Right-wing politicians want to ban Islam

Earlier today I posted part of this article in The Telegraph "The Tories must confront Islam instead of kowtowing to it". Traffic to the site jumped immediately and continues tonight. So obviously there is much interest in the subject.

Norway's Kristiansand Progress party goes further than merely confrontation and in this article say "they want Islam banned in Norway."

So, while the BBC go under cover and expose the BNP party for saying Islam is a "vicious wicked faith", in Norway you don't need to go undercover to expose a political parties feelings.

According to the Norwegian paper Dagbladet, central figures in Kristiansand Progress party (Frp) wants to ban Islam in Norway.

«We are not the only ones demanding this ban,» said Halvor Hulaas, chairperson in Krstiansand Frp to the paper. «This is an opinion that is well established in Scandinavian countries. We are now importing people with a religion that is practiced in the same way it was practiced when it was established in year 600. The freedom we have in Norway may be taken away from us if we do not start to have some demands to these immigrants.»

Karina Udnæs, deputy leader of the Progress party’s city council group in Kristiansand is pushing it even further.

«It is about high time Norway and Europe make the ideology Islam and the practice of this, illegal and punishable in the same way as Nazism,» Udnæs said. «The prophet Muhammad urged them to kill everyone infidel.»

Ouch! No David Blunkett laws for them.

Times seem to be changing and more and more the old political correctness is being cast aside. People are starting to speak out and they are naming names.

The Belmont Club took a look at "naming names" recently.

The Belmont Club start out by quoting David Warren:

In the course of three years' intense study of the issue, I've become convinced that there is -- well, this is a slight exaggeration -- no such thing as "Al Qaeda". It is, more precisely, only a name applied vaguely to one of several financing and logistical arms of the Wahabi branch of what could more accurately be called the "Islamic Jihad". Not an army, nor a disciplined network of underground cells, but an historical movement -- and thus more comparable to something like "the Enlightenment" in the West, than to any organized militia. Not to say the Jihad shares ideals with the Enlightenment -- far from it -- but rather, it is similar in being a vast idealistic movement, consciously advanced by men who co-operate as and where they think they can be most effective -- but taking their orders, ultimately, not from men but from "the zeitgeist", or "Allah".

They go on to quote the writer Bat Y'eor who recently gave an address to French Senators.

One need only look at our cities, airports, and streets, at the schools with their security guards, even the systems of public transportation, not to mention the embassies, and the synagogues – to see the whole astonishing array of police and security services. The fact that the authorities everywhere refuse to name the evil does not negate that evil. Yet we know perfectly well that we have been under threat for a long time; one has only to open one’s eyes and our authorities know it better than any of us, because it is they who have ordered these very security measures. ... Today the war is everywhere. And yet the European Union and the states which comprise it, have denied that war’s reality, right up to the terrorist attack in Madrid of March 11, 2004.

But then there may be problems with naming names as the Club point out.

Y'eor maintains that "today, Europe itself is living with this Great Fear" the source of which everyone knows but is afraid to mention in almost the same way that an earlier, more superstitious generation avoided mention of the Devil for fear of conjuring it. But the problem with conceding the point to David Warren and Bat Y'eor is that it merely articulating the word would cause a revolution in domestic and international politics something neither Democrats nor Republicans are prepared to do. Domestically it would mean that for the first time in American history, a major branch of a world religion would be declare a de facto enemy of the state. Not people, not a country; nothing with a capital unless it be Mecca, but a system of religious belief. It would strike at the very root of the American Constitutional system. Internationally it would signify that the principal enemy host, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose ruling house is intimately connected to and supports this ideology, should be targeted or its regime changed. Naming Wahabism as an enemy would indicate that the Iraq campaign, which the Bush administration was at pains to reach, was not the end but merely the beginning.

No doubt this will stir up some interesting debate but we must take up this debate and not avoid the "mention of the Devil for fear of conjuring it."
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