RUTHFULLY YOURS

Salvatore Babones is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. He wrote on Alexander Dugin in the October issue. His most recent book is Sixteen for ’16: A Progressive Agenda for a Better America (2015).
More important than the physical geography of trade is the human geography of institutions. The US and UK share a language, a financial infrastructure, a business culture, a legal heritage, and a way of thinking. In quitting Europe, Brexit backers voted to rejoin the larger world.
After the United Kingdom voted on June 23, 2016, to leave the European Union, most people focused on immigration as the root cause. Some said it was xenophobia or even racism. And certainly immigration, xenophobia and racism were major issues in the referendum. But the ultimate cause of the Brexit vote wasn’t immigration. It was economics.

Around 3.2 million non-British EU citizens live in the UK. Two-thirds of them are working there. Only 1.2 million British citizens live in the rest of the EU. Most of them are retired. More British citizens work in the United States than in continental Europe.

Imagine if the Franco-German core of the European economy were like the north-eastern core of the North American economy. In terms of GDP per capita, France and Germany are roughly on the same level as the UK. The north-eastern US is 50 per cent richer. If France and Germany were 50 per cent richer than the UK, instead of 2 million Europeans working in Britain, there might be 2 million Britons working in Europe.

If that were the case, would there have been so many European immigrants in the UK? Would there have been so much anti-immigrant sentiment? Would there have been a vote for Brexit? Britain’s Brexit vote is merely a reflection of larger global economic patterns that create little incentive for Britain to tie itself to the second-rate Western European economy.

Britain’s finance industry has long been more closely tied to New York than to Frankfurt or Paris. The rest of the economy may soon follow. Even before Brexit, British investment in continental Europe was declining while British investment in North America has been rising.

With Donald Trump promising to fast-track a trade deal with Britain, the UK will hardly be isolated once it leaves the European Union. But the whole idea that trade deals integrate economies is outdated, if it ever made sense at all. Countries are integrated into international networks by the actions of companies. In the contemporary world, countries don’t trade with countries. Companies transfer goods within value chains, and when these transfers cross national boundaries they are recorded as “trade”.

From an economic standpoint, Brexit boils down to a question about where British companies most want to do business. Is it in Western Europe, or in North America? Despite nearly half a century of strong institutional pressure to integrate with Western Europe, the EU still takes less than half of the UK’s exports. But exports are really beside the point. These days trade deals—like the EU itself—are really about economic governance. The UK could govern itself, as Australia does. Or it could choose closer integration with the world’s leading economic region: North America.

Between 1995 and 2008 global levels of merchandise trade increased from around 20 per cent of global GDP to around 30 per cent. The world globalised as goods (and services) traversed the world as never before in human history. The previous 1913 peak in international trade was dwarfed as new transportation technologies—from leviathan container ships to just-in-time air freight—reshaped global production networks. Now nearly one in three things bought on earth (by value) comes from somewhere else. The era of globalisation has arrived.

And departed? Global trade as a percentage of GDP has been flat since 2008, and an increasing proportion of that trade is in intermediate goods. On average around one-quarter of the value-added embodied in the world’s exports actually consists of intermediate goods that are then incorporated into products for re-export. But intermediate goods tend not to be sourced globally. They are overwhelmingly drawn from countries’ regional neighbours.

British multiculturalists are feeding Islamic fundamentalism. Muslims do not need to become the majority in the UK; they just need gradually to Islamize the most important cities. The change is already taking place.

British personalities keep opening the door to introducing Islamic sharia law. One of the leading British judges, Sir James Munby, said that Christianity no longer influences the courts and these must be multicultural, which means more Islamic. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Chief Justice Lord Phillips, also suggested that the English law should “incorporate” elements of sharia law.

British universities are also advancing Islamic law. The academic guidelines, “External speakers in higher education institutions”, provide that “orthodox religious groups” may separate men and women during events. At the Queen Mary University of London, women have had to use a separate entrance and were forced to sit in a room without being able to ask questions or raise their hands, just as in Riyadh or Tehran.

“London is more Islamic than many Muslim countries put together”, according to Maulana Syed Raza Rizvi, one of the Islamic preachers who now lead “Londonistan”, as the journalist Melanie Phillips has called the English capital. No, Rizvi is not a right-wing extremist. Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Laureate for Literature, was less generous; he called the UK “a cesspit for Islamists”.

“Terrorists can not stand London multiculturalism”, London’s mayor Sadiq Khan said after the recent deadly terror attack at Westminster. The opposite is true: British multiculturalists are feeding Islamic fundamentalism. Above all, Londonistan, with its new 423 mosques, is built on the sad ruins of English Christianity.

The Hyatt United Church was bought by the Egyptian community to be converted to a mosque. St Peter’s Church has been converted into the Madina Mosque. The Brick Lane Mosque was built on a former Methodist church. Not only buildings are converted, but also people. The number of converts to Islam has doubled; often they embrace radical Islam, as with Khalid Masood, the terrorist who struck Westminster.

The Daily Mail published photographs of a church and a mosque a few meters from each other in the heart of London. At the Church of San Giorgio, designed to accommodate 1,230 worshipers, only 12 people gathered to celebrate Mass. At the Church of Santa Maria, there were 20.

The nearby Brune Street Estate mosque has a different problem: overcrowding. Its small room and can contain only 100. On Friday, the faithful must pour into the street to pray. Given the current trends, Christianity in England is becoming a relic, while Islam will be the religion of the future.

“Sweden needs to be a safe space for refugees… It is time to realize that the new Swedes will claim their space. And bring their culture, language and habits. It is time to see this as a positive force… Something new — The New Country”. — Video advertisement; last sentence spoken by a young woman in a hijab.

Formal membership with a card and yearly subscription would probably not be the modus operandi of an organization working fundamentally to undermine societies in order to remake them in the image of Islam.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an organization the goal of which is to obtain an Islamic state, a caliphate, ruled by sharia — and to bring about that state — if necessary, by jihad.

It is an organization the Egyptian branch of which called for jihad as recently as 2015, thus belying claims that the Muslim Brotherhood is ‘peaceful’. As the murderous actions of Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood organization, clearly show, it is not.

A recent report has revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is well established in Sweden. The report — written at the behest of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency and commissioned precisely because of a lack of research on the MB in Sweden — caused an outcry against the authors. Twenty Swedish academics, who specialize in Islam and Muslims, protested the report[1]. They called it “substandard work”, which did not take account of “the extensive research available about Islam and Muslims in Sweden”.

According to the report, the MB has been operating in Sweden since the late 1970s in the guise of a number of Muslim-Swedish organizations, all centered around the Islamic Association in Sweden (IFIS), which itself was established in the mid-1990s as an organizational front for the MB.

IFIS has founded other organizations in Sweden, among which are Islamic Relief, Ibn Rush, and Sweden Young Muslims (SUM). These have not only given the MB a dominant position within so-called ‘Muslim civil society’ in Sweden, but also enabled it to amass considerable Swedish taxpayer funds that have helped consolidate its position.

The authors of the report conclude that the MB’s activists are “building a parallel social structure, which poses a long-term challenge in terms of Sweden’s future social cohesion”. The authors are being most diplomatic.

According to the report, the Muslim Brotherhood in Sweden promotes:

“…a system of ‘cultural pluralism’, where every minority group is on the same level as the majority group… The ideal is… that Sweden should be organized in different ‘groups’, each group having the right to practice its particular values. The Swedish population should, even though it is in the majority, be a group among other groups: all groups should have the same status”.