Business of Life

Allah's in the Church

Even though I've been following the Islamization of Europe closely, I found While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer chilling.

From Publishers Weekly
Having recently published an indictment of Christian fundamentalist intolerance in the U.S. (Stealing Jesus), New York native Bawer relocated to Europe with his Norwegian partner in 1998 and found an even more dangerous strain of religious and cultural bigotry ensnaring Western Europe. A swarming menace called radical Islam, he writes, rings Europe's cities in smoldering Muslim ghettos, provoking everything from so-called honor killings and political assassinations to the Madrid subway bombings and the massacre of school children in Beslan. Worse, the Taliban-like theocracy Bawer sees looming inside backward immigrant populations resistant to integration flourishes under the protective wing of Western Europe's America-bashing, multicultural, liberal establishment. The latter correspond to the appeasers of Nazi Germany, in Bawer's view, since he believes that radical Islamism is every bit the threat to Western civilization that Nazism was.

About the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Anna Lindh who was stabbed to death in a busy Stockholm department store in the presence of many witnesses none of whom came to her aid or attempted to detain her attacker, he writes

Onlookers just stood there, waiting for the authorities to do something. It was as if the very capacity for useful response had been breed out of them...There does seem to exist in Western Europe a deadly pattern of passivity that derives from a habit--born of life in a welfare state--of expecting the government to take care of things.

I thought of that when I read the story of how Belgian bishops have opened their churches to illegal Muslim immigrants who now live there as squatters in their tents with radios, television sets and computers provided them by Catholic relief services. They are turning the churches into mosques, moving the altar, covering the statues of the Blessed Virgin Mother and holding Islamic prayer services in the church.

I'm all for providing services to people in need no matter what their faith or lack of it, but turning over churches to Muslims when there are already 380 mosques in Belgium supported by the government seems to me to be a striking example of the European reflexive inclination to appease a growing minority that is determined not to integrate into the society of their host country nor to show that society the respect they demand for themselves.