The world may be heading “towards a war between the cross and the crescent,” warned Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a Saturday Istanbul speech. Erdogan, an Islamist in a Western suit who’s given to scimitar-rattling, was responding to recent measures Austria took against jihadism.
As the AFP reports:
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday strongly criticised Austria’s move to close mosques and expel Turkish-funded imams, slamming the decision as anti-Islamic and promising a response.
“These measures taken by the Austrian prime minister are, I fear, leading the world towards a war between the cross and the crescent,” Erdogan said in a speech in Istanbul.
The crescent is a symbol associated with Islam.
His comments came the day after the Austrian government announced it could expel up to 60 Turkish-funded imams and their families and would shut down seven mosques as part of a crackdown on “political Islam”, triggering fury in Ankara.
In reality, Erdogan’s actual gripe is that Austria is resisting a war already raging — a demographic war. It’s a conflict the Turkish leader has been enthusiastic about and has encouraged. For example, after Germany and Holland clamped down on pro-Turkish rallies last year, Erdogan growled that “Europe will pay for what they have done.” Just prior to this, in March 2017, he expressed demographic-jihadist sentiments, saying to Turks in Europe, “Have five children, not three. You are Europe’s future.”
In this vein, prominent Turkish official Alparslan Kavaklıoğlu proclaimed earlier this year that “Europe will be Muslim.” Kavaklıoğlu, an MP for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the head of his parliament’s Security and Intelligence Commission, made his comments at a party affair. Saying that Europe was aging and in decline, he predicted (as translated by the Gatestone Institute):
The Muslim population will outnumber the Christian population in Europe. This … has increased the nationalistic, xenophobic and anti-Islam rhetoric there. Hence, marginal, small parties have started to get large numbers of votes…. But there is no remedy for it. Europe will be Muslim. We will be effective there, Allah willing. I am sure of that.
Likewise, Erdogan has called Europe a “sick man,” presumably ripe for conquest. Unfortunately, he’s not all wrong, either. With the continent having lost its foundational faith, Christianity — and along with this confidence in its own cultures — atheism, multiculturalism, and hedonism have swept Western Europe. Consequently, fertility rates have plummeted to below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) throughout the Western world, resulting in a decline in its native populations. This, of course, has been used by statist politicians, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as a pretext for massive Third World immigration into the continent. “We need workers!” is the rallying cry (even though robots are poised to replace them).
But providing workers isn’t exactly what the world’s Erdogans have in mind. They’re more likely motivated by a cause called the hijra, “the migration or journey.” Prescribed by the Koran, the idea is for Muslims to engage in demographic jihad: to move to a land and Islamize it via numerical dominance.
No one articulated this goal more bluntly than late Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi when he stated in 2006, “We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe — without swords, without guns, without conquest — we will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”
Also referencing this and alluding to Europe’s “sick man” status was Italian Monsignor Carlo Liberati, who lamented in a January 2017 interview that in “‘10 years we will all be Muslims because of our stupidity,’” as I reported at the Observer last year. This timeframe is a gross exaggeration, of course, yet the clergyman was getting at a very real phenomenon: “They [Muslims] have children and we do not; we are in decline,” as he put it.
And that is the deeper problem. Austria and other European nations can combat overt jihad and expel obvious malefactors, but this doesn’t change the reality that the “hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” As pundit Mark Steyn put it, “The future belongs to those who show up for it.”
