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Home Moderate Islam is Our New Religion

Moderate Islam is Our New Religion

I have been searching for moderate Islam since September 11 and just like a lost sock in the dryer, it was in the last place I expected it to be.

There is no moderate Islam in the mosques or in Mecca. You won’t find it in the Koran or the Hadiths. If you want to find moderate Islam, browse the newspaper editorials after a terrorist attack or take a course on Islamic religion taught by a Unitarian Sociologist wearing fake native jewelry.

You can’t find a moderate Islam in Saudi Arabia or Iran, but you can find it in countless network news specials, articles and books about the two homelands of their respective brands of Islam.

You won’t find the fabled land of moderate Muslims in the east. You won’t even find it in the west. Like all myths it exists in the imagination of those who tell the stories. You won’t find a moderate Islam in the Koran, but you will find it in countless Western books about Islam.

Moderate Islam isn’t what most Muslims believe. It’s what most liberals believe that Muslims believe.

The new multicultural theology of the West is moderate Islam. Moderate Islam is the perfect religion for a secular age since it isn’t a religion at all.

Take Islam, turn it inside out and you have moderate Islam. Take a Muslim who hasn’t been inside a mosque in a year, who can name the entire starting lineup of the San Diego Chargers, but can’t name Mohammed’s companions and you have a moderate Muslim. Or more accurately, a secular Muslim.

An early generation of Western leaders sought the affirmation of their national destinies in the divine. This generation of Western leaders seeks the affirmation of their secular liberalism in a moderate Islam.

Even if they have to make it up.

Without a moderate Islam the Socialist projects of Europe which depend on heavy immigration collapse. America’s War on Terror becomes the endless inescapable slog that the rise of ISIS has once again revealed it to be. Multiculturalism, post-nationalism and Third World Guiltism all implode.

Without moderate Muslims, nationalism returns, borders close and the right wins. That is what they fear.

If there is no moderate Islam, no moderate Mohammed, no moderate Allah, then the Socialist Kingdom of Heaven on Earth has to go in the rubbish bin. The grand coalitions in which LGBT activists and Islamists scream at Jews over Gaza aren’t the future; they’re the Weimar Republic on wheels.

Flash back to Obama in his tan suit wearily saying that he has no strategy for ISIS. The original plan was to capture Osama alive, give him a civilian trial, cut a deal with the moderate Taliban and announce the end of the War on Terror before the midterm elections.

So much for that.

Moderate Islam is a difficult faith. To believe in it you have to disregard over a thousand years of recorded history, theology, demographics and just about everything that predates 1965. You have to ignore the bearded men chopping off heads because they don’t represent the majority of Muslims.

Neither does Mohammed, who did his own fair share of headchopping.

The real Islam is a topic that non-Muslims of no faith who hold sacred only the platitudes of a post-everything society are eager to lecture on without knowing anything about it.

Their Islam is not the religion of Mohammed, the Koran, the Hadiths, the Caliphs or its practitioners in such places as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq or Indonesia. Their Islam is a religion that does not exist, but that they fervently believe must exist because without it their way of life is as doomed as the dodo.

They aren’t Muslims. They have no faith in Allah or the Koran. Instead they have faith in the goodness of an Islam that exists without resort to scriptures, theology or deity. This may seem strange to actual believers, but after all their own poor tattered scraps of Christianity or Judaism don’t bother paying too much attention to deities or scriptures except when it comes to cherry-picking quotes about tolerance.

Is it any wonder that they treat Islam the same way?

The true moderate Muslims are secular liberals of loosely Christian and Jewish persuasion who have invented and believe in a moderate Islam that doesn’t exist outside of their own heads. This secular Islam, which values all life, is dedicated to social justice and universal tolerance, is a counterpart of their own bastardized religions. And they are too afraid to wake up and realize that it doesn’t exist.

When American and European leaders insist that Islam has nothing to do with the latest Islamic atrocity, they are not referencing a religion practiced by Muslims, but an imaginary religion that they imagine Muslims must practice because the alternative is the end of everything that they believe in.

Their moderate Islam is light on the details, beyond standing for social justice, fighting Global Warming and supporting gay rights, because it is really multiculturalism wearing a fake beard. When a Western leader claims that the latest batch of Islamic terrorists don’t speak for Islam, he isn’t defending Muslims, he’s defending multiculturalism. He assumes that Muslims believe in multiculturalism because he does.

Moderate Islam is just multiculturalism misspelled. Its existence is a firm article of faith for those who believe in multiculturalism.

Dissuading a believer in moderate Muslims from his invented faith by citing the long trail of corpses or the hateful Hadiths that call for mass murder is futile because these are not the roots of his religion. He doesn’t know what a Hadith is nor does he care. As a social justice man in good standing, he attributes the violent track record of Islam to European colonialism and oppression.

He has never read the Koran. He has read a thousand articles about how Muslims are oppressed at the airport, in Gaza, in Burma and in Bugs Bunny cartoons. They are his new noble savages and he will not hear a word against them. Having colonized their identities in his imagination (despite the marked up copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism that he keeps by his bedside) he treats them as reflections of his ego.

When you say that moderate Muslims don’t exist, you are calling him a bad person. When you challenge Islam, you are attacking multiculturalism and he will call you a racist, regardless of the fact that Islam is as much of a race as Communism, Nazism or the Mickey Mouse Fan Club were races.

The moderate Muslim is an invention of the liberal academic, the secular theologian, the vapid politician and his shrill idiot cousin, the political activist. Like the money in the budgets that underpin their plans and the scientific evidence for Global Warming, he does not exist.

And it is not necessary that he should exist. It is only necessary that we have faith in his existence.

The degraded lefty descendants of Christians and Jews wait for a moderate Muslim messiah who will reconcile the impossibilities of their multicultural society by healing the conflicts between Islam and the West. Until they find him, they have to believe, not in a divinity, but in the moderate Muslim.

Comments

  1. fizziks3/9/14

    This otherwise poignant piece is ruined by the global warming denialsim. What part of carbon dioxide molecules absorb and then re-radiate certain infrared wavelengths of light don't you accept as true science?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous4/9/14

      Then why doesn't it get warmer as the climate modela suggested? Science is to look after evidence and ther is none for the case of any warming. Quite the contrary, while the temperature stays flat, polar ice is increasing while "scientists" tell us it should not be there.

      Delete
    2. Anonymous4/9/14

      Carbon Dioxide is a poor absorber, trapper and re-radiator of heat. You've hit the nail on the head as to exactly why current Global Warming "science" is nonsense. There are other climate change concerns that need to be monitored, but not CO2... a tiny, tiny factor dwarfed by larger, mostly normal, cyclical factors outside of human interaction.

      Delete
    3. Anonymous3/4/15

      Really? You read that article and what you key on is that he dissed global warming? Talk about hooked on religion.

      Delete
  2. Anonymous3/9/14

    A bit of a caricature, but essentially correct. Try as I might, I have given up believing that there are 'moderate' Muslims. At heart, two thirds want Shari'a law imposed, even if they have no idea what that means. Everyone thinks that ISIS killing followers of other faiths is something new. Hello!!! In the Islamic revolution in Iran Bahais were executed as apostates. What other religion engages in killing its enemies? Whatever apologists may say, I am afraid we are back in the Dark Ages with Muslims.

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  3. Anonymous3/9/14

    Multiculturalism was the evil pushed onto the Australian people in 1975 by a conservative Prime Minister to bolster immigration. We now import 250,000 each year (to add to our 20 million) with resultant social upheavals, lack of resources and problems with law and order. The people cannot protest about multiculturalism lest they be prosecuted as racists .

    2% of the country is now muslim - represented by many different races - but have in common the religion of Islam.

    The government is now determined to find moderate muslims to help them explain away the beheadings and other acts of brutality carried out in Iraq by Australian citizens. These acts do not fit their narrative.

    The muslim leaders keep telling officials there is no such thing as moderate Islam. But they refuse to listen and we regaled daily by talk of moderates.

    Thanks for the great article.

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  4. Anonymous3/9/14

    The BEST single article on the Religion of Multiculturalism.

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  5. Luke3/9/14

    Fizziks, the carbon dioxide (CO2) has to exist (and stay existing) first. We live in a sea of oxygen (O2), with a trace of CO2. The photosynthetic plants are way ahead of CO2-breathing animals metabolically, and this gives every indication it will continue. Are you familiar with Lechatlier's Principle? It's about chemical equilibria, and (oversimplified) how attempts to upset them tend to be resisted. If CO2 does get raised, this makes the plants more efficient at converting it to O2.

    Anyway, there is much evidence that solar output is determinative on earth's temperatures, and that's declining for some years to come.

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  6. Anonymous4/9/14

    Great article. I'm sick of politicians, both liberal and conservative, telling us that Islam is "the religion of peace," yet they know nothing of Islam and ignore a millenia and a half of Muslim history. I tired of conservative talk show hosts being politically correct ranting about the dangers of "radical" Islam as if there is a peaceful version. They rant on how Islam has been "hijacked" by the terrorists, yet the terrorists are actually practicing what their religion really teaches. I know that there are many decent people who identify themselves as Muslims, but that doesn't mean that they are practicing what Koran and the Hadith teach.

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  7. Anonymous4/9/14

    fizziks-

    Climate change is very real. For example, the average climate of the northern hemisphere is so cold as to cause the

    ground to be buried under a thousand feet of ice. The cycle of glacier on/glacier off takes place every several

    hundred thousand years and can be clearly seen in many ways. Even as the science is settled that glaciation has taken

    place, the causes are still undergoing vigorous debate.

    With respect to the idea that humans are causing harmful changes to the climate at this very moment, I am waiting for

    some peer-reviewed papers that propose what the optimum climate is for our biosphere. The first question that would

    naturally flow would be where is our current climate and trend in relation to this finding.

    Strangely, nobody seems interested in this vital comparison. Not so strangely, the solutions that are frequently

    demanded in the most urgent voice, all converge on a socialist worldview: statism, bigger government, higher taxes,

    less personal liberty. That bigger picture tells me all that I need to know about "climate science".

    This is but another aspect of the world of liberal utopians.

    -- theBuckWheat

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  8. Anonymous4/9/14

    When US presidents tell you that Islam is a religion of peace, then you can look for moderate Islam in the White House.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Obama couldn't even get himself to admit that ISIS are Moslems (despite the word 'Islamic' in their name); he called them 'nihilists', which is the exact opposite of what they are. Doesn't anyone know how to use a dictionary anymore?

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  10. Dr.Zuhdi Jasser can be considered moderate muslim even though that would fall under an pré WWII joke: A proud German Nazi calls out: Ein Deutcher lügt nicht! To which Moisje remarks: One German on 40 million, a bad percentage.

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  11. Anonymous4/9/14

    THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE!

    creeper

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  12. bravo bravo bravo - and todah

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  13. Anonymous4/9/14

    Great article.

    How is it possible for progressives perceive global warming over a 150 million year span and somehow miss jihad over a 1,400 year span?

    Jihad has an easily defined starting time and place. Today it encompasses over 20% of humanity. Give jihad more time and what do you expect.

    The vast void of sub-zero space will deal with the hot air created by progressive voices. But progressive voices only accelerate the reality of jihad.

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  14. Joel Abramovitz4/9/14

    Not that this exception invalidates your real point, but I believe (based on a year's service in Kosovo) that your typical Albanian is a Muslim of a different sort, not to mention strongly pro-US and pro-Israel.

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    Replies
    1. I agree that the east europeans who call themselves muslim are very different from the mideast kind.....BUT by the very definition of the word "muslim", they are not muslims at all.

      Delete
  15. While I am sympathetic with the author's point, and agree that the dominant form of Islam is not moderate, it seems overwrought to claim that moderate Islam does not exist. There are large minorities (if not actual majorities) of Muslims in places like Turkey and Iran, not to mention Eastern Europe (such as Albania as Joel A. points out above) who practice a more secular and, yes, moderate form of Islam. Perhaps they are not "true" Muslims, whatever that means, but let's acknowledge them and hope that they gain the upper hand politically.

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  16. the "moderate" elites in Iran and Turkey are wealthy secular urbanites who have been ground under by the majority

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  17. Anonymous4/9/14

    What is striking about Islam is how little a deity matters. .The Left is trying to pick off the weak ones like they do with Christianity and Judaism. We will reward you if only give in, go to secular colleges, say the right things and keep your mouth shut when you get jobs in corporations, government and academia. Just don't believe in anything above the system.

    The strategy simply can't work with Islam. An Islamist does what he wants first and praises Allah for the opportunity. The Left can't subsume Islam because it can't offer anything. If a pedophile wants a child he gets it. If a rapist wants an easy target he gets it. If an Islamist wants free money he raids and then puts in a tax.The Left needs the moderate Moslem because those who really do believe in something higher can't let this go on forever. The Left can't change Islam but it can lose its current hold.

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  18. Anonymous4/9/14

    Absolutely Brilliant, Daniel!!

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  19. Alana Forsyth4/9/14

    Brilliant! Just brilliant.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Anonymous4/9/14

    The essays are great, but you are blessed with the smartest group of readers it's been my pleasure to come across on the Web.

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  21. I am. It's the readers that make the site.

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  22. I've said before that I've never seen such brilliance, logic and reason all gathered together in one place in both the writer and the readers. It's exception not the norm, mores the pity.

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  23. bearspaw4/9/14

    Absolutly God damn right.

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  24. Anonymous5/9/14

    fizziks,
    If the facts are on your side, than you talk about the facts. If science is on your side than you talk about the scientific method. If the facts are inconvenient and the scientific method is inconvenient, talk about how 'science is settled' and how anyone who disagrees is a stupid poopy head. Believers in AGW have quit both of the first two and have failed to show up for debates as well. Media consistently disparages 'deniers' but will not talk about anything that undercuts 'global warming'. Since 'deniers' keep bringing up specific data points they are ignorant fools who should be hung.

    If the only problem for the Global Warming believers was that it quit getting hotter a while back, then hand-waving for ten years would work to keep the Climate Change, “CO2 is killing us” meme alive.
    But there are a lot more problems than that. All the predictions of past IPCCs and AL Gore, James Hansen, and everyone else, are on the record in the public domain. Anyone who desires to see for themselves can search the record for free on the Internet. All it takes is a curious mind and a little of your time. Besides being able to see their predictions one can see their actions. Mr Gore bought oceanfront property despite his official predictions. Made a few hundred millions with his claims.

    Some of the past claims that haunt the Church of AGW besides the last eighteen years: The Arctic sea ice recovery record, Antarctic sea ice records, diminishing numbers and strengths of tropical cyclones and storms, better historical reconstructions of past climate change (LIA, MWP, HTM, etc) without manmade CO2 forcings. Coral reefs in recovery from El Nino induced bleaching, and steadily increasing food crop yields are also inconvenient truths.

    A major peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950. Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it. How to prove AGW, ignore the evidence that does not agree, and falsify part of the rest. Can you read a spreadsheet? Out of 11,944 papers that he looked at only 41 explicitly said Man caused a majority of the warming since 1950. Warming that stopped seventeen years ago.

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  25. Anonymous5/9/14

    I understand the argument, but still, what about India, Egypt, what used to be Lebanon, and other places where Muslims who consider themselves Muslims live without Sharia, and without supporting the fanatics?

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  26. Anonymous5/9/14

    Thank you Daniel for the work you put into your article.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Anonymous5/9/14

    The comment above about 'lefty Catholics and Jews' deserves another look. Obviously there are those who call themselves these names and identify with the phrase. But that is comparable to picking the cutest puppy at the shelter, even if it appears unfriendly.
    Religion is not a multiple choice affair, although many wish it were. By its' very nature it would be what we now call 'conservative'..None of that 'if it feels good do it' stuff of at least, my youth.
    A modern interpretation of 'moderate' Islam would seem to be one that sanctions wife beating only every other day, and only marrying children who are not one's cousins. As the beloved Joan said so often "oh grow up."

    sophie

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  28. I modestly propose a cloistered community be set up wherein the proponents of this new normalized and non-offensive faith perspective can gather to contemplate a more complete systematic theology and hermenutics (Herman who?), to be henceforth known as:

    Abby Normal

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  29. Anonymous5/9/14

    They do the same old lies about minorities...yet look around the world and see how they live everywhere they're the majority. It sickens me how we're forced to accept their lies.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Anonymous5/9/14

    DP111 writes..

    The degraded lefty descendants of Christians and Jews wait for a moderate Muslim messiah who will reconcile the impossibilities of their multicultural society by healing the conflicts between Islam and the West.

    I was under the impression that Obama was the messiah. Why else the adulation of Obama in 2008.

    ReplyDelete
  31. Anonymous7/9/14

    Apart from denial of global warming. which IS HAPPENING the rest of the article I totally agree with, Multiculturalism is the coffin in which Islamists will bury Western democracy and civilization.

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    Replies
    1. Anonymous16/9/14

      Science says NOT!

      Delete
  32. The author writes, "To believe in [moderate Islam] you have to disregard over a thousand years of recorded history, theology, demographics and just about everything that predates 1965." He has it more or less backwards.

    The traditional Islam that has existed in most times and places was moderate. But since the mid 20th century, the Saudis have used their oil wealth to export their peculiar brand of radical Islam. They have intentionally undermined traditional, local forms of Islam and used their wealth to create rival fundamentalist Islamic factions. They have successfully propagandized young Muslims everywhere - especially in the USA, where successive administrations of both parties have aided and abetted the takeover of Islam in the US by their Saudi friends.

    The author validates the lies of radical Muslims. He uncritically repeats their assertion that they are the real Muslims. He sides with them against history, against Islamic scholars, and against most of the older generation of Muslims. He endorses their entire made-up worldview, which sees history approaching an apocalyptic endpoint in which Muslims battle their Western/Christian/Jewish/Pagan/Secularist enemy (i.e., an undifferentiated, but supposedly unified anti-Muslim army). He simply places himself on the opposite side of the battle line.

    If you want to learn the real story about the politics of Islam in the 21st century, the best person to read is Daniel Pipes. He is an enemy of radical Islam - and therefore an enemy of the lies repeated by the author of this article.

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  33. Traditional Islam was theocratic, supremacist and oppressive. It had far more in common with ISIS than your construct of moderate Muslims.

    The Saudis did their part, but the Wahhabis were reviving the Islam of Mohammed.

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  34. Anonymous7/1/15

    Excellent article, but lacking in some specifics in order to make your case.

    In analyzing ISLAM, after 911, I returned to the original meanings of words, in particular, the word ISLAM itself. It is ‘translated’ variously, by these western so called scholars as meaning; PEACE, or SUBMIT. This is in and of itself validates your thesis. Islam, MUST, I repeat, MUST, be translated in the original Arabic in order to convey the original meaning. In Arabic, ISLAM is properly translated as;

    THERE WILL BE PEACE, WHEN ALL THE WORLD SUBMITS TO THE WILL OF ALLAH.

    There can only be ONE way to interpret this…
    Thus the doctrine of Taqqiya, or The Deception, is a form of war. Under Islam you see, there are two HOUSES. The House of Peace and the House of War. ( Or the Dar al Islam, and the Dar al Haarb.) Islam, is by definition; Holy WAR. And, All War is Deception. (Ask Sun Tzu)

    Therefore, to conclude, that there is something called ‘moderate’ Islam, is the Ultimate Taqqiya, designed to use the enemies weaknesses against them. Thus they play the Game of liberal society, those who wet their pants at the thought of (GASP) VIOLENCE against themselves, and, as you stated, they cannot fathom that anyone could possibly be unlike them or their version of religion, which, is simply using religion to paint themselves as ‘moral’ people. They use ‘sweet words on the tongue, like honey, that grow bitter in the belly’, the perfect Bibilcal representation of the doctrine of our own version of Taqqiya; Political Correctness.

    They also hate Christians, and Islam has become their soul mate simply because of the old Arab doctrine; The enemy of my enemy, is my friend.

    Obama, the False Prophet of Socialism was a moooslim, and once a muslim always a muslim. He was prophecied in a Hadith. The “Tall dark man of the west” has come, as I lay out in my article; Coincidence or Prophecy.

    God Bless
    The Piper

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  35. Anonymous14/1/15

    The climate change jab was not needed, and really takes away from what is otherwise a brilliant analysis.

    That said, there are far too many comments on this thread which seem to miss the point entirely, and conflate people with ideology.

    That there are Muslims who are not terrorists and despise what terrorists are doing is undeniable. The whole point of the article, though, was to show that the doctrine of Islam is not what such people believe; if they did, they would be terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.

    Every time there is a terrorist attack you see endless variations of the following: "I am a Muslim and what these people did does not represent me or my beliefs."
    No one is saying that they do. We are saying that they represent Islamic teaching directly found in the Quran and the Sahih Ahadith. Learn to distinguish between the doctrine of Islam (and if you are ignorant of it, study up) and your own values which, more than likely, do not come from Islamic teaching.

    Unlike other religious texts, you cannot cherry-pick the Quran; the Quran itself forbids it. Pick any verse you like which espouses forgiveness and peace (if you can find one), and I assure you it has been abrogated - which means it no longer applies, has been rendered null and void, is not 'kosher.' Either you take the Quran as a whole and accept the rules of abrogation, or you take none of it; those are your choices according to the Quran and according to Muhammad and according to the thousands and thousands of Islamic scholars over the centuries. Any real expert on Islam will tell you the same.

    Peace.

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  36. The distinguished Romanian historian Neagu Djuvara, who is 98, said on Saturday that he believes that the recent murders in France are a step in a process by which Europe will be conquered by Muslims... http://pvewood.blogspot.ro/2015/01/neagu-djuvara-thinks-killings-in-paris.html

    ReplyDelete

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