Posted on 04/28/2004 8:41:44 AM PDT by OPS4
Wednesday, Apr. 28, 2004 9:47 a.m. EDT Murdoch Warns About European Muslims, EU, Saudis!
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch let down his hair during a business conference in Los Angeles this past weekend, warning of rough times ahead.
"There is going to be real trouble coming in Europe I think," Murdoch said, noting the large Muslim communities living in France.
Calling his observations random thoughts, Murdoch told the Milken Institute's annual three-day Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton Hotel about his fears.
He sees terrorist breeding grounds in France, offered a blunt critique of the European Union and voiced fears about Saudi Arabia and China, according to Australia's Financial Review.
The topic of discussion was "Creating Prosperity and Stability Amid Ever-Accelerating Change."
Despite the ranking of his co-speakers, including Gary Becker, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences; Thomas Hughes, Deutsche Bank's global head of asset management; Sharon Allen, chairman of Deloitte's U.S. board of directors; and Jami Miscik, the CIA's deputy director of intelligence, Murdoch's views held center stage.
With his audience spellbound, Murdoch warned that he believes Europe, particularly France, has failed to properly assimilate large Muslim immigrant populations from Northern Africa and the Middle East, all of which makes Europe more vulnerable to another terrorist attack than the is the U.S.
Among his other concerns:
"The Muslim populations in France and Germany are much bigger proportionately to what they are in this country [the U.S.] and they have made a very bad job of assimilating them. "The U.S.," he said has done a "pretty good job of assimilating" its Muslim population and only has "pockets of trouble here and there."
"They [Europe] have major centers of problems that are just boiling up. Paris is surrounded by vast blocks of tens of thousands of apartments - all Muslim, all no-go areas for police and totally lawless. There is more danger of terrorist attacks coming than what we have here," he said.
The European Union has "no political leadership with the will to change". "You have this awful French socialist bureaucracy stuck in Brussels, which is deterring investment in Europe, which is over-regulating every business and everybody."
The outlook for Saudi Arabia is glum, he said, and is casting a dark cloud on the horizon for the world's economy. "I think the most outstanding thing to worry about, if we are talking about urgency, is in the Middle East and it is with Saudi Arabia. "Saudi Arabia is really the swing. If there was a revolution there it would happen overnight and you might see oil go from $40 to $80 or $90 (a barrel) and that wouldn't simply affect us. It would bring China and Japan and all those countries into a pretty terrible state."
Despite its problems China is the one bright spot he saw, adding that "the worries that I see that we don't know are the danger of Chinese continuity. I operate a business there." "We see all of this wonderful expansion around us, but the fact is, it is still a centrally planned economy and historically, centrally planned economies, particularly of that size, do become unmanageable. I'm not pessimistic about it.
"I think they do a pretty brilliant job, but we have to face the facts it is one of the uncertainties. I'm optimistic, at least in the short term, hopefully in the long term, about the Chinese economy
Ops4 God Bless America!
Personally, I would think it would be justice for the Euroweenies to live under the Islamic boot for a few generations, just so they realize how good their own civilization was, before they lost their faith in God and themselves. If France falls, I would not lift a finger to help them. I don't think Europe will ever fall to Islam, however. I think more likely that the Islamists will overplay their hand a little early, the way the Osama did with his attack on the US before he had nukes, and that they will finally force the Europeans to remove the Muslims from their continent. It will take lots of unrest, tens of thousands of dead in terror attacks, etc. before they muster the will to do this.
I'll spell it out for you. The Spanish instituted the Inquisition to root out the influence of Islam on their peninsula. They used it not just against Muslims, however, but against Jews, against whom there was resentment for the same reasons that Jews are resented everywhere--they were a successful, non-Christian minority whose wealth game them influence.
The Inquisition against the Muslims may be understandable. Against the Jews, it cost them a great deal when the Jews left and took their talents to Britain other parts of Europe. Spain's economy suffered, and when the New World's gold ran out, it was in poverty.
Spain has only recovered economically in the past generation or so, when it brought its income up from poverty levels to something closer to the developed states of Europe.
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