Lauren Booth – Israel and Euro Fascism I Is Secularism or Religion a Global Problem
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the prevalence of hate speech and bribery in Europe, as well as the "overcome of terror" of hip hop, bribery, and the current crisis. They also mention a former Croat guide who said there is nothing like being normal. The segment touches on the history of Zionism and its impact on the country, including how the former leader of the Serbian communist party leftist and followers were all right-funded nationalists and the formation of the Israeli Federalist movement led by the former leader of the House of the Church of England. The segment also touches on the current political climate and the potential for radicalization among Muslims.
AI: Summary ©
I overheard a conversation which stopped me in
my tracks and made me cold on that
sunny day.
We as Europeans have a problem with racialized
hatred.
As far as the egalitarian message of Islam
is concerned, Europe has been in a deep
stagnation.
In this video, I'm going to connect the
dots from Netanyahu to Tommy Robinson.
And as you know from his channel by
now, I'll be looking at this from the
viewpoint of faith and secularism in our societies.
But is it really surprising that fascism is
alive and well on the streets of Britain?
Seriously, did it ever go away?
I recognize the kinds of people on the
streets these last days as the same as
in the 1980s.
We used to call them Thatcher's boot boys,
the kinds of people who have nothing to
live for.
And as for fascism across Europe, has it
ever really gone away?
We as Europeans have a problem with racialized
hatred.
We like to think, don't we?
In Europe, fascism died in 1945 and it's
all been absolutely fine since.
And we are decent people and we're here
to help the world.
That's the story that we tell ourselves.
But it's never held water.
But as I found out speaking to Bosnians,
fascism has not been away from Europe one
day since 1945.
Even as a convert to Islam, 14 years
now, who's taken my fair share of abuse,
as much as you can abuse someone who's
six foot tall, English, and we'll give it
back in a better way, I hope.
I can't be bullied very easily.
But my daughters and I have had some
Islamophobic abuse in our time.
So I know that this horrible ugliness exists,
but still it's not the story that we
tell ourselves as Brits, right?
It's also really comforting to think that racism
is mostly guys with very short hair, over
50, nothing else to do, too much beer
in their bellies, not very high IQ, we
judge them, we loathe them, they're soccer, they're
soccer hooligans with nothing else to do.
Maybe it's a quiet summer with no football
going on.
But what is really disturbing is meeting young
people under 25 whose views are actually worse
or more vocal than the generation that have
gone before.
So I was in Mostar.
Mostar is a beautiful place, two parts of
an ancient city that was under the Ottoman
Empire for 500 years.
A very famous bridge there, Mostar Bridge, commissioned
by Suleyman the Magnificent, a favoured, incredible sultan
of the empire, whose name Magnificent, by the
way, was given to him not by his
own people, but by the Europeans who found
his ways really impressive.
Mostar Bridge was famously destroyed by Croat forces
during the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s.
So I'm in Mostar now with some sisters
who are all in hijab and it's a
hot day and we're just paddling around.
There's loads of people.
We actually had a really good time.
We went on a boat up and down
the river, which is stunning, and there were
people jumping off the bridge, which is a
popular thing to do.
And I overheard a conversation which stopped me
in my tracks and made me cold on
that sunny day.
And it was between a young Croat tour
guide, no more than 22 years old, I'd
say, and two German tourists.
The male German tourist said to him, it
sounds like a horrible thing happened here.
What was the deal with the war?
A young Croatian man said, well, you know,
if everyone's just nice and normal and gets
along, these things wouldn't happen.
And as he was saying that, I noted
that he was looking at my friends as
if to say, well, if they were normal,
if they behaved like us, like real Aryan
style Europeans, everything would be fine.
Well, I couldn't let it ride.
Not with all the graves of the Shaheeds
I'd seen, not with the adults who grew
up in the war and are still grieving
lost family members, not with the fact that
the man on the other side of the
bridge still suffers shell shock because he was
forced himself to become a fighter aged 10
to try and protect his people and bursts
into tears every time he speaks to tourists.
No, no, no, no, no.
I wasn't going to let it ride.
So I said to him, excuse me, I
just overheard you say that everything would be
nice if people were just normal.
And I wanted to say that actually the
genocide was against Muslims.
It was Islamophobic and it was to do
with an ideology.
So I just want to clarify that for
you tourists, at which point the young Croat
doubles down.
The young Croat looked at me and said,
have you seen what happened in the UK
last week?
And I was like, why are we jumping
from genocide in the 1990s against Muslims to
the UK now?
And then he said, did you see the
migrant who kills those white children?
And I said, what?
I said, why are you using the word
migrants?
He was someone from Wales.
Why are you making that link?
And he said, well, that's what migrants do,
isn't it?
Literally, subhanAllah, in the midst of a place
where genocide has been committed, he's linking a
genocidal thought to what took place in the
UK with falsified facts, linking it to migrants.
And again, if we're all white and normal,
the world will be okay.
It's the same thing over and over again.
It's the making of the other, the lesser,
the one that we don't want to be
around and one who maybe arrived after us
in our telling of our story.
Fascism didn't appear in 1938 and it didn't
disappear in 1945.
It just morphed into something that we're kind
of used to hearing now.
I was traveling with an incredible historian, author
and journalist, brother Amir, and he had this
to say.
In Bosnia, we faced coalition between what we
could call far left wing and far right
wing.
The infamous Serb, but I would say Yugoslav
dictator Slobodan Milosevic in the late 1980s and
early 1990s was responsible for many war crimes
that happened in Croatia, in Bosnia, later in
Kosovo, but he was not directly responsible.
Technically he was, believe it or not, he
was actually leftist.
He was leader of the Serbian communist party,
therefore leftist, but his followers, many of them
were right wing Serb nationalists and the coalition
between these two, so to speak, within the
forming of Slavia, within the context of the
Serb nationalism was devastating.
It brought a lot of misery, especially in
Bosnia and as we know, genocide.
Today we have many other isms, you know,
that cause so much confusion.
All of them I think can go under
one roof and that would be international Zionism.
Zionism at the moment is not something that
is oppressing Palestinian people, horribly as we're witnessing
these days, but not just these days, but
these decades, I would say, but you can
find it in other parts of the countries.
Many people don't know actually that Zionism was
involved in what happened here in the forming
of Slavia, including Bosnia.
It's not that we're unkind.
It's not that we're uncaring.
It's not that we want people to die
in our waters.
It's that we don't have the space, right?
We're a small country.
We have limited resources.
My gran couldn't go to the NHS for
her throat operation because there were so many
X, Y and Z people in the queue
ahead of her and the waiting list is
long and we just can't do it.
So we're just going to ask everybody to
leave, you know, just hurry them along a
bit and then everybody will be okay.
A mosque is firebombed.
Bricks are thrown at its windows.
Muslims huddle inside in fear.
Mobs of white men abuse and assault people
of colour on the streets.
A hotel housing asylum seekers is set ablaze.
Muslim-owned businesses are destroyed.
Muslim gravestones are vandalised.
Mosques are attacked and a Muslim man is
stabbed.
This is a snapshot of the Islamophobic violence
that has gripped the UK this summer.
Police were quick to identify the root rioters
as members of the English Defence League, the
EDL, a now-defunct far-right organisation comprised
of hardcore anti-Islam agitators and football hooligans.
In the early years, these unemployed hooligans and
neo-Nazis regularly partnered with the Zionist Federation
to host demonstrations in support of the Israeli
embassy.
Robinson positions himself as a staunch supporter of
Israel and has been photographed visiting IDF soldiers
and holding a gun.
His alignment with the Israeli politics of Netanyahu's
genocide is part of a broader trend where
the far-right in Europe sees Israel as
a defender of Western civilisation against a perceived
Muslim threat.
Drunken thugs with no link to any faith
attacking people of faith in their places of
worship or in their homes or in their
places of work.
I used to chat to Peter Hitchens of
the Daily Mail.
Yes, the Daily Mail.
Peter and I used to get on okay
and I respect him as someone who has
a set of morals and ethics and values
that he lives by.
I am a practicing communicant Christian member of
the Church of England.
I differ on large and important theological matters
with Muslims and in fact rather enjoy discussing
it with them and I've had many, many
conversations.
I take Islam very seriously as a faith.
The way in which so many people now
speak of it as if it was some
kind of nameless threat seems to me to
be dangerous and also possibly coded for something
else and I think that we have to
recognise that we have now living in our
society brothers and sisters who have a different
religion from the one that we may have
grown up with.
And so one time I was speaking to
him and he said I would rather have
Iranian Muslims living next to me who practice
their faith than some of this rubbish that
we've got floating around right now and he
was not talking about foreigners.
He was talking about godless people.
This is a man who genuinely cycles to
church on a Sunday.
He'd rather have Muslims living next to him
than thugs because he knows having travelled to
Iran by the way amongst other countries that
a good person who's practicing their faith is
not a drunk, is not on drugs, is
not abusing children.
I said practicing their faith is a good
neighbour, is kind and charitable and quiet and
you'd really want them in your street.
This is what Muslims have to offer the
West.
As far as the egalitarian message of Islam
is concerned Europe has been in a deep
stagnation and I think if you're watching this
from the far right or you've been radicalised
by their messaging, I think you're lonely.
I think you're disconnected.
I get that but honestly life doesn't have
to be that way.
Meanwhile a lot of beauty has been taking
place as well.
There've been counter protests attended by tens of
thousands, people gathering in Northern Ireland around shops
that have been threatened and takeaways, standing with
their neighbours who they've known for years and
even the community where my daughter recently got
married, the Abdullah Quliam Mosque in Liverpool where
my father was born, they were threatened with
violence and the community turned out and friends
like Adam Kelwick distributing fish and chips outside
to everyone.
In his farewell sermon the Prophet Muhammad peace
and blessings be upon him presented a radical
vision of what society can be like.
A black person is no better than a
white and a white person is no better
than a black person and an Arab does
not have superiority over a non-Arab and
a non-Arab over an Arab and look
after your women.
For Europe still seeking division amongst an increasingly
lost and secular group of nations, it's time
surely to embrace the teachings of the Holy
Qur'an.
That's where the healing is going to begin
inshallah and we're here for that and if
you want to ask any questions I'm here
for that.
Let's join together, let's do good, let's be
great neighbours, let's be kind to one another.
Ask your questions below.
As-salamu alaykum.