One of the claims presented against Islam-critical writers is that they suffer from paranoia about a secret Islamic conspiracy to Islamize Europe and the Western world. This is of course not true. Nobody ever sad that it was secret, at least not entirely so. The long-term goal of Islamic theology is for Islam to be triumphant across the entire world, including Europe and the Western world. This is simply mainstream Islam, as it has existed for centuries; it is not a recent innovation by a few radicals.
Besides, the truth is that far from exaggerating, even critics of Islam can be taken by surprise at the sheer speed of events, and by how quickly many Western leaders are caving in to Islamic pressures.
In Denmark, the writers Helle Merete Brix, Torben Hansen and Lars Hedegaard in 2003 published the book I krigens hus: Islams kolonisering af Vesten (“In the House of War: Islam’s Colonization of the West”). According to them, we are now experiencing a third great wave of Jihad, yet another attempt to conquer, colonize and Islamize Europe after Arabs and Turks spent centuries trying to do so before. Predictably, these courageous authors were ridiculed for their warnings, most aggressively by individuals from the political Left.
For instance, Michael Jarlner in the left-wing newspaper Politiken in his review from 2003 dismissed the book as “spiteful.” He claimed that the “ravings” of those sounding the alarm against an ongoing Islamization of Europe were “delusions” and “prejudiced paranoia of the worst order.”
The conservative columnist Mikael Jalving some years later admitted that he didn’t take such allegations about Islamization entirely seriously at first, either. However, he later came to realize that these warnings might be on to something real after all. Many of the problems related to political violence, the burning of schools, kindergartens or cars and rising Islamic threats against free speech were problems that only a brave few warned against some years ago. These problems have now become a daily reality in a number of cities.
In fact, even some allegedly delusional pessimists have underestimated how bad things truly are. Lars Hedegaard, one of the co-authors of I krigens hus, was attacked and nearly killed in his own home in 2013. Moreover, in 2003 these authors did not foresee that because of Islam, Denmark would merely a couple of years later be involved in one if its greatest foreign policy crises since the Second World War.
The Mohammed Cartoons Crisis took place after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published some relatively innocent cartoons of Islam’s founder Mohammed on September 30, 2005. I was one of the first people outside of Denmark to write about this case in English. Already in October 2005, I was campaigning in support of the paper and free speech on my old blog.
Did I understand at this point in time that this was a significant story? Yes. Did I foresee that it would become a big international incident that would cause many deaths, planned terror attacks, assassination attempts and the burning of embassies a few months later? No. What this means is that even a notorious so-called Islamophobe like myself actually underestimated the scale of events.
Between 2013 and 2014, Ahmed Akkari, one of the imams who had been heavily involved in whipping up international Islamic hatred against Denmark during the cartoons crisis, decided to switch sides and apologize for his previous actions. In a book published in 2014, Akkari revealed that a Danish delegation of imams had secretly met with the Islamic terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East in the autumn of 2005, in order to draw attention to the Mohammed cartoons and utilize them for their own purposes.
Akkari further admitted that he and many other Muslims were very happy over the mass-murdering Jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001. I was living in Egypt and that time and had myself seen celebrations among local Muslims there. However, Ahmed Akkari talks about 9/11 celebrations that he witnessed first-hand — among Muslims living in Scandinavia and the Western world, not in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Pakistan.
Overall, Ahmed Akkari confirms virtually everything that so-called Islamophobes have been saying for years: That some Muslims speak with two tongues, that many Muslim leaders seek to infiltrate our institutions and Islamize our nations and that far too many Muslims quietly despise the non-Muslim countries in which they have freely chosen to settle. They also seek to silence critics of Islam, one way or another.
The author, editor and free speech activist Lars Hedegaard was assaulted in his own home in Copenhagen on February 5 2013. He survived because his assassin missed with the first shot against his head, fired from the range of one meter, and because the 70-year-old Hedegaard fought back against his much younger would be-murderer. The gun jammed during this life-and-death struggle, preventing further shots, before the assailant fled on foot. “It comes as a surprise that I should be shot at, but apparently I should be,” Hedegaard stated at the time.