The 2011 census results show that the population of Yorkshire as a whole grew less quickly
than the average across England and Wales between 2001 and 2011, increasing by 6% from 4,977,000 to 5,284,000.
However, one city bucked the trend: Bradford. Here, there has been a massive
increase in the officially recorded population since 2001, with a rise of 11%
to 522,500. The explanation lies not only with ongoing high rates of
immigration from Pakistan and Bangladesh, but also with the far higher
fertility rate of the resident population originating in these parts of the
subcontinent.
The age structure of Bradford’s population is unusual too,
insofar as it is considerably younger than either the average for Yorkshire and
Humber or for England and Wales, with 7.9% of the population under five years
of age, and some 28.8% below 19 (see the table below for further details and
comparison with other averages). A report on this evening’s edition of Look
North noted that this rapid growth in Bradford’s young population had
implications for schooling, as there is a shortage of school places in the city
and no spare capacity to accommodate the under fives once they reach school
age. Either new schools will have to be built, or these children will be sent
to schools in neighbouring parts of Bradford district and beyond, following a path already 'pioneered' by schools such as St Bede's.
The demographic makeup of Bradford is changing, and it
is changing quickly. Given the peculiarities of the city’s age structure, these changes will accelerate once schoolchildren leave and marry, and they will do
so at an earlier age than the national average, and have larger families than
the norm. A clearer picture will be provided by further data that will be released in December.
UPDATE: The data relating to the percentage of Muslims in Bradford's population was released on 11 December 2012 and can be accessed here.
How might these two be linked? The first, an outbreak of mass popular unrest in many countries of the Arab world, in which political Islam plays a significant role; the second, a process initiated by the European Union without the consent of indigenous Europeans for the managed mass ingress of Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East. Are there indeed, any links? No sentient member of the adult population in our country can have failed to have heard of the Arab Spring, yet how many of our citizens have heard of Euromed? Euromed is after all, not something that has been widely publicised, for were it to be so, our people would vociferously object to it; not that this objection would necessarily make any difference to policy of course, for the strong opposition of a majority in Britain to mass immigration has not lessened the intent of the globalist parties – Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative – to facilitate this process.
Euromed – or the Euro-Mediterranean Process to give it its official title – lists the following as its primary aims:
With respect to the first of these aims, one can have few quibbles, for the citizens of EU member states surely do not wish for conflict with the states of North Africa and the Middle East. However, once we move away from the first of these goals, the implications for the people of Britain and the other member states of the EU become rather more worrying, for after all, was not the EU itself sold to the peoples of Europe as a free trade area rather than a superstate? The second bullet point in effect lays the economic foundations for political union between the EU and the majority Muslim states of North Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, this intent is alluded to in the third major strand promoting the ‘rapprochement between peoples’ which in effect amounts to the colonisation of a demographically ageing Europe by the high fertility peoples from the southern and eastern littoral of the Mediterranean.
The political tumult in the Arab world which became known as the Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010, rapidly spreading to other countries in the region and ultimately leading to the overthrow of governments in Tunisia, Egypt and – with the assistance of foreign intervention – Libya. By the time the Foreign Affairs Council of the European Union met for the 3069th time on 21 February 2011, significant unrest had manifested itself in fifteen Arab states and the EU was readying itself to declare in favour of the anti-establishment forces now flexing their muscles in these countries, irrespective of the nature of the movements involved.
This meeting adopted a number of conclusions, the first of which made the following tenuous claim: “Europe and the Mediterranean region share a common history and cultural heritage.” Well, if we except the history of conflict that has bedevilled the Mediterranean since the arrival of Islam, this region actually shares nothing in terms of a common cultural heritage and history since the demise of the Roman Empire. I would contend that despite the intense efforts of the early Church to eradicate much of Classical philosophy and scholarship, it is the European nations that today owe much to Ancient Greece and Rome, whereas the rational influence of Classical Antiquity is far more attenuated in those states that fell to Islam. In reality therefore, non-Muslim European peoples and Muslims inhabit fundamentally different psychological and cultural universes. Contrary to the assertion of the Foreign Affairs Council of the EU, there is thus no meaningful “common history and cultural heritage”; we belong to two separate civilisations.
On 29 August 2011 the Council of the European Commission issued a press release regarding its establishment of a ‘humanitarian presence’ in Libya. Amongst the measures it enumerated were:
Assistance to the people fleeing Libya
Assistance to refugees who cannot go back to their home country and Libyans fleeing Libya
One of the primary partners associated with this activity was the International Organization for Migration (IOM) which was founded in 1951 with the slogan of ‘Migration for the Benefit of All’. As is evident from this slogan, it can hardly be adjudged to be a neutral body with respect to the question of international migration which is attested to by the following statements taken from its website:
The Italian island of Lampedusa has this year been swamped by tens of thousands of immigrants issuing from Tunisia, Libya and sub-Saharan Africa using the turmoil of the Arab Spring as a pretext to claim ‘political asylum’ in the EU, whilst in fact being economic migrants. Many of these have clearly stated that they wish to settle in Britain, in particular, England.
Underpinning the goals of Euromed is the misplaced assumption that people are little more than interchangeable economic units, with the cultural identities that they carry counting for little, and that no culture can be judged to be superior to any other. Thus, think the policy makers of the EU and the advocates of multiculturalism, it matters but little if the imported population differs radically in its mentality and customs from native Europeans. It is the opinion of the author that this supposition is both fundamentally flawed and dangerous. Culture matters greatly.
Now that Qaddhafi is dead and Libya finds itself under a National Transitional Council; that Tunisia has become a democracy, and Egyptians head to the polls for their national elections on 28 November, the formal preconditions for Euromed’s transformation are being laid: the establishment of democratic forms of governance. The ultimate aim of both Euromed and the British foreign policy establishment is the accession of the Arab states of the Mediterranean littoral and Turkey to the EU; a greater Europe in which European values are effectively replaced by Islam, and the European peoples by Afro-Asiatics. In effect, this Euromed hybrid would not constitute so much the rebirth of the Roman Empire, as a renewed Caliphate with universal ambitions.
Cameron, Hague and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are continuing to push exactly the same line with respect to EU enlargement as was pursued under the Blair and Brown administrations. Recognition of this continuity is important, insofar as former Foreign Secretary and failed Labour Leadership candidate David Miliband made clear in a speech delivered on 15 November 2007 that not only should Turkey join the EU, but that the EU should look in the longer term to create a:
Such a move would be suicidal for Britain and the peoples of Europe. It would be far more rational and beneficial for us to orientate ourselves towards a Euro-Siberian geopolitical axis, rather than towards a North-South Euro-Mediterranean one. Alas, our foreign policy establishment and that of the EU is instead intent upon manufacturing a non-existent enemy in the form of Russia.
The precise ideological complexions of the governments that emerge from the unrest of the Arab Spring have yet to fully reveal themselves, but there exists one certainty: Islamism will play a large if not a predominant role in the politics of these countries. Already in Tunisia we see a coalition government led by the Islamist Ennadha Party; in Libya, Islamists play a significant role in the National Transitional Council and fighting has broken out between rival militias; and in Egypt, the prospect of an Islamist victory in this month’s elections looms large. Egyptian secularists and Copts live in fear of the rise of Islamism, and whereas apprehensions on this score have hitherto focused upon the long-established Muslim Brotherhood, another allegedly more ‘radical’ Islamist party – the Nour Party – linked to Saudi Salafists, has emerged and is causing even greater concerns. Its supporters are reported as having torn down election posters for the Muslim Brotherhood, and whereas Nour is Arabic for “light”, any success on the part of this party of light would serve to bring only the darkness of religious obscurantism to Egypt. According to the Financial Times, Saudi finance is believed to underpin its rise.
Why did the UK intervene in the Libyan conflict? This intervention was ostensibly launched in the name of the principle of ‘humanitarian interventionism’, invoking Qaddhafi’s prospective slaughter of Libyan rebels as a casus belli. Although there was a degree of apprehension amongst sections of the press and some politicians with respect to the wisdom of this move, the public mood at the time was manipulated in a sufficiently skilful manner by the ConDem Coalition so as to win majority support for air strikes. Al-Qaeda militants were known to be amongst the rebels, yet our government took the decision to enter the conflict on their side. The reasons for this are undoubtedly complex and beyond the scope of this particular article, but the implications of the creation of façade democracies in a number of North African countries and their recognition by the EU states are significant. Firstly, it bestows legitimacy on the new governments in the eyes of EU policy makers; secondly, it allows the peoples of the region to express their natural political preference for Islamism; and thirdly, it paves the way for these states to move towards political association with, and eventual membership of, the EU, thus sounding the death knell of European civilisation. Is this what you want? Would this make our lives better? I think not.
At this time of year there are few stories more beloved of the British press than the anticipated character of the coming winter and, closer to the time, the prospects of a white Christmas or otherwise. Thus, the Daily Express excitably pounced upon a forecast by Exacta Weather yesterday morning to run the headline ‘-20C To Hit Britain’. That this headline should come hard upon the heels of our admittedly very welcome late September and early October warmth is rather predictable, for after all, journalists appreciate the sensationalist effect afforded by contrast.
Headlines such as this one are on the stocks and ready to roll at key times of the year, and include such hardy perennials as ‘Britain colder than North Pole!’; ‘Drought could see standpipes on the streets’; ‘Wettest summer since Noah’s Flood’; ‘Spring comes early as flowers bloom in November’. Journalists are, on the whole, sensationalist and unscientific, unable to differentiate between the two basic concepts of weather and climate: weather of course being the actual meteorological conditions that we experience day-to-day and hour-to-hour, and climate being average weather measured over decades or longer. Averages naturally mask much natural variability, and if our weather were always to be concordant with our climatic averages, we would live in a very strange physical universe indeed.
Meteorology has made great strides in its forecasting ability, and weather forecasts for the coming four to five days are now far more accurate than they were only a couple of decades ago, but long-range forecasting is still in its infancy. The Earth, after all, is an extremely complex system with a wide mix of variables – solar radiative output, ocean currents, jet streams, albedo, volcanism and many others – playing a role in shaping the weather and climate. To predict this winter’s weather for the British Isles will therefore be difficult, and to predict climate fifty years hence still more so.
So, where did the Express find its story? The source turns out to be a website called Exacta Weather which the paper quoted as follows:
What does this tell us? The only surprises contained within the above speculation pertain to significant snow in November, which is reasonably unusual, and to the claims that records will be broken. How does Exacta Weather, or, more accurately, how does James Madden (because ExactaWeather is a one-man outfit – where’s Bill Froggatt when you need him?) arrive at his forecast? Does it differ from that provided by other forecasters? Well, no others have publicly made their predictions about the coming British winter available, but Netweather last month issued temperature charts for November and December (reproduced below) which although showing colder than average conditions, do not anticipate anything as dramatic as we experienced at the end of November and into December last year.
On 12th October Netweather issued updates to its forecasts for November and December, whilst also giving a tentative look at January. Compared to the charts shown above, the forecaster has revised its temperature estimates upwards for the first two months, anticipating them to be normal or marginally below normal across the British Isles. As for January, as can be seen from the image below, it is predicting that the month will be significantly warmer than average. However, its forecaster Stewart Rampling speculated later in the month that February 2012 was likely to be the coldest month of the season for Britain, witnessing significantly below average temperatures.
Whilst not going so far as to divulge its long-range forecast for this winter, the BBC has picked up on a story relating to the Met Office, in which it admits that it is re-evaluating its approach to forecasting in line with recent discoveries relating to the role of solar ultraviolet radiation. Its output has been found to vary much more greatly than anticipated, and a reduced sunspot count which is associated with lower ultraviolet emission tends to have an impact upon the jet stream in the northern hemisphere, disrupting the prevailing westerly airflow over northwestern Europe, making the likelihood of cold winters greater. The current sunspot cycle - the 24th to have been recorded in detail - is supposed to be approaching its maximum within the next two years, but the preceding sunspot minimum has been prolonged and exceptionally quiet, and the coming maximum is expected to be weak as can be seen in the graph below (for more details and the latest updates, visit the SolarHam website).
Many people claim that independent weather forecaster Piers Corbyn is particularly accurate and reliable, and as can be seen in the following video recorded at the end of October 2011, Corbyn sticks his neck out by making some very specific claims. In his forecast for Britain he asserts that we will experience extreme cold between 27 November and 28 December, but he is uncertain as to whether this will be as intense or even colder than last year. Last year the exceptional spell of cold weather arrived promptly from the Arctic on 24 November, and most of the country then experienced near-permanent sub-zero temperatures with only a couple of brief breaks until Boxing Day. Is Corbyn any more reliable than a soothsayer? Is he little more than a meteorological Nostradamus? In the end, his predictions did not come to pass.
This brings me on to an issue that generates a great deal of heat but little dispassionate analysis: ‘global warming’, or ‘climate change’ as it is now typically termed. Few other issues seem to arouse so much grandstanding by advocates for or against the set of phenomena said to characterise this anthropogenic (or not) process, with many members of the public, journalists and policy makers being incapable of the most rudimentary distinction between weather and climate outlined earlier in this piece. A hot end to September and beginning of October in England is no more indicative of a shift in climate than the cold late November and December were last year. To take either as evidence of a fundamental warming or cooling is to confuse weather with climate, but it is a mistake that journalists are eager to embrace. By way of an example, the Sunday Times has today run a story today claiming that 'Europe could be facing a return of the "little ice age"'. Even if this were to be the case, you need to bear in mind that this period was not uniformly cold, and did witness many hot summers and mild winters as well as the more characteristic bitter conditions that the label implies.
It is of the utmost importance not to confuse journalism or, more importantly, politics with natural science. That is to say, scientific methodology should not be mistakenly attacked for advocating a particular course of action when it does no such thing, for it is lobby groups, politicians and big business that warp the tentative findings of climate science and then demand that we adopt certain policies and strategies; all three attempt to use the science as a pretext for advancing their own pre-existent agendas. Thus, in the UK for example, our mainstream politicians have adopted ‘climate change’ as a pretext for hiking up domestic energy and fuel prices (thereby bringing in more tax revenue), for the offshoring of industry to non-European nations and increasing overseas aid whilst cutting all other budgets. The oil industry on the other hand funds ‘anti-warmist’ propaganda in order to safeguard its business interests, and much of what we read either for or against any particular changes in climate will most likely have been refracted through these competing interests. The science often gets lost in the mix.
The essence of science is scepticism: science seeks to falsify its own models to arrive at a better understanding of natural phenomena. Thus, if models suggesting that the anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide has a catastrophic impact upon the global climate system prove to be false, then they will be ditched. If not, they will be retained. One excellent blog on weather and climate which I think adheres to objective and rational standards and will be sure to comment upon forecasts for the coming winter belongs to Look North weatherman Paul Hudson. Indeed, Hudson has written a post entitled 'Met Office wakes up to solar influence on climate' in which he welcomes this acknowledgement as a much-needed corrective to the organisation's previous neglect of this factor. If you have an interest in these matters, Hudson's blog is well worth a visit, even if the comments section does tend to degenerate into a slugging match between advocates and opponents of global warming, irrespective of the topic being tackled.
What is crystal clear to me however, is that whatever the causation underpinning any observed shifts in climate, we in the UK and elsewhere in Europe need to find alternative energy supplies to imported oil, for its consumption generates vast wealth for our enemies: the Islamic petro-states. Oil wealth funds the propagation of Salafism through the mosques, madrassas and Islamic schools that have sprouted across Europe. Without oil wealth, countries such as Saudi Arabia would simply implode. Choke our foes of money, and our ideological war on our home turf becomes easier to win.
The real environmental crisis is a symptom not of ‘climate change’, but of unrestrained population growth. This growth is not a European problem, insofar as it is not a problem created by native European peoples and their descendants living in Australasia and the Americas, but a predominantly African and Asian problem. It is however a European problem insofar as we are being overwhelmed by a demographic invasion from Africa and Asia, and it is time that we put a stop to this. This growth in population, abetted by various religious fundamentalisms but most strongly by Islam, will be sure to bring untold misery and conflict in its wake. We live in a finite world with finite resources. Untrammelled population growth will bring death, famine, war and plague. These four however will not presage a transition into paradise, but a descent into a worldly hell. It somehow puts the forecast of a colder than average winter into perspective.
Headlines come and headlines go, but one of the many negative themes that recurs time and again is the demographic decline of the English and the native British more generally in the United Kingdom, when compared to the burgeoning immigrant and immigrant-descended population. Today’s story in the Daily Express, revealing a 40% increase in the country’s non-white population in just 8 years, taking it from 6.6 million in 2001 to 9.1 million in 2009 (and that’s just taking legal immigrants and births to the settled non-white population into account) should serve as a salutary warning to those native Britons who view this process with a blasé indifference. The report goes on to note “that British whites will become a minority in Leicester, Birmingham, Bradford and Oldham “perhaps by 2016”.”
Why should this be a matter for concern you may ask yourself; after all, isn’t it ‘racist’ to object to such a transformation? Well, if you are English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish, why would you wish to place yourself, as well as your children and their descendents, at a comparative disadvantage in your own homeland in the labour and property markets? Why would you proffer legal and material advantages to immigrants and what is currently the ethnic minority population over the interests of yourself and your own flesh and blood? Are you comfortable with the real prospect of your children and grandchildren becoming an ethnic minority in their own country? Well, our ‘equalities’, ‘diversity’ and 'human rights' legislation ensures that such discrimination does take place, and that minority status will await the English if nothing is done to remove these harmful laws.
The Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties introduced these unjust laws that discriminate against the indigenous population, particularly indigenous males, and they will rabidly defend and extend the sphere of their operation to the detriment of their own people whom they purport to represent. As they will not defend us, and as yet there is no political party standing in the wings with the imminent prospect of power, we must do what we can to combat and reverse this negative process of the displacement of our indigenous rights and interests.
The first step to take, which all native Britons should be willing to sign up to irrespective of any other political differences that they might hold, is to recognise that the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish are the indigenous peoples of their respective homelands, and that as such, their interests should take primacy within these historically constituted territories. This of course can only be achieved if we gain legal recognition of ourselves as being the native peoples of these islands, and for us to achieve this, we must unceasingly demolish the officially promoted myth that the English, the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish do not exist as distinct ethnic groups and nations. To do this of course, we must bring about a change in the consciousness of our peoples so that the official lie of our non-existence is rejected. We must therefore start a campaign for the recognition of our peoples as indigenous, and for this status to be enshrined in national and international law. Moreover, this campaign for indigenous rights must involve our neighbouring European cousins, so that the French, Dutch, Germans, Norwegians, Poles, etc, are all recognised as the indigenous peoples of their respective nation-states and accorded a concomitant right to determine their own futures. The interests of indigenous peoples everywhere should serve as the bedrock of all policy making.
The colonisation of our countries, our demographic displacement and the destruction of our national cultures and cohesion must be rejected. We need to start a campaign for the recognition of the English as the indigenous people of England, and thus should launch a carefully worded petition which we can spread via Facebook, email and other online platforms to ensure that policy makers and the mainstream mass media are compelled to sit up, listen and act.
Successful retailers are canny about customer preferences and purchasing power, and no specialist trade publication in the retail sector would last for long if it published information which did not assist its readership in increasing turnover and profits. The information contained in a lengthy feature entitled ‘Halal here we come’ which was published last month by the Online Meat Trades Journal is therefore of interest to more than the meat sector, insofar as its analysis of the Muslim market in the UK reveals some surprising statistics.
As the Mail on Sunday revealed last Sunday, millions of non-Muslim Britons are being sold halal-slaughtered meat and poultry without this fact being advertised, and Muslim consumer habits reveal why this is the case. According to the Online Meat Trades Journal the halal meat market in the UK is worth up to £2 billion per annum, but it laments that ‘most [of this] meat is imported and sold via ethnic retailers.’ It therefore sees considerable scope for the domestic industry to up its share of the halal sector and thereby increase its turnover and profits as outlined in the following revealing paragraph:
Note the reference to “up to four million Muslims” in the UK. The 2001 census suggested that there were 1.6 million Muslims in the UK, whilst in January 2009 the Times published figures which illustrated that the resident Muslim population was growing ten times faster than any other sector of society, and had by the end of 2008 risen to circa 2.4 million. Clearly, we are witnessing a terrifyingly fast growth of this population, and the more of them that are here the stronger will be their lobbying for the free ingress of their co-religionists from overseas.
The article is also candid about the spectacularly rapid growth of the Muslim population across Europe. Demographic Islamisation is happening and it is translating directly into enforced cultural and political Islamisation as well as modified business practices. Given the figures relating to the percentages of poultry and lamb purchased by Muslims in the UK, why would large producers and abattoirs opt to have a non-halal supply chain when maintaining separate feeds adds to costs and halal slaughter remains (for some illogical reason) legal, particularly when it is the halal sector that is growing the fastest? This not only has to be stopped, but to be reversed: halal slaughter in the UK must be banned, as must be the importation of all animal products derived from this practice.
The non-Muslim apologists for halal slaughter often avoid confronting the matter by claiming that slaughtering animals is painful anyway. However, this assertion is a non-starter, for as a degree of suffering is unavoidable in animal slaughter, why make this suffering worse by slitting the creature’s throat and bleeding it to death rather than stunning? This leads on to the second of the rationalisations used by the apologists: in the UK halal slaughter involves pre-stunning. Although this proviso does exist, many Muslims do not accept that pre-stunned animals truly are halal and thus insist that stunning is not employed. Bizarrely, our law allows for halal slaughter without pre-stunning. The confusion surrounding this issue is illustrated by the comments of Rizvan Khalid (an executive director of a halal processor) on the Food Standard Agency’s (FSA) guidelines on halal slaughter in his interview with the Online Meat Trades Journal:
This illustrates why you should not purchase any meat or poultry labelled as halal. Sadly, some of our major supermarkets are greedily adapting their practices to the growing halal market and thus both Tesco and Asda have been making special efforts to introduce halal ranges.
The fact is that the option of choosing whether or not you eat halal meat is quickly disappearing as Islam’s demographic ascendancy forces its doctrinaire demands upon the rest of us whilst our politicians refuse to recognise let alone tackle the issue. If when you are eating out and no guarantee can be given that your meal does not contain halal-slaughtered produce I would recommend that you either opt for whichever pork-based option is available, stick to game or the vegetarian option. When buying fresh meat, purchase from a reputable local butcher and not a supermarket.
When the Soviet Union was still in existence, many senior policymakers were concerned about the implications of differential fertility rates in its constituent ‘republics’, for it was clear that at some point in the near future these would lead to a situation in which the USSR would become more than 50% Muslim. Such a pattern was already startlingly evident by 1970 when the census revealed that the RSFSR’s birth rate was already at sub-replacement level with an average of only 1.97 children per family. In Ukraine, the situation was only slightly better with the equivalent figure being 2.04, but in the Muslim republics of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan the corresponding figures were respectively 4.63, 5.95 and 5.64. These sorts of contrasts of course are witnessed today across Western Europe, where indigenous Europeans are outbred by an assortment of Muslim immigrant populations: Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in England; Algerians in France and Turks in Germany to give but a few examples. The English, the French and the Germans are breeding at sub-replacement levels, whereas the resident Muslim populations are exploding.
Being reliant upon a conscript army the Soviets were concerned about the potential impact of demographic Islamisation upon the reliability of its armed forces. This was also an issue in which the Americans were interested, but from their perspective, the resultant tensions that demographic Islamisation would generate within the Soviet Union should be welcomed as it would help to undermine its stability.
When the USSR fragmented in 1991 the Russian Federation emerged as a fully-fledged independent state shorn of its former ‘Muslim’ republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. However, although the proportion of Muslim citizens in this new state was lower, its Muslim population was still significant. The territorial entities that had been the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics of the RSFSR remained constituent parts of the new Russian Federation, and a number of these contained peoples which had traditionally been Muslim: Bashkortostan, Chechnya, Dagestan and Tatarstan being some of the main examples. Of course, to describe the majority populations of these territorial entities as ‘Muslim’ in any meaningful sense at the time of Russia’s independence is to ignore the deep impact of decades of Soviet socialisation and atheistic campaigning which had led to a decrease in religious practice. Nonetheless, a component of the ethnic and national reawakening which swept the Soviet Union and its successor states was a turning towards traditional forms of religious identity.
In English, we fail to distinguish between ethnic Russians – russkie – and Russian citizens – rossiiane. Whereas russkie were traditionally Orthodox Christians, many rossiiane – Bashkirs, Tatars, Chechens, Dagestanis – were traditionally Muslim. The example of Chechnya and the growth of Islamism in that republic has been well documented. Islamism has fused with ethnic identity, and has even been embraced its current President (Ramzan Kadyrov) who has made the wearing of the headscarf mandatory for women in Grozny whether they’re Muslims or not, advocates Shariah and supports polygamy. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is well disposed towards Kadyrov, and it was his backing when he was President that secured Kadyrov his political position. This highlights the bogus nature of Putin’s alleged Russian patriotism.
As well as possessing large officially recognised Muslim populations, there are also many illegal immigrants in Russia drawn from the USSR’s former Muslim republics. Being the centre of Russian economic life Moscow acts as a particular magnet for such people, so much so that an estimated 2 million people living in Moscow are now Muslims. Although the Bolsheviks committed many dreadful acts of wanton destruction and removed many of the city’s Orthodox churches, a number of these beautiful buildings remain, but for how much longer? Muslims now wish to use them for worship and are demanding that more mosques be built to accommodate their growing numbers. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with the video footage of Muslims in Paris blocking the streets with their Friday prayers, but the video below taken in Moscow on Eid ul-Fitr depicts a scene that dwarfs anything yet seen in France. An estimated 55,000 Muslims blocked one of Moscow’s major thoroughfares – Prospekt Mira – to pray in a demonstration of Islamic strength and assertiveness, which must surely have produced a sense of unease amongst the group of russkie videoing this event from the rooftops.
Ethnic Russians are not reproducing at replacement level, and as elsewhere in Europe it is the swelling Muslim population that is displacing them. My sympathies are with the plight of ordinary Russians: we are in this together.
