Islam in…Iceland? Allah’s final frontier. by Bruce Bawer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/islam-iniceland/
I’ve been writing about Islam in Europe for a quarter century, but I’ve never written a word about Islam in Iceland, and at one point I was naive enough to believe that I would never have to. Pretty much everywhere else you go in Western Europe these days, there’s at least a hint of an Islamic presence and hence, to at least some degree, a sense of being in the presence of a hostile and alien threat. It was never like that in Iceland. In no other Western European urban center have I ever felt as safe as I have in Reykjavik. It’s a clean, charming city of 120,000 in a remote island country of 370,000, and until recently virtually everybody there was Icelandic. It’s like one big family – except it’s not really that big. When I walked the streets, at any time of day or night, the sense of security was palpable; indeed, it was less like wandering around a city than like wandering through the comfortable (if chilly) rooms of a well-secured home. There are high-trust societies and there are low-trust societies; Iceland was as high-trust as you can imagine. And a big part of the reason for that was the extremely low level of immigration – especially Muslim immigration.
Well, that’s over. No, that feeling of security hasn’t disappeared overnight; but it’s definitely taken a hit. On March 7, a session of the Allting – Iceland’s parliament – was interrupted by three foreign men in the visitors’ gallery who have apparently settled illegally in the country and who, in a language that was clearly not Icelandic, shouted out demands that the government provide them with homes, residency permits, and a right to be joined in Iceland by their families. (If they’re this arrogant when there are so few of them, what would it be like if their relatives – and their relatives, and their relatives – came and joined them?) One of the three, who was barechested – not a common sight in Iceland, except, of course, at one of the country’s highly popular geothermal spas – climbed up onto a railing and seemed to be preparing to leap down onto the floor of the chamber, or perhaps, alarmingly, onto one of the legislators.
The drama didn’t last for long. At the Allting, there is always one (yes, one) police officer on duty as a guard. With the help of a couple of MPs – male MPs, of course – the guard subdued the man in a trice. Still, the disturbance was unsettling enough that the members of the Allting chose to take a brief recess. Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, for her part, took the opportunity to comment that the three men’s stunt had been reflective of “a clear sense of desperation” and added that “we must work together to address these issues.” Did she mean that these men’s misbehavior should be rewarded? Is this like responding to the Hamas atrocities of October 7 by stepping up efforts to give Gazans their own independent nation?
The timing of this demonstration, it should be noted, was not coincidental. At the moment when the men began to interrupt the proceedings, the Allting had just begun to discuss proposed changes to the Foreign Nationals Act that would treat asylum cases with greater stringency. This proposal came almost exactly a year after the Allting approved of a law under which rejected asylum seekers would lose their right to free housing and medical care thirty days after being turned down. That law – which, needless to say, prompted fierce criticism from Amnesty International and other such groups, and was inevitably described as “controversial” by the mainstream international media – represented an extremely rare example of good sense in these matters on the part of a Western European legislature; in most other Western European countries, being denied asylum actually means little or nothing, with rejected applicants being permitted to hang around (and collect welfare) for years, during which many of them are repeatedly arrested for serious and even deadly crimes – and, all too often, are still not deported.
Amid all this folly, Iceland has always been an outlier. Its small size, harsh climate, and distance from the rest of Europe have long combined to make it a country that neither welcomes nor attracts immigrants. For generations, Icelanders’ concern for their own cultural purity has been so intense that when the need for a new word arises, usually because of a technological development, they don’t just borrow from a foreign language (in Lithuanian, for example, telephone is “telefonas” and computer is “kompiuteris”) but instead put their heads together and come up with something that has its roots in Old Icelandic or Old Norse. Hence telephone is “simi,” an ancient word for “long thread,” and computer is “tölva,” a mash-up of two words meaning “numbers” and “witch.”
In the age of European Islamization, Iceland’s insularity has served it immeasurably well. To be sure, the year 2022 saw what the European Conservative describes as a “surge in immigration,” although the newcomers – no fewer than 17,000 of them – were mostly from Poland, Ukraine, and Romania, countries whose citizens tend to move to the Nordic region to work hard and obey the law. Even so, Iceland’s continued resistance to the Islamic tsunami that has engulfed the rest of Western Europe has faced a growing challenge from local activists who, claiming to be motivated by compassion for the huddled masses of the Muslim world, would like to see the island country open its arms as widely as possible to so-called Muslim refugees – i.e., people who claim to be escaping oppression but who, as soon as they secure residency in the West, have a habit of flying back to the lands from which they “escaped” and spending months at a time there, living on Western welfare largesse.
The menace posed by these Islam-friendly Icelanders should not be taken lightly. I began this piece by saying that I’d never written about Islam in Iceland; but I have talked, in a 2017 video for the Glazov Gang, about what happened to one particular critic of Islam during a visit to that country. In May of that year, in a Reykjavik restaurant, an Icelander surreptitiously put something toxic into the drink of my FrontPage colleague and friend Robert Spencer, who’d just delivered a very well-received talk about the jihadist threat. “About fifteen minutes later, when I got back in my hotel room, I began to feel numbness in my face, hands, and feet,” wrote Robert afterwards. “I began trembling and vomiting. My heart was racing dangerously. I spent the night in a Reykjavik hospital.” At the hospital, Robert’s treatment was, according to a doctor who later examined his emergency-room records, “dismissive”; Robert filed a complaint, but nothing was done. The day after the crime, Robert reported it to the police, but they never did anything, either.
As Robert noted in recounting his experience in Reykjavik, his talk had been a success, indicating that there are Icelanders who recognize the jihadist threat; indeed, the island’s immigration policies suggest that most of its natives lean toward sanity on the topic. Still, in Iceland, as throughout the Western world, a preponderance of academics, journalists, and professionals tend to lean quite strongly in the other direction. We’re talking about the so-called educated class here – but for all their education they seem not to be very good at basic math. For those of us who can do simple sums, however, it’s terrifying to think how quickly a country with the population of Iceland could be overwhelmed – its resources drained, its traditions trampled, its language silenced, its freedoms quashed – by a wave of immigrants of the type who stormed its parliament the other day.
Given all this, I was surprised and dismayed to read, in one Norwegian account of the March 7 dust-up, that the Allting had actually voted recently to grant residency to 72 people from Gaza who “are already on their way to Iceland by way of Cairo.” Note that 72 Gazans headed for Iceland is the rough equivalent of 65,000 Gazans headed for the U.S. – which, just for reference, is approximately the number of people currently living in Youngstown, Ohio, or Skokie, Illinois. How many more Gazans will Iceland end up taking in? How soon before tiny Reykjavik starts looking like the iciest ever version of Karachi or Lahore or Peshawar, and the benighted fools who poisoned Robert Spencer in 2017 wake up to realize that the American bigot was right?
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