'America Alone'

[G M]

October 20, 2006

The future belongs to Islam

The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. An excerpt from 'America Alone'.

MARK STEYN

Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

This is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.





Let's start with demography, because everything does:

If your school has 200 guys and you're playing a school with 2,000 pupils, it doesn't mean your baseball team is definitely going to lose but it certainly gives the other fellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want to launch a revolution, it's not very likely if you've only got seven revolutionaries. And they're all over 80. But, if you've got two million and seven revolutionaries and they're all under 30 you're in business.

For example, I wonder how many pontificators on the "Middle East peace process" ever run this number:

The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.

Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a "moderate Palestinian" leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation -- or pseudo-nation -- of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the "Palestinian problem" that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.

Likewise, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies. What's happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history: most of us have seen a gazillion heartwarming ethnic comedies -- My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its ilk -- in which some uptight WASPy type starts dating a gal from a vast loving fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact, the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of "lowest-low" fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece's fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world have "big" families these days, it's the anglo democracies: America's fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand a little below. Hollywood should be making My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.

As I say, this isn't a projection: it's happening now. There's no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, "Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself." By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.

Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all. A people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in.

Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we're piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.

You might formulate it like this:

Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;

Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.

By "will," I mean the metaphorical spine of a culture. Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it's riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don't think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents -- in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.

Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.

We are witnessing the end of the late 20th- century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim's pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.

For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different world view.

Which brings us to the third factor -- the enervated state of the Western world, the sense of civilizational ennui, of nations too mired in cultural relativism to understand what's at stake. As it happens, that third point is closely related to the first two. To Americans, it doesn't always seem obvious that there's any connection between the "war on terror" and the so-called "pocketbook issues" of domestic politics. But there is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood -- health care, child care, care of the elderly -- to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. In the American context, the federal "deficit" isn't the problem; it's the government programs that cause the deficit. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a cheque to cover them each month. They corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.

There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: in the Eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the West, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis The End Of History -- written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism -- is that the victors didn't see it as such. Americans -- or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans -- may talk about "winning" the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies -- they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the West only accelerated.

In Thomas P. M. Barnett's book Blueprint For Action, Robert D. Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a droll joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATM card, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart of the metropolis within hours.

Here's another difference: in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland's radical imams settle the metropolis.

And another difference: technology. In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today's Indian territory, countries that can't feed their own people have nuclear weapons.

But beyond that the very phrase "Indian territory" presumes that inevitably these badlands will be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today's "Indian territory" was relatively ordered a generation or two back -- West Africa, Pakistan, Bosnia. Though Eastern Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer now than they were in the seventies, other swaths of the map have spiralled backwards. Which is more likely? That the parts of the world under pressure will turn into post-Communist Poland or post-Communist Yugoslavia? In Europe, the demographic pressures favour the latter.

The enemies we face in the future will look a lot like al-Qaeda: transnational, globalized, locally franchised, extensively outsourced -- but tied together through a powerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents. They won't be nation-states and they'll have no interest in becoming nation-states, though they might use the husks thereof, as they did in Afghanistan and then Somalia. The jihad may be the first, but other transnational deformities will embrace similar techniques. Sept. 10 institutions like the UN and the EU will be unlikely to provide effective responses.

We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the "war on terror" for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little." This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.

Four years into the "war on terror," the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: "the long war." Not a good sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower. The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.

Almost every geopolitical challenge in the years ahead has its roots in demography, but not every demographic crisis will play out the same way. That's what makes doing anything about it even more problematic -- because different countries' reactions to their own particular domestic circumstances are likely to play out in destabilizing ways on the international scene. In Japan, the demographic crisis exists virtually in laboratory conditions -- no complicating factors; in Russia, it will be determined by the country's relationship with a cramped neighbour -- China; and in Europe, the new owners are already in place -- like a tenant with a right-to-buy agreement.

[G M]

Let's start in the most geriatric jurisdiction on the planet. In Japan, the rising sun has already passed into the next phase of its long sunset: net population loss. 2005 was the first year since records began in which the country had more deaths than births. Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It's a country with no immigration, no significant minorities and no desire for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.

At first it doesn't sound too bad: compared with the United States, most advanced societies are very crowded. If you're in a cramped apartment in a noisy congested city, losing a couple hundred thousand seems a fine trade-off. The difficulty, in a modern social democratic state, is managing which people to lose: already, according to the Japan Times, depopulation is "presenting the government with pressing challenges on the social and economic front, including ensuring provision of social security services and securing the labour force." For one thing, the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. Why would any talented ambitious med school student want to go into a field in such precipitous decline? As a result, if you live in certain parts of Japan, childbirth is all in the timing. On Oki Island, try to time the contractions for Monday morning. That's when the maternity ward is open -- first day of the week, 10 a.m., when an obstetrician flies in to attend to any pregnant mothers who happen to be around. And at 5.30 p.m. she flies out. So, if you've been careless enough to time your childbirth for Tuesday through Sunday, you'll have to climb into a helicopter and zip off to give birth alone in a strange hospital unsurrounded by tiresome loved ones. Do Lamaze classes on Oki now teach you to time your breathing to the whirring of the chopper blades?

The last local obstetrician left the island in 2006 and the health service isn't expecting any more. Doubtless most of us can recall reading similar stories over the years from remote rural districts in America, Canada, Australia. After all, why would a village of a few hundred people have a great medical system? But Oki has a population of 17,000, and there are still no obstetricians: birthing is a dying business.

So what will happen? There are a couple of scenarios: whatever Japanese feelings on immigration, a country with great infrastructure won't empty out for long, any more than a state-of-the-art factory that goes belly up stays empty for long. At some point, someone else will move in to Japan's plant.

And the alternative? In The Children Of Men, P. D. James' dystopian fantasy about a barren world, there are special dolls for women whose maternal instinct has gone unfulfilled: pretend mothers take their artificial children for walks on the street or to the swings in the park. In Japan, that's no longer the stuff of dystopian fantasy. At the beginning of the century, the country's toy makers noticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japan doesn't have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketing a new doll called Yumel -- a baby boy with a range of 1,200 phrases designed to serve as companions for the elderly. He says not just the usual things -- "I wuv you" -- but also asks the questions your grandchildren would ask if you had any: "Why do elephants have long noses?" Yumel joins his friend, the Snuggling Ifbot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year old child which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.

And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what's easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you'd grab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline is universal. It's like industrialization a couple of centuries back; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first to do so will have huge advantages: the relevant comparison is not with England's early 19th century population surge but with England's Industrial Revolution. In the industrial age, manpower was critical. In the new technological age, manpower will be optional -- and indeed, if most of the available manpower's Muslim, it's actually a disadvantage. As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.

Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestly suggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply his mind to the conundrum the Crown faced:

Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is ?20000 a head... During the same time, 60000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and the expense necessary to kill us all.

Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After the revolution, there were massive population displacements: as United Empire Loyalists well know, large numbers of New Yorkers left the colony to resettle in what's now Ontario. Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects of King George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. For these people, their primary identity was not as American colonists but as British subjects. For others, their new identity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegiance to the Crown. The question for today's Europe is whether the primary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French.

That's where civilizational confidence comes in: if "Dutchness" or "Frenchness" seems a weak attenuated thing, then the stronger identity will prevail. One notes other similarities between revolutionary America and contemporary Europe: the United Empire Loyalists were older and wealthier; the rebels were younger and poorer. In the end, the former simply lacked the latter's strength of will.

Europe, like Japan, has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.

If America's "allies" failed to grasp the significance of 9/11, it's because Europe's home-grown terrorism problems had all taken place among notably static populations, such as Ulster and the Basque country. One could make generally safe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding Northern Ireland to what cynical strategists in Her Majesty's Government used to call an "acceptable level of violence." But in the same three decades as Ulster's "Troubles," the hitherto moderate Muslim populations of south Asia were radicalized by a politicized form of Islam; previously formally un-Islamic societies such as Nigeria became semi-Islamist; and large Muslim populations settled in parts of Europe that had little or no experience of mass immigration.

On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic. Time for the obligatory "of courses": of course, not all Muslims are terrorists -- though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists -- though enough of them share their basic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwise as the "good cop" end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in. And in a more profound way it rationalizes what would otherwise be the nuttiness of the terrorists' demands. An IRA man blows up a pub in defiance of democratic reality -- because he knows that at the ballot box the Ulster Loyalists win the elections and the Irish Republicans lose. When a European jihadist blows something up, that's not in defiance of democratic reality but merely a portent of democratic reality to come. He's jumping the gun, but in every respect things are moving his way.

You may vaguely remember seeing some flaming cars on the evening news toward the end of 2005. Something going on in France, apparently. Something to do with -- what's the word? -- "youths." When I pointed out the media's strange reluctance to use the M-word vis-?-vis the rioting "youths," I received a ton of emails arguing there's no Islamist component, they're not the madrasa crowd, they may be Muslim but they're secular and Westernized and into drugs and rap and meaningless sex with no emotional commitment, and rioting and looting and torching and trashing, just like any normal healthy Western teenagers. These guys have economic concerns, it's the lack of jobs, it's conditions peculiar to France, etc. As one correspondent wrote, "You right-wing shit-for-brains think everything's about jihad."

Actually, I don't think everything's about jihad. But I do think, as I said, that a good 90 per cent of everything's about demography. Take that media characterization of those French rioters: "youths." What's the salient point about youths? They're youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It's not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back with your walker across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement. Civil disobedience is a young man's game.

In June 2006, a 54-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six -- what's that word again? -- "youths" boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some 40 passengers aboard. But the "youths" were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three "youths" were arrested, and proved to be -- quelle surprise! -- of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. "You see what happens if you intervene," a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. "If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive."

No, he wouldn't. He would be as dead as those 40 passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. What future in "their" country do Mr. Demoor's two children have? My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town I remember well from many childhood visits. When we stayed with great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors of the row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. My sister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets with our little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly past smoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying frites with mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochially Flemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week before Mr. Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers in Sint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery of the -- here it comes again -- "youths." In little more than a generation, a town has been transformed.

Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 per cent are under 18 years old. Of the country's Turkish and Moroccan population, 35 per cent are under 18 years old. The "youths" get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older. To avoid the ruthless arithmetic posited by Benjamin Franklin, it is necessary for those "youths" to feel more Belgian. Is that likely? Colonel Gadhafi doesn't think so:

There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe -- without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the American mainland was attacked for the first time since the War of 1812. The perpetrators were foreign -- Saudis and Egyptians. Since 9/11, Europe has seen the London Tube bombings, the French riots, Dutch murders of nationalist politicians. The perpetrators are their own citizens -- British subjects, citoyens de la R?publique fran?aise. In Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that all female teachers, believers or infidels, wear head scarves in class. The Muslim Council of Britain wants Holocaust Day abolished because it focuses "only" on the Nazis' (alleged) Holocaust of the Jews and not the Israelis' ongoing Holocaust of the Palestinians.

How does the state react? In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant's counsel argued he couldn't get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country's patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he's too "militaristic" and "offensive to Muslims." They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George's cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban's cross as a thin yellow streak.

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but -- as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one's sympathies lie on Islam's multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."

Reprinted by permission of Regnery Publishing from America Alone ? 2006 by Mark Steyn

To comment, email letters@macleans.ca

[Crafty_Dog]

I have bought and read Steyn's book.  IMHO this is a very important book that everyone should read.

[Body-by-Guinness]

November 02, 2006

Anybody out there seen my book?

You won't sell my book in Canada? Why, I'm flattered

MARK STEYN


Some years ago, back when this here Internet thing that the kids are crazy over was brand new, I remember reading a piece about Amazon.com. And some fellow was wondering whether he should invest in Amazon.com. "No," said the big financial journalist, "you should be amazon.com."

From the murky slough of my memory, this thought swam up to the surface for the first time in years. The other day my new book was published -- as you may recall, if only because it was the cover story in Maclean's a couple of weeks back. Don't worry; lest you think this is a book plug, I don't think it's possible to plug a book that at the time of writing is unavailable in any Canadian bookstore coast to coast, from Gander to Victoria. Authors have always been interested in inventory, of course. I don't know whether he still does it, but for many years the "novelist" Jeffrey Archer had a habit of wandering into shops and surreptitiously autographing all copies of his books, thus rendering them unreturnable. Less motivated chaps, on discovering the local emporium has not a single copy of the magnum opus, tend just to shrug and move on to writing our next unwanted book.

Which is pretty much what I did when kind readers -- well, technically, non-readers -- wrote after the Maclean's cover story to point out that Chapters-Indigo-Coles-Smithbooks and all the many aliases of Canada's multi-appellated monopoly bookstore chain had no copies of my new book, whose title escapes me, as evidently it did Heather Reisman. Ms. Reisman, if that is indeed her name, is the proprietress of Chapters-Indigo-Aliases R Us, and is famous for ostentatiously announcing the simultaneous banning from all her chains of Mein Kampf, which is tough on visitors from the Middle East, where the new Arabic edition is a bestseller. ("Kampf" is translated as "jihad." Really.)

I can't speak for Herr Hitler and his Arabic translator, but I took a relaxed view of being excluded from the diverse Dominion. I was a walking Red Rose tea commercial: "Everywhere except Canada? Pity." I felt oddly liberated at having been deemed of no interest to Ms. Reisman's many chains: "Take these chains from my heart and set me free!" as Ray Charles observed in another context. But this is the Internet age, and so within 72 hours I'd had hundreds of emails from my compatriots demanding to know why I'd made the mistake of shipping tons of copies of the book to Des Moines and Buffalo but none to Toronto or Vancouver. And for the first few dozen, I wrote back explaining that it's certainly not that we failed to deliver to Ms. Reisman, and thus her "World's Biggest Bookstore" was reduced to filling the front tables with a groaning cornucopia of thousands of copies of unreadable anti-Bush tracts (Dumbass) faute de mieux: Chapters chose to order that stuff.

But then, what with U.S. book signings cutting into my time, my assistant started sending out form responses: "Dear Sir or Madam, Thank you for your letter complaining about being unable to find Mark's book in (delete as applicable) (a) Chapters; (b) Indigo; (c) Coles; (d-y) other wholly independent operating units of Chapters or Indigo, as the case may be; or (z) Mom 'n' Pop's Home-Style Village Bookstore."

At that point, a helpful reader at my website pointed out that Chapters' site had a convenient feature enabling one to search the inventory to find the nearest store with a copy in stock. A reader in Halifax then wrote back to say that she'd looked and there were no copies anywhere in Atlantic Canada, and after that she'd given up. Another helpful reader pointed out that there was a copy at the Chapters branch on Robson Street in Vancouver, which we passed on to the Halifax gal, as Robson Street is a convenient and easy drive from Nova Scotia. Mr. P. Mennel from Vancouver then wrote to say he'd been to the Robson Street branch and, although the computer did indeed show my book as being in the store, the clerk had been unable to find it. We posted this on my website in hopes we could catch the Halifax lady before she reached Saskatchewan.

By this stage, I was beginning to get a lot of mail along the lines of: "Ha! So Heather Reisman assured us that banning Mein Kampf was strictly a one-time deal. It seems her list has gotten a little longer . . ." Etc. I was reluctant to impute such motives to Chapters, but I did find myself recalling something Don Black, the lyricist of Born Free and To Sir With Love and Diamonds Are Forever, said to me years ago. He remarked how he always feels like a schmuck going into a Virgin Megastore or HMV and asking the extravagantly pierced young thing behind the desk for a Rosemary Clooney album. To be honest, I've always felt a bit like that in a Canadian bookstore. If they had, say, David Frum's latest on the shelf, you could at least slip it in between the Pierre Berton and the Yann Martel and hope the guy in line behind you doesn't spot it. But if it's not on the shelf and you have to ask for it . . . A gentleman in Calgary inquired about my book and was told there was no demand for it. During this exchange, two other people asked the same question of a neighbouring clerk and got the same response. There's no demand for the book, just a huge demand for the explanation that no one's demanding it.

A frustrated Mr. Robert Werner received the following written reply from Laura Blight, Indigo's "Coordinator, Selling Services & Solutions, Store Performance Department": "Wow, this title is certainly generating interest!" In everyone except Ms. Blight and her colleagues, it seems. The book was at No. 6 at Amazon.com; it was in its fourth printing in the U.S. on the day it was officially released; even at Chapters' own website, at the time of writing 83 patrons have given it an "average customer rating" of five stars (or maple leafs, inevitably), and yet Ms. Reisman lists it as "not yet available."

So in the end, we directed readers to Amazon.ca, which Chapters, you'll recall, wanted banned from the Canadian market. At Amazon.ca, the book made the week's Top 10 bestsellers on its first day and rose to No. 2, before selling out. At which point, Canadians had to go to Amazon.com and order from down south. And, if you do that, something called "the Canadian Border Services Agency" charges you a couple of bucks for GST along with a five-dollar "service fee." It seems a little odd for a service agency to sting you with a service fee for the service they're meant to provide. Rather as if Maclean's charged you the cover price and then tossed in a five-dollar "service fee" for writing and editing. But I guess calling it a "service fee" is a way to disguise what it really is: a protectionist tariff that's in breach of the NAFTA treaty. That's if they let it through. A day or two before the cover story in Maclean's was due to go to bed, I received an urgent email from the editor saying their copy had been "held at the border." Hmm.

As a Canadian, I've found it an interesting experience to be on the receiving end of the decayed Dominion's narrow definition of "cultural diversity," and the peculiarly restrictive combination of government regulation in aid of corporate monopoly, in which Ms. Reisman decides what books she's prepared to stock and the Canada Border Services Agency then imposes a shakedown fee on those that don't meet her criteria. There's nothing more damaging for a book than to get cover stories and interviews and whatnot, but for it to be unavailable in any store. And no doubt Chapters-Indigo's decision to order three copies and use them to prop up the wonky rear right-hand leg of the Dumbass display means fewer Canadians who don't already know about it will ever see my book, which is kinda sad, but weirdly lucrative. According to the CBC, in Canada a "bestseller" sells 5,000 copies. I was amazed to discover that we've already sold that many just on my little website. And a huge number of that 5,000 were shipped out to readers across Canada who'd tried and failed to buy it at Chapters-Indigo and, like Shelley Ide of Port Moody, B.C., wrote to say that "I will never set foot in a Chapters again." If Heather Reisman carries on boycotting me, I should be able to retire to Tahiti within the year.

In a way, it's very exciting. I could be the first Canadian author to win the Governor General's Award without ever selling a copy in a Canadian bookstore.

But I expect they've got rules about that, too.

[G M]

http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http:...nists_mark_steyn.htm

A DARK GLOBALISM
By MARK STEYN

October 17, 2006 -- New Hampshire-based columnist Mark Steyn is one of the most trenchant writers in the English-speaking world today. Hitting stores this week is his new book, "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" - a grim look at the West's fecklessness in the face of the threat from radical Islam. The Post is happy to give its readers a taste with this excerpt.
- THE EDITORS

THE dragons are no longer on the edge of the map: That's the lesson of 9/11.

When you look at it that way, the biggest globali zation success story of recent years is not McDonald's or Microsoft but Islamism. The Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam - practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere - and successfully exported it to Jakarta and Singapore and Alma-Ata and Grozny and Sarajevo and Lyons and Bergen and Manchester and Ottawa and Dearborn and Falls Church. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop.

And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalized insurgency.

As a bleary Dean Martin liked to say, in mock bewilderment, at the start of his stage act: "How did all these people get in my room?" How did all these jihadists get rooms in Miami and Portland and Montreal? How did we come to breed suicide bombers not just in Gaza but in Yorkshire?

IN the globalized pre-9/11 world, we in the West thought in terms of nations - the Americans, the French, the Chinese - and, insofar as we considered transnational groups, were obsessed mostly with race. Religion wasn't really on the radar.

So an insurgency that lurks within a religion automatically has a global network. And you don't need "deep cover": You can hang your shingle on Main Street and we won't even notice it. And when we do - as we did on 9/11 - we still won't do anything about it, because, well, it's a religion, and modern man is disinclined to go after any faith except perhaps his own.

But Islam is not just a religion. Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to provoke "the Muslim world" would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to "the Christian world." When such sensitive guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political sovereignty too. Thus, it's not merely that there's a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project - and, in fact, an imperial project - in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are not.

Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith, in which whatever's your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified. (Yes, Christianity has had its blood drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, still a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year.)

So we have a global terrorist movement, insulated within a global political project, insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world. The jihad thus has a very potent brand inside a highly dispersed and very decentralized network much more efficient than anything the CIA can muster. And these fellows can hide in plain sight.

NOT long after 9/11, I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammad.

A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammad Atta.

A sniper starts killing gas station customers around Washington, D.C.? John Allen Muhammad.

A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri.

A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet.

A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed.

A British subject self-detonates in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammad Hanif.

A terrorist cell bombs the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed.

A gang rapist preys on the women of Sydney, Australia? Mohammad Skaf.

A group of Dearborn, Mich., men charged with cigarette racketeering in order to fund Hezbollah? Fadi Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, Mohammad Fawzi Zeidan and Imad Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud.

A Canadian terror cell is arrested for plotting to bomb Ottawa and behead the prime minister? Mohammad Dirie, Amin Mohamed Durrani and Yasim Abdi Mohamed.

Sophisticates object that very few of the Mohammads on the list above are formal agents of al Qaeda. But so what? There are no "card-carrying members" of this enemy: That's what makes them an ever-bigger threat: You don't need to plant sleepers. If you've got a big pool of manpower and a big idea that's just out there all the time - 24/7, flickering away invitingly like a neon sign in the Western darkness - that's enough to cause a big heap of trouble.

AND there are minimal degrees of separation between all these Mohammads and the most eminent figures in the Muslim world and the critical institutions at the heart of the West. For example, in 2003, Abdurahman Alamoudi was jailed for attempting to launder money from a Libyan terror-front "charity" into Syria via London.

Who's Abdurahman Alamoudi? He's the guy who until 1998 certified Muslim chaplains for the United States military, under the aegis of his Saudi-funded American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council. In 1993, at an American military base, at a ceremony to install the first imam in the nation's armed forces, it was Mr. Alamoudi who presented him with his new insignia of a silver crescent star.

He's also the fellow who helped devise the three-week Islamic awareness course in California public schools, in the course of which students adopt Muslim names, wear Islamic garb, give up candy and TV for Ramadan, memorize suras from the Koran, learn that "jihad" means "internal personal struggle," profess the Muslim faith, and recite prayers that begin "In the name of Allah," etc.

OH, and, aside from his ster ling efforts on behalf of multicultural education, Alamoudi was also an adviser on Islamic matters to Hillary Clinton.

And it turns out he's a bagman for terrorists.

Infiltration-wise, I would say that's pretty good. The desk jockeys at the CIA insist, oh no, it would be impossible for them to get any of their boys inside al Qaeda. But the other side has no difficulty setting their chaps up in the heart of the U.S. military, and the U.S. education system, and the U.S. political establishment, and the offices of U.S. senators and former First Ladies.

Mark Steyn was a winner of the 2006 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. Excerpted with permission from "America Alone: The End of the World as We KnowIt" (Regnery).

[G M]

Vive La Caliphate
By Jeremy Rabkin
The Weekly Standard | November 16, 2006

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
By Mark Steyn
Regnery, 256 pp., $27.95

It's human nature to recoil from the saddest or most distressing sights. If there's another side of us that is fascinated by disaster, there are lots of disaster stories competing for attention. Cable news and the Internet make it all too easy to switch over or click on to the latest breaking tale of woe. To keep us focused on the most alarming underlying trends, we need a really entertaining writer.


So here's Mark Steyn, with all his trademarked verbal slapstick and clowning. And his new book is intensely sobering. Most of it has been said before--and by no one more insistently than Steyn himself in his regular columns in America, Canada, and Britain. But with the space now to keep spinning out the implications, Steyn offers a warning that is riveting.

The challenge starts with demographic trends. European birthrates have fallen way below replacement levels. In today's Italy, for example, there are barely half as many children under the age of five as there were in 1970. As the proportion of old people increases and the proportion of young workers declines, European welfare states face financial strains that make our own problems with Social Security look mild and manageable.

Immigration, once seen as an answer to this problem, now poses an even more intense challenge in much of Europe. Immigrants from Muslim countries have maintained high birthrates and concentrated in major cities, so large parts of major cities are now preserves of immigrant cultures. Complacent talk of multiculturalism has allowed European governments to ignore the challenge of winning the loyalties and attachments of immigrants. For children of immigrants, who have no strong attachments either to their old or new countries, extremist ideology often fills the void.

In practice, Steyn warns, Europe is trending toward societies that are not so much multicultural as bicultural--split between a growing minority that embraces Muslim discipline and identity, and a bewildered, anxious, aging population that does not. Bicultural societies are rarely stable.

Europeans scoff at the idea that Iraq could become a pluralist democracy, but then imagine that European social democracy can ensure happy harmony with people fired by some of the same zeal as Iraqi "insurgents."

You think Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia are incompatible? What do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian secular gay potheads and anti-whoring anti-sodomite anti-everything-you-dig Islamists? If Kurdistan's an awkward fit in Iraq, how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of Holland?
Sure, Western decadence has an appeal, even for children of Algerian immigrants in the banlieux of Paris. But restless young people may well combine the worst aspects of Western decadence with the worst impulses of Islamist extremism: "Whether in turbans or gangsta threads, just as Communism was in its day, so Islam is today's identity of choice for the world's disaffected."

A reform of Islam? "What if the reform has already taken place and jihadism is it?" Steyn puts the challenge very sharply: "Those who call for a Muslim reformation in the spirit of the Christian Reformation ignore the obvious flaw in the analogy--that Muslims have the advantage of knowing (unlike Luther and Calvin) where reform in Europe ultimately led: the banishment of God to the margins of society."

In some places, gradual but relentless accommodation to the new culture will steer societies along a path where "there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and sharia." Elsewhere, there may be resistance, triggering street violence or political upheaval. Amidst worsening economic trends and increasing instability, more and more educated young people will seek their futures in more promising countries--hastening the dissolution of the old society. So Steyn foresees "societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and then the long Eurabian night, not over the entire Continent but over significant parts of it. And those countries that manage to escape the darkness will do so only after violent convulsions of their own."


Even if that nightmarish vision is too extreme, the strategic point remains: No matter what rhetoric our State Department adopts, European nations are not going to be confident, capable partners for American international aims. Would France help us thwart the nuclear plans of the mullahs in Tehran? The "quai d'Orsay can live with Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear power. As things stand, France is on course to be the third."

Steyn still expresses hope for the effort in Iraq, and not just as a way of emphasizing the hopelessness of coming conflicts in Europe. In many Muslim countries, people may think about their own future more soberly or reasonably, because they're not viewing things through the perspective of mounting conflict with hedonists across town. Meanwhile, Russia, China, and Japan face their own demographic crises. The utter incapacity of international institutions will discourage smaller countries from thinking about anything more than their own immediate interests. So on Steyn's telling, we are heading to an era of ongoing crisis, an era when the world cannot bring itself even to constrain the spread of weapons of mass destruction, much less focus concentrated condemnation on such "depravities" as suicide bombing.

The United States really will be "alone" in fundamental ways. It is the one nation in the developed world that is not facing demographic decline, the one nation for which the challenge of Islamist extremism remains largely external. What is out there, of course, can come crashing into the heart of American cities as it did on 9/11. And meanwhile, we continue pouring billions of petrodollars into the coffers of Middle Eastern regimes that still seem content to recycle that immense stream of wealth into extremist religion in Europe and around the world.

Steyn offers little in the way of policy prescriptions. He argues that American self-confidence owes much to our tradition of keeping government in bounds and encouraging the self-reliance of individuals. So he ends up warning that proposals for emulating European welfare states--as in extending government guarantees for health care--will have momentous strategic consequences. Maybe. But I'm not sure invoking the imperatives of national defense in every debate about domestic spending or regulation is really a good way to get people to take defense concerns more seriously.

Steyn's main point remains. The collapse of existing political structures in Europe will require not just a reassessment of strategic calculations--NATO and all that. It will require a very considerable psychological adjustment. A calm and reasonable future is not, after all, guaranteed by the advance of technology, by the expansion of trade, or by the softening of old ideologies in the advanced countries.

The threat is not that a new caliphate will rule the world, but that the world will revert to medieval chaos and wretchedness. The United States certainly can't expect to restore the world as it was in the 1990s, but it also can't pretend that everything will be fine if we let history take its own path. We may find unexpected allies, including some in those Muslim countries that don't want to be dominated by jihadist visions. But whatever we do, we can't assume that old allies in Europe will be there for us.

Steyn's conclusion is not a joke: "To see off the new Dark Ages will be tough and demanding. The alternative will be worse."

[Crafty_Dog]

A German friend with good feeling about the US with whom I shared the Steyn piece had this to say:

============


Ever since I have been introduced by you to the idea that Europe may become part muslim I have been discussing this topic with people around me I know. We all consider this a very absurd prediction.

1.) Yes, there will be a gap in the social welfare. After all, the birthrate prediction is a statistic and may not represent the actual situation but can only show trends. One trend is that people get children at a later age than our parents. The average family now has two children at the age of 31, before it has been at the age of 21. There are a lot of young couples around me that have children now. Europeans will not die out.

2.) Yes, most countries in Europe have problems with their immigrants. France and England are an exception due to their colonialist past. They will face massive problems in the future. However not all of these immigrants are Muslims. There are a lot of people from former Yugoslavia and Africa. A lot of immigrants from Arabian countries however are Christians. Due to the conflicts in those countries, it has become harder for them to live there. A lot of refugees from Iraq for example are secular Christians.

3.) Yes, fundamental islam has become a haven for lost souls. Indeed, to a lot of young kids of former immigrants Islam gives a home. BUT, Islam does not equate terrorism, as being christian does not include being a mormon. There is fundamental islamism in Europe, as there is a by far greater number of hardworking, honest and reasonable muslims, no better or worse than a jew or christian.

4.) Europe will NOT become semi-muslim - this is wishful thinking. There're facts you can build such a theory on. Europe rather will see another wave of Nationalism.

5.) Europe has a different mechanism of integration. While in the US an immigrant is assimiliated within one generation, in Europe it takes about 3 - 4 generations. Immigrants then also aren't assimiliated, but in a profound process the origin culture is being put under a test by European values. That brings forth a lot more conflict and takes longer.

6.) Yes, Europe has an identity crisis. The changes of the 1990s were over here , not in the US. 20 years ago the new members of the EU have been our enemies. 20 years ago we learned to shoot russians in the military, now they're our ally. The US will have to show a bit more sensitivity to the changes we haven't yet been able to acclimate to anyhow. If you want Europe as a new enemy, I guess scribes like Hanson, Peters or Steyn will be very quick to give reasons for that.

[G M]

Ever since I have been introduced by you to the idea that Europe may become part muslim I have been discussing this topic with people around me I know. We all consider this a very absurd prediction.

**I think in general, europe is very much in denial, from the top down as to the changes taking place around them. A unwillingness to examine the crisis coupled with deeply ingrained "political correctness" prevents a basic discussion of the problem. The fact that this German needed to hear about this subject from an American demonstrates the core disconnect.**

1.) Yes, there will be a gap in the social welfare. After all, the birthrate prediction is a statistic and may not represent the actual situation but can only show trends. One trend is that people get children at a later age than our parents. The average family now has two children at the age of 31, before it has been at the age of 21. There are a lot of young couples around me that have children now. Europeans will not die out.

**Statistics are empirical evidence. This writer is citing anecdotal oberservations that young couples around him (I'm assuming it's him, not her) are having children. The issue isn't that europeans aren't reproducing, it's that they aren't reproducing at a sufficient rate to stabilize their population loss and the economic death spiral of socialism.**

2.) Yes, most countries in Europe have problems with their immigrants. France and England are an exception due to their colonialist past. They will face massive problems in the future. However not all of these immigrants are Muslims. There are a lot of people from former Yugoslavia and Africa. A lot of immigrants from Arabian countries however are Christians. Due to the conflicts in those countries, it has become harder for them to live there. A lot of refugees from Iraq for example are secular Christians.
**I'm not sure if the author intends to say that the UK and France have a better or worse problem with immigrants due to a colonial past. I'm assuming the author is aware of the ongoing problems with the growing French "Intifada" in the Parisian suburbs and the British lads who grew up speaking the Queen's english, cheering for Manchester United and eating fish and chips who none the less were ready to wear bomb vests and walk into the tube and become shaheeds in the midst of their fellow British subjects. They weren't poor, disenfranchised refugees living in squalid conditions. They were the products of "Cool Britiania" and the call of jihad which seems to greatly overwhelm any alligence to "Queen and Country". As far as christians fleeing the middle east, that's very true. In the US, the majority of arabs aren't muslims. The majority of muslims aren't arab. As the global jihad grows, the fate of non-muslims in muslim areas worsens and you'll see many more fleeing to non-muslim nations. For many, europe will provide only temporary shelter.**

3.) Yes, fundamental islam has become a haven for lost souls. Indeed, to a lot of young kids of former immigrants Islam gives a home. BUT, Islam does not equate terrorism, as being christian does not include being a mormon. There is fundamental islamism in Europe, as there is a by far greater number of hardworking, honest and reasonable muslims, no better or worse than a jew or christian.
**Islam doesn't always equate terrorism, but it's core theology does. It's long and bloody past and very bloody present demonstrate that islam across the globe very rarely peacefully coexists with other religions and cultures. A religion, which was founded by a genocidal rapist who funded the violent growth with attacks on caravans when his early attempts to spread his new religion by peaceful evangelization failed is a trap that which would-be reformers of islam haven't figured out a theologically viable way to escape. To create a version of islam that is willing to peacefully coexist with a secular society requires throwing out much of the koran and vast amounts of hadith and sira. It means that the core concept of islam as not only a religion, but a wholistic way of life that dictates not only personal conduct and a relationship with god, but law and government and a requirement for islam to be globally dominant must be shed. Those within the islamic world that attempt to do so in a public manner rarely die of natural causes and the jihadis can support much, if not all of their actions by core aspects of islamic theology.**

4.) Europe will NOT become semi-muslim - this is wishful thinking. There're facts you can build such a theory on. Europe rather will see another wave of Nationalism.
**It's not my wish. I'd very much prefer not to see it happen. As far as nationalism, the most likely scenario is at a certain point those europeans who wish to fight to sustain themselves will turn to right wing fascist groups and fight a very ugly civil war. A much better approach would be a rational and moderate discussion and policy changes now, but as the topic is still very much unexamined by the majority of europeans precious time is being lost.**

5.) Europe has a different mechanism of integration. While in the US an immigrant is assimiliated within one generation, in Europe it takes about 3 - 4 generations. Immigrants then also aren't assimiliated, but in a profound process the origin culture is being put under a test by European values. That brings forth a lot more conflict and takes longer.
**I'm not sure what the writer means by this. The fact that the US has and is very successful in creating Americans from immigrants is our great strength. It's ironic that the parents of european suicide bombers were much more intigrated into their adopted countries than their culturally compitent, yet rejectionist children are. Exactly how many more generations are required before the new demands for sharia law are forgotten?**

6.) Yes, Europe has an identity crisis. The changes of the 1990s were over here , not in the US. 20 years ago the new members of the EU have been our enemies. 20 years ago we learned to shoot russians in the military, now they're our ally. The US will have to show a bit more sensitivity to the changes we haven't yet been able to acclimate to anyhow. If you want Europe as a new enemy, I guess scribes like Hanson, Peters or Steyn will be very quick to give reasons for that.

**The US made possible the changes in europe and continues to provide for europe's collective protection, despite the flagrant ingratitude that seems to have become a core element of european culture at this point. It hate to break it to the writer, but Russia, especially now isn't western europe's ally. Watch how Putin is manuvering to control europe's energy supply and tell me it's out of an ally's benevolent feelings. I don't fear europe as an enemy. I fear watching it's demise. I fear seeing ancient site and artifacts destroyed because they are seen as "haram". I fear that a future crisis with an nuclear armed "Francostan". It won't be Europeans, as we know them now that we'll be confronting.**

[Quijote]

Hello everyone

Well, I'm this German friend. Let me give you a short introduction:

As I don't like everybody in this world to read about my political and social believes, I have decided to write in this Forum anonymously. You may know me from the members forum, Marc invited me to join the discussion over here. I ask you to excuse me not giving away my name. I have grown up in Germany and now live in another european country. I'm from a generation which has grown up amongst the children of the immigrants from Afghanistan, Turkey or Palastina (amongst other non-islamic countries as well) and know the problems of these youths from first hand expierence. That must be enough background information about me for now.

In your discussion of my points raised, you already make on predestination: That the takeover of muslims over Europe is scientifically proven process which evidently will take place. I don't think so.

I think in general, europe is very much in denial, from the top down as to the changes taking place around them.

That is not true. Some countries in Europe like France and England, due to their colonialist past, have always had to answer the question of how to integrate their former "subjects" into their motherland society. Scandinavian countries f.e. had to deal with this question at a much later point. The first to raise the prediction that Europe will become 'Eurabia' have been Americans. That is in itself a very radical view upon the processes which are right now taking place and IMO not reflecting reality appropriately.

A unwillingness to examine the crisis coupled with deeply ingrained "political correctness" prevents a basic discussion of the problem.

Not true. Political correctness is something that Americans have invented and certainly isn't deeply ingrained in Europe.

Statistics are empirical evidence.

They are empirical. But most somewhat reasonable statistician will tell you that there are exceptions to what statistics are capable of and what not. They first and foremost are not the 21st tarots cards to predict whats going to happen in the future - history has shown that most predictions drawn from statistics have not become true. Statistics do certainly reflect tendencies and thus are able to give a hint as how something will develop if it remains in the very same state at the point that statistic has been made. The larger the area and the more diversity of ways that data has been collected, the more inaccuraricies sneak into a statistic.

I guess we first of all have to agree that Europe is not a unified state like the USA. The EU and EFTA primarily are two economic structures. In the past years the EU has been joined by new countries which 15 years ago would have belong to enemy of the NATO. The new EU has a great diversity now, hard to make generalizations.

I'm not sure if the author intends to say that the UK and France have a better or worse problem with immigrants due to a colonial past. I'm assuming the author is aware of the ongoing problems ...

They are having a worse problem and yes, the author is aware of these problems. The french intifada you are talking about is first and foremost a social problem and no clash of cultures. These young people are all french - and most of them would like to be much more European than they're allowed to. France has done some grave errors with integration. Most probably not covered in American media are the attempts of the local muslim leaders to stop the violence.

I wil not further delve into your picture of Islam as being a religion of a "genocidal rapist". I will not take the standpoint to argument for Islam, but I would like to suggest that you dig a bit deeper into history. There have been a lot of muslim rulers which by have been much more civilzed than most christians ever were. Being an Atheist myself, I still have large respect for the follower of any religion, wether it be Jews, Christians and Muslims. There're aspects about being a muslim we in the west could only wish for that some of their followers live and express more vividly.

It won't be Europeans, as we know them now that we'll be confronting.

In my eyes this is a pretty paranoid view of the world. Do you know any Europeans in person?

Muslims are not one homogenic movement. The muslims in Europe are very different from each other, each having their own agendas. I certainly admit that Europe is having a problem with uneducated, poor and badly integrated children of foreigners. Most of these foreigners are coming from a war torn country or a very archaic society. Their children are the second generation here. Unfortunately those well educated and with more financial means, are much better integrated than those from the working poor.

There isn't the one muslim, as there isn't the one jew or the one christian. No devil with the turban swinging his sword, uniting secrectly to take over Europe. We have a very heterogenic mix of people. Some highly intelligent and some very desparate. But they're all together people like you and me.

BTW, awaiting Mark Steyn's book from the store..

[G M]

In your discussion of my points raised, you already make on predestination: That the takeover of muslims over Europe is scientifically proven process which evidently will take place. I don't think so.

***I don't think it's a done deal, but the trends don't look good.**


Quote
I think in general, europe is very much in denial, from the top down as to the changes taking place around them.

That is not true. Some countries in Europe like France and England, due to their colonialist past, have always had to answer the question of how to integrate their former "subjects" into their motherland society. Scandinavian countries f.e. had to deal with this question at a much later point. The first to raise the prediction that Europe will become 'Eurabia' have been Americans. That is in itself a very radical view upon the processes which are right now taking place and IMO not reflecting reality appropriately.

***Actually, Bat Ye'or is credited with coining the term "Eurabia". I suggest you read some of her writing on the subject. She is a Egyptian born British citizen who lives in Switzerland.***


Quote
A unwillingness to examine the crisis coupled with deeply ingrained "political correctness" prevents a basic discussion of the problem.

Not true. Political correctness is something that Americans have invented and certainly isn't deeply ingrained in Europe.

***Actually the term originates within marxism, if I recall correctly and not within the US. I'll look around and see if I can find some good examples of what I would consider european "political correctness" to cite.***


Quote
Statistics are empirical evidence.

They are empirical. But most somewhat reasonable statistician will tell you that there are exceptions to what statistics are capable of and what not. They first and foremost are not the 21st tarots cards to predict whats going to happen in the future - history has shown that most predictions drawn from statistics have not become true. Statistics do certainly reflect tendencies and thus are able to give a hint as how something will develop if it remains in the very same state at the point that statistic has been made. The larger the area and the more diversity of ways that data has been collected, the more inaccuraricies sneak into a statistic.

***Agreed.***

I guess we first of all have to agree that Europe is not a unified state like the USA. The EU and EFTA primarily are two economic structures. In the past years the EU has been joined by new countries which 15 years ago would have belong to enemy of the NATO. The new EU has a great diversity now, hard to make generalizations.

***Yes, but the EU as a structure is working to dissolve the european nation-state in any meaningful way, successfully for the most part, with some good but to my mind more harm to induvidual freedom.***


Quote
I'm not sure if the author intends to say that the UK and France have a better or worse problem with immigrants due to a colonial past. I'm assuming the author is aware of the ongoing problems ...

They are having a worse problem and yes, the author is aware of these problems. The french intifada you are talking about is first and foremost a social problem and no clash of cultures. These young people are all french - and most of them would like to be much more European than they're allowed to. France has done some grave errors with integration. Most probably not covered in American media are the attempts of the local muslim leaders to stop the violence.

***So when the "Youths" light a car (or person) afire and yell "Allah Akbar!" I shouldn't assume there is a connection to islamic identity?***

I wil not further delve into your picture of Islam as being a religion of a "genocidal rapist". I will not take the standpoint to argument for Islam, but I would like to suggest that you dig a bit deeper into history. There have been a lot of muslim rulers which by have been much more civilzed than most christians ever were. Being an Atheist myself, I still have large respect for the follower of any religion, wether it be Jews, Christians and Muslims. There're aspects about being a muslim we in the west could only wish for that some of their followers live and express more vividly.

***I would argue that I know the history quite well and my statements are well based in historical fact. Muhammad was in his 50's when he married Aisha, his third wife. She was 6, though he is supposed (according to islamic theologians) not to have consummated the marriage until she was 9 years old. The direct affect of this is girls of the same age being married to adult men all over the muslim world. When an observant muslim asks himself "What would Muhammad do?" the answer is usually something very bloody, as that was his response throughout most of his life. I'll put this article in here, as I think it clearly explain the point i'm trying to make much better than I could.***

Khaybar, Khaybar
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 9, 2006


As Hizballah fires its Khaibar-1 rockets into Israel, Kuwaiti demonstrators recently chanted, ?Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahoud, jaish Muhammad sa yaoud? ? that is, ?Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.? (The Kuwait Times rendered this as ?Khaybar, Khaybar, O Zionists, The Army of Muhammad is coming,? but this is probably sanitized for Western consumption: it is unlikely that the protestors chanted ?Zionists? rather than ?Jews? ? the former doesn?t rhyme in Arabic as does the latter, and the chant with ?Jews? is rather common.) Meanwhile, last Thursday, the Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon?s leading Shi?ite cleric, praised Hizballah for waging a ?new battle of Khaibar.?


Reporting Fadlallah?s remarks, AP blandly noted that ?at Khaibar, the name of an oasis in what is now Saudi Arabia, Islam?s prophet Muhammad won a battle against Jews in the year 629.? Reality was somewhat different. As I explain in my forthcoming book, The Truth About Muhammad (coming October 9 from Regnery Publishing), Muhammad was not responding to any provocation when he led a Muslim force against the Khaybar oasis, which was inhabited by Jews ? many of whom he had previously exiled from Medina. One of the Muslims later remembered: ?When the apostle raided a people he waited until the morning. If he heard a call to prayer he held back; if he did not hear it he attacked. We came to Khaybar by night, and the apostle passed the night there; and when morning came he did not hear the call to prayer, so he rode and we rode with him?.We met the workers of Khaybar coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they saw the apostle and the army they cried, ?Muhammad with his force,? and turned tail and fled. The apostle said, ?Allah Akbar! Khaybar is destroyed. When we arrive in a people?s square it is a bad morning for those who have been warned.??[1]



The Muslim advance was inexorable. ?The apostle,? according to Muhammad?s earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, ?seized the property piece by piece and conquered the forts one by one as he came to them.?[2] Another biographer of Muhammad, Ibn Sa?d, reports that the battle was fierce: the ?polytheists?killed a large number of [Muhammad?s] Companions and he also put to death a very large number of them?.He killed ninety-three men of the Jews??[3] Muhammad and his men offered the fajr prayer, the Islamic dawn prayer, before it was light, and then entered Khaybar itself. The Muslims immediately set out to locate the inhabitants? wealth. A Jewish leader of Khaybar, Kinana bin al-Rabi, was brought before Muhammad; Kinana was supposed to have been entrusted with the treasure of on of the Jewish tribes of Arabia, the Banu Nadir. Kinana denied knowing where this treasure was, but Muhammad pressed him: ?Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?? Kinana said yes, that he did know that.



Some of the treasure was found. To find the rest, Muhammad gave orders concerning Kinana: ?Torture him until you extract what he has.? One of the Muslims built a fire on Kinana?s chest, but Kinana would not give up his secret. When he was at the point of death, one of the Muslims beheaded him.[4] Kinana?s wife was taken as a war prize; Muhammad claimed her for himself and hastily arranged a wedding ceremony that night. He halted the Muslims? caravan out of Khaybar later that night in order to consummate the marriage.[5]



Muhammad agreed to let the people of Khaybar to go into exile, allowing them to keep as much of their property as they could carry.[6] The Prophet of Islam, however, commanded them to leave behind all their gold and silver.[7] He had intended to expel all of them, but some, who were farmers, begged him to allow them to let them stay if they gave him half their yield annually.[8] Muhammad agreed: ?I will allow you to continue here, so long as we would desire.?[9] He warned them: ?If we wish to expel you we will expel you.?[10] They no longer had any rights that did not depend upon the good will and sufferance of Muhammad and the Muslims. And indeed, when the Muslims discovered some treasure that some of the Khaybar Jews had hidden, he ordered the women of the tribe enslaved and seized the perpetrators? land.[11] A hadith notes that ?the Prophet had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives.?[12]



During the caliphate of Umar (634-644), the Jews who remained at Khaybar were banished to Syria, and the rest of their land seized.[13]



Thus when modern-day jihadists invoke Khaybar, they are doing much more than just recalling the glory days of Islam and its prophet. They are recalling an aggressive, surprise raid by Muhammad which resulted in the final eradication of the once considerable Jewish presence in Arabia. To the jihadists, Khaybar means the destruction of the Jews and the seizure of their property by the Muslims.



That Khaybar is repeatedly invoked today as a historical model for Hizballah should be a matter of grave concern for Western analysts and policymakers. It should play a significant role in discussions of whether and how a ceasefire should be pursued, and how much of a Hizballah presence can be tolerated indefinitely in Lebanon. But because most Western analysts are still dogmatically committed to the proposition that Islam has nothing, or nothing important, to do with the present global unrest, they recuse themselves from considering such data.



The costs of this willful blindness will do nothing but continue to mount.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq?s Sirat Rasul Allah, A. Guillaume, translator, Oxford University Press, 1955. P. 511.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibn Sa?d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, S. Moinul Haq and H K. Ghazanfar, translators, Kitab Bhavan, n.d. Vol. II, pp. 132-133.

[4] Ibn Ishaq, p. 515.

[5] Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, Darussalam, 1997, vol. 1, book 8, no. 371.

[6] Ibn Sa?d, vol. II, p. 136.

[7] Ibn Sa?d, vol. II, p. 137.

[8] Bukhari, vol. 4, book 57, no. 3152.

[9] Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, Kitab Bhavan, revised edition 2000. Book 10, no. 3761.

[10] Ibn Ishaq, p. 515.

[11] Ibn Sa?d, vol. II, p. 137.

[12] Bukhari, vol. 5, book 64, no. 4200.

[13] Ibn Sa?d, vol. II, p. 142.

***Ok, long but worth reading and it explains how the acts of Muhammad directly shapes the global jihad today.***


Quote
It won't be Europeans, as we know them now that we'll be confronting.

In my eyes this is a pretty paranoid view of the world. Do you know any Europeans in person?

***I've known quite a few. I spent most of my times overseas in asia, not europe. I do however read a lot of european media and think i'm fairly well aquainted with today's western europe. Most of my DNA came from europe, if that is worth anything.
 ***

Muslims are not one homogenic movement.

***Agreed.***

The muslims in Europe are very different from each other, each having their own agendas. I certainly admit that Europe is having a problem with uneducated, poor and badly integrated children of foreigners. Most of these foreigners are coming from a war torn country or a very archaic society. Their children are the second generation here. Unfortunately those well educated and with more financial means, are much better integrated than those from the working poor.

***I strongly suggest you look up another european author on the topic
http://www.amazon.com/Londonistan-Melanie-Phillips/dp/1594031444
I'll post here in the future on the Muslim Brotherhood. If you aren't aware of the group you may be surprized at the sophistication of their attempts to use both the "hard jihad" and the "soft jihad" together towards their goal of islamic world domination.***


There isn't the one muslim, as there isn't the one jew or the one christian. No devil with the turban swinging his sword, uniting secrectly to take over Europe. We have a very heterogenic mix of people. Some highly intelligent and some very desparate. But they're all together people like you and me.

***They are all people, some are like you and me. Others are very different. I wouldn't dream of walking into a crowded resturant wearing a bomb so I could blow the legs off of "infidels" and I doubt you would either. However, we are at war with those who would. You may not be interested in the global jihad, but the global jihad is interested in you.***

 

[Quijote]

I don't think it's a done deal, but the trends don't look good.

Well, at least we agree that these are trends. As I wrote earlier, I don't deny that we're having problems with bad integrated immigrants in Europe. Not all of them are muslim.

Actually, Bat Ye'or is credited with coining the term "Eurabia". I suggest you read some of her writing on the subject. She is a Egyptian born British citizen who lives in Switzerland.

No, I didn't know that. Interesting. So a lot of american scribes picked up this topic from her?

Actually the term originates within marxism, if I recall correctly and not within the US. I'll look around and see if I can find some good examples of what I would consider european "political correctness" to cite.

That might be true. But political correctness for most Europeans is associated with Americans. Even though you may read some European media, there are very open discussions here. There is however a left-socialist movement in Europe which has problems coming on point and often reacting hysterically when it comes to the topic of immigration. If you want to call that a try of political correctness, I understand why you'd look at it that way.

Yes, but the EU as a structure is working to dissolve the european nation-state in any meaningful way, successfully for the most part, with some good but to my mind more harm to induvidual freedom.

I get the impression that Americans often equate Europe with France. But Europe is large with two very prosperous countries (Norway and Switzerland) not even belonging to the EU. From east to west there's great diversity, therefore when talking about Europe I'd wish you'd be more specific talking about the situations in various countries and not just talking about Europe as the whole of the continent. It would be more easy to argument.

So when the "Youths" light a car (or person) afire and yell "Allah Akbar!" I shouldn't assume there is a connection to islamic identity?

Well, basically I'd say its the lack of connection to their islamic identity. These youths are French. But the French society has put them between two worlds, kept in the twilight zone of the culture of their ancestors and their motherland France. They're feeling foreign when in Maghreb and they feel unwanted in France. How'd you react as a youth feeling unwanted in both your worlds?
Unfortunately the radical Islam now gives them strength. But you know the way youngsters are - as soon as they'd have their own job, car and girlfriend, they would let go of that and live like any other European kid would. There is a danger for radical islamists to start recruiting in this kind of surrounding. But there are also many youngsters which despite being angry are also angry at Islam. This may sound paradox, but most of these kids would just like to be accepted and respected.

As I've said before, France will face massive problems. I myself am not a great fan of french politics.

Khaybar, Khaybar

Thank you for the article. Still I think to find solutions for the future we'll have to bring some respect towards muslims the way we have to respect everyone who choses to believe in a religion. As stated before I myself don't belong to any world's great religions. I consider this a benefit. Also do I know some muslims which are very good people. Its hard to dehumanize someone you know.

I'm pretty much aware of the muslim brotherhood. Still we most be careful about not get lost in some kind of conspiracy theory. England, due to its Pakistani immigrants, indeed has bred a very radical movement of Islam. Again, this problem is more or less focused on London and not the whole of Europe. Though I agree on being very wary of such movements. As I already wrote to Marc, Germany has made first efforts to expel such:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1705886.stm

You may not be interested in the global jihad, but the global jihad is interested in you.

I can't run through the streets and shoot every muslim which looks suspicous. Therefore I have to rely on the cilvil laws and organs of my country to protect me. And I believe the country I? live in does a good job. As many many countries in Europe are struggling to find ways to handle this threat in compliance with their civil laws and constitutions.

[Quijote]

Maybe a positive signal amongst all the bad voicing articles around here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6169398.stm

French muslims:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4376500.stm

"If on the one hand you tell people that they are French, but on the other hand treat them as outsiders, young men in search of an identity will feel lost.
They are faced with adults who tell him contradictory things. They are expected to get degrees, to be integrated, but in the end they face a wall."

[G M]

I, in no way suggest running through the streets shooting muslims. I'd love to see a "reformed" islam that is compatible with the rest of humanity. For that to be would require a lot of islamic theology to be thrown out. I'm not sure much of the muslim world is willing to do it.

[G M]

**This author amplifies my point.**

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=18170

Finding Out the Truth About Muhammad

by John Hawkins
Posted Nov 22, 2006

Yesterday, I interviewed Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch about his new book, ?The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion? (published by Regnery, a HUMAN EVENTS sister company). What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation:

Now, Muhammad was around for quite a long time before he claimed to see visions and became a religious leader, wasn't he?

 
 
Muhammad was about 40 when he first claimed to have been visited by the angel Gabriel. According to the earliest Islamic traditions he did not actually start preaching immediately. He only told his wife and a few people who were very close to him for the first couple of years after that. But, then he got the command to begin to preach. It was at that point he began to develop a...following.

Now, I've heard that Muhammad borrowed heavily from the pagan religion many Arabs worshipped at the time, as well as Judaism and Christianity. Is that true?

Yes, there are clear signs in the Koran of influences from not only the Jewish and Christian scriptures, but also Jewish and Christian oral traditions and from the teachings in particular of Christian heretical groups, most notably the Gnostics, who denied the crucifixion of Christ and said that Judas had been made to look like Jesus and was crucified in his place. (That) notion appears in the Koran, in Chapter 4, where it says that they did not kill or crucify him, but it appeared so unto them. In Islamic tradition it is identified also here with Judas, that it is he who is on the cross, not Jesus.

Now, by today's standards, would Muhammad be considered a pedophile?

By today's standards, he probably would because you're talking about a man who did, according to the earliest Islamic traditions about the incident, consummate a marriage with a nine year old when he was in his early fifties.

Now, that being the case, however, it is also true that he is the supreme example for human behavior within Islam; he is imitated in this. That means that you have child marriage being very common all over the Islamic world where it is also not regarded as pedophilia today.

Now in his time, was it regarded as pedophilia or unusual for a man his age to marry a nine year old?

No. In his time, it was taken for granted. No one criticized him (for) it. No one felt like he was doing anything wrong by doing this. Only the fact that he is imitated makes it problematic.

Would it be fair to call Muhammad a warlord or bandit leader, similar to the sort of bad actors we have in Afghanistan today?

Well, certainly there are quite a few similarities and that's not an accident either because these are people who are pious Muslims and who believe that he gave them an example for human behavior -- and he did lead battles, he ordered his followers to fight on his behalf and to offer his enemies conversion, subjugation as 2nd class citizens, or war. So, there's considerable precedent within Muhammad's life, in his words and deeds, to support that kind of a life.

Along similar lines, would it be fair to say that Muhammad lied, pillaged, murdered, and condoned rape and the murder of infidels?

He said, "War is deceit." He ordered his followers to pillage and the Koran contains very detailed instructions, both in a chapter called the Spoils of War and elsewhere in the book, for dealing with the results of that plunder. ... Murder is certainly in the aspects of the invitation to infidels that I mentioned just now. He said to his followers that they should offer non-believers conversion or subjugation as inferiors under the rule of Islamic law or death. So obviously, murder is condoned in that context. Also, he ordered the assassinations of some of his enemies?including several poets who had made fun of him in their verses and rewarded the killers, including the killers of a ... pregnant woman and a man who was according to the Islamic traditions, over 100 years old.

Muhammad ... took for granted that his followers would be having sex with the women that they captured in these battles?the wives of the pagan warriors that they had killed and the wives of the Jewish tribes that they had killed. ... In the Koran actually, it says that a Muslim may marry up to four wives and have sex with the captives that his right hand possesses, which refers to slave girls captured in battle.

Now, images of Muhammad?we've got them on the Supreme Court, for example. There are plenty of them out there. When did that get to be such a big deal?

Well, it's really a big deal when a non-Muslim makes them. Images of Muhammad are rather common in Shiite Islam. Sunni Islam tends to reject that kind of image making. But really, the main offense in the Danish cartoon controversy and also an earlier controversy that CAIR tried to stir up about that (frieze) at the Supreme Court is that non-Muslims are transgressing the limits proscribed for them within Islamic law and are not to depict Muhammad or insult Allah or Muhammad in any way. So, you have a situation where these kinds of protests, the cartoon protests in particular, the murders of innocent people and riots worldwide, were ... an element of a larger effort to impose Islamic standards of behavior onto the non-Muslim world.

So, a big part of the issue was not necessarily the images, but that infidels had made them, right?

Yes.

The Shiia and Sunni (branches of Islam) came about in a dispute over succession to Muhammad. Is that correct?

Yes, exactly.

Can you explain to people how that came about?

The prophet Muhammad died rather suddenly and he did not leave clear instructions as to his successors, as to who would succeed him as leaders of the community. The Party of Ali it was called or the Shi'at Ali believed that only a relative of Muhammad could legitimately take over his role as the leader of the Muslim community that he created. The other party believed that it was not necessary that somebody be a member of the Prophet's family, but only that the best man be chosen.

So Ali was not chosen, was passed over for the first three times in the choice for the succession to the leadership, and finally was chosen but was rather shortly thereafter murdered and his sons also were murdered. ... These became the cardinal incidents for Shiite Islam and are celebrated today, yearly, in extravagant displays of mourning of which you've seen pictures. ...

... People cutting themselves with swords ...

... Yes, people cutting their heads with swords in mourning for Hussein, the son of Ali. Really, there's not much difference between Sunni and Shiite practice of Islam although the Shiites do tend to be more spiritually minded?have more of a mystical tradition?and are certainly more emotional and extravagant in their piety and have a little bit more of an emphasis on, let's say, the cult of the Saint. But otherwise, certainly in terms of jihad warfare against infidels, there's not any significant difference between the Sunnis and Shiites.

One last question: Tell us a little bit about the 12th Imam that (Ahmadinejad) seems to be so enamored with.

The 12th Imam is, in Shiite Islam, the 12th successor of Muhammad. In Shiite Islam, the Imams, beginning with Ali, have some of Muhammad's prophetic powers and some of his luminous spirit, such that they are infallible in matters of faith and are to be regarded with this quasi-mystical devotion. However, the 12th Imam, the 12th successor to Muhammad, is supposed to have disappeared as a child, is said to be still alive, and will return at a moment of great persecution and hardship for the Muslims. There's great excitement in Shiite Islam today and it seems to be held by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran that these are the times when the persecution of the Muslims is coming to the breaking point that will hasten the return of the 12th Imam who will come back to destroy the enemies of Islam and institute the rule of Islamic law over the world.

[G M]

**Here is a good primer on Bat Ye'or views.**

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/2006/11/013959print.html

Bat Ye'or: Europe and the Ambiguities of Multiculturalism

Here is an address given by Bat Ye'or, the pioneering scholar of dhimmitude, at Paul Gerhardt Church in Munich, Germany, at Christian Solidarity International's 29th Annual Meeting, which was held from November 2 to November 4, 2006.

Ladies and Gentlemen
It is for me a great honour to be invited by CSI, an organization that has been so active on so many humanitarian fronts in order to denounce slavery, war crimes and genocide, and to alleviate human suffering. And I am thinking particularly of its struggle on behalf of human rights and dignity in Sudan since 1992, and CSI?s freeing over 80.000 Christian and other Sudanese slaves under the leadership of John Eibner and Gunnar Wielback.

The globalization of our world and the policies that have led to large-scale Muslim immigration, adopted by the European Community from 1973, has introduced into Europe conflictual situations and prejudices common in the Muslim world against non-Muslims that have been documented by Orientalists familiar with Islamic theology, law and history. But the politization of history initiated by Edward Said has obfuscated the root causes of Islam?s traditional hostility toward Jews and Christians from the seven century onward. Edward Said was a Christian raised in Egypt and educated in America; he taught English literature at Columbia University. A great admirer of Arafat and a member of the PLO?s top Committee, he endeavored to destroy the whole scientific accumulation of Orientalist knowledge of Islam and replace it with a culture of Western guilt and inferiority toward Muslims victims. The obliteration of the historical truth that he constantly pursued from 1978 ? starting with his book Orientalism ? as well as his hostility to Israel, has prevented an understanding and the resolution of problems that today assail Europe and challenge its own survival.

I will examine the relations between Islam and Christianity, Islam and Judaism, Judaism and Christianity and the tensions created by a Muslim immigration into a European Judeo-Christian civilization. I will speak of those issues in that order.

In the relationship between Islam and Christianity, we can examine both the theological and the political levels. The theological pillars of Islam are: the Koran which is Muhammad?s revelation; the Hadiths, a compilation of his acts and sayings which have a theological and normative value; and the early biographies written about him. According to these three sources, Islam sees itself as the primal and sole true religion. Islam is the pure religion of Adam and has preceded all others. The Koran uses biblical names like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus and others but they represent different people than those in the Bible ? and all are considered to have been Muslim prophets who preached Islam. Jesus is also a Muslim prophet called Isa, endowed with a different life; he brought a book: the Gospel, in which he preached Islam. We have, in fact, a Jesus named Isa, a Muslim prophet, and Yeshua, the Jewish Jesus, ?born in Bethlehem of Judea? (Matthew 2:1). According to several hadiths, Isa has a mission: at the end of time he will return to destroy Christianity and impose Islam as the sole religion over the whole world. These hadiths, often quoted in sermons, speak of him killing the pig, breaking the cross ? which means destroying Christianity ? and the hadiths continue: he will suppress the jizya or poll-tax and the booty will be boundless. The suppression of the jizya refers to the suppressions of all religion other than Islam. In the Islamic optic, what is Christianity? Christianity is a falsification of Islam and of the true message of Isa, which is the same as that revealed to Muhammad: Islam. It follows that a good Christian is a Muslim. True Christianity is therefore Islam.


And what about Muslim-Jewish relations? They are more complex but they follow the same pattern. When Muhammad emigrated from Mecca to Medina, he found there large Jewish tribes well organized with their synagogues and scholars. On their festive days they assembled and studied the Bible. Pagan Arabs were jealous and complained that they were illiterate and ignorant and didn?t have a book like the Jews and the Christians. Hence, Muhammad proclaimed himself to be the prophet whom the Jews were awaiting, an Arab prophet sent with a revelation in Arabic given by Gabriel, which was the same as that revealed to the Jews and Christians. The discrepancies between the Koran and the Bible were noticed by the Jews. Muhammad answered by accusing the Jews of hiding the truth and by saying that their Bible was a later falsification of the Islamic revelation given to the Muslim prophets: Abraham, Jacobs, Moses, and all the others. The true Bible was the Koran. Since Jewish objections hampered his predication, Muhammad decided to get rid of the Jews of Medina. Some were expelled and their belongings confiscated and shared among Muhammad and his followers; others ? from 600 to 900 males, according to Muslim sources ? were beheaded and their wives and children enslaved. This is the origin of Islamic hatred and accusations against Jews. Muhammad?s various decisions against the Jews in Arabia also set the theological jihadic laws against Christians and other non-Muslims. Muslim law gives to Jews and Christians the same legal status. That means that, in Islam, Jews and Christians are treated identically as ?the People of the Book? (ahl al-khitab). Christians, whatever their efforts to dissociate themselves from Jews or from Israel, are put into the same category of the Jews by Islamic law.
In short: Jews and Christians are left with what? The true Bible is the Koran, the Holy Scriptures of Jews and Christians are just falsifications, and all the biblical figures are Muslim prophets who preached Islam. In practice, what are the consequences?

1) Biblical narrative in the Holy Land is Muslim history, and Jews and Christians had no history there as they came after Islam. Their history and their sacred scriptures are in the Koran. This motivates Muslim opposition to the legitimacy of the State of Israel. The Bible is considered a travesty of Muslim history.

2) Because Judaism and Christianity originate from one unique trunk, which is Islam, these two religions are unrelated. It is false to assert that Christianity unfolded from Judaism. This is why the Islamized Churches in the Muslim world have developed a kind of Marcionism, abandoning the Jewish Jesus in order to link Christianity to the Palestinian Arab Muslim Isa. This trend which originated in the Palestinian and Arab Churches (Sabeel Centre in Bethlehem) is growing in Europe, supported by the antisemitic/anti-Zionist wave created by Palestinianism.

Palestinianism is the new European salvific theology created to help the Arabs destroy Israel, but which in fact is eating away at the roots of Christianity. Palestinianism teaches that if justice is granted to the Palestinians, suddenly the global jihad and the persecution of Christians in Muslim lands will disappear. ?Justice for the Palestinians? in reality means the elimination of Israel. This elimination will bring peace to the world. Since 1973, this has become a joint Euro-Arab policy. The cultural and media war to delegitimize Israel accredits also the Muslim belief that Jews and, therefore, Christians have no historical roots in the Holy Land. Another consequence of Muslim replacement theology is that when we speak of Judeo-Christian values, we are in fact referring to Muslim values. And when we refer to biblical narratives and figures, or to their iconography, we offend Muslims because they do not fit in the koranic model.

Now let us see the political context. Since Muhammad was a prophet, a legislator and a war leader, legislation and politics are united in the service of the religious expansion and domination of Islam. The ultimate goal is to impose Islamic rule over the whole world. In this perspective, Muslim political doctrine divides the world into two eternal enemies: the land of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the land of war (dar al-harb) inhabited by the infidels which must ? in the end ? be conquered by Islam. Between them no peace is possible, but only temporary truces in case Muslims are too weak to conquer them. This is the doctrine of jihad which is a comprehensive legal system of war based on theology that regulates every aspect of Muslim behaviour toward non-Muslims. Jihad is a religious duty incumbent on Muslims, individually and collectively, and this is preached regularly by imams in sermons worlwide.

Jihad covers several fields: military actions, terrorism, abductions, ransoming, enslavement, and armistice conditions, the jihad by the pen ? that is to say, propaganda ? and the jihad of the hearts, which means corruption. Jihad has been waged for thirteen centuries against non-Muslims and huge geographical areas have been conquered and their population subdued, enslaved, deported or massacred. The non-Muslim population targeted by jihad is given a choice: conversion to Islam or the payment of a ransom to the Muslim authority and recognition of its sovereignty. If they refuse both they will face war. After a land has been conquered and its population accepts to submit and pay a tribute for its security this population becomes a dhimmi people. It is ?protected? by a pact of submission, called the dhimma. Protected from what? From the jihad onslaught. Non-Muslims dhimmis are protected only as long as they pay the tribute, which is a poll-tax, and submit to oppressive and discriminatory shari?a regulations.

Islamic law covers the rights and obligations of dhimmis in great details. This has been the subject of my research. I call dhimmitude the Islamic system of governing the non-Muslim peoples subjected by jihad. This system is linked to jihad and like jihad it is a theological, political and legal institution. Dhimmitude is, in fact, the peaceful continuation of jihad because it is dhimmitude that destroyed the massive non-Muslim majorities that were conquered.

[G M]

It is my opinion that we are now living in a period of reactivated jihad and dhimmitude. Those of you who have laboured in South Sudan and Darfur and have seen the atrocities there will recognize these legal tactics of jihad described in my books or in any Muslim texts on jihad. What is happening in Iraq evokes the events in the 8th century described in Mesopotamia by the Christian Syriac cleric Pseudo-Dyonisos of Tell Mahre, quoted in my study on The Decline of Eastern Christianity which is available here in a German edition. These events are confirmed at that same period by Armenian chronicles and by Egyptian priests describing Muslim internal feuds and atrocities in Egypt against dhimmis, or by Jews in Palestine, and with the passing centuries the chronicle of the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioche (in Syria), Michael the Syrian, that covers a period till the end of the 12 century. We have countless accounts on the devastation by the Arabs and Turks in Anatolia, in the Balkans, and all along the European Mediterranean coasts and islands.

Today, as in the past, jihadist terror is waged not only against Israel, Judaism, but also against the West, that is Christianity. Beheading the enemies of Islam, like the prophet did when he set a sacred model by beheading the Jews who refused to convert ? was repeatedly done by jihadists during all the jihad conquests of Christian lands. Abducting infidels for ransom fills up countless historical accounts. Suppressing by terror all criticism by infidels of the Muslim religion or policy is mandated in the land of dhimmitude. Jihad and dhimmitude are the two forces that have eliminated the indigenous non-Muslim populations from their Islamized homeland. Jihad today is displayed in all its traditional manifestations: military and economic warfare, terror, abductions, corruption for the control of the Western media, the universities and public opinion.

Dhimmitude is applied now against non Muslims ? mainly Christians ? in most Muslim countries. Shari?a laws or laws inspired by shari?a discriminate against non-Muslims, mainly Christians, the Jews having fled or been expelled. Now it is the Christians ? in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere ? who are leaving because in Islam anti-Jewish hate is always connected to anti-Christian hate and vice-versa as it grows from the same source. Hence, anti-Zionist European policies adopted in order to protect Europe and local Christians from Islamism is useless.

Why have we regressed to a situation all too common throughout history till the 19th century and in some countries, the 20th? It is my opinion that 1973 was the fatidic date when political decisions were made that would lead Europe along the path to dhimmitude. It was the period ? after the Kippur War ? when European independent states, threatened with PLO terrorism and an Arab oil boycott, accepted to submit and adapt their foreign policies to Arab and Palestinian political demands. This is when the European Palestinian appeasement policy began. Europe helped spread the new death cult: Palestinianism, which is the sacralisation and legitimisation of the jihad against Israel. For decades Europeans have been conditioned by Euro-Arab Palestinian propaganda and Israel?s demonisation. To achieve this end a whole culture of denial of historic jihad and dhimmitude has been conceived and propagated throughout Europe. The responsibility for terror and war was deliberately shifted from the jihad ideology to Israel?s right of existence. Palestinianism is just the modern continuation against the Jews of the jihad onslaught waged against Christianity for over a millennium.

By justifying the Palestinian jihad against Israel, Europe entered into a suicidal dynamic. The repudiation of Israel?s historical legitimacy and its replacement by a jihadist world order with its own Islamic conception of justice denies Europe?s own sovereignty and legitimacy. In the Islamic context, Palestinians incarnate jihadist ideology against infidels and Muslim replacement theology; whereas, in fact, Israel represents the liberation of the Jewish people from the yoke of dhimmitude. For decades the European Union has provided the Palestinians with the intellectual, cultural and media ammunitions against Israel. It was Arafat, the subsidised ?mignon? of Europe, who invented modern international terrorism ? including air piracy against Israel in 1968 ? and created a culture of hate and a policy of chaos since September 2000 that have now become global. Europe?s alliance with the Palestinians and the Arab world against Israel and America was based on its own denial of jihad ideology. Because of this denial Europe encourage a large-scale Muslim immigration for economic and strategic interests. This is why Europe is today deeply submerged by an anti-American and anti-Zionist culture.

For Christians, Israel is central in this context, because jihad is waged in the name of Islamic replacement theology, whereby Isa replaces Yeshua or Jesus, and the Koran replaces the Gospel. Christians are linked to the Jews by the Bible. If Christians want to break from this bond, they will have to forego the First Testament, including the Ten Commandments, the Prophets, and the Psalms and somehow, link the Gospel to the Palestinian Muslim Isa of the Koran. This is the challenge that Christians are facing now. And this is the spiritual meaning of Israel for Christians now: either Christians will resist or they will convert and Europe will become one more Islamized Christian territory. The jihad against Israel is also a war against the Christian world.

It is my opinion that Europe has become the new land of dhimmitude and I will explain why. I have described in Eurabia, my last book, the causes that have triggered the dhimmitude of Europe. I will not develop this theme now but I will explain why politically and intellectually we have become dhimmis.

We accept to have our life continuously disturbed and threatened by the global jihad. From the moment the European Community, instead of fighting terror, submitted to the Palestinian threats, it lost the control over its own security. European policy with the Palestinians is a total failure because it was deliberately based on false assumptions and the denial that the PLO?s war against Israel was a jihad. Europe gave an unconditional support for Arafat, and paid billions of euros without any control to the Palestinian Authority. The result of European?s unilateral solicitude for the Palestinians has resulted in the election of Hamas, a terrorist jihadist movement. Europeans behave like dhimmis who have to pay tribute money for their security and the development of Muslim economies without even being thanked. Massive Muslim immigration, linked with the 56 Muslim countries weighs heavily on European policy. We have seen it during the Danish Cartoons Affair. According to Islamic law, dhimmis cannot criticise the Prophet or say that Islamic law has a defect without risking death. Hence, the Islamic blasphemy laws ? even at the United Nations ? have been imposed on us, and particularly on the Western media. The Islamists control the foreign, domestic and security policy of Europe through terror, the ongoing intifadas in France and the policy of chaos in the suburbs, jihadist-martyrdom bombings in Spain and England and persistent threats everywhere. It is such threats that keep the level of anti-Americanism and the hate against Israel so high in Europe.

The European policy of symbiosis with the Arab-Muslim world which I have described in Eurabia has set up a vast Euro-Arab demographic, political, economic and cultural zone encompassing immigration and multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a crucial dimension of the Euro-Arab strategic alliance. Since 1975 the texts of Euro-Arab meetings and of the EU require the establishment of cultural and political Muslim centres in European cities. The problem is that Muslims and Europeans have contradictory views on their common history. Europeans consider jihad a barbarous war causing huge massacres and enslavement, while for Muslims jihad represents a peaceful progression of Islam. Dhimmitude is a dehumanizing system, but for Muslims it is a generous tolerance offered to non-Muslims. In order to accommodate the Muslims and their integration in Europe, European leaders have promoted the Islamic view of history. Therefore, they have justified and lauded the tolerance of dhimmitude, as for instance the Andalusian myth. For this reason, Europeans ignore totally what is jihad and what is dhimmitude. While we are currently living a period of jihad, and while Europeans are already conditioned to dhimmitude, they do not realise it because the historical framework has been obfuscated.

Cultural jihad with its antisemitic, anti-American and anti-Western characteristics develops within the context of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism thus becomes the instrument for the subversion of Western thought, aimed at imposing Islamic historical and theological thinking such as the justification of Islamist terrorism ? based on the Muslim self-perception of victimhood. The erroneous affirmation that it was Islamic culture that has triggered European civilization in medieval period, is an attempt to prove Islam historical, cultural and demographical legitimacy in Europe, and consequently the implementation of shari?a principles today. It also affirms Islam cultural superiority over the West.

To conclude: There has been several interfaith dialogues but with poor results. Europe has paid billions to Muslim countries worldwide but the culture of jihad is flowering in spite of Europe?s appeasement policy. Palestinianism which is a replacement theology was the tool that led to Europe?s Islamisation and dhimmitude. By joining the Muslim jihad against Israel, the Christian West has obfuscated its own history, and now faced with a global jihad it is unable to assess correctly the situation and defend itself. Israel represents the liberation of man from dhimmitude, whereas Palestinianism represents jihad and dhimmitude ideology based on replacement theology. Europe, enslaved by Palestinianism, has chosen servitude instead of freedom. If we want peace to prevail, the Muslim world must abandon the jihadist ideology, it must recognise Jews and Christians as different and not see them as apostate Muslims. And this must start with Muslim recognition of the legitimacy of Israel, because jihad started against the Jews and it can only end with the rehabilitation of the Jews and Israel, which will bring the rehabilitation of all non-Muslims. We can achieve it if we speak the truth, if we teach in our schools and universities jihad and dhimmitude. Then, masses of peaceful Muslims, liberated from the jihadist ideology of hate, will join us to build together peace. But we cannot help them if, ourselves, we are doomed in dhimmitude.

Bat Ye?or, born in Egypt, is a pioneer researcher on ?dhimmitude? and ?Eurabia?. Her four major books translated from French into English are: The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, (1985); The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, (1996), German edition: Der Niedergang des Orientalischen Christentums unter dem Islam, (2002); Islam and dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002), and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, (2005). German translation in preparation.

[Crafty_Dog]

I don't want to clutter up responses to GM's interesting posts (which might have fit more logically in one or more of the other threads  ) but I would like to take a quick moment to say that Quijote makes a fair point when he says that one of the causes (and it is only one of several) of the Paristineans intifada is that the French block their entry into society-- IMHO this is done through French economic policies which create tremendous barriers to the creation of new businesses and employment in order to protect big unions and other vested interests.  The purpose of these policies is not anti-Muslim, but they do add heavily to the unemployment of the Paristineans. 

[Quijote]

G.M., I am completely aware of the historical background of Mohammed and why you call him they way you call him. I don't think we further need to elaborate on this, though I want to point out, that we should treat historical figures with a grain of salt. That means we should be careful about judging them in our understanding of right or wrong, nor should we believe everything being said. As I restrain from calling Jesus a "pathetic hippie freak who lacked the ganja"? to a christian or calling the toras a "bunch of rotten paper full of shitload" to a jew, i refrain from calling Mohammed a "genocidal rapist" to a muslim, unless of course I want to provoke a fight with each of them.

At my wednesday regulars' table I had a brief chat with some of my friends. Neither of them knew Bat Yeor or the term Eurabia (all of them highly educated people following the events of the day very closely). This is because her books are put in the same drawer as those conspiracy theorists that claim 9/11 to be staged by the US government (who get wide attention in some circles around here). When I read this article I find the same paranoia the muslim world has of jews and christians just the other way round: the fear of a global jihad wanting to take over the world and all muslims are participating.

To say it briefly, I don't like such polemic writings very much. They throw all kind of facts and knowledge together with a big load of personal emotion and make up a theory. Of course a book always gets more attention then someone like you or me writing on an internet forum. And of course its much harder to disprove a whole book, as I myself had to write a book now in order to convince you of my position.

If I'd put an american evangelist from kansas and a russian orthodox from siberia in one room, those two most probably wouldn't have very much in common, except that there are muslims, who consider them christians and therefore thinking, both want to defeat their culture. But that evangelist and the orthodox wouldn't even be able to communicate and if so, most probably not have to say very much to each other. Now if you take a muslim from algeria and one from pakistan, both would seem very much alike for us; dark-skinned, muslim and of course? equating the same threat. But these two have not very much to talk about with each other, as well. Now take a magreb from Paris, a turk from Berlin and a pakistani from London. Not very much in common except us considering them muslim.

It is the nature of polemic texts such as those from Bat Yeor to throw a truckload of half-truths at you. Before you would be able to take one argument apart, having a hard time to proof that it is completely wrong as it is a half-truth, you're being confronted with the next one and so on. A chain of arguments its hard to either proof right nor wrong.

 I get the impression that there is certain faction in the US that is not so much interested in hindering Europe from becoming Eurabia (or enhance Euro-US solidarity) but pursuing own domestic policy agendas and grateful pick up arguments thrown at their feet like this.

Let me repeat; a lot of the problems Europe is having are of social nature. Similar to the problems the US is having with their hispanic and afro-american population. Talking about a global jihad conspiracy is only detriment to the integration of European muslims (which in some countries is very advanced and successful). Scribes like Bat Yeor create more problems than they would offer a solution for.

I'd love to see a "reformed" islam that is compatible with the rest of humanity.

I know a lot of muslims who manage this day by day with a highly acceptable result.

[G M]

Quijote,

The problem is that indeed there is global cooperation between various jihadist factions from various geographical and ethnically diverse groups. This isn't wild speculation or conspiracy mongering but well documented fact. One real accomplishment of Osama Bin Laden is to have facilitated the global networking of these groups, both Sunni and Shia to wage jihad using the west's technology for it's asymetrical warfare. Once upon a time, there were jihadist groups that fought each other as much, if not more than the US, Israel or other targets. Now we collectively face a rainbow coalition of jihadis, from every part of the globe waging jihad with a unified goal in mind. Atheists, Buddhist, Hindus, Animists, Christians and of course Jews are all suffering at the hands of those who act "In the name of Allah". Islam demonstrates a special inability to coexist with other religions and cultures.

QUOTE:"As I restrain from calling Jesus a "pathetic hippie freak who lacked the ganja"  to a christian or calling the toras a "bunch of rotten paper full of shitload" to a jew, i refrain from calling Mohammed a "genocidal rapist" to a muslim, unless of course I want to provoke a fight with each of them."

See, here is the problem. You are free to say what you wish about Jesus or Christianity or Jews and mostly you'll get a collective shrug from their adherents. Jews in paticular, especially these days live with constant implied and direct antisemetic slurs against them. Draw a cartoon of Mohammed and go into hiding. Make a movie about how Islam oppresses women and be shot and stabbed to death in the once placid Netherlands. You need not even do or say anything seen as "provocational" and still die at the hands of the jihadis. As we speak, pacifistic Buddhists are being slaughtered in Asia by muslims to the cry of "Allah Akbar!".

QUOTE:
"If I'd put an american evangelist from kansas and a russian orthodox from siberia in one room, those two most probably wouldn't have very much in common, except that there are muslims, who consider them christians and therefore thinking, both want to defeat their culture. But that evangelist and the orthodox wouldn't even be able to communicate and if so, most probably not have to say very much to each other. Now if you take a muslim from algeria and one from pakistan, both would seem very much alike for us; dark-skinned, muslim and of course  equating the same threat. But these two have not very much to talk about with each other, as well. Now take a magreb from Paris, a turk from Berlin and a pakistani from London. Not very much in common except us considering them muslim."

Sadly you are so very wrong on this. The global jihad is networked. They communicate, train and support each other globally. The US has detainees from all over the globe captured in Afghanistan. A steady stream of jihadists with EU passports have been fighting in Iraq. When the children were murdered by the hundreds in Beslan, it wasn't just Chechens shooting belt-fed machine guns and detonating bombs, it was muslims from many different nations taking part in the "jihad". This is why a group of muslim students in Hamburg can end up creating a smoking hole in the Manhattan skyline and a few thousand less Americans one bright morning

QUOTE:
"I get the impression that there is certain faction in the US that is not so much interested in hindering Europe from becoming Eurabia (or enhance Euro-US solidarity) but pursuing own domestic policy agendas and grateful pick up arguments thrown at their feet like this."

Funny, I feel like it's 1937 or 1938 and i'm pointing out some trends in Germany, Italy and Japan and i'm getting "peace in our time" in response. Actually, it may be even worse than that. It's after Pearl Harbor and we still have people saying "Ya know, the Nazis aren't what most Germans are like and those Japanese pilots have hijacked the peaceful Japanese culture."

[Quijote]

You are free to say what you wish about Jesus or Christianity or Jews and mostly you'll get a collective shrug from their adherents.

Sure, I want to see you doing that in the US bible belt.

As we speak, pacifistic Buddhists are being slaughtered in Asia by muslims to the cry of "Allah Akbar!".

Where is that happening?

They communicate, train and support each other globally.

Sure they do. But not as connected as you may wish. The jihadists not only lead an asymetrical warfare, they're also very asymetrical structured. The jihad nowadays is something you can download from the internet. You can get your fatwah (hope you know what that is), your plans for bombs, your motivational speeches and your violence porn. In terms of military intelligence IMO it would be a grave error to think that there is a larger ultimate network. A splinter cell can be organized and structured without doing any training. Therefore considering the terrorists to be a broad network may make you blind for all the small scale developments. In order to contain a splinter cell in any country, you have to check the security situation specificially and not generally.

The AQ idea has separated from Bin Laden. If you want to see it that way, Bin Laden has been quite successful in lighting the flame for his idea with the attacks on 9/11. Now it doesn't matter anymore if he's alive or not, his jihad is omnipresent - but not omnistructured.

IMO this is making them even more dangerous than a globally well structured and organized jihad.

A steady stream of jihadists with EU passports have been fighting in Iraq.

Well, that stream is coming most of all from Syria, Saudi-Arabia and Iran.

When the children were murdered by the hundreds in Beslan, it wasn't just Chechens shooting belt-fed machine guns and detonating bombs, it was muslims from many different nations taking part in the "jihad".

Wrong. Yes, these terrorists were muslims, but they were all exclusively coming from the nearer surrounding of Beslan. Somehow I don't see the point in this argument.

I feel like it's 1937 or 1938 and i'm pointing out some trends in Germany, Italy and Japan and i'm getting "peace in our time" in response.

Well, if you see it that way then IMO you're completely diminishing what happened in the time between 1933 - 1939.

"Ya know, the Nazis aren't what most Germans are like and those Japanese pilots have hijacked the peaceful Japanese culture."

Look, don't take me for being stupid.

[Quijote]

I'd like to point out to the thread I opened about the World War for Wealth:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1075.0

All the while the West is engaged in the middle east and in polemic wars against each other, there might be an India and China on the fast lane overtaking both of us...

[G M]

You are free to say what you wish about Jesus or Christianity or Jews and mostly you'll get a collective shrug from their adherents.

Sure, I want to see you doing that in the US bible belt.

**Actually I live in a pretty "bible-belt" region of the US. I'm not aware of anything like what happened to Theo Van Gogh happening to those who critique christianity.**

As we speak, pacifistic Buddhists are being slaughtered in Asia by muslims to the cry of "Allah Akbar!".

Where is that happening?

**Thailand. I'll be happy to post lots of articles in whatever thread Crafty would like.**

They communicate, train and support each other globally.

Sure they do. But not as connected as you may wish. The jihadists not only lead an asymetrical warfare, they're also very asymetrical structured. The jihad nowadays is something you can download from the internet. You can get your fatwah (hope you know what that is), your plans for bombs, your motivational speeches and your violence porn. In terms of military intelligence IMO it would be a grave error to think that there is a larger ultimate network. A splinter cell can be organized and structured without doing any training. Therefore considering the terrorists to be a broad network may make you blind for all the small scale developments. In order to contain a splinter cell in any country, you have to check the security situation specificially and not generally.

**It's a distributed network, not a formal structure. In amny ways it's even more dangerous because of that.**

The AQ idea has separated from Bin Laden. If you want to see it that way, Bin Laden has been quite successful in lighting the flame for his idea with the attacks on 9/11. Now it doesn't matter anymore if he's alive or not, his jihad is omnipresent - but not omnistructured.

A steady stream of jihadists with EU passports have been fighting in Iraq.

Well, that stream is coming most of all from Syria, Saudi-Arabia and Iran.

**Passing through, not originating from.**

When the children were murdered by the hundreds in Beslan, it wasn't just Chechens shooting belt-fed machine guns and detonating bombs, it was muslims from many different nations taking part in the "jihad".

Wrong. Yes, these terrorists were muslims, but they were all exclusively coming from the nearer surrounding of Beslan. Somehow I don't see the point in this argument.

**Actually there were multiple arabs involved in the attack, not just Chechen and other muslims from the region. I've been to training with John Giduck who investigated the attack right after it happened. http://www.terroratbeslan.com/ I don't have the book with me at the moment or i'd cite exactly the breakdown of the Beslan terrorists.**

I feel like it's 1937 or 1938 and i'm pointing out some trends in Germany, Italy and Japan and i'm getting "peace in our time" in response.

Well, if you see it that way then IMO you're completely diminishing what happened in the time between 1933 - 1939.

**I don't think so. I see history repeating and again precious time is being wasted while the enemy is growing while the west sits in denial.**

"Ya know, the Nazis aren't what most Germans are like and those Japanese pilots have hijacked the peaceful Japanese culture."

Look, don't take me for being stupid.

** I don't take you for being stupid and it is not my intent to communicate that. No insult intended.**

[Quijote]

No insult taken! 

Let's tackle this discussion from another point of view: Would you have any solution to offer as how Europe should step up against this threat of Eurabia?

[G M]

Much stricter immigration laws, rigorously enforced. If one wishes to emigrate to the west, it should be because of a true desire to join that society, not just to enjoy the goodies while proclaiming how you hate the west and work to destroy it. The US doesn't allow legal immigrants welfare (illegal aliens are welcome to commit welfare fraud however). It's reasonable to not fund jihadist clerics who preach hatred in the mosques. If I was moving to Germany, i'd study the language, laws and culture in great detail to make sure i'd be able to function when I arrived. I wouldn't be upset if the street signs, and official documents weren't written in english and accuse you of discrimination because Germany isn't just like the place I left.

Intermarriage is a powerful intergenerational tool of integration. Remember, the Anglos and the Saxon were once warring tribes. If you move to the west from Pakistan, find a wife locally. Don't import a child bride to the west who is then hostage in a foreign land where she doesn't speak the language and doesn't know that domestic violence isn't legal in her new home. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, not the Pashtuns.

You can't have a workable nation made up of a "mosaic". It's all about the melting pot. The American experiment is imperfect, but we managed to do a lot with a vast mix of humanity and create what has been a cohesive nation out of it. You can have a nation of different "races"/ethnicities, but there has to be one common language and one loyalty to the nation.

The "West" has to move past the self destructiveness of "multiculturalism" and the constant self-flagellation of the less savory aspects of the west's collective sins. We (the collective western world) are not perfect, but do you see many people lining up to move from Berlin, or London, or Toronto to go to Somalia? Our good far outweighs our sins. The world's people vote with their feet when they can and we get the vote. We are in a long struggle for survival, we've got to remember what we are fighting for. Lots of people sacrificed so that we live the good lives we do, we honor their sacrifice be passing on to the next generations the best that we were given.

This is what leaps to mind thus far....

[SB_Mig]

G M

I think you make some excellent points. However, I have to dig a little deeper:

1) Much stricter immigration laws, rigorously enforced How? Big walls? More border control agents? Incentives to home countries to keep their emmigrants home? Deportation? Quotas? For all the recent talk on border security, we seem to not be making any progress.

2) It's reasonable to not fund jihadist clerics who preach hatred in the mosques. I'm guessing a good portion of their money is not going through Bank of America or Credit Suisse. How about a thorough investigation into all mosques sources of funding? How about making mosque members accepted members of the community and not marginalizing them?

3) If I was moving to Germany, i'd study the language, laws and culture in great detail to make sure i'd be able to function when I arrived.
So would I, but what of those who don't have the resources/time/wherewithall to learn English before their arrival?  What about cases of defection? Perhaps we should follow the example of New Zealand and only allow skilled migrants or individuals in highly specialized fields?

4) Intermarriage is a powerful intergenerational tool of integration. True, but unfortunately cultural custom often trumps all. In many countries and cultures (including some parts of our own), it is forbidden to marry outside of your religion, caste, race, etc. How do we break through these cultural barriers?

5) When in Rome, do as the Romans do Easier said than done. Some friends of mine returned recently from Seatlle,Washington. After a long two years of silence, their neighbors finally had a conversation with them before they moved. Why the long delay? The simple fact that they were from California. Now, imagine moving into suburban Iowa with your Pashtun bride and three kids. I'm gonna guess that doing as the Romans is going to take some work.

Viable integration into a society takes serious commitment from both sides. I think we need to re-evaluate our own track record on immigration/integration/cultural reform before we can start acting like we have the solutions to other countries ills.

[Crafty_Dog]

1) Much stricter immigration laws, rigorously enforced How? Big walls? More border control agents? Incentives to home countries to keep their emmigrants home? Deportation? Quotas? For all the recent talk on border security, we seem to not be making any progress.

MD:  All the more reason to get cracking.  The Peggy Noonan's piece in the new "Immigration" thread nearby I think makes some excellent points.

2) It's reasonable to not fund jihadist clerics who preach hatred in the mosques. I'm guessing a good portion of their money is not going through Bank of America or Credit Suisse. How about a thorough investigation into all mosques sources of funding? How about making mosque members accepted members of the community and not marginalizing them?

MD:  "MAKING mosque members accepted" ?!?  Care to flesh this out a bit?  As written it seems rather coercive.

3) If I was moving to Germany, i'd study the language, laws and culture in great detail to make sure i'd be able to function when I arrived.
So would I, but what of those who don't have the resources/time/wherewithall to learn English before their arrival?  What about cases of defection? Perhaps we should follow the example of New Zealand and only allow skilled migrants or individuals in highly specialized fields?

MD:  The problem is not that they arrive not speaking the host language, the problem is that many of them seem to not wish to learn. 

Getting to the heart of the matter, the problem is that Islam is not just another idea about the Creator.  It seeks sharia-- a theocratic state that does not give equal respect to other religions, that does not believe in free speech,  and other fundamental American values.  Because it seeks theocracy, Islam is also a political ideology.  The question I am asking myself as I search for understanding is why our immigration policies should not treat it similarly to the way communism was treated during the Cold War.

4) Intermarriage is a powerful intergenerational tool of integration. True, but unfortunately cultural custom often trumps all. In many countries and cultures (including some parts of our own), it is forbidden to marry outside of your religion, caste, race, etc. How do we break through these cultural barriers?

MD:  My understanding is that the US is doing a far better job of accepting Muslims into our society than Europe, but with 911 things are in a state of flux.  With millions of Muslims in America, many of them with language skills desperately needed by our government, my understanding is that very few have come forward.

5) When in Rome, do as the Romans do Easier said than done. Some friends of mine returned recently from Seatlle,Washington. After a long two years of silence, their neighbors finally had a conversation with them before they moved. Why the long delay? The simple fact that they were from California. Now, imagine moving into suburban Iowa with your Pashtun bride and three kids. I'm gonna guess that doing as the Romans is going to take some work.

MD:  Exactly so.  But if the attitude is that "I am a Muslim who happens to be in America and as a Muslim I seek a Muslim society ruled by sharia (i.e. overturning our First Amendment)" instead of "How wonderful to come to the land of opportunity, let me learn the language and ways of my new home, let me raise my children to be Americans" then there is a real problem.

Viable integration into a society takes serious commitment from both sides. I think we need to re-evaluate our own track record on immigration/integration/cultural reform before we can start acting like we have the solutions to other countries ills.

MD:  Until 911 America and its Muslims were doing pretty well.  Since then its hard to see through the smoke.

[G M]

G M

I think you make some excellent points. However, I have to dig a little deeper:

1) Much stricter immigration laws, rigorously enforced How? Big walls? More border control agents? Incentives to home countries to keep their emmigrants home? Deportation? Quotas? For all the recent talk on border security, we seem to not be making any progress.

**Because many of the republicans are in the pocket of big business and drag their feet on stemming the flow of low wage illegals and most of the democrats think that demanding that people obey the laws is some form of racist discrimination. Thus, for decades the borders haven't been secured. We've done amnesty several times saying "Ok, this this is the last time. We're serious. Really". The end result being that the flood of illegals has increased, waiting for the next amnesty. The borders need a fence. Not a "virtual fence". A secure barrier. Hammer those who employ illegals with civil and criminal penalties and the jobs will dry up. No money and many of the illegals will self-deport. Law enforcement, especially on the local level needs to be brought into enforcing immigration laws. We deal with illegals constantly. If we could arrest and put them into the federal system for deportation directly, it would make a huge impact.**

2) It's reasonable to not fund jihadist clerics who preach hatred in the mosques. I'm guessing a good portion of their money is not going through Bank of America or Credit Suisse. How about a thorough investigation into all mosques sources of funding? How about making mosque members accepted members of the community and not marginalizing them?

**Mostly in europe, the worst jihadists calling for the destruction of europe live off of the dole. Not only should they not be funded by the taxpayers, they should be booted out. Immigration is a privilege, not a right. As far as tracing outside funding of terrorist groups, it is one of the few success stories of the USG in the GWOT. Much has been done to dry up islamic charities that fund terror. Of course nation states like our good friends the Saudis fund terror globally and there is no easy way to end this right now. As far as not marginalizing muslims domestically, the problem is as Crafty pointed out, they marginalize themselves many times. Many of the allegedly "moderate" muslim imams that President Bush met with post-9/11 to intone the "Religion of Peace" mantra with have been arrested and connected to terrorist activities. CAIR, which likes to pretend to be a "civil rights group" is a documented front for jihadi terrorism. A Freedom House paper a few years back found that roughly 80% of US mosques had Saudi funded jihadist litature filled with what the left likes to call "hate speech" towards the west in general and of course the jews in paticular.**

3) If I was moving to Germany, i'd study the language, laws and culture in great detail to make sure i'd be able to function when I arrived.
So would I, but what of those who don't have the resources/time/wherewithall to learn English before their arrival?? What about cases of defection? Perhaps we should follow the example of New Zealand and only allow skilled migrants or individuals in highly specialized fields?

**For the most part, to legally enter the US requires that you meet high standards. I know US immigration laws quite well as my wife is a legal immigrant. She has an undergraduate degree. Fluent in english and speaks 4 other languages with a background in international business. She's been here for years and we are still waiting for a green card. As i'm her sponsor, i'm legally responsible for any potential costs she could impose on the taxpayers. Even if we were divorced, I must file with the USG my residence information every time I move until she is either naturalized or permanently leaves the US, because if she were to get any gov't assistance of any kind, Uncle Sam will then bill me for the costs, plus and other fees they might impose. US naturalization tests require english compitency and an understanding of US laws and culture. This is as it should be. What is frustrating is at the same time illegals flaunt the laws, use ERs for every medical need and impose costs on tax payers at every turn  while making a massive impact on the criminal justice system and them DEMAND citizenship. Again, if you want to immigrate, then EARN it.**

4) Intermarriage is a powerful intergenerational tool of integration. True, but unfortunately cultural custom often trumps all. In many countries and cultures (including some parts of our own), it is forbidden to marry outside of your religion, caste, race, etc. How do we break through these cultural barriers?

**If you don't want to leave your culture behind, then stay where you are. I don't care if female genital mutilation is accepted where you are from. We lock people up for that in America, that's our custom. You come to our country, you learn are ways. Want to live under sharia? Then stay home. We speak english here and we live under the constitution and the rule of law, not sharia. If that's not what you want, don't come here. Very simple.**

5) When in Rome, do as the Romans do Easier said than done. Some friends of mine returned recently from Seatlle,Washington. After a long two years of silence, their neighbors finally had a conversation with them before they moved. Why the long delay? The simple fact that they were from California. Now, imagine moving into suburban Iowa with your Pashtun bride and three kids. I'm gonna guess that doing as the Romans is going to take some work.

**It's the immigrant's job to blend in. I can say firsthand that my wife has been treated very well in her time in the US. Most Americans have a sort spot in their hearts for immigrants as most all of us are descended from immigrants. When people see immigrants trying, they are almost always willing to help them. This doesn't mean that the street signs need to be in Hmong or some Serbo-Croat dialect. Again, the burden is on the immigrant to become one of us, not the other way around. We aren't bringing people here at gunpoint.**

Viable integration into a society takes serious commitment from both sides. I think we need to re-evaluate our own track record on immigration/integration/cultural reform before we can start acting like we have the solutions to other countries ills.

**Our track record is outstanding. Compare what you find in the US to what happens most elsewhere in the world. Most white Americans are an amalgam of europeans that in their home countries were often deadly enemies. Just in my extended family, there are multiple skin colors in the family photos. My dad's side of the family mostly came from Germany, i'm a voting member of a federally recognized Indian tribe with some distant african ancestry (My tribe had lots of escaped slaves intermarry), one cousin is married to a Swedish citizen of Russian ancestry, another is married to an American of Japanese ethinicity and another cousin is hispanic. All this and i'm from the "pickup truck with a gun rack" part of the country. The people I know in east coast cities tend to be even more diverse.

A few years ago, my wife and I were walking through a urban area on the Marine Corps birthday. The streets were filled with Marines in their dress blues. The skin colors ranged from sub-saharan african to pale scandanavian tones. All were Marines, all were Americans.

I've trained with different law enforcement officers all over the US. As a group, I can tell you that the color blue transcends almost always. A black cop from urban New Jersey is as much my brother as a white state trooper from the midwest might be.

Does this mean everything is perfect in the US? No, but we've come a long way in a short time. We are the first universal nation and we've done much more good than evil. We still have work to do but isn't not productive to dwell on our mistakes while ignoring everything we've done right.**

 

[Quijote]

G.M., I think you're making some very valuable points there.

1.) Much stricter immigration laws, rigorously enforced.

With the advent of rightwing parties and neo-nationalist ideas rising, this will certainly happen in Europe. While US borders are pretty easy to control, European borders are not. Also Europe will have to give up its humanitarian mission to offer asylum to those being prosecuted in another country - basically 'Fortress Europe' coming true.

Even though I certainly support stricter immigration laws, I'd hate to see a xenophobic, anti-semitic and anti-humanitarian 'Fortress Europe.'

2.) It's reasonable to not fund jihadist clerics who preach hatred in the mosques.

Of course it is. But I go with Mig and say as well? "making mosque members accepted members of the community and not marginalizing them." After all religious freedom is one of the columns of western civilization. To answer Crafty's question as how this could look like;
a. Offering religious lessons in school for muslims as there are religious lessons for christians and jews. These have to be held in the country's native tongue by a certified teacher.
b. Also discrimination has to stop. A muslim does not equate a terrorist. It must be more easy for muslims who wish to integrate to get a job and be accepted into society.
c. A mosque has to be public. Its funding has to be laid open. The members list must be open and the preachers must undergo a centralized training by the state before they're being allowed to teach and preach.

3.) If I was moving to Germany, i'd study the language, laws and culture in great detail to make sure i'd be able to function when I arrived.

Yes, good point. A lot of European countries missed this. Now they're trying to make it up by offering language and cultural courses every immigrant has to do and finish with an exam.

4.) Intermarriage is a powerful intergenerational tool of integration.

It is. But;
a. there are few European women who want to marry a muslim
b. many muslim men are getting married (or proposed) at the age of 13 -15.

You can't have a workable nation made up of a "mosaic". It's all about the melting pot. The American experiment is imperfect, but we managed to do a lot with a vast mix of humanity and create what has been a cohesive nation out of it. You can have a nation of different "races"/ethnicities, but there has to be one common language and one loyalty to the nation.

That is true. But the US is the only country to do so and one of its strength is just that. You can't think that your model would work anywhere else, as the melting pot is the fundament of american culture. Europe has always been a mosaic of nations. That is our strength, that we have learned to live together instead of slaughtering each other (it took us 3000 years). We will never assimilate any immigrate, the European model is trying to understand the immigrants culture and see how we meet in the middle so each can keep his culture but still live together. But that requires consensus. A consensus radicals are not willing to make, as do the nationalists.

The "West" has to move past the self destructiveness of "multiculturalism" and the constant self-flagellation of the less savory aspects of the west's collective sins.

True. I agree with you on this point.

G.M., a lot of points you raised now are revolving around the question as we could stop the flow of immigrants to Europe. But how should we handle those Europeans whose believes are muslim, who are already here?

[G M]

There is a difference between patriotism and malignant nationalism. I think the distinction is lost in europe's politics.You can love Germany without it becoming "Deutchland uber alles". You eject people who have outside loyalties, either to other nations or to the "umma". Applying to be an immigrant is like applying for a job. You are asking, not demanding. The weight is on the immigrant to prove they deserve citizenship.

Draw clear lines about what it means to be a German (Or other nation). If they can't or won't meet the standard, then they need to find another country. If Biergardens and women walking around without the hijab offend you, then look elsewhere for a place to live. I know that if I as an American was living in Germany and complained to Germans about how some aspects of Germany didn't jibe with my American cultural values you'd feel free to tell me off. Why should you then treat any other group any differently? Give non-intergrating immigrants the same venom usually only reserved for America. 

[Quijote]

There is a difference between patriotism and malignant nationalism.

Sure there is, you don't have to tell me, go and tell the Germans. Nationalism and Anti-Semitism is on the rise again. 

I think the distinction is lost in europe's politics.

It's lost in german politics, not in the whole of Europe.

Basically you suggest to deport those who do not comply?

[G M]

Yes.

[Quijote]

How would you measure 'not complying'?

[G M]

Failure to assume a German (Or other nation that applies) identity and allegence. You may not be able to read a mind, but you can observe their actions. The immigrant should speak, read, dress and act German. Any mosque preaching anything that clashes with German values shouldn't be tolerated. Germany doesn't allow swastikas, Mein Kampf or neo-nazi gatherings. The same laws should apply to jihadist groups. You couldn't flaunt your decadent western ways in an islamic country, the same rules should apply to them in the west.

[Quijote]

The same laws should apply to jihadist groups.

Well, that is in effect. Its either in this thread or 'Islam in Europe' where it is written that Germany already expelled several preachers.

What is German? Mohammad Atta spoke, read, dressed and acted German. What about people like him?

What about those people in the second generation who already have a German passport and identity, but are caught between their cultural heritage and a society which doesn't give them a chance for integration?

[G M]

The same laws should apply to jihadist groups.

Well, that is in effect. Its either in this thread or 'Islam in Europe' where it is written that Germany already expelled several preachers.

What is German? Mohammad Atta spoke, read, dressed and acted German. What about people like him?

What about those people in the second generation who already have a German passport and identity, but are caught between their cultural heritage and a society which doesn't give them a chance for integration?

Germany hasn't expelled enough yet.

As far as Atta, on the surface he was "culturally compitent" but he found the path to jihad from a Hamburg mosque.

People caught between need to choose one or the other. Germany or the umma. Failure to choose IS a choice.

[Quijote]

Basically I agree with you.

Wait until I read 'America Alone', I think than we'll have more to disagree upon again...   

[G M]

 

[Crafty_Dog]

All:

I recently persuaded a high IQ friend of libertarian orientation to read Steyn's book.  He has opposed Bush's Iraq decision with considerable vigor and intellectual rigor from a principled perspective from the beginning.  I'm hoping to persuade him to come play here. Here is his response to Steyn's book:

Marc
=============


As you predicted, Marc, I found many ideas and suggestions that I can accept or even enthusiastically endorse.

First a comment about the broad themes: (1) that the developed world's low birth rates constitutes demographic suicide, (2) that Islamic people will soon constitute a political majority in many European countries, and (3) that Islam is both a political and religious force that is hostile and dangerous to all non-Muslims. I can agree with the broad outline presented by Steyn. His view of Islam's fundamental nature I see as controversial, but I agree that -- at a minimum -- some significant number of people who claim the Muslim heritage are in fact dangerous and hostile toward us.

Steyn won me over immediately in his Prologue:

"The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood ? health care, child care, care of the elderly ? to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. In the American context, the federal 'deficit' isn't the problem; it's the government programs that cause the deficit. These programs would be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat; it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism ?" (page xx)

Unfortunately, however, I still find Steyn to be outrageously inconsistent. The words just quoted and many other passages appear to blame "big government" for the near destruction of our society. Other comments in this direction include: "? an apocalyptic scenario ? can best be avoided not by more government but by less ? by government returning the primal responsibilities it's taken from them in the modern era."  Another one: "What flopped ? big time, as the vice president would say ? was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA, and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms." 

After expressing such enlightened views, how does Steyn then go on to say   "I'm a supporter of the Bush Doctrine, of bringing liberty to the Middle East" ?  Or, how can he say things like:  "? there's a lot to be said for a great nation that understands its greatness is not an accident and that therefore it should spread the secrets of its success around" ?

First of all, I reject his belief in America's "exceptional" qualities. Maybe we were exceptional at one time, but now we are just a few years behind the Europeans in our implementation of a death-inducing welfare state. There are also ways in which we are unfortunately exceptional in a negative sense.  In truth, our US government leaders don't have any idea what the "secrets of our success" were. Steyn himself fails to mention the most important determinants: the concepts of private property, free exchange, and the division of labor. Societies in the modern era pretty clearly achieve success in proportion to their implementation of these principles. These are the corner stones of liberty; liberty is not ensured by "democracy." In fact, when carried to logical extremes, democracy erodes respect and official support for private property and other fundamental liberties.

After watching this Iraq war unfold, how can anybody still think that the US government can make productive changes in Middle Eastern cultures? It's preposterous to believe that the "Bush Doctrine" contains any useful concepts whatsoever. Steyn even says this, in part, "This leaves option three: Reform Islam -- which is not ours to do. Ultimately, only Muslims can reform Islam." (page 205).

Another nice line from Steyn (page 207): "The threat to US power comes not principally from Chinese innovation or Indian engineering graduates but from America's own cultural indolence, just as the sack of Rome was a symptom of the fall of the empire rather than the cause."   Right on.

As I keep saying, to save ourselves from this Steyn-articulated doom, we need to -- somehow -- undo the government policies and concepts that have destroyed our economic system's superiority and pretty nearly destroyed our people's will and abilities. With respect to Islam our problem is most significantly related to demographic and immigration issues. That's not to say that we should never whack somebody militarily, but the big problem is not going to be solved by the USAF, the Navy, or even the Marine Corp. Steyn agrees with much of this, but apparently still likes the ideas of "ending the Iranian regime" and "striking militarily when the opportunity presents itself."  (page 206). Hasn't Steyn noticed that big government is at it's biggest and most expansive when at war? Historically, our most rapid movements toward socialism and fascism-like behaviors occurred during wars. I am afraid he is arguing that we should pursue two totally incompatible strategies simultaneously.

JMHO. What do you say, Marc?

===========

[G M]

**Germany figures in this, so I thought i'd post it here.**

Published on The Brussels Journal (http://www.brusselsjournal.com)
The Rape of Europe
By Paul Belien
Created 2006-10-25 20:57

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics. The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families. Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other major European cities.

Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization. “The dominant ethos,” he told De Volkskrant, “is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated. She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death.”

In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared “humanist”) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

As Tom Bethell wrote in this month’s American Spectator: “Just at the most basic level of demography the secular-humanist option is not working.” But there is more to it than the fact that non-religious people tend not to have as many children as religious people, because many of them prefer to “enjoy” freedom rather than renounce it for the sake of children. Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist.

“If faith collapses, civilization goes with it,” says Bethell. That is the real cause of the closing of civilization in Europe. Islamization is simply the consequence. The very word Islam means “submission” and the secularists have submitted already. Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it.

Some of the people I meet in the U.S. are particularly worried about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. They are correct when they fear that anti-Semitism is also on the rise among non-immigrant Europeans. The latter hate people with a fighting spirit. Contemporary anti-Semitism in Europe (at least when coming from native Europeans) is related to anti-Americanism. People who are not prepared to resist and are eager to submit, hate others who do not want to submit and are prepared to fight. They hate them because they are afraid that the latter will endanger their lives as well. In their view everyone must submit.

This is why they have come to hate Israel and America so much, and the small band of European “islamophobes” who dare to talk about what they see happening around them. West Europeans have to choose between submission (islam) or death. I fear, like Broder, that they have chosen submission – just like in former days when they preferred to be red rather than dead.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source URL:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1609

[G M]

**A disturbing view of Russia's future as well.**

http://hotair.com/archives/2006/12/03/the-coming-muslim-majority-in-russia/

[TB]

Marc posted a comment from me, just above, and I have decided to try my hand on this interesting forum. It looks like everybody here has lots of intelligent commentary on an amazingly broad array of subjects.

With respect to this topic of the Islamic challenge to Europe and America, I think the diagnosis shared in the preceding post is wrong or at least incomplete:

<As Tom Bethell wrote in this month’s American Spectator: “Just at the most basic level of demography the secular-humanist option is not working.” But there is more to it than the fact that non-religious people tend not to have as many children as religious people, because many of them prefer to “enjoy” freedom rather than renounce it for the sake of children. Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist.>

The suffocating state is, IMO, more the point. Germany was the first of the welfare states and therefore has become one of the most damaging. "... many of them prefer to 'enjoy' freedom ... "? There is precious little freedom left in the European welfare states. I know a young couple who immigrated to Florida from France to start a single-store eyeglasses business -- because the French made it virtually impossible for them to do the same in that country! What does the word "freedom" mean if you can't start and run a small retail business? It seems to me that these factors, together with the intolerable tax burden, explain the lack of desire to raise children -- more so than a failure of religion.

TB

[G M]

For what it's worth, i'd agree that the socialist economic death spiral the europeans have inflicted on themselves contributes to what is happening.

[Crafty_Dog]

I agree with TB on the importance and power of the suffocating state.

Recent events in France such as the young elite school types successfully protesting the proposed law allowing companies to fire new employees more freely is but one example.   France is a country that throughout the Cold War had, IIRC, 20-something percent of its population consistently vote Communist!  The pro-union attitude is not pro-people or pro-growth, it is exclusionary in order to confer benefit that would not be attained freely.  The cost is to the excluded-- in this case the Paristineans.

PS:  Welcome aboard TB!  Delighted to have you hear with us! 

[TB]

For what it is worth, Crafty Dog, here is an article from the dean of the Austrians explaining why state "interventionism" leads toward socialism. Ludwig von Mises says a "middle of the road" policy leads inexorably in that direction. He claims, in fact, that this very process created both Germany's and Britain's socialism.   http://www.mises.org/story/2370

As I said before in the other forum, I think this "fight" with Islam is not something we can win in the same sense as we won WW II. More than anything, winning is going to require changing the trend with respect to state intervention and control. Mises, in the above article, argued that socialism is not inevitable. In my opinion, however, it's getting to be darn important to shift the trend. To save us from this Muslim takeover hypothesized by Steyn, we need to eliminate those factors that make continued migration so desirable -- as a first step.

Tom

[Quijote]

Heya TB, welcome aboard!

Henryk M. Broder

Henryk M. Broder would be the living example opposing the theory that Europe would be unaware of its "fate" (when reading your comments here you could get the impression that Europe is already islamized). I highly respect Broder, he works with the Spiegel, my favourite magazine of which you often find excerpts here. Broder is very critical and loud - thats also good. But he belongs to a generation that has grown up in a "pure" Germany without any immigrants. Of course the world he has grown up has already gone - and its good that its gone. Its the old Germany where former nazi-party members still had control of society. He has a written a very good book but like Bat Ye'or, he's sitting at the sideline gloating, cheering and making jokes while Europe is going down instead of trying to find solutions.

Welfare state

In the Scandinavian countries the welfare state is up and running just fine. The welfare state itself doesn't seem to be a problem, its how you manage it.

In most of your posts I often find comments and opinions about France and conclusions drawn about that country taken to the situation in Europe all together. France has homemade problems, other countries have theirs. France can't be equated with the whole of Europe.

**A disturbing view of Russia's future as well.**

Russia has a hardcore neo-nationalistic anti-whatever movement. You'd rather see gulags filled with muslims again than a islamized russia (not much better).

Interestingly the picture you have of Europe and what I expierence "on the ground" differ extremely.

[Quijote]

Interestingly the picture you have of Europe and what I expierence "on the ground" differ extremely.

Or have I alread become a muslim but don't know it yet? 

[G M]

Quijote,

You do have a "ground truth" advantage here. Without giving out any more information than you'd prefer, can you give us a general idea of your geographical area and kind of work? Obviously, some fields more than others may deal with certain issues that we're discussing. 

[G M]

**This is a good idea, at least I think so.**

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/05/nuktest05.xml

Migrants face new 'Britishness' test
By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor
Last Updated: 7:02am GMT 05/12/2006




Tests in the English language and the British way of life will be compulsory from next year for foreigners wanting to settle here, the Government said yesterday.

It will bring long-term immigrants into line with people who seek UK citizenship, who already have to sit the tests.

   
Liam Byrne: migrants must recognise responsibilities
Last year 180,000 people were granted settlement to stay. Some go on to seek British nationality but others may choose to retain their own while staying permanently.

Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said: "It is essential that migrants wishing to live in the UK permanently recognise that there are responsibilities that go with this.

"Having a good grasp of English is essential in order for them to play a full role in society and properly integrate into our communities."

Applicants who already possess a good standard of English will take the existing Life in the UK exam.

Immigrants with poorer English can take a specially developed English for Speakers of Other Languages course with a simplified citizenship course.

Habib Rahman, chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said that subjecting applicants for indefinite leave to remain in the UK (ILR) to the same tests as those seeking British citizenship would send out "confusing messages".

"ILR does not confer the same set of rights and protections on applicants as UK citizenship," he said. "Persons with ILR are still subject to the immigration rules in a way that UK citizens are not.

"Also, this seems designed to place an extra hurdle in the path of people applying for ILR who have already fulfilled other criteria.

"It is evident that education providers cannot deal with existing demand for English language training. We question why the Government wants to generate more demand."

The Life in the UK test is aimed at those with a good grasp of English and their pass mark will be at least 75 per cent. Each applicant sits a 45-minute exam of 24 questions to show a basic knowledge of national culture.

Those less accomplished in English can attend a combined language and citizenship class instead. They will be expected to complete the course ''successfully" but do not have to pass the exam to gain citizenship.

The computer-based, multiple-choice examination are available at 90 test centres from today. Candidates who fail can retake the test as many times as they wish.

A Government handbook, Life in the UK, contains much of the information that will feature in the tests, including what to do if you spill someone's pint in a pub (offer to buy another).
 

[TB]

Quijote,

Just to try and clarify my opinions on a couple of things. I have no knowledge or opinion about Steyn's claims of imminent "Islamification" in Europe. My comments are aimed at the general damage done by the welfare state concept. If there is an Islamic and demographic problem as severe as Steyn claims, my instincts are to blame the welfare state. My hostility to the welfare state is based on extensive readings in so-called Austrian School economics and observation of the welfare process within the US.  By the way, I didn't mean to imply that the European countries are in any way homogeneous. If I seemed to generalize my anecdote about France, your point is very well taken -- I shouldn't do that!

I disagree that the welfare states are up and running well. Even in Scandinavia the problems are brewing.  See "How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden" for another view on that issue
( http://www.mises.org/story/2190 ). The biggest problem with the welfare state concept is that it is progressive --- in the sense that the state tends to keep getting bigger and bigger. When the idea is pushed too far, you can lose liberty on nearly every dimension. If you have never read Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" you might find his views challenging.

[G M]

**I wish I had written this. It captures my viewpoint very well on this topic.**

The Jihad: We're All in This Together
By Don Feder
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 8, 2006


Don Feder delivered the following speech to the Americans for A Safe Israel National Conference (“America And Israel – The Present Danger”) held in New York City on December 3, 2006. – The Editors.

You have a problem. It’s a problem shared by Jews in Hebron, Serbs in Kosovo, Hindus in the Kashmir, Catholics in Lebanon, and Americans walking the streets of New York.


Consider the inter-connectedness of the following incidents, all of which took place in the past few months:



In Indonesia, three Christian schoolgirls were beheaded.
In Iraq, a Syrian Orthodox priest was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.
In Somalia, a nun was shot to death as she left the hospital where she worked, tending the sick and dying.
In Lebanon, just days ago, a cabinet minister was assassinated.
In Britain, authorities uncovered a conspiracy in which native-born Brits plotted to blow up several trans-Atlantic flights, killing as many as 3,000.
In Afghanistan, suicide bombers are at work again.
In Iraq, they never stopped. Additionally, the week before last, a group of worshippers were abducted from a mosque, doused with gasoline and burned to death in what’s described as “sectarian violence.”
In France, a high school philosophy teacher is in hiding after very credible death threats following publication of a September 19th commentary in Le Figaro.
Some 139 people died in riots in Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – following the publication of Danish cartoons.
Europe is experiencing the worst wave of anti-Semitic violence since Kristallnacht. The former director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum reports there an average of 12 assaults a day on Jews in Paris.
In Kosovo, 90 percent of Serbs gave been ethnically cleansed from the province since 1999. The rest live in a state of siege.
In Mumbai, India, a series of blasts killed almost 200.
In Gaza, terrorists recently celebrated the latest “ceasefire” by raining more rockets on southern Israel.
And the leader of more than a billion Catholics received death threats and demands that he convert after giving a speech in which he called for a balance of faith and reason, and quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor.


What do the foregoing have in common?



To quote columnist Mark Steyn, in his excellent book America Alone: The End of The World As We Know It, it begins with an “I” and ends with a “slam.”



I am not saying that all Muslims are terrorists. I am saying that almost all terrorists are Muslims – the mother of all no-brainers – and that Islam is a faith that is, shall we say, terrorism-friendly. I challenge you to name another faith in which your entry into Heaven is assured by killing those of another faith in a holy war.



I am not saying that Muslims are inherently bad people. Most Muslims are like most people everywhere. I am saying that there are elements in Islam that incline adherents to commit the crimes detailed a moment ago.



I am saying – and let me be clear about this – that a faith embraced by as many as 1.3 billion people worldwide contains within it the seeds of the evil we see all around us – seeds which require only the right conditions to germinate. It all goes back to the Koran.



Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the midst of a world war, one every bit as deadly as the Cold War, and with a potential for devastation to rival World War II. Actually, the Cold War is a bad analogy. For perhaps the 20 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, almost no one was willing to die for Communism. Today, ten of millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – around the world would gladly die, and kill, for Dar Islam.



But we make a fatal mistake if we think of Islam only in terms of suicide bombings, sniper attacks, death threats, forced conversions, female genital mutilation, honor killings, jihad-this and fatwah-that.



Every bit as important is what’s going on in maternity wards from Brussels to Bombay.



Of the 10 nations with the lowest birthrates, nine are in post-Christian Europe. And the ten countries with the highest fertility rates? That’s right – starts with an “I” and ends in a “slam.”



Fertility rates in the Muslim world look like this: Niger (7.46 children per woman), Mali (7.42), Somalia (6.76), Afghanistan (6.69), and Yemen (6.58). The Palestinian woman in Gaza who – at age 64 – just became the world’s oldest suicide bomber was the mother of nine and (at last count) the grandmother of 41.



Between 1970 and 2000, while the share of the world’s population represented by the industrialized nations declined from just under 30 percent to just over 20 percent, the share accounted for by the wonderful world of jihad rose from 15 percent to 20 percent.



Compared to the rest of the industrialized world, the United States is experiencing a veritable population explosion – with a birth rate of 2.11, just about replacement level. From there, it’s demographic winter as far as the eye can see: Canada (1.5), Germany (1.3), Russia and Italy (1.2) and not-so-sunny Spain (1.1). The latter three nations could cease to exist, as they are currently constituted, within the next 50 years.



According to a November 21st Washington Times story, by 2015, more than half the soldiers in the Russian Army will be Muslims. And you thought the Czar was bad! By 2020, over 20 percent of Russia’s population will be reading the Koran, religiously.



Within the lifetimes of some in this room, the UK, France Belgium, and the Netherlands could go Islamic green. For the present, Muslims comprise 10 percent of the French population. But of “Frenchmen” under 20, fully 30 percent share the faith of Osama bin Laden, Baby Assad, and Iran’s nut-cake leader.



You can talk all you want about population control being the happy result of higher standards of living, careers for women, sex education, contraception and access to abortion. In fact, it’s becoming the assisted suicide of the West. What it really comes boils to is this: Confident societies have babies. People with a sense of mission have children. Nations with a sense of destiny and faith in the future fill maternity wards, and nurseries and cradles.



Those that believe in God as a vague, philosophical concept (if He exists at all), don’t. Instead of the future, they put their trust in 401(k) plans, elaborate state welfare systems, and gated retirement communities.



There are still enough of those of us who care enough to act. But the hour grows proverbially late.



Everyone is so focused on their own thing that they miss the larger picture. Zionists rightly worry about Palestinian terrorism and fate of Israel should Judea, Samaria, and Gaza become Hamas-istan.



Serbs decry the destruction of ancient churches, monasteries, and shrines in Kosovo – not to mention the ethnic cleansing that followed NATO’s victory over Slobodan Milosevic – and worry about the province being permanently detached from Serbia.



Hindus anguish over the ongoing violence in Kashmir, supported by Pakistan, which has claimed more than 50,000 lives in the past 20 years, as well as terrorist acts in the rest of India.



Groups like Voice of the Martyrs meticulously document Christian persecution in the Muslim world. Lebanese Christians lament the demise of the last Christian country in the Middle East and Hezbollah creating a state-within-a-state. Coptic Christians complain about the treatment of their co-religionists in Egypt. And the beat goes on. But these are all part of a seamless chador. What happens in Kosovo affects the Kashmir. As Judea and Samaria go, ultimately, so go Lebanon and London.



In retrospect, it’s easy to see that a number of events in the 1930s were steps leading to the Second World War: Hitler’s rise to power, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, and so on. It’s always easier to see the interconnectedness of events and the significance of trends in retrospect – well after the fact. But at least after Pearl Harbor, most Americans understood that they were at war. It’s been five years since this generation’s Pearl Harbor, and most of us still don’t have a clue.



When word of Pearl Harbor reached London, Winston Churchill called Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The conversation ended with the British prime minister telling the American president: “Well, we are all in this together now.” As indeed they were; as they probably had been since the early 1930s, though almost no one was aware of it at the time.


Well, my friends, we truly are all in this together – Jews and Catholics, Lebanese Christians and Hindus, Orthodox Serbs, and Indonesian Christians. Until we begin to understand that, we have no hope of countering the global jihad. When Zionists start caring about the fate of Serbs in Kosovo, when Hindus support Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria (designated the West Bank), when Serbs stand up for Indian Kashmir, then we will begin making progress.