A panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference brought together some of Europe’s most notorious anti-Islam voices Thursday in a discussion titled “Countering the Global Jihad” on how the growth of the Islam is threatening a western way of life and what the U.S. could do to fight back.
“I came here really today to make the point that do not let what has happened in Europe and Britain happen to America,” said Paul Weston, the former leader of the British Freedom Party, which the Southern Poverty Law Center categorized as “the political wing of the racist and xenophobic English Defense League.”
Weston has also been identified as a “white nationalist,” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The panel was organized by Frank Gaffney, the founder of the Center for Security Policy and a leading progenitor of Islamophobia and anti-Islam conspiracy theories.
The hour-long panel discussion was ripe with fear mongering that western countries should be doing more to stop the spread of Islam and stop saying that radical Islam is merely a perverse interpretation of the faith.
“This denial of what Islam is is going to be the downfall of Europe because by the time the politicians have finally got the balls to to stand up and tell the truth, it may be too late by that time for demographic reasons to actually do anything about it,” Weston said as he highlighted just how much faster the Muslim population was growing compared to white British who tend to have fewer children.
The room full of CPAC attendees erupted in applause.
The panel also featured Danish Islam critic Lars Hedegaard, who was engaged in a lengthy court battle in 2011 after he was accused of hate speech for saying that “girls in Muslim families are raped by their uncles, their cousins or their dad.” The Supreme Court of Denmark did acquit him. Hedegaard was nearly assassinated in 2013. And as chronicled in the New York Times, the Muslim community came to defend his rights to free speech in Denmark despite the fact that many of his remarks have been aimed at the Muslim faith.
Thursday’s discussion focused mostly on the refugee crisis in Europe and how many of those entering the continent, according to Hedegaard and Weston, were not real refugees pouring over the border because of war, but Muslims looking for economic relief in Europe.
“Europe as we knew it is just a few years away from a complete breakdown,” Hedegaard said Thursday on the panel, adding later that migrants are rushing through Europe and using up social services from housing to health care without assimilating to the continent.
“You can see where this will end. This will end in breakdown. This will end in warfare. This will end in bloodshed,” Hedegaard said.
