Suicide by welfare: How the West is funding ISIS with cradle-to-grave benefits
By: Benjamin Weingarten | August 06, 2016
When James Burnham wrote the bracing and prescient Suicide of the West, one wonders if he could have conceived of the lengths to which the West would go to destroy itself.
Exhibit A comes from Europe, where the Wall Street Journal reports that at least five of the alleged plotters in recent jihadist attacks in France and Belgium received approximately $56,000 in welfare benefits in the period leading up to their slaughter. That is, the jihadists financed themselves with European taxpayer dollars.
Jihadists know that things many Europeans consider to be their greatest strengths -- cradle-to-grave welfare and multiculturalism -- are its greatest weaknesses against a global Islamic supremacist movement.
Apparently, only now the Europeans are reckoning with the fact that while the welfare state is supposedly “a primary tool for combating poverty as well as integrating immigrants” as the Journal terms it, that the very welfare state is being used to fund Islamic warfare on its own citizens.
In Belgium amazingly, benefits may only be cut after a person is convicted of terrorism, or leaves the country. So if you are a member of a sleeper cell collecting unemployment checks, and the authorities have not built a case against you and prosecuted you, you may continue to tap the public till to finance your treasonous activities.
The director of Belgium’s Financial Intelligence Processing Unit, Philippe de Koster, claims that there is no evidence public funds were used directly to finance attacks in Brussels and Paris. However, “social-welfare benefits provided them with livelihoods and indirect support for their terrorist activities.”
Moreover, de Koster seemingly contradicts his own statement, as he goes on to assert that, according to the Journal “suspects transferred welfare money onto prepaid debit cards that later were used in the twin attacks.”
As Mr. de Koster well knows, money is fungible. Whether you are paying for a jihadist’s meal or parts of his bomb, you are still providing material support for a jihadist. Whether you fly $400 million in an unmarked cargo plane to Iran as part of an #Iransom or a settlement payment, you are still providing material support for the world’s leading state sponsor of jihad.
On the former, that Europe is just waking up to state underwriting of jihad is shocking.
The case of the United Kingdom is illustrative of the continent’s willingness to drape the niqab over its head and claim blindness.
Several years ago, the infamous UK-based jihadist preacher Anjem Choudary was captured on video calling for his followers to quit working and claim unemployment benefits to free up their time to fight the infidel.
As Daniel Johnson notes in Standpoint, in the UK “Muslims have long been claiming welfare benefits for multiple wives; the only condition is that they must have married them abroad.”
In 2016, the UK sweetened the plot for the ideological foreigners living in its midst, drafting new welfare rules that will allow men with more than one wife additional benefits. According to the Daily Mail, while the husband and his first wife will be able to claim a married couples’ allowance, all other wives will be allowed to claim a single person’s allowance.
Thus, the UK ensures that its welfare state harmonizes with a Sharia law that sanctions polygamy, a policy incidentally supported by London’s new Islamic supremacist-friendly Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan.
It would be the height of dangerous folly to assume that jihadists have not studied the welfare laws in every single European state to figure out how to maximize their legal financing of terror. After all, taking advantage of welfare is the European thing to do – it has the double benefit of providing funds for jihadist operations and allowing jihadists to blend in like normal citizens.
Indeed in 2015, ISIS put out a book titled “ How to Survive in the West – A Mujahid Guide” that called for jihadis in the free world to claim extra government-provided benefits, among other “easy money ideas.” To justify transacting with Westerners, and to assuage the fears of devout Muslims uncomfortable with partaking in potentially “forbidden” economic activity, the authors of the book wrote that “the population who will soon rise against the believers will get poorer while you will get richer and be able to fund the Muslim cause.”
Could the jihadists put it any more clearly?
Meanwhile, on the multiculturalism front, PEW reports that 1.3 million refugees sought asylum in Europe in 2015, about half of whom came from the following three countries: Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The aforementioned jihadists who took advantage of Europe’s welfare system were all EU citizens. Many of those who have been jihadized in Europe are second and third generation Europeans. Given the existential threat that exists in Europe among people born and raised on the continent, why is Europe accepting any immigrants today, rather than focusing on jailing or deporting all of those working to undermine and destroy Europe already on its soil?
And does Europe still believe that lavishing benefits on its Muslim immigrants will integrate them any better than it has to date? The materialist mindset that assumes that redistributing wealth to people will make them disavow their deeply held religious beliefs is absurd. All one has to do is read what ISIS says in the latest issue of its English language Dabiq magazine to understand that what motivates the Islamic supremacist population already in the West and soon to come here is its commitment to making the world submit to Islam, not to getting a job, an education or freedom.
It appears that Europe, and increasingly the U.S., are self-righteously suicidal. We in the West seem to believe that building socialist and multiculturalist utopias—even if we literally get our heads chopped off in the process—is the greatest moral good. The complete progressive perversion of society is growing ever closer to its final triumph.
- See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/08/suicide-by-welfare-how-the-west-is-funding-isis-with-cradle-to-grave-benefits#sthash.xzOpP0Fy.dpuf |
