Political Islam - a 'European' ideology?

A post at Brussels Journal by John Laughland speaks to the coming of an organized global caliphate. He is reacting to an article by the Grand Mufti of Bosni-Herzegovnia, Mustafa Ceric. The first is "The challenge of a single Muslim authority in Europe" which advocates that the "best place to start constructing such an authority is Europe itself." Amazingly the journal which has published this piece is European View, the journal of something called the Centre for European Studies, a "mouthpiece of the European People's Party."

Ceric makes no bones about the fact that Muslims must obey shariah law. “The Islamic convenant, the shari’ah, is perpetual, it is not negotiable and it is not terminable,” he writes. According to him, “a European Muslim imamate” should be established “as a way of institutionalising Islam in Europe”. (By ‘imamate’ he means the application of shariah law in practice.) The author says that the two great strands of Islam, Sunnism and Shiism, should unite “with the objective of creating a global Muslim authority”. Ceric argues that Europe is specifically the best place to start creating such a global authority. He writes, It is not enough that Europe recognises the presence of Islam on its territory. Muslims deserve more than that. They deserve that their presence be legalised in the sense of creating a political and economic climate in which European Muslims can represent themselves through the institutions that should have both governmental support and public acceptance.

This is the part of his text which Köhler attacks as implying “a parallel jurisdiction” and she is right. In a sense, we should not be surprised that such a call should come from a Bosnian. Bosnia precisely did have such parallel jurisdictions under Ottomon rule, with courts for Muslims and courts for non-Muslims. To some extent, the paraphernalia of minority rights, which became a centrepiece of the 1974 Yugoslav constitution and which continues to bedevil Bosnian politics to this day, is a hangover from that period: both stand in marked contrast to the English and French traditions of centralised statehood.

But what is really striking about the article – and what the Christian Democrat official naturally overlooks – is that the rise of a Muslim political identity (and even perhaps of a Muslim parallel jurisdiction of the kind which the Archbishop of Canterbury seemed to call in a recent and very controversial speech) is precisely made more likely by the weakening of national identity caused, in part, by the anti-national pan-European ideology of which the German CDU is one of the main propagators.

Ceric himself sees the link between Europeanism and political Islam very clearly. After a few concluding sentences which border on the threatening – European society is still too “immature” to realise the advantage of a single Muslim authority, yet it will come whatever the European political establishment now thinks – he concludes with this sentence:

A single Muslim authority in Europe will come sooner or later because of need by young European Muslims who are capable of seeing their Islamic identity as prior to their ethnic or national identities and who are comfortable with their European identity coexisting with their Islamic upbringing. [my emphasis – jl]

Later in the article, Laughland references the Robert Dryfuss book, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, (New York: Henry Holt, 2005)

... that British and later American secret operatives deliberately supported pan-Islamic radicals in order to weaken nationalist leaders in the Arab world. The more such people were committed to the ummah, the less they would be interested in creating strong nation-states.

and points out that

Ceric seems to have the same view, since for him the need for a Muslim political authority rises as national identities weaken, whereas European “identity” is no threat to it at all. Could there be a clearer indictment of the suicidal nature of the EU’s project of dissolving national identity in Europe today?

Is the involvement of the Americans and the British naiveté or shortsightedness? Perhaps the reviews and commentary at Amazon will be helpful. From Publishers Weekly:

One of the CIA's first great moments of institutional reflection occurred in 1953, after American covert operatives helped overthrow Iran's left-leaning government and restored the Shah to power. The agency, then only six years old, had funded ayatollahs, mobilized the religious right and engineered a sophisticated propaganda campaign to successfully further its aims, and it wanted to know how it could reapply such tradecraft elsewhere, so it commissioned an internal report. Half a century later, the most prescient line from that report is one of caution, not optimism. "Possibilities of blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers," the document warned. Since this first known use of the term "blowback," countless journalists and scholars have chronicled the greatest blowback of all: how the staggering quantities of aid that America provided to anti-Marxist Islamic extremists during the Cold War inadvertently positioned those very same extremists to become America's next great enemy. (Indeed, Iran's religious leaders were among the first to turn against the United States.) Dreyfuss's volume reaches farther and deeper into the subject than most. He convincingly situates America's attempt to build an Islamic bulwark against Soviet expansion into Britain's history of imperialism in the region. And where other authors restrict their focus to the Afghan mujahideen, Dreyfuss details a history of American support—sometimes conducted with startling blindness, sometimes, tacitly through proxies—for Islamic radicals in Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Syria. At times, the assistance occurred openly through the American private sector, as Dreyfuss describes in a fascinating digression on Islamic banking. But ultimately, too few government officials were paying attention to the growth and dangers of political Islam. A CIA officer summarizes Dreyfuss's case when he says, "We saw it all in a short-term perspective"—the long-term consequences are what we're facing now. (Nov.)

Scroll down for other reviews and commentary.

Shortsightedness seems to be the general opinion. And Rachel Neuwirth at American Thinker says this about the view "hypocritical view" of the British press in light of their behavior:

If the British chattering classes have their shortcomings, they are still not as severe as that of Britain's politicians and "civil servants" (read "bureaucrats") who specialize in foreign and colonial policy. All too many British officials in these branches of the government (again, not by any means all) speak the language of morality (phrases like "a sacred trust" come easily to their lips) while pursuing what they regard as the interests of the British Empire (now disguised as the British Commonwealth) by any and all means, including lies, deceit, trickery and broken promises. It is these officials who, through the centuries, have won for Britain the venerable ignominious epithet "perfidious Albion."

Outside of the Muslim countries, no press in the world is as biased, as unfair, and as dishonest and vindictive towards Israel as the British press. The BBC and the newspapers The Guardian and The Independent take the lead in relentlessly vilifying the Jewish state, but Sky News, Reuters, The Economist and numerous other major media outlets do not lag far behind them in their race to see which can defame and malign Israel the most. Israel is incessantly castigated as an imperialist and colonialist power whose people stole their country from its "indigenous" and rightful owners, the "Palestinians."

That the press of a country that at one time or another conquered a substantial chunk of the entire world by the most ruthless and deceitful means imaginable (consider, for example, Sir Walter Raleigh's frank account of the murderous treachery that he employed to seize Trinidad from the Spanish, or Sir Francis Drake's ruthless plundering of the Spanish colonies) should castigate as colonialist, imperialist and racist a country that, even including the "occupied" territories, is only the size of Wales -- which, by the way, is yet another country that England conquered in a series of brutal wars -- is hard to fathom. So is the British press's outrage at Israel's "undemocratic" rule over perhaps a million and a half Arabs, when Britain ruled for centuries in the most autocratic manner hundreds of millions of subjects, many more people than lived in Britain itself, to whom it gave no democratic rights whatsoever. Britain only surrendered this Empire when it was bankrupt after two world wars, and no longer had the means to hold onto it. Even then, she surrendered it only under intense prodding from the United States, whose help she absolutely needed to rebuild her shattered economy and defend herself.

Yet the press and government of this nation that ruled vast territories thousands of miles from its own shores, countries that posed no threat whatsoever to Britain, have the gall to condemn Israel for maintaining a few checkpoints in the "Palestinian" territories, located only a few miles or in some cases only a few yards from her major population centers, in order to prevent terrorists from bringing bombs into these population centers and using them to murder thousands of Israelis. And they have the gall to call these checkpoints an "occupation," even after Israel unilaterally handed over most populated areas of the "occupied" territories (whose total size, in any case, is only equal to that of the English suburban county of Sussex) to her enemies, in a vain attempt to make peace with them.

The British press creates the impression that Britain has no connection to "Palestine" except as a sympathetic observer of the suffering of its Arab inhabitants at the hands of "Zionism." One would never guess from reading it that it was not so long ago that Britain ruled Palestine, or that she set in motion the Arab-Israel conflict in the first place, or that the conflict would not even exist without decades of British broken promises and odious divide-and rule maneuvers in the Middle East.

And after giving a short history of the control of Palestine by the British until 1948,

In 1947, Britain referred Palestine to the United Nations and asked it to find a solution to the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine that Britain had done so much to foster through its contradictory promises to both sides. When the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending that Palestine be partitioned into separate and independent Jewish and Arab states, His Majesty's Government, through its representative in the United Nations, solemnly promised to help implement the resolution, even though it had not voted for it.

Instead, the British sabotaged the resolution in every way possible. It refused even to allow the commission that had been appointed by the United Nations General Assembly to oversee implementation of the partition resolution into the country. On the other hand, it permitted the Arab states to send troops into Palestine under the guise of "volunteers," even before the British administration had completed its withdrawal from the country. It stood aside and did nothing to preserve order as war raged throughout the country and thousands of both Jews and Arabs were killed, even though it nominally retained responsibility for the administration of Palestine until May 15, 1948. Worst of all, it withdrew its administration without appointing or recognizing any government, Jewish or Arab, to take its place, or organizing any kind of successor administration. In an unprecedented act in the history of colonialism, the British simply withdrew, leaving the country that they had misgoverned for thirty years in total chaos. One British author has called this bizarre act an "experiment in anarchy." Another has characterized British policy in Palestine as "divide and lose."

Britain's two-faced machinations did not prevent Israel from winning the independence that the Jews had been promised, but only at the cost of thousands of lives, and with no help whatsoever from the promise-bearing great power. However, Israel has had to live in a constant state of siege from neighbors who remain at war with her, and who still refuse to allow her the "secure and recognized borders" enjoyed by all other sovereign states in the world.

The Palestinian Arabs never got the state that Britain promised them. Syria never "received" Palestine in accordance with Britain's secret promise, either. First incited to go to war for Palestine, and then left to shift for themselves by their forked-tongued British ‘friends," the Palestinian and Syrian Arabs are still fighting Israel for the land that Britain once promised each of them.

Britain, for her part, has done absolutely nothing to encourage the Arab states to make peace with Israel. Instead, its inflammatory press incessantly incites the Arabs to continue their war of terror against the Jews. The British Foreign Office has done nothing to discourage the British gutter press from indulging in this incendiary propaganda and misinformation campaign. And the BBC, a government owned and controlled station with close ties to the Foreign Office, has actively participated in the hostile propaganda and incitement against Israel, in both its Arabic and English-language services.

It ought not to be forgotten that the British flag consists of a triple cross -- the cross of St. George for England, that of St. Andrew for Scotland, and that of St. Patrick for Ireland (Wales, it would seem, does not even merit a cross!). What a fitting symbol this "Union Jack" is for the nation that triple-crossed the Jewish people, the Arabs of Palestine, and Syria into believing that she would give each of them Palestine, while breaking its promises to all three. It is a trail of broken promises that has led to six decades of seemingly endless war.

We have the Islamist knife at our throat because of the over-confident shortsightedness of the foreign policies of the United States and Britain, and other Western powers.

Although it's too late for finger pointing, and we must do what is necessary for cultural and existential survival, it's good to know WHY and HOW the Islamist monster was released upon the contemporary world.