Is “Islam,” at least the version practiced in the West, compatible with Western values, democracy, traditions and history? This issue is largely avoided in the United States, under the rug of “diversity” and “multiculturalism”? If not, are “Islam” and its never-challenged “representatives” to be seen as a danger? What is to happen when freedom of expression and religion conflict with democratic rule, separation of religion and state, and with the more important but less legally defined concept of national identity? Do nations and their voters have a right to a distinct cultural identity and history of their own, or are they forced to give up that identity for the sake of “diversity, “ multiculturalism” and “anti-racism”? Americans, or at least American business and cultural elites, in a strange alliance, are still sleep walking around these issues? However, Europeans - especially the French, Germans and British; that is to say, the largest powers - cannot do so anymore, as a number of cases in France and Germany are proving.

[The article goes on to detail several cases in Germany and France. Do link to this article.]

The problem is that UOIF, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood (which is heavily subsidized by Gulf money), is adept at manipulating existing law and prevailing social mores to promote its own agenda - an agenda that includes Islamic schools, the first of which opened in September. Where the state refuse to accept Muslim students wearing Islamic symbols, it would strengthen UOIF’s call for more private Islamic schools - soon to become the equivalents of Pakistani madrassas and Indonesian pesantren: recruitment centers for radicals in the country of the Enlightenment. It is indicative that UOIF’s very name, “of France” rather than “French,” suggests “exile” in the Islamic sense of the word.

While France, with some 5 million Muslims - or, more precisely persons originating in Muslim states (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc.), approximately half of whom do not practice Islam - is now forced to face the issue of Muslim integration. So is Germany with its 3million Muslims. But the United Kingdom (2.5 million Muslims), and other European countries seem to believe that this is a non-issue, considering it politically incorrect to even discuss the matter. Thus, a Muslim girl wearing a scarf in a British school has no problems whatsoever. For that matter, an educated Pakistani Muslim businessman who speaks no English after years of living in Britain on an uncertain immigration status, had no trouble being elected to a local city council and demanding the taxpayers pay for a translator in order for him to do his job. That explains why counter-terrorism analysts coined term “Londonistan.”

[. . . .]

From Aubervilliers to Karlsruhe to Göteborg to Granada - and perhaps soon, Detroit - the issue appears to be more or less the same. It is not nearly as confusing or “complex” as the liberals would make it. Are Western values like freedom of religion and secularism to be sacrificed as “outdated” in a “multiculturalist”? How ironic that the same people who applaud the prohibition of any church or synagogue in Saudi Arabia support a “democratic right” to build Europe’s largest mosque very close to the Vatican.

One the positive side, just as half of French “Muslims,” like Alma and Lila’s mother, are “non-practicing” (or more accurately, practicing their religion at home). Muslims in the West need not lose their faith. But perhaps the nations of the West need to restrain its immigration policies, and beyond that, to discuss the broader question of national identity and laicité.