," as it is to gulp a gram of Ecstasy.

In the cities still dominated by ancient spires and domes the starkness and terror of the Cross have been forgotten; the image itself is being removed from sight. The young converts’ newly arrived co-religionists know, and thrive on the fact that Islam is well on the way to supply the only religious tradition left standing in Western Europe.

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