RUTHFULLY YOURS

Political leaders across the Western world seem to have a clear set of priorities that we will not change, and therefore we must simply accept the problem.

There are several possible reasons for this, but the most likely is that they know that it is the policies of successive governments, including their own, that have caused such attacks to happen. If countries such as Canada, France and Finland had been more careful with their national security, these current attacks would not be happening.

In order to avoid the political repercussions that might follow any honest evaluation of our current situation, they seem to conclude, the only thing to be done is to pretend that terrorism is — like the weather — something that just happens to us, and that our principal problem is the bigotry of Europeans rather than another two women lying dead on our streets.

In Europe today, it is what goes unacknowledged and un-commemorated that reveals the trouble we are in.

There are plenty of public campaigns and calls by politicians to demonstrate “awareness” of things that are either non-existent problems or second-order problems. Earlier this year, for instance, the President of Austria came up with an eye-catching initiative. Addressing the ban on women wearing full-face coverings in public places, Alexander van der Bellen, the former leader of the Green Party, said:

“If this real and rampant Islamophobia continues, there will come a day where we must ask all women to wear a headscarf — all — out of solidarity to those who do it for religious reasons.”

That day has not yet come. Non-Muslim women across Austria have not yet all been asked to wear the headscarf in solidarity with Muslim women who wear the headscarf. But it is possible that they will be asked to do so in the near future, whenever the President of Austria or another senior figure decides that “Islamophobia” has become even more “rampant” and that this requires all the women of Austria to cover their heads. By contrast, after real and deadly attacks on women across Europe, nobody knows precisely what to do.

Recently in Marseille, two women, aged 20 and 21, were walking past the Saint-Charles train station. The women — named as Mauranne and Laura — were cousins, one a medical student, and the other a trainee nurse. A man stabbed both of them to death, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” before each assault. This man — who was shot dead by police — is believed to hold a number of identities, including a Tunisian passport in the name of one Ahmed H, born in 1987.

The attack in Marseille is reminiscent of a number of attacks in Europe in recent years, not least the murder in August of two women and the wounding of eight others in the Finnish city of Turku. The perpetrator of that attack was a 22-year-old Moroccan, Abderrahman Bouanane, who had lied about his age, identity and asylum claims when he had arrived in Finland a year earlier.

After Turku, nothing changed. In the same way nothing will change after Marseille. On the same day that the latest two young women were butchered on the streets of France, an Islamist carried out an attack in Canada. In Edmonton, a 30-year-old Somali refugee stabbed a police officer and mowed down pedestrians with a van. An ISIS flag was subsequently found in the perpetrator’s car. In response to the atrocity, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, released a statement, saying:

“We cannot — and will not — let violent extremism take root in our communities. We know that Canada’s strength comes from our diversity, and we will not be cowed by those who seek to divide us or promote fear.”

On October 1, a Muslim man of North African descent in his 30s arrived at Saint-Charles station in Marseille with one purpose in mind – to murder as many people as possible in the name of Islam. His first victim, a 20-year-old medical student from Marseille never stood a chance. The assailant lunged at her with a knife whose blade measured 8 inches, and stabbed her repeatedly while screaming “Allah Akbar.” He fled the scene but returned shortly thereafter to claim his second victim, a 21-year-old trainee nurse from Lyon. According to sources, one of the victims also had her throat slit.

The cold-blooded and depraved murder of the two young women failed to satiate terrorist’s lust for blood. After murdering his second victim, he ran toward soldiers patrolling as part of Operation Sentinelle, who shot him dead. In Western Europe, this is the new normal but the situation is particularly acute in France, which has experienced a rolling wave of terrorism since 2012. The country currently resembles an armed camp with the deployment of thousands of soldiers and police armed with automatic weapons, patrolling sensitive locations. But apart from increased security, France appears unable or unwilling to do more to counter the threat.

The Marseille slaughter could have easily been prevented but French authorities imbibed with a combination of political correctness, laziness and just plain stupidity, allowed it to occur. The terrorist who committed the gruesome attack was known to law enforcement. He was a recidivist whose rap sheet included a laundry list of petty crimes. In fact, just days before the attack, he was arrested for shoplifting but inexplicably released despite the fact that he possessed at least seven fake identities. The man, who informed the police that he was homeless, had given them a Tunisian passport in the name of Ahmed H, born on November 9, 1987 at Bizerte. But a quick fingerprint check would have revealed that he was lying through his teeth. Unfortunately, the fingerprint verification was performed after the Marseille slaughter.

French law enforcement officials attempted to deflect responsibility by claiming that the man had no known terrorist ties and that shoplifting offenses generally result in a police report and a court summons to appear at a later date. The proffered excuse is disingenuous at best. For years, French law enforcement officials have been cognizant of the nexus between criminal activity and radical Islamic terrorism. Several well-researched and detailed studies have confirmed this interconnection. In fact, as many as 80% of those who have committed terrorist attacks in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe in the name of Islam have criminal records with lengthy rap sheets that include drug dealing, petty larceny, assault and identity theft.

As noted, the terrorist who committed the Marseille outrage was a serial shoplifter and an identity thief. Khalid Masood, the UK terrorist who carried out the Westminster car-knife attack in March had a number of convictions for causing Grievous Bodily Harm (GBH) possession of offensive weapons and public order offenses. Kobili Traore, the Muslim man who brutally beat elderly Jewish pensioner Sarah Halimi, while yelling Islamic and anti-Semitic slogans, and then proceeded to throw her out of a third-floor window to her death had spent several years in prison for acts of aggravated violence and drug dealing. Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who stormed the Hypercacher kosher supermarket in Paris killing four, had previously been jailed for dealing in stolen goods, drug trafficking and robbery. Brothers Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam, who were part of the gang that perpetrated the deadly Paris attacks in November 2015, were drug users and traffickers. The bar the duo owned in Molenbeek, a district of Brussels, was shut down by police for being a drug den.

Because Germany had committed genocide, it was impregnated with self-hatred and a rejection of its own identity. Germany turned to European construction and tried to define itself as European, in order not to call itself German.

A gradual replacement of the non-Muslim population with a Muslim population is taking place. Forty percent of children under five and born in Germany today have foreign roots.

The demographer Michael Paulwitz wrote a year ago that unless the current trends are reversed, Germans will become a minority in their own country, possibly in fifteen to twenty years.

Germany’s federal elections were supposed to lead to the triumph of Angela Merkel. Their results were rather different from what was anticipated. Merkel’s “victory” looks like a disaster: the Christian Democratic Alliance (CDU-CSU) won 33% of the vote — 9% less than four years ago, its worst result since 1949. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which governed the country with Merkel during the last four years, lost more than 5%, and fell from 25.7 % to 20% of the vote — the worst result in its history. Alternative for Germany (AfD), a conservative nationalist party born in 2013, obtained 12.6%, and will enter in the Bundestag for the first time. Die Linke, the Marxist left, received 9%. As neither the SPD nor Die Linke will participate in the next government, and as AfD is radically opposed to the policies pursued by Merkel, she has only two possible partners: the libertarian Free Democratic Party and The Greens: both of whose positions on most subjects seem incompatible.

Angela Merkel will remain Chancellor, but by default, and mostly because there was no other real choice: six months ago, two-thirds of the German population wanted her to be replaced. Only 8% wanted her to remain in her post. Martin Schultz, former President of the European Parliament, who was the SPD candidate, did not offer anything different and led a lackluster campaign.

If Merkel succeeds in forming a coalition, it will be a precarious and unstable assemblage that will keep Germany on the verge of paralysis and make the country the sick man of 21st century Europe.

Germany actually already is a sick country, and Angela Merkel is part of the sickness.

In 1945, Germany was in ruins. It rebuilt itself and gradually became Europe’s leading economic power. While regaining strength, it did not assert itself politically and remained discreet, humble, repentant, silently shameful. Because of its role in the war, it was reluctant to recreate an army when NATO powers asked it to rebuild one; instead, it adopted a general position of appeasement that led to “Ostpolitik”, a policy of rapprochement with the communist East and the Soviet Union.

Because nationalism had led to National Socialism, Germany rejected any form of nationalism. Because Germany had committed genocide, it was impregnated with self-hatred and a rejection of its own identity.

Germany turned to European construction and tried to define itself as European in order not to call itself German.

This process lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the country. Reunification was widely perceived in Germany as the fruit of humility and discretion.

Angela Merkel, who had seemed to embody a successfully reunified Germany, inherited this process when she became Chancellor in 2005.

Malfunctions had already begun to surface. The German economy remained prosperous, but poverty was increasing (in 2005, 17% of Germans were officially poor and earned half of the national average income) and the number of working poor was growing.

The birth rate was extremely low. It had started to decline in 1967, and rapidly fell to 1.5 children per woman. The population, in general, was aging.

Germany began to bring in Turkish migrants to compensate for the lack of manpower. By 2000, the number of migrants had reached 3.5 million.

Importing Muslim migrants also brought a slow Islamization of the country. In the main cities, mosques were built. Koranic schools were opened. Islam was integrated into public school curricula.

Merkel constantly sought consensus and worked with the Social Democrats for eight of the twelve years she spent as the head of the government.

Germans seemed to accept this arrangement until she decided to open the borders of Germany to a huge wave of refugees and migrants from the Middle East in August 2015. More than 1.5 million unvetted people entered the country; most were young men entitled to family reunification.

Claims that refugees would assimilate without major problems started colliding with reality. Rapes multiplied. Violence escalated.

In 2016, almost half the crimes in Berlin were committed by recent migrants to the country Jihadist networks took shape. Terrorist acts started to take place. Muslim anti-Semitism led to attacks on synagogues. The costs of welfare rose sharply.

Merkel expressed no regret. She did not even have second thoughts after the elections: she said that if she had to open the borders of the country again, she would do it. She tried to impose her decisions on immigration on the reluctant European countries of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. She is still trying.

Shame is still present in the minds of million of Germans, but fading away. A few years ago, a survey showed almost 70% of Germans were angered at still being held responsible today for crimes against Jews. Roughly 25% of people surveyed agreed with the statement: “Many Jews try to use Germany’s Third Reich past to their advantage”. Recent polls shows that between one-third and one-half of Germans view Israel as the political equivalent of Nazi Germany. The German government now regularly pretends to give lessons on morality to Israel, but never criticizes terrorist leaders such as Mahmoud Abbas.

Germany remains in a position of appeasing, securing and strengthening economic ties with rogue regimes such as Iran. The German army is so ill-equipped that during exercises instead of weapons, it uses broomsticks. Polls show that the German population now think that the main danger to world peace does not come from Iran or North Korea, but from the United States. Germany is today the most anti-American country in the Western world . Stern, Germany’s most popular news weekly magazine, recently put on its cover an image of Donald Trump performing a Nazi salute while draped in the American flag.

Economic efficiency is low. The German economy is essentially an industrial economy and not adapted to the digital age. Investment in GDP has declined; innovative activity is weak; productivity stagnates. Since 2008, annual productivity growth has been only 0.5%. The planned closure of German nuclear power plants in the name of “protecting the climate” raises wholesale electricity prices, while German households and businesses bear the financial burden of paying among the highest electricity costs in the developed world. Unskilled immigrants from the Muslim world cannot replace skilled Germans who retire or pass away. The number of poor people continues to increase. The capacity for receiving immigrants has reached its limits; living conditions in many shelters have become substandard: floors are not cleaned regularly and are soiled for days with blood, urine, feces, and invasion of cockroaches are frequent. The German Commissioner for Immigration recently said that only a quarter to a third of the refugees who settled in Germany could enter the labor market. The others will have to rely on government benefits for the rest of their lives.

Diseases that were nearly eradicated, such as tuberculosis, made a comeback. Vaccines did not exist as Europeans had stopped making them.

The median age in Germany is now 46.8. A gradual replacement of the non-Muslim population with a Muslim population is taking place. Forty percent of children under five, born in Germany, have foreign roots. Since 2005, the population of new arrivals has increased by 24%, while the native population has decreased by 5%.

Demographers say that unless the current trends are reversed, Germans will become a minority in their own country, possibly in fifteen to twenty years.

Nothing at the moment indicates that the trends will reverse.

Most of the German press is permeated with political correctness. Newspapers and magazines support multiculturalism, and do not talk about the most urgent problems facing the country: anemic economic growth, population ageing, and Islamization. Many journalists, professors and writers say that German culture does not exist. When books criticizing Islam may become best sellers, their authors are immediately demonized. Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany Abolishes Itself”) was an enormous success in 2010, but its author, Thilo Sarrazin, was immediately treated as a “racist” and pushed towards the margin of all political debates. Rolf Peter Sieferle, a former counselor of Angela Merkel, wrote several articles describing the self-destruction of Germany. “A society that can no longer make the difference between itself and the forces that dissolve it lives morally beyond its means,” he said in 2015. Insulted and rejected by those with whom he used to work, he committed suicide in September 2016. A collection of his notes was published after his death, Finis Germaniae (“The End of Germany”).

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party promises to “shake off the Bundestag”. The 12.6% of the vote it received will undoubtedly give it a voice. Its leaders are treated by the media and other political parties as the incarnation of the devil. Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel warned against the entry of “real Nazis” into the parliament . A leader of the far-left Die Linke party asked: “Have we not learnt the lessons from the war?”. Jewish leaders are scared: Dr. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany said that AfD uses strategies generally used by aspiring “fascist dictatorships.”

The AfD party is not Nazi, however. Its members rather seem to fear that Germany and Germans will disappear under the weight of Islam. The Nazis were anti-Semitic, militarist, socialist, and desired to conquer. The AfD is not anti-Semitic, not militarist, not socialist, and does not want to conquer other countries. Jewish leaders in Germany are frightened because they think that if the AfD is hostile to one minority, the Muslims, it could grow hostile to other minorities. They are probably wrong. There is no comparison between Muslims and Jews. The AfD has strongly supported Israel’s right to exist and Israel’s right to has to fight the Islamic threat against it.

Some AfD members have made controversial statements about German soldiers, and about the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

At the same time, the AfD is currently Germany’s most pro-Israeli party. It is also the only party that clearly foresees the very real risk of Germany sliding towards an Islamic sunset.

Is it possible for Germany to recover? We shall see. What is at stake here, however, is far more than Germany.

Last month, an Islamic preacher was caught red-handed in Britain preaching for ISIS and jihad, and inciting youths to commit violence against non-Muslims. To everyone’s purported astonishment, he was not delivering his lectures on websites. He was delivering sermons live in a public-charity mosque — funded by taxpayers — in Stoke-on-Trent.

France and Britain remain in the constant grip of Islamist terror, yet their governments, despite having laws prohibiting “hate speech”, have so far failed to address the influence that preachers of violence and hatred have with local Muslims.

Blaming terror recruitment only on the internet is just an invented story, like the one that every suicide bomber or those who committed acts of terror in the name of Islam were lone wolves who merely took “inspiration” from terror outfits such as al-Qaeda or ISIS.

Governments in Britain and other countries in the grip of terror posed by Islamists have probably also been using the “online” excuse to shake off any charges of reckless endangerment or criminal neglect that they have might have committed by allowing these extremists to flourish in West.

The terrorists involved in the Parsons Green Underground attack and other incidents, as in Barcelona, were found to have ties with local mosques or seminaries, yet the administrations of these places have refused to take any responsibility, and stated that they are not accountable for the acts of their members.

Another terrorist attacks France and slaughters two innocent women at the Marseille train station. The terrorist was reportedly chanting the Arabic verses.

Within 24 hours, another terror attack took place in Edmonton, Canada outside a football stadium, when a man with a knife left five people injured. An ISIS flag was reportedly found in suspect’s car.

The strike in a country known for going extra miles to take in immigrants from the war-torn Middle East exposes the fact that these terrorists are enemies not only of human rights but often if the very people trying to help them.

No soft gesture, however, will deter extremist Muslims unless the whole world submits to their version of Islam.

BARCELONA—Catalonia set a course toward declaring its secession from Spain as soon as Monday after separatist parties requested the regional parliament convene that day to review the results of this week’s independence vote, injecting further tension in the standoff with the Spanish government.

The request came on Wednesday as Catalan President Carles Puigdemont made a televised address in which he took issue with a speech Spain’s king made the previous evening admonishing Catalonia’s leaders for “inadmissible disloyalty.” Addressing the monarch, Mr. Puigdemont said his speech had “disappointed many in Catalonia, who appreciate you…[and] expected another tone from you, a plea for dialogue and harmony.”

Two separatist parties that control Catalonia’s parliament petitioned Mr. Puigdemont to discuss the official results of Sunday’s referendum on independence, advancing the wealthy Spanish region toward declaring a split with Spain. Mr. Puigdemont, who has been at the head of Catalonia’s secession push and is a member of one of the parties, said this week Catalan leaders “will act over the weekend or early next week.”

Some lawmakers have said they would follow a controversial law they passed last month that requires them to declare independence within 48 hours of receiving the official results. Monday’s session “is to declare the independence of Catalonia,” said Mireia Boya, a Catalan lawmaker from the Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), which has taken a hard line on secession.

“We will declare independence 48 hours after all the official results are counted,” Mr. Puigdemont said in an interview with BBC broadcast Tuesday. But despite the pledges, the timetable for any declaration of independence remained unclear.

Sunday’s vote, boycotted by opponents of independence, was marred by clashes with police that left nearly 900 people injured, according to regional authorities.

Tensions since have since risen further. On Tuesday, King Felipe VI, Spain’s head of state, accused Catalan leaders of undermining the rule of law. “They have attempted to break the unity of Spain and national sovereignty,” he said in a rare televised address.

Some Spaniards welcomed the king’s tough stance toward the separatist leaders, whom they blame for organizing an illegitimate referendum that has created a fissure not only in Spain, but also in Catalonia between those who support a break and those who don’t. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump got bad advice about the secession crisis in Catalonia. When Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy visited the White House last week, he said that Spain’s northeastern region would be “foolish to secede.” On the contrary, the gutsy Catalans are the world’s poster-boy for populism. Their independence movement is a real revolution. America shouldn’t meddle in Spain’s internal affairs, to be sure, but we ought to recognize a kindred political movement when we see it. Ultimately, the Catalan independence movement is a response to Europe’s demographic cataclysm.

Here’s what I wrote in Asia Times today:

Political analysts are blinking in disbelief at yesterday’s events in Catalonia, trying to recognize the political phenomenon that took the world by surprise over the weekend. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, a revolutionary movement has asserted its power over an important European region. The conduct of the Catalan independence referendum was a thoroughly organized insurgency involving the whole of civil society, from the region’s Catholic Church to the organs of public safety. Unlike the failed independence movements of Quebec or Scotland, it was not a top-down affair promoted by a small political elite with the sentimental support of a popular minority. Unlike Italy’s Lega Lombarda, it was not a regional lobby fighting for more control of tax revenues. Catalan’s independence movement is the genuine article.

Never in postwar European history have tens of thousands of citizens collaborated in a campaign of civil disobedience so well planned that it successfully countered the mass deployment of national police and the paramilitary Civil Guard, and with sufficient grit to take nearly 1,000 injuries requiring medical treatment. The Catalans kept more than 2,000 voting stations open and saved their ballots from seizure, allowing more than 2.4 million of the region’s 7 million residents to vote. Ninety percent of them supported the establishment of an independent Catalan republic.

To frustrate the Madrid government’s attempt to suppress the referendum, the independence movement coordinated the occupation of hundreds of polling stations by ordinary citizens, including families with children. It persuaded the regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, to stand off the Civil Guard and National Police, as in this video published by the Catholic-Monarchist newspaper ABC:

It organized the fire brigades of Catalan towns to form human shields between the polling stations and the Civil Guard. It established mechanisms to hide the ballot-boxes from the national police and transport them to a secret site for counting. Where the national police forces broke through, ordinary citizens defended the vote with their bodies, resulting in nearly 1,000 injuries, against roughly a dozen injuries for police, in a display of determined but non-violent resistance.

The Catalans did so with the explicit support of their Church, 400 of whose clerics signed an independence manifesto last week, including some bishops. Unlike the anti-clerical left-wing movements of the past, the Catalan revolutionaries evinced thoroughly bourgeois goals. As a revolutionary movement, the Catalans better resemble the Americans of 1776 than the French of 1789, the Russians of 1917, or the Catalan revolutionary government of the late 1930s that ultimately was crushed by Francisco Franco. They are tired of subsidizing the backward money-sinks of Spain’s southern provinces; they are hard-working and productive, and want to separate from the economically irreparable parts of Spain.
In retrospect, the panic on the part of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is easier to understand. Universally condemned for overreacting to the Catalan independence movement, Rajoy had few choices. He knew that he was dealing not with a few grandstanding politicians but with a movement that reached into the capillaries of civil society. If he failed to kill it in its cradle, he would not have another opportunity to stop it. Thanks to the thorough organization and grit of ordinary citizens, Rajoy failed miserably. His statement yesterday that “there was no referendum” rings hollow. It recalls the famous deathbed statement of the mid-19 th-century Spanish prime minister, the Duke of Valencia; asked if he wanted to forgive his enemies, he said, “I have no enemies. I killed them all.”

Western countries are much more lenient toward the jihadists and Islamists. In the Middle East, there are severe consequences if they preach against their own political system. They are permitted to grow only if they teach antagonism towards the West, Christianity, Judaism, and Western values.

In Iran, when the Islamist party of Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, it did not embrace all other Islamist and jihadist groups. It supported and promoted only those jihadist groups that agreed to focus on promoting two major issues: anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Other Islamist groups, which turned against the regime itself, were immediately removed from society even though they were practicing Khomeini’s version of radical Islam.

The issue becomes: Where do you draw the line? When a radical imam in the US or Europe is publicly inciting anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-Western hate, should they be allowed to continue? When many radical Muslim centers in the West preach jihad and terrorism, should you still let them enjoy freedom of speech and assembly? Their preaching is the major factor behind the increasing terrorism we have currently spreading throughout the West. If we allow them to continue, the vicious trend will only ratchet up exponentially.

One of the strategies of these groups is to tap into communities where young people are facing problems — financial difficulties, family hardship, maybe psychological issues. The imams superficially embrace them as fathers, as if embracing his children. Then, they create explanations for why these young people are faced with such problems. They teach them that the problem lies in their society, their government, their own people, even their own families.

Growing up under Sharia law and in Islamist schools, we were taught that the highest level a person can reach is to be a mujahid. A mujahid is a person that God truly loves. Once, I dared to ask what exactly the term mujahid meant. The imam said that a true mujahid is a person who does not just die defensively for protecting Allah’s values. A true mujahid, one who is most loved by God, is a person who acts offensively, including through violence, when he or she sees our religious values are being violated in any part of the world. That person is a true holy warrior, he explained.

That description has been echoed through the halls of schools, and whispered into the minds of children. It has followed me throughout my life. Now, as I reflect on the first time this thirst for violence was explained to me, an eerie reality comes into focus. If the teachings of these radical imams are accurate, then the rate of mujahidin in the West appears to be increasing far higher in the West than in the East.

As some clamored to reach this ideal, we were told that one major indicator of whether the number of mujahdin is increasing or decreasing in a society is to look at the rate of those who are becoming martyrs. The higher the rate, the more mujahidin are there, and the more satisfied God is. It was a powerful message delivered to young, impressionable minds, that were eager to please and learn.

Growing up in the Middle East, within Muslim-majority nations, I rarely heard of radical Islamists committing terrorist acts in the region. But in the few years that I have lived in the West, I have regularly heard of bombing and suicide missions committed by radical Islamists. Their targets have been Americans and Europeans, including attacks in London, Paris, Nice, Brussels, Boston and San Bernardino — and often one another.

Information about these attacks is splashed across the media, discussed between concerned citizens, and echoed throughout global politics. This situation prompted me to ask: Why do there appear to be more Islamist terrorists in the West, even though the homeland of their religious teaching is on the other side of the world?

It would seem implausible that the West, with freedom of education, would become a hotbed for these violent minds, and yet the numbers are clear.

The new law also requires immigrants from non-EU countries to sign an “integration contract” which obligates them to learn written and spoken German and to enroll in courses about the “basic values of Austria’s legal and social order.” Immigrants are also required to “acquire knowledge of the democratic order and the basic principles derived from it.”

The massive demographic and religious shift underway in Austria, traditionally a Roman Catholic country, appears irreversible. In Vienna, where the Muslim population now exceeds 12.5%, Muslim students already outnumber Catholic students at middle and secondary schools. Muslim students are also on the verge of overtaking Catholics in Viennese elementary schools.

“The immigration seen in recent years is changing our country not in a positive but in a negative way… Uncontrolled immigration destroys the order in a country.” — Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz.

A groundbreaking new law regulating the integration of immigrants has gone into effect in Austria. The so-called Integration Law — which bans full-face Muslim veils in public spaces and prohibits Islamic radicals from distributing the Koran — establishes clear rules and responsibilities for recognized asylum seekers and refugees who are granted legal residence in the country.

Austrian officials say the main goal of the law is to promote respect for Austrian values, customs and culture; Muslims claim that the measure unfairly targets them and will promote “Islamophobia.”

As of October 1, anyone covering his or her face in public with a burka, niqab or mask is subject to a fine of €150 ($175). The law, which follows similar bans in Belgium, France and the Netherlands, requires the face to be completely visible in all public spaces, including bus, rail, air and sea transport. Those who refuse to comply are subject to arrest.

The new law also requires immigrants from non-EU countries to sign an “integration contract” which obligates them to learn written and spoken German and to enroll in courses about the “basic values of Austria’s legal and social order.” Immigrants are also required to “acquire knowledge of the democratic order and the basic principles derived from it.”

Immigrants are subsequently required to take an “immigration exam” to prove that they have “in-depth knowledge of the German language for independent use” and “in-depth knowledge of the fundamental values ​​of the legal and social order of the Republic of Austria.”

Immigrants have a period of two years to prove their compliance with the integration agreement. Those who fail to comply are subject to fines of up to €500 ($585), imprisonment of two weeks and the loss of social welfare benefits — but not deportation.

The new integration law is the brainchild of Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, the leader of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). Kurz, who has taken an increasingly hard line on immigration, is leading the opinion polls in the run-up to parliamentary elections on October 15 and is on track to becoming Austria’s next chancellor. He explained the rationale behind the new law:

“The new integration law regulates the central framework conditions for the integration of people who want to settle in Austria: We need clear rules and regulations in order to achieve social solidarity and social peace. The principle on which this law is based is ‘integration through performance.’ People are not judged by their country of origin but by their will to contribute to Austria. The main goal of this law is to promote integration.”