Below are the video and transcript of the panel discussion “Muslim Migration into Europe: Eurabia come True?” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2015 Restoration Weekend. The event was held November 5-8th at the Belmond Charleston Place Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina.
“Muslim Migration into Europe: Eurabia come True?” from DHFC on Vimeo.
Erick Stakelbeck: We have an incredible panel with a very timely issue obviously. Muslim refugees or migrants literally swarming into Europe, western Europe, in waves and potentially changing the face in many ways of western civilization if it continues unabated the way it has been. Folks, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that, so we have a great panel today. You’re getting the best of the best on this issue. A few quick words and a few numbers because at the end of the day when we talk about these issues — Islamism, the jihadists, the demographic changes — a lot of times our dear fellow Americans are busy maybe watching the Kardashians or taking a selfie as all these things are going on. So folks, I think what we need to do, and one of the things we’ll do today on this panel, is we’re going to help register with people or get the point across that what happens over there matters over here. We need to care. So I’m going to give you a few quick examples before we get to our great panelists of why we should care.
Here are some stunning numbers for you in doing research for the panel about what’s going on right now in Europe, our cousins across the pond. What happens there could be a harbinger for what’s going to happen here, especially under the current administration and in terms of the left vision for this county. Number 1, the European Union believes that there will be at least 3 million refugees coming to EU countries in 2016 alone. Folks, that’s an astounding number. Three million in 2016 alone. Number 2, the British government. British government officials believe this will continue. This wave of refugees or migrants, whatever you want to call them, for the next 20 years. That’s the belief of the Brits. Another number. Our own Daniel Greenfield wrote about this yesterday, I believe. Ten thousand refugees. That’s what President Obama wants to bring to the United States in 2016. Ten thousand, I suppose, mainly Syrian refugees from a war zone where jihad and ISIS are running rampant. Brilliant idea.
Ten Thousand refugees, folks. They will cost $640 million to resettle here in the United States. And lastly, as Daniel wrote yesterday, 91 percent receive or will receive food stamps and 68 percent will receive cash welfare. What a great day in America. And by the way, an important statistic here. The FBI director, James Comey, said during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing a few weeks ago that you know what? We probably can’t vet all of these Syrian refugees. Sorry, folks. Now a few reasons we should be concerned about that. Number 1, Europe, obviously, has become a major hotbed for jihad. We’ve had at least 5,000 Europeans, Brits, French, Germans, Danes, leave their comfortable homes in Western Europe and travel to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. Hundreds of them, according to European officials, have already returned to places like Britain, France, Germany, and folks, when you’re fresh off slicing heads in Syria, you’re probably not going to transition peacefully back into civilian life and get a job at McDonald’s when you return to the West.
The House Homeland Security Committee also said at least 250 U.S. citizens have gone over there. Dozens have returned already, and lastly, the FBI director, James Comey, said that in all 50 U.S. states we have investigations ongoing right now, in every state in the union, into ISIS-related activity on American soil. So the barbarians are not just at the gates. They’re inside the gates. That’s not alarmism. That’s not sensationalism. That’s not scare tactics. I’m merely quoting Obama administration officials, and hey, we can trust them, right? They’ve never lied. Hey, folks, let me tell you. If they’re sounding the alarm about it — and they haven’t exactly been forthcoming about the severity of the Islamic jihadist threat, in case you haven’t noticed — so if they’re sounding the alarm about it, maybe we should be a bit concerned. But remember, Western Europeans can travel without a visa into the United States, so we’re going to have millions of mainly Muslim men, despite the heart wrenching pictures you’re seeing of little children on the surf in Europe dying. These are mainly Muslim men, who are coming into Europe at astounding numbers on a regular basis. Thousands a day.
So I think that’s a good place to start it. We have a great panel. I want to start with former Michigan congressman Peter Hoekstra. He’s got a new book that is available today, and let me tell you. I’m in Washington, D.C., the belly of the beast. I’ve interviewed Congressman Hoekstra many times. He was the Hill’s voice of reason, of clarity on this issue, on all issues related to radical Islam, jihad, the Middle East, etc. He’s a brave, he’s a courageous voice. I think you’re going to enjoy hearing from him on this issue. So, Congressman.
Peter Hoekstra: I’m working with Steve Emerson at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, and I’m proud to be with Steve. Steve has been on the forefront, as many organizations have been and forefront, of identifying this threat that we face as a nation, and so, I’m in a position where I can continue being involved in the fight. I really enjoyed our first speaker this morning, the keynote address, but the thing that I was most concerned about is, as I’ve observed what the Islamic jihadists have done in Europe — I’m a native born Dutchman. So I’ve been very concerned and spend a lot of time talking with the Dutch security folks about what’s happening in their country. Bill, this morning, talked about the soldiers on the walls. We can communicate, but we can only communicate if we know what’s going on, and the radical jihadist’s movement has been very good at developing a strategy to get themselves in a position of strength before we ever know where they have gotten to. They have done it in Europe, and they’re doing it here in the United States.
It’s a slow evolution. Think about it. What do you think of CAIR? We know who CAIR is, but at the IPT, we track every press release that comes out, and they are consistently identified in their own communications, but more importantly, the media communicates who they are. The leading civil rights Muslim organization in America fighting for the civil liberties of the Islamic, the Muslim community. That’s not who they are. They are the unindicted coconspirators of the Holy Land Foundation. They’ve been a front organization for Hamas, generating cash to fund the activities of Hamas in the Middle East, and they are recruiting people to help Hamas achieve its objective. This has gone on in Europe, and this is going on in the United States. They are just 10, 15 years ahead of where we are going unless people on the walls actually mobilize themselves and are equipped to fight this. It’s called the stealth jihad. That is phase 1 of what they are doing, and the problem is that they come in, and they take advantage of our strengths, of who we think we are, providing humanitarian assistance, providing tolerance and openness and civil liberties and all of those types of things. They take our values, and they turn them against us.
One of the things that we are going to be working on is we need to equip, and there’s going to be someone later on on the agenda talking about this because it’s absolutely essential. How many of you believe that America is founded on Judeo-Christian values? Okay. There’s a reason we say Judeo-Christian values rather than Judeo-Christian-Islamic values, but how many of you can define the difference between Judeo-Christian values and what that stands for and can have a 30-second or a one-minute conversation with your neighbor and say, we’re Judeo-Christian values? And the difference between Judeo-Christian and Islamic values are this, and that is why we believe what we are, and that’s why America is what it is. And the thing is, we know that there’s an issue because Ben Carson can get up and say you know what? I’m really not comfortable having a Muslim as president, and CAIR and all of their front organizations go out and call him an Islamophobe and try to marginalize him as they try to do to many of us in this room or on this panel on a daily basis; to marginalize us, but it is amazing to watch. And this is an opportunity of hope: when Ben Carson says that, and they attack him his, numbers do go up. And the reason they go up is that America understands and Americans understand that there is an issue.
They maybe can’t quite articulate what it is, but they know that there’s a problem, so we have to be very careful about the stealth jihad, and that’s what we’re trying to expose at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, but that’s now where Europe is. Europe already has moved to Phase Two of what’s going on, and that is the Islamic movement has now gotten to a point where they have put Europe into chaos. Chaos in the Netherlands. There are cars being burned. There are politicians that are being burned, and the history of the Dutch is that they always have consensus. The call it the polder strategy. The people who work together because of their common enemy. The polders are the lands that they’ve reclaimed from the sea. The Dutch have always had consensus, polder politics, because the people on the polder recognize that their enemies or their opponents are not the people who have different views living on the polder. Their common enemy is they have to work together to confront and defeat the sea each and every day. So it’s always been consensus, but with the influx of the Islamic community — and yes, there are no-go zones in the Netherlands. All right? There are no-go zones in France. There are no-go zones.
So there are no go zones in Britain as well, but they are tearing the Dutch apart politically. They are starting now. Hallelujah. There are people in Germany that are saying no to Merkel. That it is absolutely crazy to say that we’re going to take at least 600,000 people into Germany this year, and she’s not seeing a top limit. It’s kind of, we’ll take 600,000, but there are more coming in. We will take those. My wife and I, we were on a cruise this summer, and we ended up in Budapest, and we thought about staying in Budapest for a couple days, but we got on the train, and we went to Prague the day the cruise ended. We were very thankful. We left on Saturday. We got to Prague on Saturday night. Sunday night we turned on TV, and the little railroad station that we went through in Budapest, there were 15 of us going through the Soviet efficiency, but the next day it was surrounded by 10,000 invaders or refugees. People climbing through the windows of the train that we would have been on if we would have stayed a day or two longer. Total chaos. People who wanted to get to Europe. What’s happening in Europe, they’re tearing apart the social fabric. They are invalidating the number one responsibility of a government, which is to provide security for its people.
So you’ve got an increase of civil unrest with the people there. The second thing is you think we can’t track them. Think what’s happening when you’re getting 10,000 to 12,000 people a day coming across the border with false documents produced all across the United States. They are young males. You have an immediate problem in that a number of these people are already radical jihadists. The second problem is that you’ve seen it in the Netherlands, in Germany, Sweden, these other places. When they come, they don’t integrate. They are not assimilated. They become marginalized. They may be okay when they first get there, but they are the next wave of jihadists in Europe, the people who have not become assimilated, so there is a security risk, and then there is the social. Again, the social services, the strings that they put on. These communities can’t provide the welfare. They can’t provide the education. They can’t provide healthcare and those types of things.
So Europe, I think, is evolving into this era of chaos, which is exactly where the radical jihadists thrive. Think about where they are thriving today. They are thriving in parts of the world where there is chaos. Libya, which is what the book is about, Iraq, and Syria. This is where radical jihadists believe that they can thrive. Their goal is to establish chaos in Europe. They are effectively doing it. Ultimately, their goal is to create chaos here in the United States. That’s what we have to be vigilant about. Their third phase, and they’re very patient, will be to take us over. Thank you.
Erick Stakelbeck: Thank you, Congressman, and I have to mention your articles, Foxnew.com and elsewhere for IPT are excellent.
Peter Hoekstra: Thank you.
Erick Stakelbeck: And doing great work with Steve Emerson at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, as you mentioned. Our next speaker is one of my favorite writers hands down. This is no time to mince words, ladies and gentlemen. Daniel Greenfield does not mince words in his writing, and I appreciate it. I appreciate it very much. We all do. He is a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center focusing on all of these issues of radical Islam, Islamism, jihad, so, folks, without further ado, Daniel Greenfield.
Daniel Greenfield: There’s an old Hemingway quote about going bankrupt. How did you go bankrupt? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly. Here in the United States, we’ve had a front row seat to gradual bankruptcy. What does that mean? Under Obama, good policies have been replaced by bad policies. Good money has been replaced by bad money. Debt has been piled up in every state of the union. We have the same speech. The state of the union is strong. We’re investing trillions of dollars in Muslim, green energy self-esteem. Of course, that’s not an investment because an investment is when you get money back. It’s just spending, but that’s how you go bankrupt. And at the end of the day, the bill comes due and suddenly it’s, “Where did all the money go?” “How did we suddenly go bankrupt?”
Now demographic bankruptcy is also a very real thing. Economic bankruptcy is when you have no more money. You wake up one morning. There’s no more money. Demographic bankruptcy is when you wake up one morning. There are no kids, and this is a very real problem. You’ve heard China is abandoning its one-child policy. It’s now going to be a two-child policy. Germany though has a one-child policy of its own. The German birthrate is 1.3. That’s a one-child policy. That’s a 1.3-child policy. There’s a slight problem here because if you’ve got a birthrate of 1.3, and you’ve got socialism, who is going to pay for all of this? The entire system is based on the idea that the next generation is going to pay in, and the next generation is going to pay in, and this whole thing can keep running along indefinitely, but the Europeans aren’t having kids. I grew up in Europe myself for sometime, and it wasn’t unusual. I was one of the few kids running around. There are a lot of elderly people. There were some middle aged people. There were not that many young people, and it’s actually getting worse these days.
So if you look at Germany, Germany is a very bad case scenario, but there are even countries that have lower birth rates. Now this is a problem because in the normal birth rate, you’re supposed to have a pyramid. The younger workers at the bottom. Then it gets narrower. There are the middle age, and then there are the elderly. In Europe, the pyramid is upside down. You have the elderly at the very top. You have a small wedge of people who are middle aged, and you have a shrinking wedge of people who are young, which means they are going demographically bankrupt. Now Europe has been going demographically bankrupt for awhile now because of its falling birth rates, so the socialists who run it have come up with an absolutely amazing plan, which socialist plans can’t possibly fail. They’re going to solve this demographic bankruptcy and this resulting economic bankruptcy when there’s nobody to do the work or pay the bills or even write the welfare checks by bringing in millions and millions of Muslims to fill in the gap. So you’re going to have people from high birth rate countries come in, and they’re going to be at the very bottom of the pyramid.
They’re going to do the work, so Hans and Fritz will retire. They can retire at 55 or whatever. He’ll get his pension, and that’ll be fine, and Mohammed will come in, and he’ll work hard, and he will have a lot of kids, and the whole socialist system will keep working great. There’s just one, tiny, little, minor problem with it, and I’m not talking about the terrorism, the Sharia, the no-go zones, the attacks on Jews, or all the other fun stuff. There’s just one other minor problem, which is that the people coming in don’t actually work. Muslim unemployment rates, yeah. I mean you can count on socialists to bring in more people who don’t work to a country where the problem is that too many people already aren’t working.
But Muslim unemployment rates in Europe, it’s not unusual to see unemployment rates in the 20 and 30 percentile range. Among youth, you see unemployment rates in the 50 and 60 percent range, and that’s not because, as the excuses go, they’re disaffected. They’re not given work. They’re not given opportunities. They don’t want to work, and why should they want to work? Because there’s a basic cultural difference between Europe, between the West, and Islam, the Muslim world. Europe, the West, we’re a work ethic culture. We believe in working. We believe in coming home and saying okay, honey, what did you do? I worked 8 hours a day. That’s great. The Muslim world, it does not work like that because the Muslim world is a slave culture. We’re in the south now. We’re in Charleston. We’re supposed to feel very bad about slavery, which is a 19th century thing in America. In the Muslim world, it’s a 20th century thing.
Saudi Arabia abolished slavery, I believe, in 1962. 1962. The JFK administration came to the Saudis, and they said maybe you should give human rights to women, and let people vote and get rid of the slaves. Back then we had a little more leverage with the Saudis than we do now, so the Saudis grumbled and said all right. All right. Fine. We’ll get rid of the slaves. That was 1962. That was a great moment in Muslim human rights. The Muslim world has never really abolished slavery especially in the Middle East except because of European pressure. The English forced the Egyptians, for example, to get rid of slavery. The Saudis still have slavery, by the way. They just made it an even worse form of slavery. The original form of slavery, the slave owners would at least take care of the kids. They would take care of the old people. It was still evil, but it was slightly less evil. The Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the Qataris moved on to this kind of concentration camp slavery where you take workers at the peak of their lives. You take young workers. You burn everything out of them. In some cases, you downright kill them. Then you dump them back to the country where they come from with some pocket change. This is concentration camp slavery.
It’s what the Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, that’s what they’re built on. They have huge work forces. All these nice skyscrapers, you see all these paradises for the rich, they are built by slave labor. They are built by thousands of people just dying in the heat building this thing. They are built by this, and it’s like Sparta except we supply the military, and we supply the wealth, and they just sit around on their asses all day and own the slaves. That’s the Saudi — that’s all these societies. These are societies where the idea at the top is not to work. You do not work. You see all these leaders who are fat, who are ridiculously fat. They look like they have trouble walking across the room. The Saudi royals, Qatar, that’s because they don’t walk across the room. They sit on their asses all day, and they have these servants from Africa usually fanning them with palm leaves or whatever, and they’re not going to fan themselves with palm leaves because that’s what slaves are for. That’s how a slave culture works. Even the people who aren’t at the top believe that work is something you’re punished with. It’s not something you want to do, and socialists, by the way, believe the same thing. Work isn’t a good thing. It’s something you have to be forced to do.
This is a slave culture, and in the slave culture when people come into a country where it has generous socialism, that has generous welfare policies, they’re coming there not to work. In fact, you have the whole idea that these people are refugees. They are not refugees. They are not coming across the border from Syria, making it across the border into Germany, and saying, “Thank God, we’re in Germany now. We can be safe from the civil war.” That’s not how it is. They’re crossing into Jordan. They’re crossing into Turkey. In Turkey, there’s no war. There’s no war in Jordan. They stop being refugees the moment they leave Jordan or Turkey, and when they head to Europe, they’re no longer refugees. They are economic migrants. It is very important to remember that. There is no war in Turkey. There is no war in Jordan. They are not refugees once they leave Jordan or Turkey.
Now why are they going to Germany, for example? Why? What’s so great about Germany? Now I interviewed some of these guys, and they say you know what’s great about Germany? Hitler. We like Hitler. Germany is bringing in people to accord with tolerance and European values, and what these people admire most about Germany is Hitler. They may not have heard that he died awhile back, so they may be a little unclear about the details, but what’s so great about Germany? What’s so great about Sweden? Why are they all headed there? Welfare. It’s a great welfare state. You have a German teacher asking her students in class what they wanted to be when they grew up. Susie, what do you want to do when you grow up? I want to be an ecological engineer. Hans, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to fly hot air balloons. Mohammed, what do want to be when you grow up? I want to be on Hartz IV. Hartz IV is Germany’s welfare. “Hartz” means “heart.” It’s because it’s very caring to give people free stuff, so they want to be on Hartz IV.
Germany has very generous welfare policies. So does Sweden. They don’t want to go to a lot of these countries. You have interviews with these refugees who are in Slovenia. They’ve never heard of Slovenia before. They’re not interested in Slovenia. They don’t want to live in Slovenia. Slovenia doesn’t have great, free stuff. They want to go to Germany for all the free stuff they can get, so Europe is dealing with its demographic bankruptcy by bringing in more people who don’t want to work, by bringing in more people who are going to take more out of the government than they’re going to pay into it. So the socialists have actually managed to take a crisis that they are responsible for and made it even worse. Now how did demographic bankruptcy happen in the first place? How did you get to a 1.3 child rate? That’s a ridiculous number. It’s not China. Nobody was forcing women to have abortions. Nobody was marching in at gunpoint forcing them to have abortions.
This was Germany. They voluntary did this to themselves, and it’s not just Germany. It’s across Europe. Why did this happen? This happened because they decided that their future wasn’t their children. There are two reasons that people have children. One’s slightly cynical. Children take care of you in your old age. The second one is that you care about children. Children are the future. Europe, of course, has no future because it doesn’t have children right now, so the first part, Muslims have high birth rates. They have very high birth rates, so when you have Muslims coming in to Sweden, you have Somalis, for example, coming into Sweden, they have a birth rate that’s three or four times higher than the Swedish population. Syrians are coming to Germany. Germany, as I said, has a birth rate of 1.3. Syrians have a birth rate twice that. Afghans, who are the second biggest group, forget about the Syrians. The Afghan refugee boom is now becoming very huge. It’s a country of 30 million. A quarter of them polled have said that they want to leave Afghanistan.
One hundred thousand are expected to try to get into Europe this year.
But their birth rate is much higher because this is an investment program. This is a retirement program. Their kids take care of them in their old age. In Europe, your kids don’t take care of you in your old age. The government takes care of you in your old age. Under socialism, you have a cradle to grave state. The problem is that Europe now has a lot more graves than it has cradles. It has a whole lot of people, who are elderly. It doesn’t have a lot of cradles. It doesn’t have a lot of kids. The Muslims are supposed to solve this problem, but, of course, their retirement plan is have a lot of kids, charge them for the government. It’s not a great plan because, again, you’re not producing any more workers.
Now the second idea was that in Europe the things you would care about were not your children. They would be progressive policies. People weren’t living to see — I want to see my kids get married. I want to live to see my grandkids get married. Hell, it’s I want to live to see the European Union. I want to live to see diversity, and they’re living to see it now. I want to see light rail. In the UK, they’re talking about it’s important to have no more than one child because of global warming. You can’t have too many children because of global warming. So global warming, leftist policies matter to them more than their kids. That’s why they have no kids. They have faced demographic bankruptcy because they faced economic bankruptcy, because they face ideological bankruptcy.
Now we’re not immune to this stuff. We’re going slower than Europe, but we’re also going gradually, politically bankrupt. We’re going economically bankrupt, and we’re going demographically bankrupt. The Muslim population in the United States has increased 67 percent since September 11. It’s a great way to commemorate September 11. Sixty-seven percent increase. The Muslim population in the United States is younger. Their birth rate is higher just like in Europe. In the UK, you can look at the sea at the bottom level. When you hear that Mohammed is the most popular name in the UK for children or the most popular name for children in Oslo — so Oslo is 10 percent Muslim, but it’s Muslim at the bottom where it matters, where the children are. And England and Wales it’s 4 percent Muslim, but if you look at the children under 4, 9 percent are Muslim, and that is the future.
We think economic bankruptcy, the numbers sometimes sneak up on you because we don’t pay attention to the numbers that matter. When it comes to demographic bankruptcy, the numbers that matter are under 30, under 20, under 10, under 4. The median age in Germany is 46. The median Muslim age in Germany is 34. They are a much younger population. They’re having more kids which means they define the future. Now this is important for us to realize because this immigration thing is not just a problem of borders. It’s a problem of values. It’s important for us to have the children. It’s important for us to raise the children that are going to be the future because if we fail to do that, if we do what the Europeans do then we turn it over. At some point we’re going to be facing an economic crisis, and we’re going to do what the Germans did, which is say we can bail ourselves out with 5,000, 10,000 Muslims. Germany expects 1.5 million Muslims, according to a leaked government document, but with family reunification that can be up to 7.3 million people, and that’s just one country.
They’re promising that this is going to solve our demographic problems. This is going to be the future, but what they’ve really done is said that our future, socialism, matters more to us than our country. It matters more to us than our people. It matters more to us than our children. We can’t allow our United States to go that route. We can’t allow refugee resettlement to fill our cities, to fill our towns with people who are supposed to be our future, who we are told are going to do the work that we don’t want to do. Socialism is the underlying problem here. The migration we’re seeing is caused by socialism. It’s caused by left-wing policies, and now the left wing as it always does manages to make a crisis that they caused even worse. The United States is now going to be facing the same crisis. We saw that again with Obama recently. We’re going to be seeing more and more of it as time goes by. If we don’t recover the birth rate, if we don’t fundamentally change the demographics, we’re going to go the way of Europe.
Erick Stakelbeck: Now, folks, I told you he doesn’t mince words, and we appreciate that. The thing I love about this panel today is it’s long on a quality that’s been missing in the United States for the past few years. Common sense — and Daniel mentioned refugee resettlement. Folks, look no further than Minneapolis and St. Paul. With the largest Somali Muslim population in the United States, dozens of young Somalis have traveled to places like Somalia, Syria, Iraq to join terror groups. Oh, and by the way, the Mall of America is right there in that Minneapolis area. Prime terror target but move along, nothing to see here. Well, our next speaker is, to my mind, one of the most brilliant voices of thinkers, analysts on all of these issues we’re talking about, and he has been before anyone else was doing it. Dr. Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and a columnist at National Review, The Jerusalem Post. You read his stuff everywhere and many other publications. He’s the author of several books on the Middle East and Islam. He is a true authority. Dr. Daniel Pipes.
Daniel Pipes: Thank you, Erick, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My topic is the European response to the wave of migration that took place, that is taking place. Indeed, the largest number of migrants to Europe was in October; far more than September or July or August. And the number, this October was nine times more than last October.
My assumption is that people respond to realities on the ground and that the recent surge of migration is having an impact on European attitudes. I expect that this will have a profound impact, that we’ve just begun to see the implications. And I think the first significant implication is the election in Poland, which was influenced by fear of large numbers of migrants coming into the country. I think it’ll be especially acute in countries like Austria, Germany and Sweden, where the governments have been the most enthusiastic about bringing in large numbers of migrants. The question I cannot answer for you is how quickly this is going to take place. It’s clear it’s under way. How quickly it will take place, I don’t know, but we will soon see in polls and elections what the impact has been.
One important factor in European context is the institutions. In some countries, there are clear institutions, parties and intellectual associations and political volunteer organizations, which you can join if you’re concerned about this issue. In particular, there are political parties, most especially, for example, in the Netherlands with the PVV of Geert Wilders, where if you’re worried about this question, you have a very prominent party. There are other countries as well where you have a clear place to turn. But, in some cases, such in Germany, there’s no such party. There are possibilities. Maybe in the future, they will take up this issue, but they don’t. So very important is the institutional context which varies from country to country. Most important of all are ideas. You have at one extreme a Neo-Nazi movement in Greece called the Golden Dawn. At the other extreme, you have a very acceptable party such as the United Kingdom Independence Party, which is made up of people you’d be happy to invite to dinner. And there’s a range in between. There’s a choice.
These parties have a range of commonalities. They’re all worried about Islam, immigration, they tend to be populist, and, to a certain extent, nativist. They are not right-wing parties in general; certainly, some are. But in general, they’re populist parties. In general, they combine a strong sense of nationalism on the one hand and a left-wing economic program on the other hand. Wilders would be a perfect example of that. Another perfect example would be Marine Le Pen in France, who has moved to the left in economic policies. Marine Le Pen is also very important symbolically in another way. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the National Fund Party decades ago, and he was a, he is a very cranky man full of Holocaust denial theories, bizarre economic notions and the like. He came with a lot of baggage. To make a long story short, his daughter, Marine, has thrown him out of the party. He’s baggage that she doesn’t need because she’s moving to the center.
I see this and its equivalence in other countries as a positive step. In other words, if you want to grow your party, if you want to get to 50 percent, then you have to slough off all these eccentric, nasty habits and attitudes that many of the parties used to have. And this is, I think, something that is taking place in country after country. If you’re serious about dealing with this bunch of issues about Islam and immigration, you have to be dealing in a moderate and serious way and not having theories about the Holocaust that are strange and ugly. And I think that is a positive element that one can see in country to country.
I like to focus on Sweden because I think it is, in many ways, the most dramatic case. And the Sweden Democrats are a party that got started some decades ago and has had, I think, symbolically, a rise that speaks to what I’m saying. To give you the numbers, it received 0.4 percent of the vote in 1998. It’s every 4 years like us. Point four, so less than 1 percent. That then tripled to 1.3 percent in 2002. It then more than doubled to 2.9 percent in 2006. It then almost exactly doubled to 5.7 percent in 2010, which was critical because you need 5 percent to get in the Parliament. It then more than doubled again to 12.9 percent in 2014. And the current polls show it at 23, 24, more or less double again. So what you see here is that Swedes are awakening to this issue in a way that was unimaginable in 1998; I mean, one half of 1 percent. And today, it’s one quarter of the electorate. This is something serious that’s taking place. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this.
We have in our presence Kent Ekeroth, if you could stand, who is the international secretary of the Sweden Democrats, and he’ll tell you more about that. I won’t get into the details of Sweden, but I think it’s a perfect illustration of these numbers of the kind of concern when there is a party you can turn to that people are responding to.
Finally, a couple words about Eastern Europe, the part of Europe that was in the Soviet block. They had true socialism, to refer to Mr. Greenfield’s presentation. They had the full socialism. They had communism. And they got inoculated, and they’re not interested in it anymore. They speak frankly. They talk in ways that are unheard of in Western Europe. Here, you have Viktor Orban of Hungary talking about the Christian civilization of Europe. You have the Slovac and Polish governments saying sure, they’ll take Syrian refugees, but only the Christians among them. They’re saying things absolutely unimaginable in Western Europe. And I think it’s important, not just because suddenly, Eastern Europe is in play as the pathway to Western Europe. But also it’s important because they’re saying things that no one in Western Europe can say. And these are people in positions of power; there’s the prime minister of Hungary, for example. So I think this is a new element that suddenly came into the equation only in the last half year that possibly has serious implications for an alternate way of understanding these issues; not just domestically, but throughout Europe.
So in brief, my view is don’t give up on Europe. There are positive responses taking place to the crisis that’s now underway. It’s by no means clear that the Europeans will respond constructively, but there is a real possibility of it, and we, in our various ways, can help guide them in that direction, in the right direction. Thank you.
Erick Stakelbeck: Thank you, Dan, and I’m glad you brought Sweden up. I think if you ask the average American what’s going on in Sweden in terms of Muslim immigration and Muslim violence, they’d be shocked. They – in Scandinavia, they think blonde hair, blue eyes, Swedish bikini themes. That’s what the average American thinks. So it’s good that we’re bringing this up today, because the reality is much different on the ground.
You look a city like Malmo, the third largest city in Sweden, I believe, which, don’t quote me on this, but I believe the population is nearly half Islamic in the City of Malmouth; third largest city in Sweden. Pretty astounding. Another thing with the Holocaust denial, folks, already it’s a problem, obviously. In Europe, the rising anti-Semitism driven mainly by the Muslim, or largely by the Muslim immigrant population, it will explode even greater if we have 3 million Muslim migrants, refugees coming to the EU in 2016. People from a region where Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are required reading.
So our next, our final speaker, Bruce Thornton, is – we’re talking about Judeo-Christian Western civilization and preserving it. He is a historian of Western civilization, a great voice on it. He is a professor of classics and humanities at California State University Fresno and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His most recent book is the Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich and Obama’s America. Great title. Bruce Thornton everyone.
Bruce Thornton: Thank you. I want to sort of pull back a little bit and look from a broader perspective that I hope will join together the panel’s presentations. Policies are always about ideas, and we tend to talk about policies as though we’re talking about technical issues. But they’re really about ideas and ideologies.
And so what I want to look at is what ideas led to the attitude that Europeans now have about Muslim immigration? And there were three, as always, there’s three that I think are important. The first one is secularization. That is, Europe beginning in the early 19th century and United States as well, to a certain extent, began to believe that it could do without God, that religion was a superstition of the past, that the development of science, technology, improvement of life, global trade, etc., all of that meant that we didn’t need a religious foundation anymore. The problem is without a religious foundation, or to use the words of Thomas Jefferson, if the rights aren’t guaranteed by nature and nature’s God, then you have a big problem. Because there’s no reason why anybody should prefer tolerance to intolerance, to believe in human rights or to borrow from this morning, why we should not be wolves, but, rather, we should be human beings who rest, look upon people as in themselves rather than means to ends. And so that undercut the foundations of Western civilization, which come from three cities. They come from Athens, they come from Rome, and they come from Jerusalem. And we call that, as it has already been mentioned, Judeo-Christian tradition.
So what happens after secularization is that everybody then looks at the material world and science and the methods of science as the way to explain our lives and our, what we believe and what we should do. And in the 19th century and following, the new trinity became Darwin or Marx or Freud, and there were generated ideologies like communism or socialism or fascism or, all sorts of attempts to fill the vacuum that had been left by the retreat of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And the problem with that is there is another religion, as we’ve already heard spoken of, that really believes in a law, and they believe in the revelation of Mohammed, and they believe in Sharia law. They believe that enough, not just to kill themselves and their children, but to kill us and our children. And we have to take that belief and its intensity seriously. And it’s very difficult for the West to do that because we have reduced religious belief to a lifestyle choice. And I know the media likes to tell us how religious America is. If you just count church-going; sure, you can make that argument. I say watch cable television. I say think about the most use of the Internet is to view pornography. I don’t think that we are as bad as Europe is. Not yet, but we’re on the same road.
The second is what we could call internationalism. The same time in the 19th century, the belief arises that along with religion being a superstition from our past, something that we are going to evolve beyond, that human nature is progressing beyond, so, too, were local identities, national identities, ethnic identity, religious identity. These are all old-fashioned leftovers. Sure, they still exist, but we keep progressing. We can move away from those dimensions of our identity; those traditional dimensions of our identity and who we are and all become members of a global community. Which, of course, there’s no such thing as a global community. There’s no such thing as a global village. People live in particular places and particular times with particular beliefs, religious beliefs, etc.
So if you have that attitude, however, that there’s this international identity that’s developing that we’re all humans or converging on this certain kind of identity, which, of course, is Western in its origins; respecting human rights, privilege and prosperity, comfort, leisure, etc., then, why should we be concerned about our national identities? These cause problems. So the EU was created, wasn’t it? In part, as a way to say we’re going to move beyond being French and being German. Look at all the problems that caused in European history. So that was the second idea.
But even before this current crisis, with the financial crisis, all of a sudden guess what? Frenchmen were Frenchmen, and Germans were Germans, and Greeks were Greeks, weren’t they? The Greeks said hey, Germans, you owe us for World War II, and the Germans said no, we’re thrifty and hardworking, and you guys are lazing about in coffeehouses playing backgammon at 11:00 in the morning instead of working. They weren’t “Europeans” anymore, were they? When they came down to bailing out the Greeks or the Portuguese or whoever, those national identities returned. Why? Because they never disappeared. But they have been demonized. And what Daniel is talking about is some of the various parties in Europe that are always by the media called the “extreme right.” Aren’t they? Even like the Wall Street Journal if you read the story. It said well, the extreme right, and that immediately demonizes them, doesn’t it? All they are, as Daniel said, they’re populist parties. They’re like, we’re Frenchmen. We like being Frenchmen. We’re Swedes. We like being Swedes. We think it’s a great thing to be a Swede. It doesn’t mean we have to go kill people who aren’t Swedes. But that also does mean that we don’t have to stop being Swedes.
So that’s been a big problem, and it has resurfaced with this immigration crisis, as was mentioned again by the response of Hungary. Because of their experience in recent history over the last 50 years, they like being Hungarians, and they like being Christians, and they see no reason why they should join Germany in pretending that all these hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions of different religion, different cultures coming into their country that they should simply accept it and that to want to be Hungarian is somehow racist or xenophobic or something like that. And that’s created this east-west division.
Finally – and this is going to sound incoherent, you’re gonna think I’m contradicting myself between No. 2 and No. 3 – is that the West and Europe has embraced multi-culturalism. And multi-culturalism is a species of cultural relativism. And we all know that we’ve all heard this, and all cultures are the same, they’re all equal. We’re all children of Abraham. We all like the same things. We all want the same things. We all want peace and prosperity. But they have their particular way of life. And there’s two levels at which multi-culturalism sort of functions. One is, let’s say, boutique multi-culturalism. That is, now – excuse me. Now, we have a whole range of consumer choices. Don’t we? We want to go out to eat. Well, we can go get Thai noodles, we can go get Mexican food, we can go get Middle Eastern food, we have music, other cultural products that we can enjoy. We have the whole world now as our marketplace. And also, they’re exotic. Right? They’re different. They seem to have a romantic allure because they have these different customs.
That’s not the danger of multi-culturalism, though. The real danger of multi-culturalism is that it’s predicated on the notion of Western guilt and Western crime, specifically, colonialism and imperialism. Now, I, personally, I don’t understand why we credit ourselves or indulge the notion that the problems of the Middle East come from colonialism. The last time I checked, up until World War I, what we call the Middle East today was run by the Muslim Ottoman Turks. And if you want roots for the problems of the Middle East, it’s not from colonialism. It’s from the fact that for all the 19th century, you had a series of incompetent, spend-thrift sultans running the Ottoman Empire, and they culminated in making the wrong choice in 1916 of joining the Axis Powers, excuse me, the Central Powers fighting for Germany because they thought Germany will win. We’ll get our lost European empire back, the Balkans. And they lost. And they did that by the way, despite the diplomatic begging of the British and the French to stay neutral; not to join their side, but to stay neutral.
So we’ve accepted this lie that all of their problems come from colonialism, so we feel guilt. The West feels guilt. Europeans, in particular, feel guilt. And they feel like they need to make reparations. And this influx, this migration that began long ago, remember – this is not a new problem. This is just the latest, very visible manifestation of a continuing problem. That’s how we’re going to say we’re sorry. That’s how the Europeans are goint to make reparations because their dysfunctions in their world is in part, a consequence of bad European behavior. And by the way, since we’re on this topic, we should never ever let an adherent of Islam talk to us about colonialism and imperialism when Islam for a thousand years is one of the most successful imperialist colonial powers on the planet. You know? They whine on about the occupations, so-called occupation of Judea and Samaria. Right? How about the continuing occupation of Northern Cyprus by Turkish Muslims that started in the ’70s that involved population transfers, ethnic cleansing, the destruction of 300 Christian churches? And they’re still there by the way. How about the 7 centuries in Spain, in Italy, in the Balkans, in Greece, the heartland, the cradle of Western civilization? So this whole argument about colonialism and imperialism, should never ever be given one ounce of credibility. It’s ranked hypocrisy. It’s an example of just how smart this enemy is because they can look into the Western soul, and they can see its self-doubt, and they can see its guilt. Right? They can see its lack of faith. They can see that it lives for today. That’s why the Europeans aren’t having children. Children are expensive. They’re time-consuming. It takes funds away from vacationing in the Riviera or doing whatever; sex vacations in Thailand or whatever. So those bad ideas lie behind this phenomenon we’re talking about. It’s not the only thing. The need, as Daniel Greenfield pointed out, absolutely correct, the need, for what they think will be labor, but will just be welfare drones. But those count, too.
Now, very quickly, how does this apply to us? We’re on the same road. Aren’t we? As our speakers have already said, we’re on the same road. We indulge, particularly, the progressives who control the schools and control the media and control popular culture. They’ve been on this road a long time. We have gone a lot farther down it in the last 6 years. We indulge the same pathologies, ideological pathologies. And we’ll have the same result later rather than sooner as in the case of Europe. I could go on and on, but I think by the looks that Michael Finch is giving me, I’m supposed to stop, so thank you.
Erick Stakelbeck: Folks, let’s give our panel a hand. Great stuff, gentlemen. Now, Michael, are you gonna –
Michael Finch: Yeah, we’re not gonna have a lot of time. It may be quick questions; two to three quick questions. I’m gonna start with Judy, and then I think Art Salz has his hand, and then Jared Bowman. So those will be the three.
Audience member: I want to put that figure of 10,000 Syrian refugees in context. Our whole refugee program takes in 70,000 a year and has for many years. We’ve taken in just millions of refugees over the years. Now, most of them are Muslim. All of the Syrians, except a very few, are Muslim Syrian refugees because Christians don’t go into refugee camps, which is where the U.N. finds the refugees to send here because they’re persecuted by the Muslims in the refugee camps. So they go find other Christians to stay with. So it’s all refugees who are Muslim coming in. Many of the other ones coming in are also Muslim, and sometimes, you don’t know it, because they come in like persecuted groups from Asia, little minority groups. They’re Muslims. They’re very disruptive. They’re sent to communities out in the middle of the United States. That experience of that village in Germany, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s like that. They come in great numbers. There have been hundreds of thousands of Somalis that have come in over decades. This is something Obama invented; it’s our refugee program. It’s not well vetted. It’s run by a lot of things that sound like charities, like Catholic Charities, that kind of thing, that are actually just conduits for government funding. And they’re always pressing for more refugees. So the whole thing is a problem, and the whole thing helps lead to the stealth Jihad here.
Audience member: This is to the panel in general. There are approximately 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and I have two questions. No. 1 is that they grew really very, very fast. The first question is, what accounts for their speedy growth? And the second question is, what is the nature of Islam that’s so attractive, and what is the difference in the world of various portions of Islam; the East, the Arabian experience and so on? Thank you.
Daniel Pipes: We’re supposed to give quick answers. I don’t think there’s a quick answer to that series of questions.
Michael Finch: Why don’t we take the last question and then you guys can kind of sum up.
Audience member: So first off, I want to say thank you. I agree that a major problem is cultural relativism. I’m in high school at a small Jewish school, no less. And every time I stand up in class, and I say the influx of Islam will destroy the republic, which I truly believe, I’m called a racist, I’m called intolerant, I’m called a bigot. I’m told that I can’t judge other cultures because, as Mr. Thornton said, no culture is better than any others, which is absolutely untrue. My question is what can we do to regain the courage to call evil what it truly is and that is evil?
Bruce Thornton: Well, in schools, you do what you’re doing, and you fight back, and you ask them uncomfortable questions, and then you point out the hypocrisy of people who say that all cultures are equal, and then ask them well, then, why is all of the influx of immigration into the West, and there’s not any influx of immigration out of the West into Saudi Arabia or any other part of the world? They vote with their feet. And immigration patterns over the last century are the biggest refutation of multi-culturalism. Because when it comes down to where do you want to live – I’ll give you very quickly one last – this question came up once. They have a – my university was hiring a dean, and I forget what the topic was, but that issue came up. And she said well, how do you, how can you judge that one culture is better than another? And I said you know what, the culture that doesn’t mutilate the genitalia of its girls, that culture’s better than the one that does. Right?
Peter Hoekstra: I was just going say you’ve got to feel comfortable this weekend. At least you’re with a whole group of Islamophobes. So I hope you enjoy the weekend. But a couple of things. We can make a very compelling case that Judeo-Christian values as exercised here in United States are superior. And we have to do a much better job of identifying the truth about what Islam stands for, at least, as a certain number of these 1.3 billion Muslims as they practice it. Take a look at what they are doing to religious minorities. It is absolutely embarrassing that we have a president that will not acknowledge the genocide that is going in the Middle East. It is going on in Egypt, it is going on, or to a lesser extent, in Egypt. But Iraq and Syria, Christians and whatever, Jews, are left are being slaughtered on a daily basis. Take a look at what they do to the gay community. They take them on top of a building, and they throw them off the top of the building. Take a look at what they do to women. This is a very clear and compelling case. We are a superior culture, and we have to be, like you’re doing in schools, go out and claim it. But the thing is they have done such a good job with organizations like CAIR, and we have to get better at confronting these organizations and identifying who they really are and what they stand for and what they intend to do.
There was just a recent march in New York City a couple of weeks ago, quote unquote, to support the Palestinians. All right? But if you listen to their speakers, at the end, as you’re going through their speakers, they’re saying Netanyahu, Obama, soon you will feel the intifada. Right? This is happening in New York City, and if you don’t label where these marches are going on, they look exactly like the marches that are going on in the Middle East, and it’s happening right here in the United States. And they are calling not only about we want, religious freedom and equality and those types of things, they want, they’re talking about bringing violence right here into the United States, and we need to highlight that. And we need courageous people, like what you support, to actually be talking about this and confronting it.
Daniel Pipes: I’d like to add a word of caution. I’m a historian, and the role of a historian is to understand how things change over time. Let me just say two words; communism and Nazism. The Muslim world has never developed anything remotely as evil as what we in the West have developed. Let’s not get too high on our horses. We Westerners have a lot in our history to be very ashamed of. What we are noting is that the Muslim world is at a low point today going through a crisis, and we are not going through any comparable crisis. But let’s not say that this is the Judeo-Christian world that is so wonderful on the one side, and the Islamic world is so horrible on the other side. In 1943, where would you have rather been living? In Germany or in Iraq? In German, in Italy or in Senegal? Or let me put it differently, as you come from a Jewish school. In the long history of Islam and Christianity and the Jews who are in one and the other of these two civilizations, from the origins of Islam into the close of World War II, that is to say from 620 until 1945, a very, very long period of time, almost always, Jews went from Christian countries to Muslim countries because they were better off in Muslim countries. It’s only the last 70 years since 1945, the Jews have left Muslim countries for predominantly Christian countries.
So let’s keep some perspective. Yes, I agree with all the specifics, that the immigration is only way and not the other way, and there’s only one civilization where girls are being genitally mutilated; all true. But things change over time. We were not always who we are today, and they were not always who they are today. So keep this in perspective. And this is both grounds for hope on their side that they can get better because they’ve gotten worse in my career, and it’s been nothing but getting worse. But that has the positive implication it could get better. And let’s not be too proud of ourselves and nothing can go wrong here, because we can make some major mistakes, too. Such as, for example, Golden Dawn. It’s an atrocity. And it’s gaining support in Greece, the home of Western civilization. Let’s not be too proud of ourselves, and let’s not be too condemnatory of them, please.
Bruce Thornton: I don’t want to start an argument with an eminent scholar like Daniel, but Nazism and fascism were aberrations of Western culture and Christianity. There was nothing Christian about them. And they were corrected. Everything that’s going on in the Middle East today, everything is consistent with Islamic ideology. And as that Egyptian critic of Islam says, what has ISIS done that Mohammed didn’t do? And there is no difference.
Michael Finch: Daniel Greenfield, did you want to make a last comment?
Daniel Greenfield: The most important thing about the Syrian refugee crisis, so-called refugee crisis is not to allow ourselves to be emotionally stampeded. The media very successfully manipulated people with that photo of the dead boy. The reality is the majority of the refugees are males. The majority of the refugees may not even be Syrians. Locals in Greece described seeing huge amounts of fake passports just being abandoned on the beach. In Greece, they’re signing up people as Syrian who can just speak Arabic. Anybody who wants to, gets in the door. It’s very important to not let us be emotionally manipulated. As Bruce has said, by the idea that Muslims are in some ways superior to us, morally superior to us, even though this is an actual slave-owning culture, merely because of some things that we did in the 20th century.
Our civilization speaks for itself. Their civilization speaks for itself. We can look at, to see the difference any time at any point. The West is a point of religious diversity. It’s a place where Jews, Christians and a whole variety of other people, including atheists and Buddhists, can exist. The Muslim world has been wiping out its religious minorities from the very beginning; from Mohammed’s ethnic cleansing of Jews down to the entire dictate that there’s no room for two religions there. There’s no room for co-existence in the Arabian Peninsula. There still isn’t. There are no churches in Saudi Arabia. There’s no synagogues in Saudi Arabia. There are never going to be any churches and synagogues in Saudi Arabia unless the ideology there so fundamentally changes that it becomes like us. That’s the bottom line. We’re getting things right. They’re not. And the reality is they have never really gotten things right. There have been times when the Muslim world has been less bad. There’s never been times when it was good. And that’s the important thing to take away. When we – as our countries become more Muslim, they become more bad. They don’t become more good.
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