Europe’s Cities Absorb Sharia Law

If the West keeps betraying the democratic value of individual freedom, Islamic fundamentalists, like those who imposed burqas on Libyan women, will do the same to Western women. (Photo by Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

 

• London Mayor Sadiq Khan banned advertisements that promote “unrealistic expectations of women’s body image and health”. Now Berlin is planning to ban images in which women are portrayed as “beautiful but weak, hysterical, dumb, crazy, naive, or ruled by their emotions”. Tagesspiegel‘s Harald Martenstein said the policy “could have been adopted from the Taliban manifesto”.
• The irony is that this wave of morality and “virtue” is coming from cities governed by uninhibited leftist politicians, who for years campaigned for sexual liberation. It is now a “feminist” talking point to advocate sharia policy.
• To paraphrase the American writer Daniel Greenfield, the irony of women celebrating their own suppression is both heartbreaking and stupefying.

Within days after the Islamic State conquered the city of Sirte in Libya two years ago, enormous billboards appeared in the Islamist stronghold warning women they must wear baggy robes that cover their entire bodies, and no perfume. These “sharia stipulations for hijab” included wearing dense material and a robe that does not “resemble the attire of unbelievers”.

Two years later, Europe’s three most important cities — London, Paris and Berlin — are adopting the same sharia trend.

Europe: Laughing at the Messenger

In response to US President Donald Trump’s recent reference to “what’s happening” in Sweden, Swedish Twitter users mocked him by posting photos of people putting IKEA furniture together. The joke would have been funnier had a failed asylum seeker from Eritrea not murdered Carola Herlin (left) and her son in an IKEA store in Västerås, Sweden, in August 2015.

 

• Once again, an American has pointed to a failing in European society, and instead of focusing on the problem identified or even admitting that there is a problem, the European response has been to point at the American and blame him for creating the problem he has in fact merely identified.
• We are being given an accurate representation of a serious problem.
• If the response to every problem is denial, and the response to anyone pointing to the problem is opprobrium, legal threats or hilarity, it suggests that Europe is not going to make the softer-landing it could yet give itself in addressing these issues.
• It might make us feel better, but every time we attack or laugh at the messenger, rather than addressing the message, we ensure that our own future will be less funny.

How can one excavate the minds of so many European officials and the extraordinary mental gymnastics of denial to which they have become prone?