Europe: Judeo-Christian Symbols Vanish, Islam Rises

by Giulio Meotti • February 4, 2018 at 5:00 am

The British housing market is now dealing with a new special entry: former Christian churches. A former Methodist church in Surrey was recently put on sale for the first time in its 154-year history. And a few days later, a church in London went on the market -- converted into apartments.
Religious symbols are an integral part of a civilization. When old symbols vanish, new ones -- with their own identities -- take their place. Europe's public imagination today is being flooded with Islamic symbols, from veils in schools, swimming pools and workplaces, to the volume and height of mosque minarets.
We impenitent secularists might be happily indifferent to the fall of the old religious symbols -- but we should not be indifferent to the new religious symbols taking their place.

The demolition of one of the towers of St. Lambertus Church in Immerath, Germany on January 9, 2018. (Image source: Superbass/Wikimedia Commons)

French writers coined the term "le grand remplacement," meaning the demographic replacement by immigrants of native Europeans. There is, however, another replacement taking place on the old continent.

Look at the images taken by the Israeli-Hungarian photographer Bernadett Alpern. Synagogues -- like silent witnesses of the fall of a fundamental branch of the European civilization -- have been turned into museums, swimming pools, shopping centers, police stations and mosques.

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Trump, the Ayatollah and the Wizard Of Oz

by Amir Taheri • February 4, 2018 at 4:00 am

The Twitter following of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei fell from 2.2 million on January 1st to just over 960,000 on January 25.

In his first year as President, Donald J Trump has been credited and more often blamed for numerous things. His admirers credit him with the 32 per cent rise in the stock market and the lowest unemployment rate since the halcyon days of the 1950s.

As for his detractors, well, you know, they blame him for everything they don't like under the sun.

Trump, however, has his barometer of success: the number of followers attracted to his Twitter account.

At a dinner party in his Florida watering hole a few weeks ago, Trump told a friend that his aim was to have at least 100 million Twitter followers by the end of his first term.

Echoing his controversial "my button is bigger than Kim Jung-un's" quip, he also boasted that no political leader came anywhere near him, as far as the number of Twitter followers was concerned.

Do political leaders worry about how many Twitter followers they have?

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