Swedes and Danes and people with beards - more on those damned cartoons.

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, 11 February 2006 00:01.

Is it too early to draw the lesson from the affair of the Danish cartoons that liberal democracy and Islam cannot peacefully coexist - and therefore won’t? You will not be at all surprised to learn that I, a denizen of the heinously radical right, don’t think it is. But I also think that many others - most of us rightists, actually - will in due course be happy to agree.

It is, you see, natural for the peoples of the West to seek to maintain their customs and, indeed, their sovereignty in their own lands. It is in the nature of Islam to seek dominance over everyone and everything. Something’s gotta give, as they say. But Islam will not in any way moderate itself to accommodate Western hegemony. No “moderates”, not even Abdullah Badawi, Malaysia’s prime minister and a man recognised as a leader of “moderate Islam”, is really suggesting that it should. Ergo, the accomodation must come from the West.

That would be a significant step towards dhimmification in the view of a lot of folks on the Conservative, libertarian and nationalist right. But that’s the point. The liberal-left has a completely different view, namely that its ultimate interest is the protection of the MultiCult, the society it has created in the image of “Man as free individual”. If all that enriching, celebrated diversity falls apart in its hands ... if all the years of effort dedicated to the destruction of that dark, limited, backward thing, the racial nation state ... if all that goes to waste, then a new chaos will descend. Hated nationhood will awaken from its long, helpful slumber. The future, which should have been individualist, free and racially egalitarian, will become completely, perhaps tragically unpredictable. Think how intolerably unfair that would be to the poor left. So damned near yet so far.

The liberal Establishment, therefore, cannot respond to the towering outrage of Islam with a robust and principled defence of Western free speech. It must compromise, much as it compromised with global capitalism (which it didn’t much like either). In fact, compromise with capitalism hasn’t been at all stressful, certainly not for those prepared to do without the odd cup of Fair Trade coffee.

With Islam all one need do is substitute free speech for Fair Trade, and presto. And then, dear citizen, everybody hangin’ to the left can get back to being tolerant – the left always loves its own tolerance. It can coo about cohesion and inclusion, precious this and valued that, chicken tikka marsala, that mongrel white race, and every damned, diverse dishonesty it can dredge up. Basically, it can fold to the Moslems in order to keep the Moslems in the fold.

Which course it will take, of course, will take time to resolve, and may need outrage among the turbans to plug on unperturbed for a while yet. But Believers can be of good cheer. Signs of Western dhimmitude are already appearing.

I don’t mean the obvious reluctance among the MSM to publish the Danish cartoons. I don’t altogether blame them. Self-preservation is a healthy and honourable pursuit. Besides, those Danish scribbles were of execrably poor draughtsmanship, and as a serious commentary on Islam they never got past first base.

No, the signs of dhimmitude I am talking about are coming from the top. The Swedish government is the first to ditch free speech and back the outraged Religion Of Peace. Perhaps that wasn’t too difficult for them, since the free speech was that of the hated Sweden Democrats - a peaceful party not dissimilar to the positively pacific BNP.

A month ago these vicious, right-wing Democrats not only published the cartoons on their website but announced a competition for readers sending in images and cartoons depicting the Prophet.

That was too much for Sweden’s Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds. She immediately jumped on the SD, condemning it as “insensitive, provocative and irresponsible”. Insensitive = don’t upset my best, bearded friend. Provocative = don’t upset my best, bearded friend and make him do something bad. Irresponsible = don’t upset my best, bearded friend and make him do something bad to Swedes in his bit of desert.

Now this has happened:-

A Swedish Internet provider has shut down the website of an extreme right fringe party after authorities voiced concerns over a Prophet Mohammed drawing contest posted on the site.

Internet provider Levonline shut down the Sweden Democrats’ website late Thursday following discussions with both the foreign ministry and the National security police.

The foreign minister, Laila Freivalds however denies that the ministry ordered the internet provider to shut down the website. Speaking to reporters she said the foreign ministry and the security police simply informed the company of possible ramifications for Swedes abroad.

As Radio Sweden reported on Thursday - the party’s publication SD-Kuriren issued a competition on its website on January 10 for drawings of Mohammed just as criticism of the Danish publication of satirical cartoons of the Muslim prophet last September was beginning to swell.

In a press release on the party’s website the party says it pulled the drawings after considering the consequences for Swedes living in the muslim world.

In a statement, Editor in Chief of the SD-Kuriren, Richard Jomshof has criticised the authorities for what he terms ”putting pressure” on the internet service provider to shut down a ”law-abiding” website.

So, it seems that as long as nastiness may befall any ex-patriats still soberly stuck among the Ummah, the dhimmi model is the Swedish model. That way Moslem sensibilities are left in tact and the liberal Establishment gets to keep its supercharged anti-nation play-thing. Contentment all round.

But not for long, I think. There will be liberals, a fair few of them alarmed and semitic, who understand the sticking plaster nature of this. Accomodation with Islam is only ever a short-term contingency - a step on the road to complete submission and the global Ummah. But, as the issues clarify and the cultural costs become unavoidably apparent, it is the mainstream right which will be most sorely tested.

That, for them, free speech and the right to offend is non-negotiable was proven by the two defeats inflicted on February 1st in the UK Parliament upon the Religious Hate Crimes Bill. There is, therefore, already a not-so-hairline crack in the long-standing left-right consensus on the MultiCult and the death of the old racial nation state. It may well be that the liberal Establishment and an offended Islam, because they pull one another apart, will together only manage to cleave that crack in the consensus completely in two. Indeed, it’s quite difficult to read into it any other outcome in the longer term. This would make a highly satisfactory end to the strange affair of the Danish cartoons, and something much more likely to put a smile on one’s face.

Tags: Islam & Islamification

Comments:

Posted by Amalek on Sat, 11 Feb 2006 13:39 | #

The ‘liberal establishment’ is no more obviously kowtowing to Islamism than you are to the liberal establishment, when you mouth ahistorical platitudes about ‘Western freedom of speech’—the absolute right to insult others—as a cornerstone of the way of life some of us wish to recreate.

When England was leading the world into the agricultural and industrial revolutions, conquering large parts of the planet and attracting admiration from all around, it was far from a land where blasphemy, libel and slander and sedition spoke ‘freely’. There have always been legal limits to reinforce shared notions of seemliness: the avoidance of the ‘vulgarity’ you are always enjoining us to observe. Penalties for transgression could be grim.

Fetishising ‘freedom of expression’ is another decadent, liberal, ‘Judaeo-Christian’ novelty which you have swallowed and expectorated in your gullible way, like ‘Islamofascism’ and ‘antisemitism’. This is far from a conservative view of the problem. You sound more like E.M. Forster than Lord Salisbury.

Pending the removal of most non-white aliens from the United Kingdom—the only practical solution to the Gordian knot of imposed, mistaken and now visibly disastrous jumbling up of races on our islands—there is no quasi-sacred necessity to give provocateurs of any stripe unlicensed tongue. And I do not unduly mind various informal kinds of pressure and surveillance to flush as much provocative poison as possible out of the system. If the Swedes do it without wielding a cudgel, tant mieux.

(The whole business is a charade, anyhow. ‘Banned’ sites are soon mirrored. China cannot stop its citizens using uncensored Google.)

As before, the genius tutelary of Majority Rights belabours the symptoms while trying to confine identification of the root cause to a ‘forum’ which nobody uses.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 11 Feb 2006 14:06 | #

As a self-proclaim Asian, Amalek, you may be forgiven for knowing nothing of Hogarth and the coffee houses. Nor that insulting the King of England was a cause greater distress to Whiggism than Toryism.

Freedom of expression is woven into English history and is the cornerstone also of Dutch and Danish political life. But you are not Dutch or Danish, either, are you?

What, in fact, are you, Asian Boy, and what the hell do you hope to achieve by hypocritical professions of anti-semitism?

Posted by Matra on Sat, 11 Feb 2006 17:31 | #

Guessedworker:

It is in the nature of Islam to seek dominance over everyone and everything. Something’s gotta give, as they say. But Islam will not in any way moderate itself to accommodate Western hegemony.

That’s good! It makes it more difficult for sentimental weak Europeans to sympathise with them. We should want their women to wear hijab and their men to run around screaming for the blood of infidels. We’ve got enough hidden enemies as it is. If they integrated it would be a longterm disaster for us.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Swedish government is cracking down on its indigenous people rather than its alien elements. Sweden is the Canuckistan of Europe.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 12 Feb 2006 23:11 | #

Returning to the subject of the post, today’s Telegraph explored the history and motivations of the British government in its lax and less than honest attitude to Islamic radicalism, even post 7/7.

The government and security services knew what was happening: they were frequently alerted by pleas for action by increasingly desperate foreign governments. But they chose to allow the fanatics to continue their deadly activities.

It is difficult to understand the thinking behind this transparently self-destructive policy. The idea seems to have been that if we left Islamic fanatics free to plot terrorism here, they would reciprocate by not blowing up people in Britain. The short-sighted stupidity of that policy was definitively demonstrated by the deaths of more than 50 people on July 7 last year.

... MI5’s covert pact with the terrorists resulted, as all such pacts do, in them breaking their side of the bargain. There is, however, a disturbing echo of that hopeless pact in this Government’s present policy towards radical Islam. It can be seen in their cringeing reaction to the violent protests over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Instead of joining most of the rest of Europe’s leaders in robustly defending the right to free speech, and attacking the fanatics who have threatened to “behead those who insult Islam”, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, has gone out on a limb and said that the publication of the cartoons was “unnecessary, insensitive, disrespectful and wrong”.

Those remarks reflect the thinking behind MI5’s shameful policy: if we are “nice” to radical Islamists, they will be “nice” to us. But the belief in the possibility of a deal with radical Islam is totally wrong. Islamic terrorists are prepared to kill and maim innocent people precisely because they are not interested in any kind of “deal”. The only way to defeat the extremists is to isolate them from the peaceful majority of Muslims in Britain, and combat their horrible ideology of death directly.

Well, I don’t believe that Jack Straw’s remarks reflect such a policy at all. They reflect the long-held desire to see only “moderate Islam”, because only moderate Islam could conceivably be worthy of its place in the West. Only moderate Islam could legitimise the transgressions of the political elite against the native British. Having to admit the horrendous reality of radical Islam would have put at risk the entire Multi-Cult.

Every day now we are being fed more and more opinion pieces and news stories in which “moderates” criticise “radicals”. Were there really such an active distinction between them we would have seen thousands of “moderates” flood out on to the streets to protest 9/11, Bali, Madrid, 7/7 and 21/7? There were none.

The reality of opinion among Moslems will inevitably be highly complex. It most assuredly does not reduce to the helpful simplicities of a great block of decent, to-be-celebrated British people who happen to pray in mosques and a few hundred hotheads easily-led by evil men. This reduction is a stratagem employed, as always, to prevent native British peoples from taking against the MultiCult. We will anyway.

Posted by Matra on Tue, 21 Mar 2006 22:00 | #

GW quoting Radio Sweden back in february when the cartoon crisis broke:

A Swedish Internet provider has shut down the website of an extreme right fringe party after authorities voiced concerns over a Prophet Mohammed drawing contest posted on the site.

Internet provider Levonline shut down the Sweden Democrats’ website late Thursday following discussions with both the foreign ministry and the National security police.

The foreign minister, Laila Freivalds however denies that the ministry ordered the internet provider to shut down the website. Speaking to reporters she said the foreign ministry and the security police simply informed the company of possible ramifications for Swedes abroad.

Some news from Sweden. The Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds has now resigned:

Freivalds, 63, had been criticized in the media and by opposition politicians for the shutting down of the Web site of a far-right party that was planning to publish caricatures of Muhammad.

The site was closed Feb. 9 after a Foreign Ministry official contacted the Web hosting company, which critics said was an intrusion on the freedom of speech.

The ministry said the official had not the ordered company to shut down the site, but merely advised it that the caricatures could pose a danger to Swedes, given the Muslim anger directed at the time toward neighboring Denmark, where the original prophet cartoons were published.

Freivalds had told Swedish media she did not order the ministry official to contact the company, but a later report from the ministry said she was involved in the decision, sparking calls for her resignation.

It would seem that her poor handling of the tsunami aftermath didn’t help her standing in Sweden. But it is rare we have any good news from the most politically correct country in the West so let’s see this as a minor victory. Unfortunately the website that published the Muhammed pictures is still closed down.