Is Ignorance the Reason Why People Don’t Like Islam?

Fjordman’s latest essay has been published at Tundra Tabloids. Some excerpts are below:

Anders Ravik Jupskås has been hailed in the mainstream media and consulted as one of Norway’s leading experts on so-called right-wing extremists. In a case where Jupskås was used as the senior academic “expert” by the state broadcaster NRK, he talked about right-wing extremism and so-called Islamophobia as nearly the same thing. In his view, there seems to be no rational reason to be opposed to Islamization or continued Muslim immigration. Such resistance basically comes down to ignorance, for the most part. This view was made explicit when Jupskås was interviewed by NRK, who presented numbers indicating that people in Oslo were supposed to be more positive towards Muslims than elsewhere in the country.

[…]

France probably has the highest percentage of Muslims of any Western European country today. According to the logic displayed by NRK and Mr. Jupskås, French people should really love Islam because they have met so many Muslims personally. The only problem with this theory is that it is flat-out wrong and has no empirical basis, which means that it is not real science, merely a combination of wishful thinking and propaganda.

A survey from October 2012 showed that 60% of the French think Islam is too prominent in their country. 43% said the presence of Muslims was a “threat” to national identity while only 17% saw it as culturally enriching. 67% said Muslims were not integrated into the mainstream, and 68% thought Muslims themselves were to blame for this. Muslim leaders and others indirectly admit that rising opposition to Islamization is a fact by warning that a wave of so-called Islamophobia is now sweeping society.

Similar trends can be seen in other European countries, from Germany to Britain. In response to this, international Islamic organizations are intensifying their efforts to clamp down upon any criticism or mockery of Islam in the Western world, precisely because they sense growing popular resistance — and they are right.

The bottom line is that Europeans are “getting to know” Islam and those who practice it, and they don’t like what they see. Some European countries in the south and east still have deep national memories of being at the receiving end of centuries of Muslim slave raids and looting, and needed no modern reminder of the true face of Islam.

No, this is not about xenophobia, fear of the unknown. It’s about fear and loathing of something they know all too well: the smugness, the muggings and the violent street crime, the daily insults, the arrogance, the gang rapes, the people who come from backward countries but still behave as if they are the new Master Race.

What we are witnessing now is a rising tide of righteous anger amongst the native peoples of an entire continent, the cradle of the most inventive and creative civilization the world has ever known, who have finally had enough of being robbed of their dignity, their history and their land in exchange for lies and Multicultural fairy tales presented to them by their mass media and so-called leaders.

It will only grow in strength in the years to come.

Read the rest at Tundra Tabloids.

For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.