The European Union’s Massive Brexit Self-Harming Exercise
As the resumption of the Brexit debate looms in the House of Commons, it is reported that the European Commission is haughtily retaining its refusal to consider any revision to the Withdrawal Agreement (WA); this attitude is also backed by the numerous leaders of European Union countries whom UK PM Theresa May has contacted. Those leaders assume that, like most of them themselves, the UK will eventually grovel before the Commission and accept its dictate.
As someone who grew up in fundamentalist Muslim countries, the continuing spread in the West of apologists for sharia law is, to say the least, intriguing. It is, of course, good-hearted to wish people from other cultures to feel welcome. Many of these apologists, however, have no first-hand experience of how it feels actually to live in that part of the world or to be a victim of day-by-day radical Islam. What is painful is that although many of these apologists have never lived under Islamist rules, they often act as if they had.
At a recent conference in Cologne on the future of Europe’s Muslims, Ali Erbaş, the head of Turkey’s state religious authority, the Diyanet, railed against what he called the “increase in anti-Islamic discourse and actions… [that] threaten European multiculturalism.”
Pour raconter son histoire, Fayçal prend ses précautions. Il n’accepte de parler qu’en-dehors de son quartier, dans un café discret. Le jeune homme n’a pas encore 30 ans. De forte corpulence, il a un visage doux et arbore un sourire gêné. Méfiant, il regarde constamment autour de lui. Après avoir passé plus d’un an en Syrie, il est retourné chez ses parents. Depuis, il ne sort presque plus de chez lui et se sent surveillé en permanence.
The Syrian jihad presented invaluable opportunities for