The European Commission and the Latest “Rights Of Man”

“In its latest bid to tackle the biggest migration crisis since World War II, the European Commission proposed making countries pay a ‘solidarity contribution’ of 250,000 ($290,000) euros per refugee they decline to take.”—from a May 4 news report

This extraordinary news shows how far the European Union, the Party of Good, the Party of European Duty Toward Muslims — the “duty” being that of helping ameliorate the conditions of Muslims by taking into Europe ever-greater numbers of these “refugees” – is prepared to go, in squeezing economically those member states of the European Union that are not willing to accept as many Muslim migrants as the European Commission, in its wisdom, has determined they should take in.

It is not coincidental that those countries most reluctant to accept the European Commission’s diktat are in Eastern Europe. They received their political freedom comparatively recently, having been held captive as members of the Soviet bloc, and are grateful for what they thought would be freedom from the kind of bullying they endured from the Soviet Union. They assumed that they were rejoining Europe; instead they find they have joined quite a different thing, the European Union, an officious multinational meddler and bully. Given their own history, these Eastern Europeans are keenly sensitive to assaults on their freedom by E.U bureaucrats who, in their nonstop display of political correctness, seek to force Eastern Europe to take in ever more migrants, just as the “enlightened” states of Western Europe have had to do. The Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, however, have not yet succumbed to these pressures; they do not think that Europe owes Muslim migrants anything.

In a recent interview in a German news weekly, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban complained that “the language of the European elite [pressuring states to take in more Muslims] is ideological and dogmatic.” Orban dared to state the kind of home truths that were once so obvious, and now are so scandalous: he said that Islam is “the rulebook of another world” that “spiritually has never been part of Europe – it came to us.” Czech President Milos Zeman has addressed anti-Islam rallies and recently declared that “it’s practically impossible to integrate Muslims into Western Europe.” He has also denounced the use of such scare-words as “Islamophobe” and “racist” to describe those opposed, like him, to more Muslim immigration.

As for Poland, last November, 170,000 Poles held an anti-Islam rally in Warsaw, described as the “largest demonstration in Polish history.” The participants were particularly incensed by the European Union’s demands “that Poland ‘absorb’ Muslims who have flooded into Germany over the past few months.”

While the European Commission has so far failed to convince the countries of eastern Europe that they have a “duty to Muslims” that can only be discharged by welcoming them as migrants, it has been more successful, invoking the “Rights-of-Man,” in Western Europe.

The original “Declaration of the Rights of Man” was articulated in the period of the French Revolution, and formally drawn up in August 1789 by the National Constituent Assembly of Revolutionary France. Representative government was endorsed and the divine right of kings dismissed, the legal equality of all citizens was proclaimed, and the rights of all to “liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression” declared. The freedom of speech and of the press were guaranteed. The “Rights of Man,” like the American Bill of Rights, was in the main an attempt to limit the power of the state against the individual. But in the last half-century, the “Rights of Man” has become a phrase, increasingly emptied of its original content, invoked for other purposes and now used as an instrument of oppression by the European Union against both states and their peoples, in a determined effort to transform Europe.

In French journalist Ivan Rioufol’s latest column, he quotes approvingly Professor Jean-Louis Harouel’s pithy description of how “the Rights of Man” have been re-interpreted:

“Les droits de l’homme, inventés par l’Occident pour protéger ses citoyens contre les risques d’arbitraire du pouvoir, sont devenus depuis un demi-siècle une religion séculière suicidaire pour les Occidentaux.”

“The Rights of Man, invented by the West to protect its citizens against the risks of arbitrary power, have become over the past half-century a secular and even suicidal religion for Western man.”

This new version of the “Rights-of-Man” does not come from representatives of “the People” in a National Assembly in Paris, but from bureaucrats in Brussels; it is a top-down prescription based on a faith that is not to be questioned. It’s the “religion” of People-Are-The-Same-The-Whole-World-Over, of – in its extreme form — “all people have a right to move wherever they can” and “people should live wherever they want.” It’s connected to the contempt for oneself and for one’s own country from which Western elites now masochistically suffer (Prof. Harouel: “Le programme de la haine de soi et de son pays est aujourd’hui devenu la pensée officielle, imposée par le politiquement correct de la religion des droits de l’homme”; englished thus: “The program of hatred of oneself and of one’s own country has become the official line, imposed by the political correctness of the religion of the Rights-of-Man”). Of course, the Muslim migrants are convinced of just the opposite; they are, according to the Qur’an, the “best of people” (3:110). And they don’t need anyone to tell them that they have the right to move somewhere; the world, by rights, belongs to them, even if some parts – for now — are still controlled by non-Muslims.

This updated “Rights-of-Man,” undeclared by any legislative body but shared by so many in Europe’s political and media elites, does not guarantee the freedom of speech but only the freedom of speech so long as Muslims are not offended (see Charlie Hebdo, see Garland, Texas). This updated “Rights-of-Man” no longer guarantees freedom from arbitrary power, but justifies the exercise of arbitrary power by the European Union, in forcing its members to take in large numbers of immigrants from a world that is completely foreign and hostile, and who, by and large, refuse to assimilate.

The simple desire of people to preserve the laws and customs of their own country, to minimize the level of physical insecurity which they must daily endure, to decide for themselves whom they wish to admit and whom to keep out, the understandable need, that is, to remain masters in their own homes, all this, once taken for granted, is now stigmatized as “right-wing nationalism,” which then becomes “xenophobia,” which then becomes “far-right racism,” and with that, all possibility of discussion is shut down. A refusal to consider, much less publicly discuss, the future consequences of this huge migration prevails among those European leaders – see Merkel, see the Pope — most determined to put into effect these metamorphosing “Rights of Man.”

If a referendum were held today in Europe on Muslim immigration, we all know what the result would be at the ballot box, and we also know it would have no effect on the E.U.’s “Rights-Of-Man” juggernaut. These rights that originally limited the power of the European states against their own peoples are now invoked by a supra-national body, the European Commission, to deprive those same states, not when they oppose, but when they reflect the will of their own peoples, of the power to decide their own immigration policies.

The fine of nearly $300,000, imposed by the European Commission for each Muslim migrant who is rejected by a country after having been deemed suitable for entry by the E.C., constitutes the dizzy culmination of a policy conceived by European elites, with their twisted version of the “Rights of Man.” If that policy succeeds, it will lead inexorably to the Islamization, through demography, of large parts of Europe, sacrificed on the altar of this new “suicidal” (“suicidaire”) religion.

And with a larger and larger share of Europe’s population consisting of Muslims, and of non-Muslims willing — out of ignorance, out of fear, out of despair — to be their collaborators, the next iteration of the “Rights of Man” in Europe will be considerably older than the previous one, and represent even more of a change. And it already has a name. It’s called the Sharia.