It is usually illegal to use public money to build religious buildings in France, but an exception exists in Alsace-Moselle, where the largest mosque in the European Union is nearing completion in Strasbourg, just a few kilometres from the European Parliament.
Consent for the project was given by the socialist authorities, and funding was offered by the city, but was ultimately provided mostly by Millî Görüş, an Islamist political foundation in Turkey, and Qatar, which is funding 140 mosques, schools and Islamic centres across Europe at a cost of more than €70 million.
It is the job of politicians to connect the dots and understand how these vast public projects are intended to affect people’s lives.
The Threat Europe Refuses to See
More than a quarter of the world’s nations are Muslim. Some of them are reasonably ordered states, aware of a danger which soft democratic socialists like to pretend does not exist. Some have even introduced severe restrictions on mosques, forbidden children from attending prayers, banned many types of donations and after-sunset iftar meals, prohibited the broadcasting of prayers, and required worshippers to bring identification - all to curb the unaccountable spread of political Islam throughout their societies.
Enter Qatar.
Why is a state which houses Hamas and Al-Qaeda, tightly controls its press, and effectively deprives the vast majority of its residents of citizenship given a free hand by our own authorities to encourage political Islam in the West?
Qatar derives no wealth from its own society because it has no society. Its income comes from natural-gas exports, and its future looks as bleak as that of any other Third World state unless it can patronise ready-made societies elsewhere.
Liberal-left politicians in the West should be horrified by everything Qatar represents, but they are willing to make concessions in order to be rewarded with Islamic votes and cash in exchange for shutting down debates about Qatar’s human-rights record.
The problem is that where Islamist patronage goes, Islamist problems follow.
Following the Money
Pandering to their wealthy benefactors, the EU gave more than €40 million to a charity so thick with the Muslim Brotherhood that it has been designated a terrorist organisation by the UAE.
Islamic Relief Worldwide operates in more than 40 countries and has worked with both the United Nations and European institutions. However, its founders and directors finance the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Egypt and lend support to the Council of European Muslims, the Muslim Brotherhood’s umbrella organisation in Europe.
European authorities justify their sycophantic collaboration with Islamic sponsorship in the name of “diversity” and “tolerance”, but in reality, it is a hypocritical chivalry which bolsters the socialist voter base and lines the pockets of Eurocrats with millions.
If European taxes are funding humanitarian work, European taxpayers should be able to know where the money goes. When Islamist buildings rise in our great cities, people should be aware of where the sponsorship is coming from and remember how this cynical socialist-Islamist pact will end.
A Pact That Cannot Last
Left-wing democrats purport to love our democratic system, yet their Islamist patrons do not.
The latter are using European left-wing parties to dismantle it, whether it is the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, Die Linke in Germany, as the recent election in Berlin has shown, or the Socialist Workers’ Party in Spain, which has acted as an enabler of a Moroccan invasion of Spanish soil in Ceuta.
Once a critical demographic threshold is reached, it is clear which extreme of this cynical social-engineering project will dominate the other.
Just look at Iran.
Hermann Tertsch
Spanish MEP | Journalist | Lawyer
