Lessons From the Ivory Coast

The crisis in the Ivory Coast has important lessons for Europe, Israel and the United States. And none of these lessons is being conveyed by the Western media.

The most important aspects of the crisis in the Ivory Coast are being overlooked or deliberately disguised by the Western media. One can read media report after media report without discovering the basic fact that the Northern Ivory Coast “rebels” are Muslims. Indeed they are Muslims who by and large entered the Ivory Coast as infiltrators, through borders that are poorly patrolled, from neighboring countries. A better advertisement for stronger border control cannot be found. At least four million illegal immigrants, mostly Muslim, entered the Ivory Coast during the past two decades, tilting the demographic balance there.

And these Muslim infiltrators and interlopers, increasingly backed by African, French and Western powers, are challenging the control by Ivory Coast natives over their own country. The sufferings and violence in the Ivory Coast may well illustrate what awaits Europe if it continues its own demographic suicide and if it continues to flood itself with Muslim immigrants. {snip}

The Ivory Coast of today, or Côte d’Ivoire, is essentially a bi-national state, although each “nation” is in fact a collection of tribes. The northern “nation” is Muslim; the southern “nation” consists of Christians and other Non-Muslims. {snip}

The background to the civil war and the current constitutional crisis is the massive in-migration of Muslims from the countries neighboring the Ivory Coast, mainly from Burkina Faso. The infiltrators settled in the northern half of the country, and also in pockets in the south, including in some neighborhoods inside the country’s largest city, Abidjan. Today Muslims, including illegals, are almost 40% of the population of the country (although Muslim and other sources claim they are really considerably higher), the remainder being a mixture of Christians (mainly Roman Catholics) and animists.

Tensions between the immigrant population and the indigenous Ivorians goes back to the 1960s. Successive governments there have regarded the immigrants to be “circumstantial Ivorians” (their term), as opposed to the “pure Ivorians,” who are the natives. The illegal “aliens” constitute more than a quarter of the current population of the country. {snip}

The current political standoff in the Ivory Coast is largely a Muslim-Christian confrontation. The “rebels” represent the Muslims of the country, especially of the north, and in particular the “aliens.” {snip}