Europe’s Ramadan

Look at all the lights! Aren’t they pretty?

March 19, 2024

By Bruce Bawer

Reprinted from FrontPageMag

Well, it’s that time of year again: the Holy Month of Ramadan, when one of the holiest things you can do is to grab a copy of your Holy Book, fly to the Holy City of Mecca, make your way to the Holy Mosque (Al-Masjid Al-Haram), fall to your knees, and pray with all your mind and heart and soul for the extermination of the infidel.

To be sure, many of Allah’s more fervent believers, having carefully perused the words of His Holy Book, recognize that prayer in itself is woefully insufficient, and that in order to properly celebrate this holiest of months it is necessary to act upon the Holy Book’s injunctions that they do their own part to bring about the infidel’s consummate and unmitigated destruction.

So it is that in 1973, Egypt, Syria, and eight other Arab governments took the occasion of Ramadan to launch the Yom Kippur War against Israel. In 2016, the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, in which the jihadist Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53, occurred during Ramadan. When the Holy Month came around in 2022, Palestinians were once again motivated to up their game, subjecting the people of Israel to a series of devastating rocket attacks as well as dozens of stabbings, bombings, and other sacred activities. And during last year’s Ramadan, some of the most pious of Muslims launched rockets into Israel from every direction – Gaza, Lebanon, Syria – while equally devout rioters waving a Hamas flag occupied the Temple Mount and threw stones at Jews who were engaged in prayer at the Wailing Wall, probably for peace on earth and good will toward men. Suckers!

Which brings us to the present day. You might say that this time around, Hamas started its Ramadan celebration a few months earlier, namely on October 7. Since that day, alas, Israel has made things rather tough for the Prophet’s ardent followers in Gaza. The other side of that coin, needless to say, is the proliferation of pro-Hamas marches that have taken place weekend after weekend in the streets of major cities all over the part of the world that – still governed (for the time being, anyway) more or less in accordance with Western democratic norms instead of being subjected to the harsh tenets of sharia law – is designated by the Koran as the House of War. In those marches, the sons and daughters of Allah have been joined by individuals who, while not yet converts to the True Faith, are patently eager to demonstrate their willing subjugation to it.

Surely Allah, in his Heaven, is smiling down on these acts of pure servility.

But these marches aren’t the only way in which compliant infidels are announcing to the world their deference to Islam. This year, for the first time, the city of Oslo, Norway, is commemorating the month of Ramadan with a spectacular public display of brilliant, twinking lights in the shape of half-moons. These lights have been placed around Oslo’s City Hall (where, a few weeks ago, passersby could see a Hamas flag flying proudly) and along a couple of neighboring streets. Those streets, as it happens, are named for two of the most distinguished Norwegians of all time – Roald Amundsen, who led the first teams to reach both the South and the North Pole, and Fridtjof Nansen, who was also a major explorer (leading the first team to cross Greenland), but who won even greater distinction as a diplomat, playing a key role in the peaceful separation of Norway from Sweden and introducing the “Nansen passport” for persons left stateless after World War I. Neither Amundsen nor Nansen was a Muslim (Amundsen was a devout Christian who, during his perilous polar expeditions, felt he was entirely in God’s hands; Nansen was an atheist), but no doubt the names of these streets will, in the fullness of time, be changed to honor Muslims who have played key roles in Norway’s Islamization.

How did Oslo end up with Ramadan lights? They were proposed last year by Eirik Lae Solberg – a member of the Conservative Party who is now the head of the Oslo City Council (in effect, mayor of Oslo) – as a way of showing how “inclusive” Norway’s capital is. In a speech delivered at the lighting ceremony, Solberg proclaimed that “diversity makes Oslo, Oslo.” Reading this line, I immediately recalled what President Biden said in an interview with NBC’s Jonathan Capehart after this year’s State of the Union address. In the speech, under pressure from people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Biden had mentioned in passing the brutal murder of Laken Riley, an Augusta University nursing student, by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. In addition to calling the victim Lincoln instead of Laken, Biden called the killer an “illegal immigrant” – a faux pas for which he was eviscerated by the moral police of the American left. In his NBC interview, accordingly, Biden apologized for using that term, explaining that he should have said “undocumented.” People like Riley’s murderer, he added, had “built the country.”

Sure, illegal aliens built America. And diversity makes Oslo, Oslo. In fact, the kind of diversity represented by those Ramadan lights has transformed Oslo from a clean, quiet, and exceedingly pleasant city – a city in which, forty years ago (when there were barely a thousand Muslims in the entire country), you could stroll all over town in the middle of the night without ever feeling for an instant that  you were in the slightest bit of danger – into a city (now over 10% Muslim) with ever-expanding and increasingly insular Muslim enclaves. It’s a city in which more and more Norwegian parents are removing their children from public schools where they’re tyrannized every day by primitive Muslim bullies; a city in which the violent-crime statistics rise every year, and in which newspaper headlines about car burnings, shootings, stabbings, machete attacks, and gang melees (horrors of a sort unknown in Oslo before the massive Muslim influx) have become commonplace.

It’s a city that a growing number of people like me, who have the option to leave, have left – precisely because public officials who do things like spend tax money on Ramadan lights either can’t or won’t do anything to keep Oslo from descending ever further into Koran-fueled anarchy. It’s a city whose “diversity,” or “inclusivity,” if you want to use those words, isn’t a matter of integration or assimilation but of the steady development of a parallel society that is rapidly gaining power (of which these stupid Ramadan lights are just one example). And it’s a city where, two years ago this June, a jihadist opened fire at and around the pub that used to be my regular watering hole, killing two people (both of them acquaintances of mine) and wounding twenty-one. When the perpetrator’s trial started last week at the Oslo Courthouse, it began with the defendant complaining bitterly that – what else? – the proceedings had been scheduled during the Holy Month of Ramadan.

Where did Solberg get the idea for Ramadan lights? From Sadiq Khan, of course. Last year, on Mayor Khan’s orders, London – a metropolis that’s world-famous for having been utterly transformed by Islam (and not for the better) – celebrated Ramadan with a dazzling display of lights in the West End. This year, the lights are back for the second time. Joining Khan at this year’s lighting ceremony, some supposedly civic-minded public figure named Rahima Aziz hailed the lights as “a beacon of solidarity and harmony, representing the coming together of people from all faiths and none in this great, multicultural city” and as “a celebration of Muslims in Britain, a bold and prominent display of how proud we are to be Muslims at a time of shocking levels of hate towards Muslims and other faith groups.” The lights, incidentally, spell out the words “Please Don’t Hurt Us.” No, I’m kidding. They spell out “Happy Ramadan.” This year, moreover, there’s also a great big “illuminated crescent moon” in London’s Edgware Road. It’s been described as “a stunning, heart-warming sight” that is meant to celebrate – what else? – “Edgware Road’s diversity.” (Before you laugh at this concept, first ask yourself: how diverse is your street?)

Oslo isn’t the only city in Western Europe to borrow Khan’s cockamamie idea. In Germany, the city of Frankfurt is lighting up a leading pedestrian street, Grosse Bockenheimer Strasse, in honor of Ramadan. The “display of lights in the shape of stars, lanterns and crescent moons” was applauded by Mayor Nargess Eskandari-Gruenberg as a “beautiful gesture” representing “the peaceful co-existence of all people in Frankfurt” and intensifying the “cohesion in our diverse urban society.” Indeed, said Eskandari-Gruenberg, they are “lights of togetherness: against prejudice, discrimination, anti-Muslim racism and also antisemitism.” Antisemitism? That’s rich. As my friend Hege Storhaug, a prominent Norwegian women’s-rights activist and critic of Islam, asked the other day on Facebook: why aren’t Jewish holidays celebrated like this in Norway? “We know the answer,” she wrote. “Jewish decorations in our streets would scarcely be hanging peacefully for 24 hours before Norwegian and Muslim vandals tore them down.” Hege also pointed out a key detail about all these light displays: in the Muslim world, there are no “Ramadan lights” and nobody says “Happy Ramadan”: no, in cities like Kabul and Karachi and Kandahar, “Ramadan is a gloomy month” that’s all about “suffering,” “aggression,” and “irritation.”

Well, not for the eager-to-please infidels of Western Europe. For them, Ramadan is, above all, an opportunity to make (as politician Robert Lambrou of Alternative for Germany has said apropos of the Ramadan lights in Frankfurt) a “gesture of submission to Islam.” For the gesture of submission on Grosse Bockenheimer Strasse, taxpayers shelled out at least $80,000. (By contrast, noted Yannick Schwander of the Christian Democratic Union, when the streets of Frankfurt are lit up for Christmas, the money comes not from the public till but from “trade associations and donations.”) By the way, Frankfurt’s light show isn’t not the only way in which that burg is bending the knee for Ramadan: according to one report, teachers in a Frankfurt public school decided to show their respect for fasting Muslims by barring fifth graders (non-Muslims, you understand) from using water fountains – even though Muslims themselves aren’t required to fast for Ramadan until the age of 14.

So it goes. Every year there’s more and more of this sort of nonsense. As vividly illustrated by the breathtaking two-tiered approach of London’s Metropolitan Police during the current pro-Hamas demonstrations, cowards in positions of responsibility all over the Western world are deciding that appeasement is preferable to resistance, accommodation better than struggle, cowering slavery more desirable than precarious freedom. I submit that they’re insanely, calamitously, tragically wrong, and that the pusillanimous course they’ve chosen is only helping to hasten the conquerors’ already rapid advance and to bring about the utter collapse of liberal Western society.

But in the meantime, look at all the lights! Aren’t they pretty?

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