Mouood Mouood English Edition
Crescent International Monthly, Toronto, Canada, January, 2015
Encouraged by official anti-Muslim policies, Islamophobia is rising alarmingly in Europe and North America. Neo-Nazi groups in league with Zionists are leading this criminal enterprise.
The West’s hatred of Islam and Muslims goes deep into history. It can be traced all the way virtually to the beginning of Islamic history, although the Qur’an enjoins respect for Christians because Prophet ‘Isa (Jesus – a) is also one of Islam’s Prophets and the noble Messenger (pbuh) always treated the Christians with kindness. Regrettably, Christian and Jewish scriptures are full of hatred for the other in language that borders on the scandalous. Islam has never accepted or adopted such language. The hated-filled polemic of Christians and Jews has been transferred to Muslims as well.
This may be due to the fact that much of Islam’s liberating expansion took place at the expense of Christian empires. The Crusades were in fact launched on a complete lie: that Christians in Palestine were facing threat of extinction at the hands of the “heathens” (Muslims). Pope Urban II’s sermon on Mount Clermont (1095ce) urging Christian soldiers to march to Jerusalem to “save their Christian brethren” was essentially meant to divert the energies of warring princes in Northern Europe from fighting each other to the external “other.” This was a masterstroke, even if totally wicked and criminal in intent. Interestingly, Christians residing on the Mediterranean rim refused to join the Crusader hordes. Equally revealing was the fact that when the Crusaders took Jerusalem, they neither spared Muslims nor Jews and Orthodox Christians. The latter were killed because they had lived in harmony with the Muslims!
Christianity’s troubled relations with Islam have continued through the ages. First, it was based on rejection of the Qur’an as divine scripture and the Prophet (pbuh) as not a real prophet but an impostor (nastaghfir-allah). Later Muslims were hated for providing refuge to Jews escaping Christian persecution in Europe. When Muslim forces marched into Europe, liberated Andalusia (present day Spain), and then rules from 750–1492ce, or even reached the gates of Vienna (1683ce), it merely added to the European’s angst against Islam. With Ottoman armies unsuccessful in their siege of Vienna to capture the Austrian empire’s capital as they had done with Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453, the bakers of Vienna baked croissants as a symbol of Muslim defeat! (The croissant represents the crescent, used by Muslims as a symbol).
In contemporary history, Muslims did not arrived in Europe or North America as liberators, but as workers, laborers and professionals. Yet the West’s hatred has not subsided. Islam and Muslims are simply not accepted as equals; they have remained the “other.” In the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Muslims arrived in Europe to work in factories. The Second World War had decimated European populations; an estimated 60 million people perished over a five-year period. Hundreds of millions of others were maimed.
This was also the time period when the women’s liberation movement was born. While seen as a movement to liberate women, it was in fact a great hoax perpetrated on them. The Second World War had forced many women to come out of the home to work in factories as the men went to war. The capitalists — the gnomes of industry — realized the value of cheap labor that women provided, so the women’s liberation movement was born. Ask leaders of the women’s liberation movement and they would readily concede today that it has been a disaster for women.
Muslims arrived in Europe — Britain, France, Germany, etc. — in the wake of the end of colonialism. They came in search of menial jobs from societies that had been plundered by European colonialists. In the 60-year period, they have taken root in these societies and their second and third generations have been born there, yet they are still not accepted as equals. In Britain and France, Muslims live largely in the ghettoes. The English may love curry and balti tikka but they refuse to accept Muslims as fellow citizens. In France, Muslim youth of Algerian and Tunisian descent have rioted in the face of police brutality and against the incessant racism of the state. Hijab is banned in state schools and Islamophobia is rampant. In fact, this is the last form of racism that still finds official acceptance.
In North America, Muslims arrived at about the same time as they did in Europe. Some researchers have suggested that Muslim presence predates the arrival of Columbus in America. There are even artifacts to this effect. This may be true but the presence of Muslims in significant numbers is a recent phenomenon. If Muslim migration to Europe consisted largely of menial workers, the relatively educated and upwardly mobile Muslims came to North America. This was based on the immigration policies of the countries concerned — Canada and the US — that restricted entry to non-professional groups. Canada opened its doors to “visible minorities” — a euphemism for non-white people — in 1968 when Pierre Elliott Trudeau became the prime minister.
Naturally, over the years, not only has Muslim population grown in both Europe and North America but Western policies have also become quite aggressive because of the situation in the Muslim world. Zionist Israel has had great impact on the anti-Muslim policies of many of these countries. This has been particularly pronounced in North America. In the US, the Zionist regime’s front organization, the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), operating in contravention of US lobby laws, has a stranglehold on US politicians. Many commentators, among them Pat Buchanan, refer to the American Congress as Zionist occupied territory!
In Canada, groups like the Centre for Israel Jewish Affairs (CIJA), Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the B’nai Brith carry the Zionist regime’s banner. They need not bother since the current Canadian government led by Stephen Harper is so pro-Zionist that it puts many Israelis to shame. And then of course there are the Zionist storm-troopers, the Jewish Defence League (JDL). There is nothing defensive about the group; it is made up of extreme right-wing zealots whose ranks are filled with biker gang members who go about intimidating and in some instances even attacking those Canadians that dare criticize Israeli crimes.
Given Europe’s proximity to the heartland of Islam — North Africa and the Muslim East — any significant movement of people from there would have an immediate impact on Europe. Thus, in recent months and years, because of wars launched by the US and its European allies on many Muslim countries, there has been a flood of refugees escaping war zones. While the bulk of these refugees have sought asylum in neighboring Muslim countries — Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. — some have also ventured farther afield. Europe and even Australia has been the destination of some of them now referred to as asylum seekers. There has been harsh reaction against such“asylum seekers” without taking into account the fact that Western policies are directly responsible for turning people into refugees. These have resulted in extremely hostile reaction against asylum seekers as well as Muslims in general.
Massive anti-Muslim rallies have erupted in many parts of Europe in recent years. On December 15 (2014), for instance, the neo-Nazis held a noisy rally attended by an estimated 15,000 people in the streets of Dresden. PEGIDA that stands for Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West, organized the protest. Referred to as “pinstriped Nazis” because they comprise many well established German citizens, they carried banners with slogans such as “Zero tolerance toward criminal asylum seekers,” “Protect our homeland” and “Stop the Islamisation.” Draped in German flags, their raised fists were punctuated by chants of “Wir sind das Volk,”(“We are the people”). That right-wing neo-Nazis would attract 15,000 people on a cold wintery night is frightening indeed given Germany’s long history of Nazi horrors and fascism. Many Zionists were also part of the howling mob.
