That’s the first question I ask girls on Tinder these days — Hey sweetie, are we ready to learn the hard lessons from Cologne?
By Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman:
Nobody has adequately zeroed in on the underlying triple whammy — government blindness to the problem of Muslim integration, police failure to act and media-government collusion in “seeing no evil” — that underlie this European — not just German — tragedy.
For years, Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmo, led by popular Mayor Ilmar Reepalu, failed to ever hold to account Muslim perpetrators of hate crimes against the city’s tiny Jewish population. Muslim attacks on local Jews were even condoned by city fathers as understandable “payback” for Israeli actions against Palestinians. Reepalu is now retired, but the culture of denial and complicity he helped foster has contributed to inaction and silence in the face of a tremendous surge in rapes by predominately Muslim immigrants in Sweden, with the third-largest number of rapes worldwide.
In France, the culture of denial and inaction against hate crimes targeting Jews set the stage for today’s threat by Islamic radicals to social peace and French ideals. Back in 2000, before then-Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy tried to do something about it, French authorities stood by as Jews were attacked in religiously mixed Parisian neighborhoods. There followed firebombings of synagogues, incited by fiery street-corner imams, with tepid police response. One incident tells all: Two Arab men, one with a gun, commandeered a Jewish school bus, terrorizing the students and smashing the windshield. The police refused to label it as a hate crime, only as an act of vandalism. The most then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin would do was “pray for harmony.” The escalating hate and violence laid the groundwork for the Muslim terrorist attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, killing a rabbi and three little children.
Today, France’s struggles with homegrown and imported Islamic terrorism are a direct outgrowth of its years of cynical indifference to anti-Jewish Muslim violence and the no-go zones that emboldened Islamist extremists.
And as the political and social dynamics continue to roil, Jewish leadership wonders aloud whether there is any future for Jews in democratic Germany.
Looking forward, it is clear that while police and intelligence agencies can do more to protect us from the next Cologne or San Bernardino, the key lies within the Muslim world. ISIS and al-Qaida deftly market their extremist agenda on social media. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, our supposed NATO ally, said this during a speech in Cologne in front of a Muslim immigrant audience drawn from as far as Belgium, the Netherlands and France: “I understand very well that you are against assimilation. One cannot expect you to assimilate. … Assimilation is a crime against humanity.”
Belatedly, the White House has announced it will launch a new effort to counter ISIS’ inroads among young Muslims. We urge President Barack Obama to seek the counsel of Americans such as Zuhdi Jasser, the Phoenix cardiologist who helped found the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and the Center for Islamic Pluralism.
A devout Muslim who believes that “America in fact provides the best atmosphere for Muslims to practice our faith,” Jasser spoke a few weeks ago at the launch of a Muslim Reform Movement at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He made clear that Erdogan’s anti-assimilation gospel is a dead end, that religious pluralism is indivisible, and that anti-Semitism will lead nowhere good for growing number of Muslim newcomers who want to be benefit from America’s historic “open door.”
Embracing that Muslim-to-Muslim message should be a top priority of a president in search of a legacy. It will make America safer and pave the way for new Muslim immigrants to become a part of the fabric of our democracy.
COMMENTS POSTED ON THE ARTICLE:
* You are dreaming if you think we could take in hundreds of thousands of Muslims without it having a detrimental effect on Jews. If my grandchildren are assaulted by Muslims and if my parents’ tombstones are desecrated will you take responsibility for it, Rabbi Cooper?
I recently saw an article that defines liberals perfectly and pertains especially to Jewish liberals. The definition of a Jewish liberal is a masochist who defends sadists.
* Jews have always acted as the canaries of civilization, when you let them be attacked, the time is very close to when you yourself will be attacked without pity by the same hateful attackers.
The answers to a problem never lie with “the other” here Islam. We need to tell Islam in no uncertain terms that our women and our lives are sacrosant, and this, unfortunately involves violence and intransigency, distrust and discrimination.
Islam needs a good reason to respect the West. So far it has a good reason to disrespect it, taunt it, and a well founded belief it can get away with it.
* This is what happens when you stop listening to your citizens.
