ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (28 page)

Salafists are ultra-fundamentalist and frequently violent—they comprise ISIS’s base. It’s no wonder Germany’s interior minister has warned that the terrorist threat in his country “is critical. The number of threatening individuals has never been as high as now.”
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In the western German city of Wuppertal, Salafists led by a radicalized white convert named Sven Lau have dubbed themselves “Sharia Police” and taken to patrolling city streets at night to curb drinking and gambling, which are “un-Islamic” activities.
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Predictably, Germany’s growing ISIS problem, combined with incitement by Lau and other Salafi extremists, has created a backlash. Rival groups of German soccer hooligans have put aside their differences to start a new movement called “Hooligans Against Salafists.” On October 26, 2014, close to five thousand hooligans gathered in Cologne to march against radical Islam. The protest began peacefully but soon descended into violence, with demonstrators battling German police.
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A few weeks before the hooligan rally, supporters of ISIS engaged in violent clashes with Kurdish opponents of the Islamic State on the streets of Hamburg, bringing a violent Middle East conflict to the heart of Europe.
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Those clashes were a major reason behind the formation of a mass movement called Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) that has drawn thousands of protestors to weekly anti-Islamization rallies in the city of Dresden in eastern Germany (including seventeen thousand at one pre-Christmas event in December 2014).
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in typical Euro-PC fashion, has condemned the rallies, saying PEGIDA leaders’ “hearts are cold and often full of prejudice, and even hate.”
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Yet one poll showed that nearly one out of three Germans believed the marches were justified and one out of eight Germans would attend a PEGIDA march if one were held in their hometown.
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The growing popularity of PEGIDA and the hostilities in Cologne and Hamburg are merely harbingers of culture clashes to come. As of November 2014, a whopping three hundred ISIS supporters were facing trial in Germany.
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For most Americans, Scandinavia conjures images of blond-haired, blue-eyed Swedish bikini babes and Viking longships. Yet the most popular name for men and baby boys in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, is not Sven or Olaf, but Mohammed.
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Meanwhile, in Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmo, which is 20 percent Muslim, “Large enclaves . . . have earned the dread label ‘no-go zone.’ They are unsafe for non-Muslims, particularly women who do not conform to Islamist conventions of dress and social interaction. They are especially perilous for police, firefighters, and emergency-medical technicians.”
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Denmark may be the smallest Scandinavian country, but when it comes to producing ISIS jihadists, the Danes punch well above their weight. Among Western nations, Denmark has sent the second-highest rate of foreign fighters per capita to the Islamic State, trailing only Belgium. At least twenty-eight of those Danish jihadists reportedly received welfare benefits from the Danish government—while they were still waging jihad on behalf of ISIS in Syria. But never fear: fifteen of them have been ordered to pay the government back.
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I’m sure they’ll hop right on it, being loyal Danish citizens and all.

That’s precisely the attitude that Denmark, somewhat quixotically, seems to be counting on its wayward jihadi sons to adopt. Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, has chosen to treat its returning ISIS fighters not to prison time but to counseling sessions. According to the
Washington Post,

          
In Denmark, not one returned fighter has been locked up. Instead, taking the view that discrimination at home is as criminal as Islamic State recruiting, officials here are providing free psychological counseling while finding returnees jobs and spots in schools and universities. Officials credit a new effort to reach out to a radical mosque with stanching the flow of recruits.

                
Some progressives say [the Danish city of] Aarhus should become a model for other communities in the United States
and Europe that are trying to cope with the question of what to do when the jihad generation comes back to town.
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Please Aarhus, don’t give the Obama administration any more brilliant ideas.

While the Danish government—via Danish taxpayer dollars—is busy helping returning jihadists get in touch with their feelings, Aarhus’s Grimhojvej mosque (which the
Washington Post
article described, charitably, as “one of the most polarizing houses of worship in Europe”) is busy “openly back[ing] a caliphate in the Middle East” and “refus[ing] to offer a blanket denunciation of the Islamic State.” And why would it? Danish authorities believe the “vast majority” of the some thirty Aarhus residents who left Denmark for the Islamic State had links to the mosque. It’s easy to see why. A mosque spokesman told a Danish newspaper: “An Islamic state will always be what we Muslims yearn for, therefore we can not help but support the Islamic State, even though it comes with errors, so we must wait and see.”
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While they’re waiting, Aarhus officials will no doubt be more than happy to recommend a good shrink.

If anyone should have their heads examined, it’s European government officials, who’ve created an atmosphere where returning ISIS terrorists are coddled while Jews are openly harassed in the streets in a vicious manner not seen since Hitler’s heyday.

First, some background. One of the major stories of the summer of 2014 was Israel’s fifty-day military operation against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. The Israeli military launched Operation Protective Edge to put a stop to the endless barrage of rocket fire by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists against Israeli civilian centers. The Israelis also aimed to
dismantle an extensive network of heavily fortified underground tunnels dug by Hamas beneath the Gaza border and into Israeli territory. The Isralis learned from prisoners that they captured in this operation that Hamas was planning to use at least some of the tunnels to infiltrate Israeli communities and kill and kidnap Israeli civilians.
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In short, Israel was battling to eliminate a Palestinian jihadist threat competitive with ISIS in its remorseless desire to slaughter innocent men, women, and children. Like ISIS, Hamas despises the West and openly calls for its demise. And like ISIS, Hamas wishes to see the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate ruled by sharia law. Given these facts, it should have been a no-brainer for European governments to stand strong with Israel and support its efforts to vanquish a shared radical Islamic enemy. Only it didn’t work out that way.

From Britain to Norway, from Spain to Italy to Belgium, European government officials blasted Israel’s supposed use of “disproportionate force” in Gaza, with Britain’s deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, going so far as to say that Israel’s “response appears to be deliberately disproportionate. It is amounting now to a disproportionate form of collective punishment.”
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The fact that Hamas was using Palestinian civilians as human shields, leading to countless Palestinian deaths, didn’t matter. Nor did the fact that Israel went to such extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties that the former commander of Britain’s forces in Afghanistan said, “No army in the world acts with as much discretion and great care as the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] in order to minimize [civilian] damage.”
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Despite all the international hand-wringing about civilian deaths, an exhaustive Israeli study showed that the majority of Palestinians killed during Operation Protective Edge were, in fact, terrorists.
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But Europe’s elites had long since made up their minds. From the meeting rooms of Brussels to the newsrooms of the BBC, Israel was cast as a militarized, oppressive bully and the Palestinians as noble, helpless victims.

Not surprisingly, the increasingly hostile, condemnatory view held by European politicians and media outlets toward Israel has trickled down to
the European public, culminating in large, widespread anti-Israel rallies across the continent during Operation Protective Edge. Tens of thousands of anti-Israel protestors, composed mostly of an unholy alliance of Islamists, pro-Palestinian activists, and hard leftists, took to the streets of European capitals to castigate not just the Jewish State but the Jewish people—in some of the most audacious displays of anti-Semitism that Europe had seen in decades. Here is just a small sampling:

On July 26, 2014, Metropolitan Police estimated that as many as forty-five thousand demonstrators gathered outside the Israeli embassy in London to protest against Israel’s operation against Hamas.
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The rhetoric at that march and similar ones around the country was replete with calls to genocide: