Posted on 04/13/2004 2:36:57 PM PDT by MegaSilver
NIALL Ferguson, the controversial Scots historian, has run into yet another academic spat over his claim that increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants could lead to "the death of Europe" within 50 years.
Two leading authors claimed that Mr Ferguson's comments, made in a newspaper article this week, were "alarmist" and "ridiculous".
Mr Ferguson had said Muslims were poised to "colonise" Europe and transform the continent into "a hybrid called Eurabia". He warned that Muslim colonies would "proliferate" in coming decades because of falling birthrates throughout Europe and the likelihood that most new immigrants would be Muslims.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Mr Ferguson said Europe was poised to become the world's greatest importer of people and that it was highly likely that a majority of new immigrants would be Muslims.
Claiming that unease about the cultural consequences of this extended far beyond the likes of the British National party, he said: "Something very big is happening here. Indeed, there are those who believe it portends, if not the death of Europe, then its mutation into a hybrid called Eurabia."
Mr Ferguson, who works at New York University and is due to take up a post at Harvard University later this year, claimed prophecies that declining European fertility and immigration from Muslim countries could transform the continent had gained credibility since 9/11. He added that Europe's fastest-growing neighbours were countries which were predominantly Muslim, such as Algeria, Egypt and Turkey.
"In the face of such a demographic revolution, western Europe's immigration policies resemble dykes built to stop a tsunami," said Mr Ferguson.
"In any case, what will be left of those policies if, as seems quite possible, Turkey is admitted to the EU in the next phase of enlargement? In short, a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise a senescent Europe to the north and west."
Mr Ferguson added that the prospect that such colonies would "almost certainly proliferate" in the coming decades takes on a double significance when it is considered alongside the decline in European Christianity.
He added: "A creeping Islamicisation of a decadent Christendom is only one of the conceivable scenarios: while the old Europeans get even older and their religious faith gets even weaker, the Muslim colonies within their cities get larger and more overt in their religious observance."
However, Angus Calder, the Edinburgh-based historian, said Mr Ferguson was seeking to alarm and shock, while Neal Ascherson, the author and journalist, accused him of "playing along with fundamentalist panic".
Mr Calder said yesterday: "Ferguson is a clever man but his basic position tells me he has taken free market liberalism to an insane pitch. I would not deny that it could happen but I think he is being alarmist. "He is definitely not a racist but he is a historian who fizzes with ideas, not all of them considered long and hard enough."
Mr Ascherson said: "The idea that they (Muslims) are coming to get us, that they will invade, settle and conquer us, is ridiculous. He is having fun, pulling our legs and enjoying himself.
"This hare was started running by GK Chesterton, an English nationalist who foresaw that western Christian civilisation would disappear and that eventually London would be covered with green flags with crescents and mosques. The other difficulty about Ferguson's thesis is that Islam's population in Europe is tiny and that, although Islam may come in, it is also going out at the other end.
"Every year, possibly every day, young people are ceasing to be Islamic, so you can't raise this sort of demographic panic with only half the figures because there is an exit figure as well as an entry figure." He added: "The trouble with Ferguson is that he is stuck with the idea of multi-culturalism and people forming and staying in a community. But that is not what happens at all. More and more young Muslims in every generation become acultured or hybridised to the culture in which they are living."
The countries that make up the EU accounted for at least 14% of the world's population 100 years ago, but now make up 6% and by 2050 will be 4%, according to the United Nations.The UN forecasts the population of the EU will contract by about 7.5 million over the next 45 years. This assumes a net immigration to Europe of 6.8 million, meaning the decline in indigenous Europeans would be about 14 million.
History of conflict The civilisations of Christian Europe and the Islamic Middle East have clashed for centuries. Some significant dates are :
711: Moors from north Africa invade Spain and within five years have conquered most of the Iberian peninsula.
1095: Pope Urban II calls upon Christians to join a war against the Turks and first crusade begins. Armies march on Jerusalem from Europe, massacring the Jewish and Muslim population.
1453: The Byzantine empire of Orthodox Christians destroyed by the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks
1492: Ferdinand and Isabella expel the last of the Moorish rulers from the Iberian peninsula, uniting most of what is now Spain under their rule.
1529 and 1532: The Ottoman Empire reaches its zenith during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. Twice he tries to the invade the Austro-Hungarian empire, being beaten by the weather after reaching the gates of Vienna
1571: At the battle of Lepanto, Ottoman naval forces clash with the combined naval power of the Pope, Spain, and Venice. A defeat effectively ends Ottoman sea power.
So does Pat Buchanan in his book "The Death of the West," which says basically the same thing.
Their invasion is one of quite resettlement just as America's borders are seeing thousand of Mexicans and others slip across and "resettle", Muslims included - I am not laughing..........
1462. "Vlad the Impaler" has prepared a suitable welcome for the returning Turkish Army. The Turks marched across Wallachia to find a land poisoned and bare in response to their invasion, and when they reached the capital of Tîrgoviste they were confronted with a forest, one kilometer by three kilometers, of impaled corpses, the Turkish and Bulgarian prisoners Vlad had taken. The Turks gave up and went home again. ( Method to defeat- Let the Muslims know what real terror was.)
Ascherson said: More and more young Muslims in every generation become acultured or hybridised to the culture in which they are living.
The sense of these two statements are directly contradictory. Are there no social "scientists" studying this question? What does the data say?
My sense is that Europeon culture is dying under the load of socialism and cultural leftism; the Islamists (and non-fanatical Muslim youth)must see this as well. Who would you want to sign up with--a moribund culture or a dynamic (if insane) movement to achieve what your culture has aspired to for more than a millenia--the destruction of liberal society and forced conversion of the infidels?
It appears not to be a slide... but rather a blind leap off the edge of common sense and freedom !!!
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I'm wondering which was first. Not that it matters.
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