“The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.”
Thus spake Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 1997 when he was still mayor of Istanbul. For that, he earned a conviction for inciting religious hatred. Turkey was still trying to be a European-style secular country, even dreaming of joining the EU.
That sentence made famous by the man who has now been heading his country for over 20 years — as prime minister and then as president — comes from a poem written by Turkish nationalist poet Ziya Gökalp in 1912, during the First Balkan War, which led to the Ottoman Empire’s loss of most of its remaining European territories and population.
It was three years before the genocide of Armenians and the mass murder and expulsions of other Christians, mainly Assyrians and Greeks. Genocide laid the foundations for an almost Muslim-only Turkish state, and the killers were Kurds as well as Turks.
Today, the Turkish president has proven ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — a worldwide Muslim-supremacist organization — whose professed goal is to spread Islam and impose Sharia law on the whole world.
The Muslim Brotherhood was established in 1928 by an Egyptian teacher, Hassan al-Banna, and it traditionally had its headquarters in Cairo. After the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the presidential election in 2012 in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring and was ousted by a military coup in 2013, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE declared the brotherhood a terrorist organization. Its leaders found refuge in Qatar — and in Turkey.
Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs, Diyanet, is very active among Turks living abroad, particularly in Europe. In 2018, Erdoğan compared Diyanet’s members and imams to “an army of 140,000.” Turkish imams in Europe are generally considered to be allied with the brotherhood, which, from its new Turkish base, has shifted its efforts to Muslims living in Europe. The Turkish nationalist pan-European Muslim organization Millî Görüş is also said to have close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 1982, the brotherhood drew up a 14-page, 12-point strategy to “establish an Islamic government on earth.” From 2004 to 2010, Mahdi Akef was the 7th General Guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Its goal remained unchanged: “The Muslim Brotherhood aims to create a worldwide Islamic state. We Muslims immigrate everywhere, and there’s still a long way to go before we take over Europe.”
The brotherhood does not distinguish between Sunni and Shiah Muslims. It played a role in the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 and later in the establishment of Al-Qaeda. Hamas also has strong personal, financial, and ideological links with the brotherhood.
In Europe, many EU-subsidized Muslim organizations have ties to the brotherhood. In 2021, the European Conservative and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament published a very useful report on these connections called “Network of Networks — The Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.”
The EU pays for and encourages projects aimed at promoting Islamic immigration to Europe, such as the Eurislam project, whose goal was to find ways better to integrate Muslim newcomers through mutual adaptation by immigrants and Europeans.
The European Commission has a history of promoting Islam in the name of protecting minorities (Muslim, non-white, LGBTQ, etc.). September 21 is European Action Day Countering Hate Speech Against Muslims. In 2017, Dutch socialist Frans Timmermans, First Vice-President of the European Commission, wrote to all “Muslim compatriots” to assure them that “they are not only key stakeholders in European society, but also that they can find in the European Commission a loyal friend . . . .” Mr. Timmermans worried about “anti-Muslim hatred” and “illegal on-line hate speech,” proclaimed that young Muslims “represent Europe’s future,” and concluded that “our common European project needs to be rethought together.”
Spreading the religion of Islam is a Koranic obligation. If non-believers will not convert peacefully, they should be converted by force, through jihad, or Islamic holy war. The Muslim Brotherhood officially endorses jihad.
In the world of orthodox Islam, only Christians and Jews may optionally be allowed to keep their religion in Muslim lands if they accept the status of dhimmi, or second-rank citizens who pay a special tax, can be humiliated at will, and can be stripped even of their remaining rights if their Muslim masters so decide.
After the Americans invaded Iraq invasion of Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam Hussein’s Arab nationalist secular regime, most Iraqi Christians, who numbered about a million in the late 20th century, were killed or fled. They were one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East, with a presence dating back to ancient Assyria.
Emil Shimoun Nona, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, in northern Iraq, was forced out and is now the Archbishop of the Chaldean Catholic Diocese of Australia and New Zealand. In 2014, he published this warning to Europeans in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, a liberal, mainstream newspaper:
Our suffering today is a prelude to what you Europeans and Western Christians will also suffer in the near future. I lost my diocese. The physical place of my apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead. But my community is still alive. Please try to understand us: Your liberal and democratic principles are worthless here. You need to rethink our reality in the Middle East because you are welcoming more and more Muslims into your countries. You are also at risk. You must make strong and courageous decisions, even if it means contradicting your principles. You think that all men are equal, but that is not true. Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this in time, you will become victims of the enemy you have welcomed into your home.
During the civil war in Syria, America and Western Europe gave military and financial aid to rebel groups, including Islamist groups, against another Arab nationalist, secular regime, that of Bashar al-Assad. Syrian Christians shared the plight of their Iraqi brothers. However, in part thanks to Russian intervention in support of Assad, and because Assad is still in control of much of Syria, about half of the formerly 1.5-million-strong Christian community still remains.
In 2011, a Franco-British-American attack overturned the nationalist, secular regime of Muammar Gaddafi and wrecked Libya. Along with the civil wars in Iraq and Syria that the West promoted, this led to a permanent increase in illegal immigration into Europe. Even before 2011, Erdoğan’s Turkey had visa-free flight connections with Africa and the Middle-East, and had become one of the main illegal gateways to Europe. Libya controlled its borders and made illegal emigration to Europe very difficult.
Radical Islamic groups foster and sometimes organize illegal entry into Europe. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), with 57 member states, encourages legal migration. Russia, which is home to some 25 million Muslims out of a total population of 147 million, is an OIC observer nation.
In 2017, the Pew Research Center published a report on Europe’s growing Muslim population with three future scenarios, depending on the level of immigration. Six years later, it was already clear that we had the “high” scenario. The share of the Muslim population in Europe (excluding Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) is expected to increase from 4.9 percent in 2016 to 14 percent by 2050.
Sweden would be most affected, with an increase from 8.1 percent to 30.6 percent. Here are projections for other countries: Germany from 6.1 percent to 19.7 percent, Belgium from 7.6 percent to 18.2 percent, Netherlands from 7.1 percent to 18.2 percent, France from 8.8 percent to 18 percent, Britain from 6.3 percent to 17.2 percent, Norway from 5.7 percent to 17 percent, Finland from 2.7 percent to 15 percent, and Italy from 4.8 percent to 14.1 percent.
Europe is rapidly ceasing to be Christian. According to a study by France’s Statistical Office (INSEE), in 2019–2020, only 19 percent of Frenchmen called themselves Catholics, 9 percent claimed other Christian affiliations, and 10 percent said they were Muslims. However, only 8 percent of Catholics go to Church regularly while 20 percent of Muslims regularly attend Mosque. While 67 percent of children raised in Catholic families and 69 percent of those raised in other Christian families keep the religion, 91 percent of Muslims do. Only a few hundred French Muslims convert to Christianity every year, while thousands of Frenchmen convert to Islam. Muslims who convert choose Evangelical churches or Traditional Catholic communities because the mainstream Catholic Church is afraid of them.
The Koran encourages believers to kill both the convert and the persons who converted him. Ex-Muslims are seldom killed for apostasy in Europe, but a report published in 2022 by the European Center for Law and Justice details many cases of persecution.
Younger generations of Muslims in Europe are becoming more radical in the face of increasingly degenerate, atheist Europe, where wokeness and gender/LGBT ideologies are the new religion.
A study published in 2016 by the pro-immigration think-tank Institut Montaigne found that 28 percent of French Muslims put Sharia law above French law and favored polygamy and wearing the burqa. In the 18-24 age category, the number was almost 50 percent! Another poll, taken in 2014, found that 27 percent of Frenchmen, ages 18-24, supported the Islamic State (ISIS) that was then established in Iraq and Syria. This poll did not distinguish respondents by religion; the percentage of young Muslims who supported ISIS must have been much higher.
It is in this environment that the Muslim Brotherhood carries on its work, along with the Salafi movement. Both groups are a source of Jihadi terrorism in Europe, as well as in Muslim countries, many of which have banned them.
At the same time, all 57 OIC member states are committed to the guidelines adopted by the 9th Islamic Summit Conference in Doha, Qatar, in 2000: to foster the Islamic identity, culture, and religion of Muslims living outside the Islamic world, to counter integration efforts by host countries, to pressure them to accept the presence on their soil of a separate Muslim community, and to let Muslims to preserve “their spiritual and moral superiority.” The guidelines continue:
This strategy should be targeted at providing the necessary conditions for individuals from the Muslim communities to occupy the key positions within host societies, in the economic, cultural, political or information fields . . . .
Muslims now constitute an essential element in the demographic structure of the West by virtue of their residence and integration in the economic and social fabric of the West. Everybody is now convinced of the fact that Islam has become a visible phenomenon in North America and a reality that cannot be ignored in the western society. Some have even started considering Islam to be so firmly grounded in Europe that it can never be uprooted.
The OIC notes that “Western societies are not identical, accordingly, an advantage should be drawn from the differences in their policies.” It devotes a chapter to the need for Islamic schools outside the Islamic world. Another line of action by the OIC is through social centers and Islamic charities, something perfected by the Muslim Brotherhood.
To understand the OIC, but also the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafist movement, and countries such as Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, one must recognize that Islam is not just a religion, like Christianity or Hinduism. Islam is the complete organization of religious, political and social life. For an orthodox Muslim, the Ummah — the world Islamic community — takes precedence over citizenship, race, or ethnicity.
For traditional Islam, there is implacable division between the world of Islam, where people profess Allah and his prophet, and the world of war, which remains to be converted or conquered. Islam is totalitarian and internationalist, just like communism. The ultimate aim of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood is to establish a world califate like that ISIS declared in 2014.
European leftists such as Frans Timmermans have largely sidelined Christianity. Now they welcome in hundreds of thousands of Muslims every year, who will be influenced from abroad, taught by Imams who are so radical they are banned even from many Islamic countries. Are Europe’s rulers blind to the threat or is this what they hope for?
By Augustin Goland