Posted on 05/11/2004 1:46:10 AM PDT by Remember_Salamis
Muslim Europe
By Daniel Pipes FrontPageMagazine.com | May 11, 2004
“Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam.” So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione (The Force of Reason). And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity’s ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam.
Two factors mainly contribute to this world-shaking development.
· The hollowing out of Christianity. Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition or its historic values. The numbers of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the past two generations to the point that some observers call it the “new dark continent.” Already, analysts estimate Britain’s mosques host more worshippers each week than does the Church of England.
· An anemic birth rate. Indigenous Europeans are dying out. Sustaining a population requires each woman on average to bear 2.1 children; in the European Union, the overall rate is a one-third short, at 1.5 per woman, and falling. One study finds that, should current population trends continue and immigration cease, today’s population of 375 million could decline to 275 million by 2075. To keep its working population even, the EU needs 1.6 million immigrants a year; to sustain the present workers-to-retirees ratio requires an astonishing 13.5 million immigrants annually.
Into the void are coming Islam and Muslims. As Christianity falters, Islam is robust, assertive, and ambitious. As Europeans under-reproduce at advanced ages, Muslims do so in large numbers while young.
Some 5 percent of the EU, or nearly 20 million persons, presently identify themselves as Muslims; should current trends continue, that number will reach 10 percent by 2020. If non-Muslims flee the new Islamic order, as seems likely, the continent could be majority-Muslim within decades.
When that happens, grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilization (the jahiliya?) – at least until a Saudi-style regime transforms them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up. The great national cultures – Italian, French, English, and others – will likely wither, replaced by a new transnational Muslim identity that merges North African, Turkish, subcontinental, and other elements.
This prediction is hardly new. In 1968, the British politician Enoch Powell gave his famed “rivers of blood” speech in which he warned that in allowing excessive immigration, the United Kingdom was “heaping up its own funeral pyre.” (Those words stalled a hitherto promising career.) In 1973, the French writer Jean Raspail published Camp of the Saints, a novel that portrays Europe falling to massive, uncontrolled immigration from the Indian subcontinent. The peaceable transformation of a region from one major civilization to another, now underway, has no precedent in human history, making it easy to ignore such voices.
There is still a chance for the transformation not to play itself out, but the prospects diminish with time. Here are several possible ways it might be stopped:
· Changes in Europe that lead to a resurgence of Christian faith, an increase in childbearing, or the cultural assimilation of immigrants; such developments can theoretically occur but what would cause them are hard to imagine.
· Muslim modernization: For reasons no one has quite figured out (education of women? abortion on demand? adults too self-absorbed to have children?), modernity leads to a drastic reduction in the birthrate. Also, were the Muslim world to modernize, the attraction of moving to Europe would diminish.
· Immigration from other sources. Latin Americans, being Christian, would more or less permit Europe to keep its historic identity. Hindus and Chinese would increase the diversity of cultures, making it less likely that Islam would dominate.
Current trends suggest Islamization will happen, for Europeans seem to find it too strenuous to have children, stop illegal immigration, or even diversify their sources of immigrants. Instead, they prefer to settle unhappily into civilizational senility.
Europe has simultaneously reached unprecedented heights of prosperity and peacefulness – and shown a unique inability to sustain itself (one demographer, Wolfgang Lutz, notes that “Negative momentum has not been experienced on a large scale in world history”).
Is it inevitable that the most brilliantly successful society also be the first in danger of collapse due to a lack of cultural confidence and offspring? Ironically, creating a hugely desirable place to live would seem also to be a recipe for suicide. The human comedy continues.
But at the present rate of immigration in America I doubt we will have the will to fight either, the next time around.
BUMP
Only because the US and Britain have, more or less, run post WWII Europe, and other than letting a European work a copier machine or make some espresso, Europeans have had little say. No more. Hence the usual qualities of European political leadership have reasserted. That is, lying, theft, ordering each other about, incompetence, borrowing, trend blindness, self delusion and of course, the usual boot licking subservience of the the European peasantry so long as it's gullet is stuffed like any pig awaiting slaughter.
We ought to be careful of letting these Europeans in. They are not your great grandfathers Europeans. They are socialist/serf/communist/leftist to their core, and would join up with the Democrats, quickly transforming the US into what they have in Europe now. Maybe Patagonia, or the New Hebridies.
Sorry, U.S. immigration quotas a skewed against Europeans. Besides who wants a bunch of tired old weedy socialists adding themselves to the welfare roles.
One thing's certain: Anybody who takes the Europeans' advice--or advocates emulating them--is a fool!
1) the author uses the term "negative momentum." What's that? His brain has negative momentum for using such post-modernistic, politically correctisms like this.
2) The current jfk is certainly fond of pionting at our Europeans brothers as a model for us and a friend we can't live without. But, correct me if I'm wrong, many of us are here, because of serious problems there.
For all those who really enjoy doom scenarios here is one for you.
Its very boring but true.
Manufacturing jobs of to China.
Service industry jobs such as Front/Back office, software development, call centers, accounting amongst others of to India and the Philippines amongst others.
Tony
But it's a lot easier to get their from Africa. The Italians are actively recruiting in Latin America, but again it's easier to get their from the Middle East and Africa.
<The Italiuands are also looking for rescue from Poland, Lithuania, Rumania, Bulgaria, etc. Ha!
I predict that when Parisian women are ordered to cover their legs, all hell will break loose.
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