Human Rights Watch: promoting Islamism and undermining Democracy

The very name of the organisation – ‘Human Rights Watch’ – conjures up a vision of some benign guardian keeping a watchful eye upon the (mis)conduct of governments and ensuring that gross violations of ‘human rights’ are brought to the attention of men and women of good intent around the globe. Who can argue against the desire to protect life and limb, freedom of conscience and equality before the law? These all strike me as eminently sensible; the prerequisite foundations for any just society. However, ‘Human Rights Watch’ has revealed itself to be something other than what I have described, and paradoxically, through a muddled combination of globalist universalism, abstract individualism and cultural relativism, has now found itself in a situation where it is actively facilitating the spread of an ideology and its bearers that do not recognise the concept of ‘human rights’.

Astonishingly, an AP report from 22 January entitled ‘HRW calls on West to accept Islamist rise to power’ states:

“The United States and other Western governments must accept the new reality that Islamists have emerged to fill the power vacuum in the Arab world after a wave of popular uprisings, Human Rights Watch said in its annual report Sunday.

The New York-based group also urged Islamist parties, which have emerged as the biggest winners in recent elections in Tunisia and Egypt and are expected to fare well in Libya, to respect the rights of women and religious minorities, saying they cannot "pick and choose" when it comes to human rights.

Islamist parties are "genuinely popular" in the Arab world, said HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth, warning that "ignoring that popularity would violate democratic principles."

"Being a political Islamic government should not be a reason to turn a government into a pariah," Roth told reporters in Cairo, where the group released its annual report.”

For some reason, HRW staff appear unable to appreciate that Islamism is based upon an outlook entirely alien to their own which does not recognise the abstract human rights that they purport to espouse. This is what makes HRW’s comments regarding European countries all the more worrying:

“The group also claimed that even member states of the European Union have violated human rights through restrictive asylum and migration policies.”

Effectively, HRW is seeking to deny Europeans the right to national self-expression and self-determination, and would instead be content to see such a mass influx of Muslim immigrants that they would undermine the very foundations of human rights themselves across Europe, as well as national citizenship rights. HRW is deeply infected with the bacillus of cultural, ethnic and racial self-loathing characteristic of the dominant ideology within European countries and their daughter societies America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. So deep and entrenched is this self-loathing, that today HRW published an article by Benjamin Ward entitled ‘Europe’s Treatment of Minorities Endangers Our Core Values’, key extracts being reproduced below:

“EU governments proved reluctant to help refugees and migrants fleeing Libya, including people risking their lives at sea in rickety boats. European countries have been quick to resume migration cooperation with Libya, Egypt and Tunisia with the aim of speedily deporting migrants who reach Europe, including those originating from Sub-Saharan Africa. And the arrival of Tunisian migrants in Italy last year led to a row in which leading EU governments questioned aloud the value of free movement, a fundamental EU pillar.

When it comes to Europe’s domestic human rights record, the long-term trends are deeply worrying. As a new essay from Human Rights Watch explains, four trends stand out: the erosion of civil liberties in the fight against terrorism; the rise of populist extremist parties and their negative influence on mainstream politics; the declining effectiveness of traditional human rights institutions; and growing intolerance and abuse toward migrants and minorities. Taken together they amount to a crisis.”  

Thus, HRW has reached well beyond its original remit of documenting and campaigning against human rights abuses in totalitarian societies, and has instead moved into the realm of globalist political lobbying, effectively acting as a vigorous advocate of the ‘no borders’ movement. It calls for the undermining of democratic process and choice in European nations by denigrating the domestic desire for national security and solidarity through its use of demonising terminology such as “populist extremist parties.” If European nations are unable to protect their own citizens and their own cultures, then they will be swamped and destroyed by alien cultures and peoples not so reticent about using whatever means they deem necessary to impose their will and demographic stamp upon the territories that they occupy. The demographic danger that European nations face hails predominantly from Africa and Asia, and this immigrant horde carries with it an ideology that shows nothing but scorn for the values that HRW claims to hold dear: Islam. These demographic interlopers cynically employ the ideology of ‘human rights’ when it suits them, without believing in its content. So, why is it that the earnest types at HRW fail to understand this basic fact? Perhaps the following goes some way to explaining it.

One of the notable features of recent history is the manner in which concepts of human behaviour, rights and responsibilities born and elaborated within European societies and their settler colony offspring have come to be seen, particularly by the natives of these states, as universally valid and applicable. Initially, these ideas were spread to almost every corner of the globe as a consequence of the dominant geopolitical position of these powers, either through their direct dissemination by systems of colonial education, or via newly accessible texts printed in imperial languages such as English, French and Russian that were eagerly devoured by emergent colonial intellectual elites. Peoples who had previously lived their lives in accordance with non-occidental norms and values dictated by the specifics of their religious, caste or tribal affiliation, were thus exposed to radically different ways of conceptualising nature, society and the individual, as embodied in specifically Western ideologies such as Liberalism, Socialism and Marxism. Even in those non-Western states that avoided colonisation, the success and dynamism of occidental societies spurred a thirst for emulation, as best exemplified by the case of Japan.

The apogee of occidental power was brought to an end by the First World War which dented Western self-confidence and gave birth to a sense of profound doubt and pessimism with respect to the nature of Western Civilisation and its achievements. It, together with Japan’s defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, led to the emergence of a growing revolutionary confidence amongst colonial peoples, both in the form of anti-colonial nationalism and also revolutionary Marxism, with the two often fusing under Soviet and then later Chinese tutelage. The Second World War dealt a further blow to occidental confidence, with Europe subsequently divided into rival Capitalist and Communist camps headed respectively by the USA and USSR. It was the experience of the 1930s and WWII that enabled the predominantly Jewish émigrés of the Frankfurt School who had established themselves in American academe to propound and propagate their dogma of multiculturalism and ‘anti-racism’, which was later exported to Western Europe owing to the hegemonic position of the USA in that half of the continent. Decolonisation, ‘national liberation struggles’ and the New Left born in 1968 fused with US multiculturalism to create a new sphere of leftist identity politics, that whilst seeing itself as ‘radical’ and ‘oppositional’ at the time, has come to form the hegemonic discourse of Western nations today: multiculturalism, political correctness and cultural relativism. From this so-called movement of ‘liberation’ stem the social balkanisation, censorship, thoughtcrime and self-denigration and abasement before other cultures, most notably, before Islam, that characterise Western societies in the current period.

This effective collapse of self-belief within the West has led to the self-loathing mode of thought that characterises the perspective of Human Rights Watch, which whilst more than willing to condemn generous and tolerant Western societies as being ‘intolerant’ and a danger to liberty, is keen to also turn a blind eye to the inherent barbarity of doctrinaire Islam and Islamism. By doing so, HRW is effectively running the risk of calling for the burial of the West, and its replacement by unbending, intolerant and barbaric theocratic social norms and punishments. HRW thereby reveals itself to be a decadent organisation that actively undermines the ideals it was established to defend. Founded in 1978 as successor to Helsinki Watch, a body created in 1975 to monitor human rights abuses in the then Soviet bloc, it has in recent years received its primary funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation (formerly Institute). Wikipedia reports that Soros donated $100 million of the $128 million that it received in 2011. Soros of course has caused a great deal of human misery through his speculative activities and has ‘warned’ of the rise of nationalism in Europe. Might not his money have no small impact upon the focus and activity of Human Rights Watch, and its anti-democratic, anti-European and anti-nationalist agenda? [Hat tip to Cygnus for sending the link which suggested this piece].

‘A Potential Model for Europe’: Bosnian Islam!

On occasion, I happen upon articles that possess such outlandish content that I have to pinch myself to check that I am not dreaming, and today has afforded me one of those moments of incredulity. Although perhaps not quite as bizarre as David Icke’s belief in a global conspiracy involving interdimensional humanoid lizards, it isn’t that far removed in terms of its sheer counterfactuality. The said article appeared on the Deutsche Welle site, and related to last week’s gathering of international scholars in Stuttgart which addressed the question: ‘What’s the ideal form of Islam for a European context, if there is one?’

The answer that seemed to win most favour was ‘Bosnian Islam’, owing to the manner in which it had previously been institutionalised and headed by a Grand Mufti. Delegates appeared to consider that this made it in some way more acceptable to Europeans, as it thus possessed a structure somewhat analogous to the Church. However, the statement that really took my breath away is reproduced below:

Muslims make up the majority in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they live harmoniously alongside Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Sephardic Jews. This diversity, along with the 130 years during which the country was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made Bosnian Islam what it is today.

The use of the word “harmoniously” in this context does not strike me as apposite, unless you are happy to construct sentences such as “Bosniak Muslims and mujahideen harmoniously playing football with the heads of murdered Serb civilians”. To hold up the experience of Bosnia as a model for the rest of Europe to emulate sends a chill down my spine. For me, the appropriate form of Islam in Europe is ex-Islam. We should be supporting apostasy, not the propagation of this unbidden supremacist proselytising ideology. For some reason however, the scholars who gathered in Stuttgart appear to have omitted this approach from their deliberations.

Their preferred Model for Europe: The 'harmonious' Face of Bosnian Islam

My preferred Model for Europe: Gordana Tomic (non-Muslim Serb)

Mark Steyn on Islam in Europe

In the following interview from Danish television (hat tip Vlad Tepes), Mark Steyn presents his analysis of the political impact of the demographic Islamisation of Europe. Will Europe be the same when it has an entirely different population? Jews, he points out, are leaving Malmö because of hostility from the resident Muslim population. In Steyn’s opinion, the city has “gone past tolerant multicultural Sweden and become something else”.

He highlights how a couple of generations ago, indigenous Britons would have been astonished if you had predicted that in 2010 75% of Bradford’s Pakistanis would be married to their first cousins. In cities such as Brussels and Rotterdam we are already witnessing a situation in which they are taking on a “semi-Muslim political character”. Many cities, he claims, are “past the point of no return” in terms of their demographic Islamisation. His analysis is very much in line with that of Christopher Caldwell whose 'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West' was published last year.  If you have not read it and have any interest in this subject, I would recommend that you get hold of a copy.

When Steyn's interviewer deploys the hackneyed assertion that Muslim immigrants are required to help bolster the economies and welfare states of western social democracies, Steyn provides a rapid rebuttal noting that collectively Muslims do not pay their way and are in fact an economic drain upon their host societies. Importantly, he notes that the rot underpinning the failure of Muslim minorities to adapt and assimilate to the host societies originates in the politically correct multiculturalist attitudes of European elites. These, he observes, were adopted after they lost confidence in themselves and their peoples in the wake of World War II. They drew the wrong conclusions which led them to a wholesale rejection of nationalism, ethnic identity and their cultural inheritance. Immigrant children in the UK for example are taught to despise the history of the country in which they now live, for they are told that it was a fount of imperialist inequity. It is unsurprising therefore that Muslim immigrants do not believe that there is anything worthwhile to assimilate to.

Most of the following video is in English, but the short portions in Danish are not subtitled. The interview with Steyn begins at 34 seconds in, breaks off for a few seconds, and resumes at 1 minute 35.

Muslim Prison Populations in Europe

Much has been written in the UK over the past year highlighting the disproportionate representation of Muslims in the prison population; moreover, the deeply worrying phenomenon of Muslim gangs targeting inmates for conversion has been brought to light. According to the Labour Market Survey the UK had a Muslim population of a little over 2.4 million in 2008 out of a total population of 61.4 million, some 3.9% of the total. However, in that same year some 12% of the prison population of England and Wales was recorded as being Muslim.

Although these figures demonstrate the statistically higher frequency of criminality amongst the Muslim population in England and Wales, data from elsewhere is even more startling. A report in the Washington Post from 2008 stated:

Research by the Open Society Institute, an advocacy organization, shows that in the Netherlands 20 percent of adult prisoners and 26 percent of all juvenile offenders are Muslim; the country is about 5.5 percent Muslim. In Belgium, Muslims from Morocco and Turkey make up at least 16 percent of the prison population, compared with 2 percent of the general populace, the research found.

These figures are bad, but they pale in comparison with those encountered within the French penal system:

As a matter of policy, the French government does not collect data on race, religion or ethnicity on its citizens in any capacity, making it difficult to obtain precise figures on the makeup of prison populations. But demographers, sociologists and Muslim leaders have compiled generally accepted estimates showing Muslim inmate populations nationwide averaging between 60 and 70 percent.

Bivouac-ID notes that more conservative estimates of the French Muslim prison population still place it at in excess of 50% of the total. As in the UK, French prisoners are targeted for conversion to Islam, with an estimated 400 Islamists proselytising within the French prison system in 2008. The current French population is estimated at 65.4 million with some 5 million French citizens being Muslim (7.6%). Neighbouring Switzerland too has a significant overrepresentation of Muslims within the prison system. For example, the overcrowded Champ Dollon Prison in Geneva reported that in 2009, 56.6% of its inmates were Muslim.

Clearly, there is a problem of Muslim criminality which manifests itself across the societies of Western Europe which have admitted a significant influx of Muslim immigrants. A small part of this disproportionate representation will arise from the fact that the Muslim populations are younger than those of the host societies’ average owing to the higher Muslim fertility rate. In the UK for example, there were an estimated 301,000 Muslims under the age of 4 in September 2008. We should therefore expect the bulge in the Muslim criminal population to grow even further in the years ahead.

Having provided a brief sketch of the size of Muslim prison populations in a number of European states, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to what these statistics demonstrate. Do they illustrate the innate ‘racism’ of the host societies and the alleged relative economic deprivation of Muslim populations as the official explanations would have you believe; or, is it the case that they demonstrate the innate incompatibility of Islam with our societies and the contempt of doctrinaire Muslims for the kuffar?