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A Lot More Than London Bridge is Falling Down by Mark Steyn

At about 10pm British Summer Time on Saturday night, the London Bridge area was the scene of a series of vehicle attacks and stabbings. So my scheduled conversational topic with Judge Jeanine on Fox News was replaced by yet another discussion about terrorism. We’ll link to any video that gets posted. I’ll be back on Fox with Abby, Pete and Clayton tomorrow morning, Sunday, live at 8am Eastern/5am Pacific.

As I write, six members of the public are dead, and three attackers. I’m wary of weighing in as the situation is unfolding, but, though the details are always different, in the end the story is always the same. And, as I said only the other day, the reality of what is happening in Britain and Europe is that this problem was imported and that, until you stop importing it, you’re going to have more of it.

No one likely to end up as Prime Minister or Home Secretary after this Thursday’s election seems minded to say that, never mind act on it. Instead, we have the usual post-terrorist theatre: Congratulations for the speed of the emergency services, and sober anchormen announcing that Theresa May will be chairing a meeting of COBRA – as though a bunch of bureaucrats with a butch-sounding acronym has any clue about how to stop the corpse count from mounting. The cynical strategy of British and Continental leaders is to get their citizens used to this.

For that to work, it’s not helpful for new attacks to follow so swiftly on the last attacks. After Manchester, Mrs May raised the official “Threat Level” from Mildly Perturbed to Somewhat Disturbed or whatever it was, and in order further to reassure the public put soldiers on London’s streets. Soldiers aren’t really much use at stopping homicidal car drivers or random stabbers. To do that, you’d have to ban motor vehicles and sharp knives, which, given the fecklessness and decadence of Europe’s political class, I wouldn’t entirely rule out. Absent that, it’s unfortunate that the London carnage occurred before Katy Perry, Justin Bieber & Co had had a chance to hold their stupid, useless, poor-taste all-you-need-is-sentimentalist-delusional-crap pop concert for the victims of the Manchester carnage. Maybe they’ll cancel it, or maybe they’ll make it a twofer.

Meanwhile, even as the politicians trot out the rote response that these attacks “won’t change us”, everything changes: more armed police, more soldiers, more bollards, more security checks – and smaller lives, fewer liberties, less free speech. London Bridge still stands, but everything else is falling down, in Britain and Europe.

In Australia in recent days there has been some controversy over a Quadrant editor’s response to the obnoxious remarks of someone on the ABC’s Q&A panel that an American has more chance of being killed by a falling refrigerator than by terrorists. This happens not to be true. As far as I can tell, the only source of this bon mot is a US Consumer Product Safety Commission report that found that, between January 2000 and December 2011, toppling television sets, furniture, refrigerators and all other domestic appliances killed a total of 349 Americans – or 29 people per year.

For purposes of comparison, in Britain Islamic terrorists have just killed 28 people in 12 days. [SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE: it’s now 29.] More to the point, your refrigerator is not trying to kill you, and not eternally seeking new ways to do so. You don’t have to worry about your fridge getting hold of an automatic weapon, or a dirty nuke. The Islamic supremacists want to kill as many infidels by whatever means are to hand. Nor are statistics relevant: If you’ve lost your only child because she went to an Ariana Grande concert, that’s 100 per cent of your kids who are dead. When it comes to deceased loved ones, the only statistical pool that counts is your family, not the nation or the planet.

The Foundations of Global Jihad by Maria Polizoidou ****

U.S. National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster, by rejecting the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” appears to be ignoring the ideological, cultural, religious, political and economic factors behind global jihad.

It is as if McMaster believes that the terrorists’ war against the West emerged out of nowhere — unconnected to a multi-pronged logistical foundation and network.

A Palestinian state would quickly become a theocracy — an ISIS clone, denying its citizens exposure to Judeo-Christian culture, as Islamists are currently trying to do in Europe, Australia and Canada.

Despite considering Iran a grave threat to the Middle East and the rest of the world, the U.S. establishment opposes canceling the nuclear deal, and instead apparently prefers to provide the Islamic Republic’s theocratic regime with the logistical means to continue developing its nuclear weapons program.

U.S. National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster, for example, by rejecting the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” appears to be ignoring the ideological, cultural, religious, political and economic factors behind global jihad. It is as if McMaster believes that the terrorists’ war against the West emerged out of nowhere — unconnected to a multi-pronged logistical foundation and network.

The same can be said of the American media, the Justice and State Departments and the intelligence services — and not only in relation to terrorism.

U.S. National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster, by rejecting the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” appears to be ignoring the ideological, cultural, religious, political and economic factors behind global jihad. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The American establishment also seems to be suffering from a similar form of tunnel-vision in relation to the Palestinians’ quest for a state, by ignoring the fundamental logistics behind it. Under the best circumstances, any state created would not be like Denmark. The reality is that such a state would adopt the political and institutional nature of the totalitarian regimes of the Gulf countries, just as Hamas did in the Gaza Strip after Israel’s withdrawal in 2005.

A Palestinian state would survive through funding from regimes such as Iran, Qatar and Turkey, and continue to serve as their proxy in the region. Similarly, it would quickly become a theocracy — an ISIS clone, denying its citizens exposure to Judeo-Christian culture, as Islamists are currently trying to do in Europe, Australia and Canada. Witness the attacks in Europe on Paris’s sports stadium and the Bataclan theater in November 2015, or on young girls listening to music in Manchester on May 22, 2017. Or the attempted Christmas bombing in Australia and attempts further to silence free speech in Canada.

Bill Martin: Pacifying the Religion of Peace

Our political, civic and even religious leaders are stubbornly unwilling to grasp and accept Islam’s true nature, its ambitions and what those things mean in the context of Australia’s future. Silence, as they say, gives consent. The need now is to get loud and stay loud.

What is to be done about Islam?

Before any attempt to answer that question, it is essential that those taking up the challenge determine what is Islam, so let us, first of all, toss out the two most audaciously false claims: that it is the Religion of Peace™ and “one of the Great Abrahamic Faiths”. The first will only be true, according to Muslim authorities, when all of mankind is under the rule of the only “true” version of Islam, whatever that means. The second assertion stems, ironically, from the easily demonstrated fact that Muhammad plagiarised and distorted fragments of Christian and Jewish scriptures widely known in his 7th century Arabia. The late Christopher Hitchens, a scathing critic of all religions, reserved a particular contempt for the Koran, its borrowings, contradictions and arrogant presumptions. His appraisal of the Koran and its origins,good as any and better than most, can be heard here.

In fact, Islam is more than a mere religion. Rather, it is a totalitarian socio-political philosophy, adroitly contrived by Muhammad to secure for himself and successors total control over its followers by invoking the sacred authority of Allah.

It is no coincidence that the Nazis and Islam were staunch allies and actively cooperated to serve their shared interests, the murdering of Jews high on their lists. The Nazis must have envied Islam’s efficient functioning, how it had no need for a Gestapo to enforce absolute control of its adherents.

The second requirement is to ascertain the disposition of Islam towards us — the West and our traditions, in other words.

Islamic scriptures leave no room for doubt about the attitude of Islam regarding the non-Islamic part of the world in general and the “people of the Book”, Jews and Christians, in particular. It asserts vehemently that Islam is the only true religion and, further, that it is divinely destined to subdue all the world under its authority. Furthermore, it is prescribed as the sacred duty of every Muslim to endeavour in all possible ways to bring about that destiny. The Koran also specifically instructs the faithful to fight and kill the unbelievers (kaffirs), the enemies of Allah, true lord of the universe. They are also told that unbelievers, inferior beings, must either submit to Islam or die, with a third option of living as tolerated inferiors (dhimmis) and paying a special tax (jizya) for the privilege of being indulged by their Muslim masters.

All of the above is furiously contested by Muslims and their apologists, who regularly refer to certain verses of the Koran as proof that all accusations are unfounded. There certainly are Koranic verses urging love and compassion, but they need to be considered in context. First, bear in mind that the Koran speaks specifically to the faithful and refers to unbelievers only indirectly, which means the enjoinment of benevolent attitude applies only between Muslims.

Another is the rule of abrogation, which states that chronologically later verses supersede and negate earlier and contradictory messages, rendering them invalid. It is undisputed even by Muslims that the verses directing the faithful to be hostile and violent towards the unbelievers are of later origin than the ones with the kinder messages. Trotting out the more favourable but superseded verses to defend Islam while simultaneously presenting it as a pacific creed is taqiyya in action– the slippery business of telling sanctified lies in order to further the cause.

UN Globalists vs. Trump Anti-Israel UN human rights apparatus also interfered in U.S. presidential election. Joseph Klein

The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, went into the lion’s den known as the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday for the stated purpose of challenging the status quo. Sadly, the status quo won, at least for the time being. The UN’s human rights apparatus, including the Human Rights Council and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, continues to face no consequences for its blatant hypocrisy, anti-Israel bias, and even for its interference in the U.S. presidential election last year.

Ambassador Haley dutifully pointed out to the other Council members something that many of them are quite proud of and have no intention of changing – the anti-Israel bias so prevalent in the Human Rights Council as well as other UN forums. She also urged reforms that would preclude the worst human rights abusing countries such as Saudi Arabia from serving as members of the Council. However, she ducked completely the issue of the UN human rights chief’s interference in last year’s presidential election. And Ambassador Haley stopped short of turning her pleas for reforms into demands for action. She drew back from threatening to withdraw U.S. political and financial support for the Council and the whole UN human rights apparatus if serious changes were not forthcoming immediately.

Indeed, on the same day as Ambassador Haley delivered her remarks to the Human Rights Council, High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jordanian Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, signaled business as usual in his opening statement to the Council. After going through the motions of declaring that the Holocaust “has no parallel, no modern equal,” Zeid then immediately drew a parallel of his own to his version of the Palestinians’ situation today. “Yet it is also undeniable that today,” Zeid said, “the Palestinian people mark a half-century of deep suffering under an occupation imposed by military force. An occupation which has denied the Palestinians many of their most fundamental freedoms, and has often been brutal in the way it has been realized; an occupation whose violations of international law have been systematic, and have been condemned time and again by virtually all States.”

Aside from his regular Israel-bashing, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who hails from the decidedly non-democratic country of Jordan, decided to stick his nose into the U.S. presidential campaign last year. Moreover, he continues to offer his unsolicited opinions on matters directly impacting America’s national sovereignty, such as protection of its borders.

“If Donald Trump is elected, on the basis of what he has said already, and unless that changes, I think it’s without any doubt that he would be dangerous from an international point of view,” Zeid proclaimed to the press less than a month before the election.

Two kosher restaurants in Manchester firebombed By Thomas Lifson

Slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Jews is underway in Manchester, escaping much notice by the outside world in the wake of the slaughter at the Arianna Grande concert. Antisemitism UK is the source for this report on the culinary terrorism underway:

JS Restaurant, the oldest kosher restaurant in Manchester has been gutted by fire following a suspected arson attack overnight at approximately 4:00.

As can be seen in the picture below, the second wave attack was successful, closing a business that also served as a community center, allowing observant Jews a place to gatsher and enjoy food together

Two days ago, Ta’am, another kosher restaurant in the city, was firebombed for the second time, and CCTV captured images of two youths conducting the attack. Last year the same restaurant was also set alight.

Once again, the only term used by police to describe that attackers who were photographed is “youths.”

If Labour led by Jeremey Corbin is elected in today’s voting, things will get much, much worse for the Jews of Manchester and the UK. But they are only the first target of the conquerors.

Ht tip: Cheryl Jacobs Lewin

Donald Trump, Europe’s Best Friend By:Srdja Trifkovic

According to the media machine and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic, President Trump’s recent attendance at two summits—in Brussels (NATO) and Sicily (G7)—went very badly. He went through many tense encounters, made a number of statements his interlocutors did not like, notably on the uneven burden of defense costs, on his dislike of the Paris climate change accords, and on German trade sufficits. Significantly, he sounded lukewarm on NATO’s Article 5 (“all for one, one for all”). Some Europeans tried to score a few domestic points by exploiting latent anti-Americanism in their encounters with Trump, notably the newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron with that now famous gladiatorial handshake.

According to The Guardian, Trump’s visist has left the continent’s leaders aghast, but at the same time it has had one unexpected positive consequence. Just like the Soviet threat forced Europeans to focus on what they had in common and how to protect it, this theory goes, Trump’s attitudes may help improve Europe’s ability to integrate: “The continent’s interests lie in making sure the toxicity of Trump is somehow curtailed. That can only happen if it sets new ambitions for itself. Just weeks after Emmanuel Macron’s electoral victory in France brought a major moment of solace, Trump’s tour will have starkly reminded Europeans of the new world of uncertainties, and the need to pull together.”

According to another commentator writing in the same organ of Britain’s leftist bein pensants, “In truth, Trump’s mixture of vulgarity, arrogance, ignorance and rudeness makes Europeans secretly feel extremely good about their own sophistication and civilised manners. Contrasts can be soothing. Just as Europeans decided Brexit needed to be dealt with in unity . . . Trump is fast turning into a binding factor.” In brief, the postnational elite loathes Trump and wants a new global strategy “for a world where, every so often, the US electoral cycle produces a corrupt, deluded isolationist who can think only in monosyllables.”

This sentiment was reflected in German chancellor Angela Merkel’s unusually blunt statement at an election rally in Munich last weekend: “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands,” she said, “naturally in friendship with the United States of America, in friendship with Great Britain, as good neighbors with whoever, also with Russia and other countries. But we have to know that we Europeans must fight for our own future and destiny. The times in which we could rely fully on others, they are to some extent over. This is what I experienced in the last few days.”

In Europe Merkel’s statement caused an instant sensation. In America the globalist establishment predictably chastised Trump for undermining our partnerships and alliances of long standing. Richard Haass, president of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, called Merkel’s comments a “watershed,” and warned that the resulting scenario is “what U.S. has sought to avoid” since World War II. On the whole it would be very welcome news if the German Chancellor really meant what she said, but there is less than meets the eye.

If Merkel was serious, over 50,000 American soldiers can finally be withdrawn from Germany, where their stay has not had any military-strategic justification for the past twenty-six years. She is loath to do so, because their upkeep at the U.S. taxpayers’ expense is a boon to the German economy. If she seeks military self-reliance, then Germany—with the GDP of $3.4 trillion—will have to spend considerably more on defense in the future than the miserly 1.2 percent she is spending at the moment. It seems, however, that Merkel still wants to have it both ways: the days of full reliance on the United States are over, she says, but only “to some extent.”

The real meaning of Merkel’s words is clear if we replace “we Europeans” with “I” or “we Germans.” In addition to “the Russian threat,” Trump’s “unpredictability” is a perfect excuse for Euro-federalists to push for a massive restructuring of Europe’s political, economic, military, and trade strategies in order to turn the EU into a superstate, a German-led geopolitical player in its own right. The oligarchs in Brussels can hardly wait: after an icy meeting with Trump, the European Council president Donald Tusk declared that “the greatest task today is the consolidation of the free world around values, not just interests.” Merkel’s and the superstaters’ long-term hope is that Trump will be a single-term president, but that the consequences of their “taking fate into their own hands” and imposing an ever-tighter union will be permanent.

London Attacks Followed by Same Old Stale Arguments We are in a rut. By Jonah Goldberg

The saddest part about the recent terrorist attacks in the U.K. — aside from the actual horror for the victims and their families, of course — was that there was so little new to say about it.

But that didn’t stop anyone. Everyone backed into their usual rhetorical corners, filling in the blanks on the familiar post-terror conversation like it was a game of Mad Libs, only none of the answers were particularly funny.

I, for one, could easily recycle one of umpteen columns on how the Left’s response is wrong and why we have to shed our dysfunctional aversion to speaking plainly about the nature of the threat and what is required to fight it. Or I could note that President’s Trump’s response to the attack was less than helpful. But to what end? Who hasn’t heard the arguments a thousand times already?

Watching cable news and surveying the algae blooms of “hot takes” on Twitter, it’s hard to imagine anything will dramatically change. We are growing numb to the problem as it becomes part of the background noise of daily life. One of the attackers in London was even featured in a 2016 TV documentary titled The Jihadi Next Door.

Contrast the reactions to the London attacks and to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord. A writer for The Nation spoke for many when he assured readers that “this is murder” and a “crime against humanity.” No sane liberal condoned the terrorist attacks, but the condemnations seemed rote, while passion was reserved for admonishing those who made too big a deal of them or flirted with “Islamophobia.”

In 2014, Jeremy Corbyn, who has a remote but possible chance of being the next British prime minister, argued that supporting the Islamic State is just another “political point of view” and that the government shouldn’t put up “legal obstacles” to Islamic State fighters trying to return to England. This perspective hasn’t cost him much with his admirers on the left, but I have to wonder what the reaction would be if he described climate-change “denial” as just another political point of view.

But there I go, falling into the familiar trap of scoring ideological points rather than dealing with the larger truth. And what truth is that? Simply that we are in a rut when it comes to terrorism.

The Ariana Grande concert attack in Manchester did generate more than the usual passion because lots of pundits and policymakers, never mind television viewers, have teenage daughters they could imagine attending an event like that.

But did you hear about the bombing of a popular ice-cream parlor in Baghdad last week? Families taking their kids there for a post-fast treat were blown to bits by the Islamic State.

Are Jihadists Taking over Europe? by Giulio Meotti

In the four European countries most targeted by terror attacks — Britain, France, Belgium and Germany — the number of official extremists has reached 66,000. That sounds like a real army — on active duty.

The terrorists’ ransom is already visible: they have destabilized the democratic process in many European countries and are drafting the terms of freedom of expression. A jihadist takeover of Europe is no longer unthinkable. Islamic extremists are already reaping what they sowed: they successfully defeated Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, the only two European candidates who really wanted to fight radical Islam.

Europe could be taken over the same way Islamic State took over much of Iraq: with just one-third of Iraqi territory.

“Germany is quietly building a European army under its command,” according to some in the media. Apparently German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after her clash with U.S. President Donald Trump, would like to invest, along with France, in a European army.

At present, however, there is just one real army in Europe — the Jihadist Army, as in the terrorists who struck London on June 3 and murdered seven people, just two weeks after carnage in Manchester.

In the four European countries most targeted by terror attacks — Britain, France, Belgium and Germany — the number of official extremists has reached 66,000. That sounds like a real army, on active duty.

Intelligence officers have identified 23,000 Islamic extremists living in Britain as potential terrorists. The number reveals the real extent of the jihadist threat in the UK. The scale of the Islamist challenge facing the security services was disclosed after intense criticism that many opportunities to stop the Manchester suicide bomber had been overlooked.

French authorities are monitoring 15,000 Islamists, according a database created in March 2015 and managed by France’s Counter-Terrorism Coordination Unit. Different surveys estimate up to 20,000 French radical Islamists.

The number on Belgium’s anti-terror watch-list surged from 1,875 in 2010 to 18,884 in 2017. In Molenbeek, the well-known jihadist nest in the EU capital, Brussels, intelligence services are monitoring 6,168 Islamists. Think about that: 18,884 Belgian jihadists compared to 30,174 Belgian soldiers on active duty.

The number of potential jihadists in Germany has exploded from 3,800 in 2011 to 10,000, according to Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Germany’s domestic intelligence service).

These Islamists have built a powerful infrastructure of terror inside Europe’s cities. These terror bases are self-segregated, multicultural enclaves in which extremist Muslims promote Islamic fundamentalism and implement Islamic law, Sharia — with the Tower Hamlets Taliban of East London; in the French banlieues [suburbs], and in The Hague’s “sharia triangle”, known as “the mini-caliphate,” in the Netherlands. These extremist Muslims can comfortably get their weapons from the Balkans, where, thanks to Europe’s open borders, they can travel with ease. They can also get their money from abroad, thanks to countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. These Islamists can self-finance through the mosques they run, as well as get “human resources,” donated by unvetted mass migration coming through the Mediterranean.

23,000 potential jihadists in the UK, 18,000 in Belgium, 10,000 in Germany, 15,000 in France. What do these numbers tell us? There might be a war in Europe “within a few years”, as the chief of the Swedish army, General Anders Brännström, told the men under his command that they must expect.

Take what happened in Europe with the terror attacks from 1970 to 2015:

“4,724 people died from bombings. 2,588 from assassinations. 2,365 from assaults. 548 from hostage situations. 159 from hijackings. 114 from building attacks. Thousands were wounded or missing”.

Terrorism across Europe has killed 10,537 people in 18,803 reported attacks. And it is getting worse:

“Attacks in 2014 and 2015 have seen the highest number of fatalities, which includes terrorists targeting civilians, government officials, businesses and the media, across Europe since 2004”.

Facebook’s Little Ethics Problem by Ruthie Blum

Facebook has been aiding abusers of human-rights — such as China, Turkey, Russia and Pakistan — to curb the freedom of expression of their people.

“On the same day that we filed the report, the ‘Stop Palestinians’ page that incited against Palestinians was removed by Facebook… for ‘containing credible threat of violence’ which ‘violated our community standards.’ On the other hand, the ‘Stop Israelis’ page that incited against Israelis, was not removed. We received a response from Facebook stating that the page was ‘not in violation of Facebook’s rules.'” — Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, head of The Israel Law Center.

According to Darshan-Leitner, Facebook’s insistence that it cannot control all the content on its pages is disingenuous, if not an outright lie. After all, its algorithms are perfectly accurate when it comes to detecting users’ shopping habits.

There is a problem at Facebook. On May 8, the social media platform blocked and then shut down the pages of two popular moderate Muslim groups — on the grounds that their content was “in violation of community standards” — without explanation.

Had these pages belonged to the radicals who incite followers to violence, however, the move would have been welcome, and would have corresponded to Facebook’s Online Civil Courage Initiative, founded in Berlin in January 2016, to “challeng[e] hate speech and extremism online,” in the effort to prevent the use of social media as a platform for recruiting terrorists.

The pages that Facebook shut down, however — Ex-Muslims of North America, which has 24,000 followers; and Atheist Republic, with 1.6 million — do nothing of the sort. In fact, they are managed and followed by Arabs across the world who reject not only violence and terrorism, but Islam as a religion.

This, it turns out, is precisely the problem.

Angry Islamists, bent on silencing such “blasphemers” and “apostates,” troll social media and abuse Facebook’s complaint system. It’s a tactic that works like a charm every time, as conservative and pro-Israel individuals and groups — whose posts are disproportionately targeted by political opponents and removed by Facebook for “violating community standards” — can attest. As in most of those cases, the pages of the former Muslims were reinstated the next day, after their administrators demonstrated that the charges against them were false.

The president of Ex-Muslims of North America, Muhammad Syed, who is originally from Pakistan, complained about the practice in an open letter to Facebook, and demanded that the company do more to protect former Muslims from online harassment by Islamists:

“Ironically, the same social media which empowers religious minorities is susceptible to abuse by religious fundamentalists to enforce what are essentially the equivalent of online blasphemy laws. A simple English-language search reveals hundreds of public groups and pages on Facebook explicitly dedicated to this purpose [enforcing blasphemy laws online] — giving their members easy-to-follow instructions on how to report public groups and infiltrate private ones.”

Syed also started a Change.org petition, calling on Facebook to “prevent religious extremists from censoring atheists and secularists.” According to the website Heat Street, which broke the story, there are many other secular Arab groups that have been similarly flagged by religious Muslims on social media.

Sweden’s Multicultural Apartheid by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

Swedish politicians keep trying to portray Sweden as a liberal and tolerant paradise. Experience from the suburbs, however, where most of the migrants are, shows that a large part of Sweden’s population is not part of Sweden’s liberals and feminists. They, in fact get harassed by Islamists every day. In those communities, there is a lack of tolerance.

These women are not some right-wing pundits who criticize Islam. Instead, they are simply Muslim women who are denied fundamental rights in Sweden because they are women and happen to live in communities where parallel Islamic social structures have been created.

The problem is that those who govern Sweden do not originate from, or have any deeper knowledge about, the immigrant suburbs, where people cannot live as free citizens, and clearly have no interest in these suburbs. The LGBT movement and the feminist movement prefer to silence those who protest Islamic oppression in Sweden’s immigrant suburbs.

In Sweden, as in many other suburbs throughout Europe, the repression from which many refugees are fleeing, instead seems to be following them there. Nalin Pekgul, who defines herself as a practicing Muslim and has served as a politician in the Social Democrat Party, stated that in immigrant-settled areas, such as Stockholm’s Tensta suburb, where she lives, the self-appointed “morality police” gather outside assembly rooms to prevent young people from entering if they try to organize parties with music. Islamist organizations in Sweden, Pekgul says, have strengthened their position through support from Saudi Arabia and Sweden’s government agencies, media, political parties and so on.According to Pekgul, there are many Muslims in in Sweden who have become fundamentalists. For calling public attention to these changes, Pekgul has been called an “Islamophobe”. When, in protest against the extremist Muslims, she began wearing short skirts in Tensta, she was harassed.

Another Muslim, Zeliha Dagli, who came to Sweden from Turkey in 1985 and was an elected representative of the Left Party in Sweden, has fought for women’s rights in Stockholm’s immigrant suburbs for 25 years. In 2015, she wrote:

“Once upon a time I ran away, terrified of my childhood imams in our former homeland. Some of them controlled the girls in the village. Older girls were not allowed to pass through the square in the village, but had to sneak and take detours and make themselves ‘invisible’.