Oct. 1993

Islam's New Drive into Europe

By Sir Alfred Sherman

There is a Muslim threat to Christian Europe. It is developing slowly and could still be checked, but the policies of the Western powers have done almost everything possible to help it grow. The factors that created the threat were:

1. Totally irresponsible immigration policies in Western and Central Europe, which have rapidly created an increasingly militant minority of 15 million Muslims there.

2. The alienation of Turkey by the European Community, which rejected Turkey's sincere efforts to join the E.E.C., virtually compelling it to seek identification with a Muslim world it was trying to escape from.

3. Germany's aggressive policy in the Balkans, calculated to break up Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, suppress Serbia and achieve hegemony in the region with Hungarian help.

4. Vatican support for this policy and the Pope's persistent courting of Arab states regardless of the interests of their Christian minorities.

5. The failure of the United States, ostensibly a supra-ethnic and supra-religious political entity, to understand the historical depth and the power of ethnic nationalism and religious conflicts.

The gradual Muslim colonization of Western and Central Europe owes much to social and spiritual disorientation there. Immigration policies were often the function of welfare policies and efforts to create full employment by monetary expansion, which in practice led to the coexistence of labor shortages and mass unemployment. Weak Governments, reluctant to deal with the situation by less generous welfare policies,
labor saving and realistic wages, preferred the easy short-term expedient of importing cheap Third-World labor, which perpetuates its own need.

Another factor was the decline of Christian and Western values caused by the unlearning of Western history, including the threat from Islam. In essence, pro-Islamism - like pro-Third Worldism and (until recently) pro-Sovietism - are symptoms of the collapse of belief in their own values among the West's intellectuals and politicians.

The Yugoslav civil war demonstrated that the New World Order announced by ex-President Bush has become an ugly reality remote from the democratic utopia marketed to the naive. The U.N. is now a kind of super-state, able to destroy existing states and to create new ones. It engages in military operations and economic warfare. It has virtually destroyed the Serb economy, on the flimsiest of excuses. A great power controlling the majority of U.N. votes can apply similar treatment to
all but the strongest of states. Pretexts are always available. I saw how the "bandwagon effect" worked. It was not dissimilar from the anti-Czech hysteria of the 1930s, when Hitler was presented as a moderate and reasonable man.

The Bosnian Serbs were isolated. They could not even rely on Serbia and Montenegro. Seemingly, they stood no chance against Germany, the United States and the Muslim world. The widely held view that Russia is supporting them has no basis in fact. Russian public opinion is pro-Serb but public opinion does not make policy in Russia. Today, Russia seeks to ally itself with Third-World states, including Iran and the Arabs, for the sake of money (especially markets for arms) and influence, while relying on aid from the U.S. and the European community. A few million Serbs are of no importance in this equation. Indeed, Russia has signed a minorities agreement with Hungary, directed against Romania, Slovakia and Serbia and has an informal agreement with Germany dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. The German sphere includes the Balkans, as well as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Rumania. Russia is left with the Baltic states, Belarus and the Ukraine.

In France, considerable support for Serbia across the entire political spectrum is held in check by Government reluctance to confront Germany and thus hamper European unification. In Britain, the media are aggressively pro-Muslim and erstwhile pro-Soviet pacifists have been converted to bombing Serbs. However, the Government is aware of the dangers of the German-U.S. policies, and in particular of the counter-productive nature of bombing threats. Its actions tend to confront the line of the media and the Serbophobe lobby, but are somewhat inhibited by a strong sense of commitment to the European Community.

In the United States, Arab money talks. Arab states spend millions of dollars annually on high-powered public relations and even larger amounts on campaign contributions and other means of buying influence. It could be said that while the Japanese are buying up American real estate, the Arabs are buying up politicians, universities and the media. The manner in which some State Department officials have called for tougher action against the Serbs - and then resigned to take up highly paid posts in Arab-financed bodies - speaks for itself.

The main factors preventing Western military intervention against the Serbs and causing the Western switch to promoting a division of Bosnia into Croat, Muslim and Serb provinces were the tough stand of the Serbs themselves (which convinced all and sundry, including the U.N., that fighting them would cost heavy casualties) and the opposition of France and Britain. A subsidiary factor was the increasingly obvious fact that the fighting between Muslim and Croat forces was at least as brutal as that between the Muslims and the Serbs. Finally, Western media had little choice but to give Croat and Muslim atrocities some attention. Croatia - the darling of Germany and the Vatican - had to be protected from harm. But the phrase "the Christian majority in Bosnia-Herzegovina" is still taboo in the West.

The Zagreb Government faces a dilemma of its own making. Three and a half million Croats live in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Many of them have no stomach for fighting, especially against the Serbs of Kraina. Croatia cannot sustain a war on two fronts - against the Serbs in Kraina and against the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Croats in Bosnia almost unanimously desire an alliance with the Serbs, in order to defend Croat-inhabited areas under attack and reconquer those already lost. But the former Ustashi groups inside Croatia (especially in Slavonia) insist on fighting the Serbs. President Tudjman, encouraged by ex-Foreign Minister Genscher of Germany to raise false expectations of a Greater Croatia including both Serb and Muslim territories, now finds it difficult to withdraw from either commitment. With Western and German policy towards the Croat-Muslim conflict becoming ambiguous, Tudjman
faces serious difficulties.

Despite the military setbacks of the Muslims in Bosnia, the Yugoslav civil war represents a break-through for militant Islam. For the first time, it has mobilized international support - not only from the U.N. Security Council but from Germany, the U.S. and the European Community. The Muslim state in Bosnia may remain small. But the possibility that it may expand to the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, Kosovo, as well as parts of Macedonia and Montenegro exists. The more likely scenario that these areas may be linked with Albania (already a member of the Islamic Conference) - should worry Christian Europe no less. And this brings us to Turkey.

The key questions are whether Turkey intends to exploit the Yugoslav crisis and its aftermath to resuscitate its pre-1683 role as the dominant power in the Balkans and, if so, whether this will be part of a re-Islamization process within Turkey itself. In 1683, the Ottoman armies were defeated and turned back at the very gates of Vienna. Today, a still secular Turkey has been rejected by the E.E.C. to which it wanted to belong and is finding cooperation with the ex-Soviet Muslim republics increasingly difficult due to Arab and Iranian attempts to promote Islam there and U.S. discouragement of Russo-Turkish cooperation to prevent this. During the last three decades there were signs that Ataturk's reforms did not bite deeply enough into the Turkish national psyche. Yet there can be no doubt that German and American encouragement for a more aggressive role for Turkey in the Balkans would reinforce the other factors strengthening neo-Ottomanism and Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey. If this kills Turkish secularism and drives Turkey to exploit Islam for the expansion of its political influence - not least in the Balkans - the West will only have itself to blame.

The former Greek Prime Minister, Andreas Papandreou, writes in The Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo, of 19 June 1993, that President Sali Berisha of Albania wants to place the Serbian province of Kosovo under U.N. or NATO control. Papandreou fears that the presence of NATO troops will encourage the Kosovo Albanians to revolt and that the Serbs will fight bitterly to retain the province. He claims that Albania is being supported by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but that "another consequence of the German leadership of Europe and the Vatican vision of a Catholic Europe" is the revival of ties between Orthodox Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece. He concludes: "Don't torch Kosovo, otherwise we shall all be in flames."

The German-Vatican assault on the Eastern Orthodox churches and nations is manifested on several levels. Support for Croatian chauvinism, whose genocidal policies in the 1940s evoked no criticism from the Vatican at the time or subsequently, is matched by a new version of the Nazi claim to be defending Western civilization against Eastern barbarism. Willi Claes, the Foreign Minister of Belgium, which is now a German satellite, recently announced at an international seminar that societies where the Western churches prevailed were basically democratic and peaceful, whereas the Byzantine legacy invariably produced communism or despotism. Predictably, the authoritarian nature of all existing Muslim regimes except secular Turkey was left unmentioned.

The Albanians, unlike the Bosnian Muslims, are not Slavs. Kosovo, where the proportion of Albanian Muslims graudally grew to 90%, was the cradle of Serb nationalism, but was subjected to waves of "ethnic cleansing" (of Slavs) since the 15th century. During both World Wars, the German-Austrian-Italian occupiers engaged in such "ethnic cleansing", since the Serbs were their enemies. Tito, whose parents were Croat and Slovene respectively, not only failed to repatriate Albanians illegally settled in Kosovo during World War II to Albania or to facilitate the return of the expelled Serbs but continued the "ethnic cleansing" process, intensifying it in the 1960s and again in the 1970s when his non-alignment policies required the courting of Muslims.

Papandreou is right to assume that Kosovo is a powder-keg only the Serbs can defuse and that the Yugoslav civil war has accented the role of religion as the prime factor in European internal strife - and not only in the Balkans. From the viewpoint of Iran, the Arab states and possibly even Turkey, ethnic considerations have become subsidiary to Islamic considerations.

Due to foolish immigration policies, there are some 15 million Muslims in Europe. Their higher birth rates and further immigration increase their weight steadily, while the number of Europeans in Africa and Asia is dwindling. Muslims are the largest religious minority in France, Germany, Britain and the Benelux states. The number of Muslims in France is approaching 5 million. In Britain, there are already 2 million and more people attend services in mosques than in Christian churches. The creation of a fundamentalist Muslim state in Bosnia has raised the level of Islamic interest in matters European. The facile assumption that during a period of history when agnosticism is on the rise among Christians and Jews, while Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise among Muslims, the latter will want to embrace the culture of the former is false. Western culture is not yet in danger in Europe, but the danger is just around the corner. It will become serious if no steps are taken to avert it. Yugoslavia has been a prime example of Western - and Christian - irresponsibility.