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Jul 28, 2016

Islamism Rises from Europe’s Secularism

by Giulio Meotti
July 24, 2016

On October 2000, in the sunny French city of Nice, the 105-member European Convention drafted the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Drawn up by the committee of former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the document only referred to the “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe”. The European Parliament had rejected a proposal from Christian Democrat MEPs and Pope John Paul II, to include in the text Europe’s “Judaeo-Christian roots”.

In the 75,000-word Charter there is not a single mention of Christianity. Since then, a wind of aggressive secularism has pervaded all EU policies. The European Court of Human Rights, for example, asked to remove crucifixes from classrooms: they were allegedly a threat to democracy.

The city of Nice — where exactly sixteen years ago Europe’s rulers decided to eliminate the Judeo-Christian roots from the (never approved) EU Constitution — has just witnessed the bloody manifestation of another religion: radical Islam. “Nature abhors a vacuum”: This is the truth to which our élites do not want to listen; Islamism rises from what William McGurn, George W. Bush’s speechwriter, called “Europe’s feckless secularism”.

You can see it not only in Europe’s churches, three-quarters empty, and the boom of Europeans converting to Islam, but also from what is happening in Europe’s schools. The trends do not support Viktor Orbán’s vision for a Christian Europe.

A few days ago, Belgium, which was recently targeted in terror attacks, decided that religion classes in French-speaking primary and secondary schools will be cut in half starting in October 2016, and replaced with an hour of “citizenship classes”: lessons in secularism. In Brussels, half the children in public schools already choose to take classes in Islam.

In France, the Socialist government imposed a “secularism charter” in every school, banning Christianity from the educational system. That charter is the manifesto of the “révolution douce” (“soft revolution”), France’s extreme secularism. It is an attempt to eliminate any claim of identity. A Jewish yarmulke, a Christian cross and an Islamic veil are treated the same way. This secularism is what has been rightly defined “the Left’s blind spot with Islam”.

It is a secularism that has also gone mad. The Yves Codou elementary school in the village of La Môle, for example, celebrated “Parents’ Day” instead of Mother’s Day, in order not to upset gay couples. Municipalities have already changed the enrollment form for schoolchildren by eliminating the words “father” and “mother”, replacing them with “legal manager 1” and “legal manager 2”. It is George Orwell’s “Newspeak”.

After two major terror attacks in 2015, France, instead of promoting a cultural “jihad” based on Western values, responded to Islamic fundamentalism with a ridiculous “Day of Secularism” to be celebrated every 9th of December.