I shall be leaving for book-promo before the end of February and may be away up to 6 mths. Regards Anders.
The Book
He began with a quotation.
‘The men the European public admires most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.’
He continued with a plagiarism.
‘Most Europeans look back at the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in two-parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school.’
He had no inhibitions about stealing for the good of the cause. He credited hardly anyone. They were all subsumed into a higher entity: Andrew Berwick.
What was going wrong with Europe?
Andrew Berwick blamed it on the ideology of Political Correctness which, he wrote, was the same as cultural Marxism – Marxism transferred from the economic to the cultural sphere. He wanted to recapture the values of the 1950s, when women were housewives and not soldiers, children were not born outside wedlock and homosexuality was not glorified.
‘Those who would defeat cultural Marxism must defy it,’ urged Andrew Berwick. ‘They must shout from the rooftops the realities it seeks to suppress, such as our opposition to sharia, the Islamisation of our countries, the fact that violent crimes are disproportionately committed by Muslims and that most cases of Aids are voluntary, acquired from immoral acts.’
One of the prominent features of cultural Marxism is feminism, wrote Berwick. It is ubiquitous and all-consuming:
It is in television, where nearly every major offering has a female ‘power figure’ and the plots and characters emphasise inferiority of the male and superiority of the female. It is in the military, where expanding opportunity for women, even in combat positions, has been accompanied by double standards and then lowered the standards, as well as a decline in enlistment of young men, while ‘warriors’ in the services are leaving in droves. It is in government-mandated employment preferences and practices that benefit women and use ‘sexual harassment’ charges to keep men in line. It is in public schools, where ‘self-awareness’ and ‘self-esteem’ are increasingly promoted while academic learning declines. And sadly, we see that several European countries allow and fund free distribution of contraceptive pills combined with liberal abortion policies.
He went on: ‘The man of today is expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.’
It was great to sit there cutting and pasting. Lots of the stuff he had been brooding about, but had not put into concrete form, was all thought out for him.
‘Who dares, wins,’ he wrote at the end of the introduction.
‘We are deceived by our own governments into thinking that Christian and Islamic civilisation are of equal value,’ he wrote. Obviously, they were not.
The book veered between polemic and pedagogy. He listed the five pillars of Islam – faith, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and the giving of alms – at times presenting the Qur’an as though he were a primary school RE teacher: Allah’s commandments to Muhammad via the Archangel Gabriel; the great battles for Islam; the taking of Mecca and introduction of sharia.
But then he got to jihad – the Muslims’ duty to wage holy war – and he explained the Arabic term al-Taqiyya, which translates as dissimulation and in Islam means that Muslims can conceal their faith if it would put them in mortal danger to confess to it. Berwick claimed this was a Muslim tactic to hide their ambition of taking power in Europe. Until they struck. He explained the term dhimmi: non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, who are protected and allowed to exercise their own faith as long as they pay a tax, jizia, and do not raise any objections. This was the future lying ahead for Christians.
He used the Arabic terms to prove the Muslims had a plan to conquer the West and to kill Jews and Christians. The Repentance verse of the Qur’an was part of the proof: kill the polytheists wherever you find them, arrest them, imprison them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every site of ambush!
The verse was much more effective without the word polytheists. Then you could write that the verse was about Jews and Christians, when it really referred to sects that worshipped multiple gods in old Arabia. It also had more impact if you put kill them last.
He often quoted Robert Spencer, the man behind Jihad Watch. Spencer had dissected the Qur’an into its component parts, taking them out of context to show how violent and full of hate it was. Berwick subscribed to that understanding of the Muslim holy book.
He hastened on, jumping backwards and forwards in time. The Crusaders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the extermination of the Christian minority in Lebanon in the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide in 1915, the different dynasties of the seventh century. Towards the end of the book he got to the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the start of the Ottoman downfall in Europe. The battle was a prophetic parallel to his own book, which he had given the title 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence. Four hundred years after the famous battle, the Muslims would be vanquished and out of Europe for ever.
‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.’ With this quotation from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World Berwick opened the second part of the book, which he called Europe Burning. Starting with quotations added authority, so he threw in various bits of Orwell and Churchill too. He only had to google ‘famous quotations’ and so many good ones came up.
The first hundred pages were essays by Fjordman with titles like ‘The Eurabia Code’, ‘Boycott the United Nations’, ‘How the Feminists’ War Against Boys Paved the Way for Islam’, ‘What is the Cause of Low Birth Rates?’ and ‘The Fatherless Civilisation’. The themes overlapped with things Berwick wrote himself. It was cut-and-paste, stolen and shared. A lot of it was sheer repetition. One thing that could not be clarified too often was: why we can never trust those who call themselves moderate Muslims.
Because they are deceiving us.
The Qur’an usually furnished the proof Berwick needed, as in sura 8, verse 12: Remember when God revealed to the angels: ‘I am with you, so grant the believers resolve. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. So strike above the necks, and strike their very finger!’ He really liked using that particular sura, called al-Anfal. It was the sura Saddam Hussein had used to name the genocide of the Kurds in the 1980s. In Berwick’s reading, the unbelievers were the Christians; in the Ba’ath Party’s they were the Kurds.
Then he complained a little. It was, after all, quite a laborious task he had taken upon himself. ‘Occasionally I get annoyed over the fact that I am compelled to spend significant amounts of my time refuting Islam, an ideology that is flawed to the core and should be totally irrelevant in the twenty-first century.’
But he had to do it, because the actual number of Muslims in Europe was being kept secret by the authorities. There were far more than they said and, more importantly, those numbers were increasing all the time, through births and mass immigration. This assertion was supported by more Fjordman essays and quotations from assorted experts, and finally proved by the Qur’an.