Worldview: Europe

by A Concerned Citizen

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Retired on 31 December 2007

2006 Articles
Is Europe Doomed?
Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism
Political Correctness
The Muslim Invasion
Anti-Western Intellectuals
Freedom Fighters
The Popular Reaction
The Business View
Other Articles

The Bigger Picture
The Future of France

General News
Year 2007

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2006 Articles

Important Note

8 Nov 07: As I review my 2006 articles on Europe, I must emphasize at the outset that my views have moved on since the days when I naively believed the conservative American press. (I am so embarrassed!) For example, I now realize that the French were right on Iraq! As for Muslims, I still fear the orthodox ideology, and even the possibility that they may 'take over' Europe through demography, without first shedding this ideology. However, I also realize that there is much propaganda of a distinctly neocon flavor infecting the current craze against Islam. Real Muslims are far more complex, and some of their grievances against Israel and America are indeed legitimate, while others are grossly exaggerated. We, too, have our prejudiced myths based on political emotion. So I have formed no firm conclusions as to how much of a 'threat' they pose in Europe, though it might be a good idea to curb new immigration for a while until the dust settles. Meanwhile, I simply collect articles.

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Is Europe Doomed?

Introduction
Pipes On How We Could Lose

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Introduction (May 06): The once magnificent civilization of Europe seems to be decaying before our eyes. The triumph of rationalism heralded by Newton and the Enlightenment has been replaced by the obscurantism of trendy post-Modernism. Europe threw off the shackles of medieval Christianity only to lose its soul in materialism and nihilism. Political correctness, which is now restricting free speech in the name of 'tolerance', has made of mockery of liberal secularism. The Europeans are losing their spiritual spine as well as their ability to reproduce, while Muslims full of fanatical zeal and ardor to procreate are pouring in. The Muslims are vocal about wishing to change what they perceive as a decadent European culture in favor of the totalitarian Islamic law called Sharia, which is the very antithesis of the liberal secular democracy the West fought so hard to achieve. Yet political leaders of all stripes go out of their way to appease the Muslim community. At present it seems likely that Europe will be Islamic within 50 to 100 years. How ironic that the loss of Europe will be due, not to brute force, but largely to a suicidal rejection of their own civilization on the part of selfish, disaffected and stupid intellectuals.

Well, that's the gloomiest view, and there seems to be a lot of truth to it. One of the most vigorous expressions of this civilizational jeremiad is by conservative journalist Mark Steyn, in a book called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. The contents of the book are neatly summarized in an article by Daniel Pipes:

EUROPE IS FINISHED, PREDICTS MARK STEYN
Daniel Pipes, 14 Nov 06

Steyn begins with the legacy of two totalitarianisms. Traumatized by the electoral appeal of fascism, post-World War II European states were constructed in a top-down manner 'so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures'. As a result, the establishment has 'come to regard the electorate as children'.
Second, the Soviet menace during the cold war prompted American leaders, impatient with Europe's (and Canada's) weak responses, effectively to take over their defense. This benign and far-sighted policy led to victory by 1991, but it also had the unintended and less salutary side-effect of freeing up Europe's funds to build a welfare state. This welfare state had several malign implications:
The nanny state infantilized Europeans, making them worry about such pseudo-issues as climate change, while feminizing the males.
It also neutered them, annexing 'most of the core functions of adulthood', starting with the instinct to breed. From about 1980, birth rates plummeted, leaving an inadequate base for today's workers to receive their pensions.
Structured on a pay-as-you-go basis, it amounted to an inter-generational Ponzi scheme, where today's workers depend on their children for their pensions.
The demographic collapse meant that the indigenous peoples of countries like Russia, Italy, and Spain are at the start of a population death spiral.
It led to a collapse of confidence that in turn bred 'civilizational exhaustion', leaving Europeans unprepared to fight for their ways.
To keep the economic machine running meant accepting foreign workers. Rather than execute a long-term plan to prepare for the many millions of immigrants needed, Europe's elites punted, welcoming almost anyone who turned up. By virtue of geographic proximity, demographic overdrive, and a crisis-prone environment, 'Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans', Mr. Steyn writes.
Arriving at a time of demographic, political, and cultural weakness, Muslims are profoundly changing Europe. 'Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.' Put differently, 'Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity.' Much of the Western world, Mr. Steyn flat-out predicts, 'will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries'. With even more drama, he adds that 'it's the end of the world as we know it'.

By contrast, Pipes has a somewhat more optimistic view:

MUSLIM EUROPE
Daniel Pipes, 11 May 06

'France becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam.' So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione, or, The Force of Reason. And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam.
Two factors mainly contribute to this world-shaking development.
The hollowing out of Christianity. Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition and its historic values. The numbers of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the past two generations to the point that some observers call it the 'new dark continent'. Already, analysts estimate Britain's mosques host more worshippers each week than does the Church of England.
An anemic birth rate. Indigenous Europeans are dying out. Sustaining a population requires each woman on average to bear 2.1 children; in the European Union, the overall rate is one-third short, at 1.5 a woman, and falling. One study finds that, should current population trends continue and immigration cease, today's population of 375 million could decline to 275 million by 2075.To keep its working population even, the E.U. needs 1.6 million immigrants a year; to sustain the present workers-to-retirees ratio requires an astonishing 13.5 million immigrants annually.
Into the void are coming Islam and Muslims. As Christianity falters, Islam is robust, assertive, and ambitious. As Europeans underreproduce at advanced ages, Muslims do so in large numbers while young.
Some 5% of the E.U., or nearly 20 million persons, presently identify themselves as Muslims; should current trends continue, that number will reach 10% by 2020. If non-Muslims flee the new Islamic order, as seems likely, the continent could be majority-Muslim within decades.
[. . .]
There is still a chance for the transformation not to play itself out, but the prospects diminish with time. Here are several possible ways it might be stopped:
Changes in Europe that lead to a resurgence of Christian faith, an increase in childbearing, or the cultural assimilation of immigrants; such developments can theoretically occur but what would cause them is hard to imagine.
Muslim modernization. For reasons no one has quite figured out (education of women? abortion on demand? adults too self-absorbed to have children?), modernity leads to a drastic reduction in the birth rate. Also, were the Muslim world to modernize, the attraction of moving to Europe would diminish.
Immigration from other sources. Latin Americans, being Christian, would more or less permit Europe to keep its historic identity. Hindus and Chinese would increase the diversity of cultures, making it less likely that Islam would dominate.
Current trends suggest Islamization will happen, for Europeans seem to find it too strenuous to have children, stop illegal immigration, or even diversify their sources of immigrants. Instead, they prefer to settle unhappily into civilizational senility.
Europe has simultaneously reached unprecedented heights of prosperity and peacefulness and shown a unique inability to sustain itself. One demographer, Wolfgang Lutz, notes, 'Negative momentum has not been experienced on so large a scale in world history.'
Is it inevitable that the most brilliantly successful society also will be the first in danger of collapse due to a lack of cultural confidence and offspring? Ironically, creating a hugely desirable place to live would seem also to be a recipe for suicide. The human comedy continues.

All this seems plausible enough. The mathematics of demographics are inexorable, unless the basic assumptions change. My gut feeling is that Muslims will not assimilate, because Islam keeps them in a state of ignorance and belligerence, which in turn will make them ever more despised by the Europeans, as the latter become ever fewer and more afraid. Already, with the Mohammed cartoon affair, we see astonishing signs of appeasement on the core Western value of freedom of speech. What will happen when the Muslims are far more numerous?

I am bemused that Pipes, a Jew, should place so much stock in Christianity as a bastion of civilization. Perhaps he is trying to curry favor with conservative Christians and form a joint alliance to save Israel. I would much prefer that the emphasis be on Enlightenment and liberal secular values. That is what I am pleased to call 'Western Civilization', and I would expect any true intellectual, especially a Jewish one, to agree. The achievements of Western Civilization seem to me to be in spite of, rather than because of, Christianity, though perhaps the latter did lead to some development of the inner conscience. On the other hand, it just might be that, due to a psychological quirk of human nature, an assertive and self-righteous religion like Christianity is necessary to provide the cultural juices for survival against a similar but worse foe. The gentle Buddhists don't seem to be faring too well in Asia, nor the wise Hindus in India.

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Pipes On How We Could Lose (26 Dec 06): Daniel Pipes is now less optimistic than in the article above; he worries that the West could go down the drain if we lose our civilizational backbone:

HOW THE WEST COULD LOSE
Daniel Pipes, NY Sun, 26 Dec 06

On the face of it, the West's military predominance makes victory seem inevitable. Even if Tehran acquires a nuclear weapon, Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War. What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the gulag?
Yet more than a few analysts, including myself, worry that it's not so simple. Islamists (defined as those who demand to live by the sacred law of Islam) might do better than the earlier totalitarians. They could even win. That's because, however strong the Western hardware, its software contains some potentially fatal bugs. Three of them — pacifism, self-hatred, complacency — deserve attention.

I'm a bit more skeptical of this line of thought than I was some months ago, partly due to the colossal analytic failure of the neocons and of many conservatives regarding Iraq. It is clear that they understood nothing of Iraqi society. Not Wolfowitz, not Pipes, and not even Bernard Lewis. They all failed to predict the Iraq fiasco. Nevertheless, I agree that orthodox Islam is incompatible with Western freedoms, and that we could lose those freedoms through demographics, if Muslims in the West reproduce and non-Muslims do not.

I am more skeptical about slippery (sleazy?) hot-button words such as 'pacifism, self-hatred, complacency'. Those who were against the Iraq war were labeled as pacifists, and they have been vindicated. We have replaced a stable society under a dictator with a horrible sectarian civil war and a flimsy constitution favorable to Sharia. All of this could have and should have been predicted, by people like Pipes, but was not. Is that progress?

As for 'self-hatred', the simple truth is that the West has committed many crimes against humanity, such as colonialism and religious and racial persecution, often in the name of Christianity. One needn't be a 'lefty' to believe this but merely decent and informed. Neither does that mean that we must reject what is best in the Western tradition, such as rationalism, freedom of thought and speech, and secular democracy. For example, the Mohammed cartoons affair was truly a disgrace to the PC European establishment. However, the same people who pontificate about our loss of 'civilizational confidence' often turn out to glorify the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, which is a direct affront to secularism and rationalism. Religion should be private, and all that is best in Western civilization is more the legacy of the Greco-Roman rational tradition than the ever reactionary and obscurantist Church. By the way, few conservatives seem to worry that the Republican party in America has effectively become the 'party of Jesus'. It took liberals to point that out.

As for complacence, I am all in favor of screening immigrants who espouse Jihad ideology or who otherwise do not believe in secular democracy. That would be an example of 'rationality' and would be a lot better than throwing our military weight around in the Middle East and making a mess. The Middle East cannot truly democratize until the inhabitants change their thinking. We cannot do that for them. It must come from within. However, we do have a right to resist a flood of immigrants who deny the principles of our civilization. I might point out that the reason for this flood of immigrants in Europe is that capitalists wanted cheap labor and Eurocrats wanted a chimerical leverage on the world stage. Strange how most conservatives are silent on the greedy basis behind the Muslim flood, as well as on the considerable Western role in fostering radicalism in the Middle East. (For example, the US created the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to counter the Soviets and continues to be friends with the Wahhabi-promoting Saudis and the terror-promoting Pakistanis.)

I fully support Israel and blame the Arabs for the Israeli-Palestinian predicament, but I also suspect that Jewish hardliners like Pipes and Caroline Glick want to get the US military embroiled in the Middle East in order to serve Israel's interests as they see them. We should give plenty of aid to Israel but keep our soldiers out.

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Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism

Jean-Francois Revel: Anti-Americanism: An Introduction [bio]

Walter Russell Mead: Two Books Take Aim at French Anti-Americanism

Bernard-Henri Levy: Anti-Americanism in the Old Europe

Philippe Karsenty: French Media Bias against Jews, USA and Capitalism

YNet News: In Spain, anti-Semitism is new leftist trend

Dutch Socialist Leader Compares Muslim Terror to WWII Resistance

Richard Baehr (American Thinker): Why Europe Abandoned Israel

Le Nouvel Observateur: Who Are France's Real Pro-Americans?

Sasha Abramsky: The Other America

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Political Correctness

Orion News Blog: Muslim Riots in France in 2005

Flemming Rose: Europe's Politics of Victimology

Melanie Phillips: Suicide of the West

Telegraph: Houellebecq defends right to call Islam 'stupid'

Telegraph: UK teacher was fired for criticizing multiculturalism

Denis MacShane: Our failure to confront radical Islam

Bat Ye'or: Europe and the Ambiguities of Multiculturalism

Andrew Sullivan: 'Stupefied by Relativism'

EU Commission President: PC killing our freedoms

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The Muslim Invasion

Theodore Dalrymple: The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris

Guy Milliere: France is Not a Western Country Anymore

Bat Ye'or: How Europe Became Eurabia

Bat Ye'or: The Protocols of the Elders of Brussels

Andrew G. Bostom: Eurabian Nightmares

Daniel Pipes: 'Almost like an Invasion'

Nima Sanandaji: Sweden's Immigration Nightmare

Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept

Melanie Phillips: UK's Weak Response to Rushdie Fatwa

Daniel Pipes: Europe's Muslim Population in Demographic Free-fall?

Serge Trifkovic (FPM): Europe's Fellow Travelers

Martin Walker (Wilson Center): Europe's Mosque Hysteria

Dutch Justice Minister: Sharia OK if most agree

Roger Scruton: Should Enoch Powell have spoken?

Fjordman: The Eurabian Code

Telegraph: French police: Muslims are waging civil war against us

Stephanie Giry (Foreign Affairs): France and Its Muslims

David Warren: Giry's Politically-Correct Account is a Lie

Lorenzo Vidino (MEQ): The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe

Jonathan Last (Philly Inquirer): The risk in the rise of Islam

Daniel Pipes: The 751 No-Go Zones of France

Bernard Lewis: Europe and Islam

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Anti-Western Intellectuals

Laurent Murawiec: The Wacky World of French Intellectuals

George Crowder: Are Post-Modernists Fascists? [more]

Jim Holt: Sartre, Brilliant philosopher or totalitarian apologist?

Roger Kimball: The Perversions of Michel Foucault [more]

Wesley Yang: Foucault and Khomeini

Richard Wolin: Foucault the Neohumanist?

Patrick West: The philosopher (Foucault) as dangerous liar

Roger Kimball: The Rape of the Masters

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Freedom Fighters

Oriana Fallaci
Robert Redeker
Other Articles

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Oriana Fallaci (15 Sep 06): Oriana Fallaci, who bravely identified the Muslim threat to Europe, and suffered vilification from the Europen elite for her efforts, has died at 77 after a battle with cancer. Robert Spencer has given her a fitting tribute on his Jihad Watch website:

ORIANA FALLACI HAS DIED
Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch, 15 Sep 06

She was one of the most fearless and courageous defenders Western civilization had in these latter days, and the West rewarded her by hounding, persecuting and vilifying her.
Such is the state of the society and culture she loved and tried to save from itself.
Many times in her last months, after she did me the honor of calling me her friend, I thought to myself, What can I do for Oriana? Of course, the only answer was to do exactly what I am doing here at this site, and in my books, and in traveling around the country speaking, trying to alert people to the reality and magnitude of the global jihad.
I invite you, then, on this day of sadness and loss, to pay tribute to Oriana. There is no way we can make up for what we have lost in her. But the best way we can pay tribute to Oriana is by becoming Oriana. Let there be a hundred new Orianas today, a thousand new passionate and articulate and absolutely unbowed defenders of Western culture and civilization, with a fine contempt for all the many weapons of physical and psychological intimidation that the jihadists and their non-Muslim allies and tools in the Western media and government establishments use to try to silence and discredit us.

A commenter on Spencer's post has conveniently provided two paragraphs from her book The Rage and the Pride:

THE RAGE AND THE PRIDE (excerpt) From the comments section of the Spencer article

I am not speaking, obviously, to the laughing hyenas who enjoy seeing images of the wreckage and snicker good-it-serves-the-Americans-right. I am speaking to those who, though not stupid or evil, are wallowing in prudence and doubt. And to them I say: Wake up, people. Wake up!! Intimidated as you are by your fear of going against the current — that is, appearing racist (a word which is entirely inapt as we are speaking not about a race but about a religion) — you don't understand or don't want to understand that a reverse-Crusade is in progress. Accustomed as you are to the double-cross, blinded as you are by myopia, you don't understand or don't want to understand that a war of religion is in progress. Desired and declared by a fringe of that religion, perhaps, but a war of religion nonetheless. A war which they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that might not seek to conquer our territory, but that certainly seeks to conquer our souls. That seeks the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. That seeks to annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. You don't understand or don't want to understand that if we don't oppose them, if we don't defend ourselves, if we don't fight, the Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that for better or worse we've managed to build, to change, to improve, to render a little more intelligent, that is to say, less bigoted — or even not bigoted at all. And with that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures... Christ! Don't you realize that the Osama Bin Ladens feel authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don't wear your beard long or a chador, because you go to the theater or the movies, because you listen to music and sing pop songs, because you dance in discos or at home, because you watch TV, wear miniskirts or short-shorts, because you go naked or half naked to the beach or the pool, because you fuck when you want and where you want and who you want? Don't you even care about that, you fools? I am an atheist, thank God. And I have no intention of letting myself be killed for it.
To make you cry I'll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered 'Allah akbar, Allah akbar'. Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don't believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn't even what I want to underline. It's that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah-akbar, Allah-akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones.

COMMENT: As I and most other critics of orthodox Islam have said many times, there may indeed be many decent moderate people calling themselves 'Muslim', but the intolerance and violence are very much part of the dominant tradition. We Europeans may have moved on from our medieval age, but the Muslim tradition seems to leave little room for reform, without fundamentally undermining the basis of that tradition. Hence my pessimism. Now Europe may be in danger of losing all that she has won, in terms of human rights and democratic freedoms, from demography if not outright invasion. That Fallaci was vilified by the European intellectual classes shows the perversity of human nature. If Europe loses its precious heritage, she has only herself to blame. The appeasement of Islam is truly Orwellian. How amazing that such an intellectual powerhouse should come to this. The loss of honesty and virtue can paralyze intelligence.

More Fallaci excerpts from Michelle Malkin. A tribute by Daniel Pipes.

More articles on Fallaci in the London Times, the IHT, and the WSJ.

Brendan Bernhard: The Fallaci Code

Tunku Varadarajan: An Interview with Oriana Fallaci

Margaret Talbot: The Agitator (Oriana Fallaci)

WP: Oriana Fallaci Dies [more]

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Robert Redeker

THE REDEKER AFFAIR
Christian Delacampagne
Commentary, January 2007

But the vast majority of responses, even when couched as defenses of the right to free speech, were in fact hostile to the philosophy teacher. The Communist mayor of Saint-Orens-de-Gameville, echoed by the head of Redeker's school, deplored the fact that he had included his affiliation at the end of the article. France's two largest teachers' unions, both of them socialist, stressed that 'they did not share Redeker's convictions'. The leading leftist human-rights organizations went much farther, denouncing his 'irresponsible declarations' and 'putrid ideas'. A fellow high-school philosophy teacher, Pierre Tevanian, declared (on a Muslim website) that Redeker was 'a racist' who should be severely punished by his school's administration. Even Gilles de Robien, the French minister of education, criticized Redeker for acting 'as if he represented the French educational system' — a bizarre charge against the author of a piece clearly marked as personal opinion.
Among members of the media, Redeker was scolded for articulating his ideas so incautiously. On the radio channel Europe 1, Jean-Pierre Elkabach invited the beleaguered teacher to express his 'regret'. The editorial board of Le Monde, France's newspaper of record, characterized Redeker's piece as 'excessive, misleading, and insulting'. It went so far as to call his remarks about Muhammad 'a blasphemy', implying that the founder of Islam must be treated even by non-Muslims in a non-Muslim country as an object not of investigation but of veneration.
[. . .]
Today in France, research on the most contested issues of race and religion is taboo unless one exhibits the 'right' politics. To speak at conferences or to be considered for important posts, a scholar must be prepared to describe the colonial era in French history as nothing less than an exercise in genocide and to denounce American policy in the Middle East as barbaric cruelty. Those who refuse to comply find themselves shut out.
A notable instance of such blacklisting occurred in 2004, when a scholar applied for a three-year position at the prestigious College International de Philosophie. His credentials were formidable, but when his 'pro-American' views became known to one member of the committee (the candidate, it seemed, was not completely opposed to the war in Iraq), a quiet but effective campaign was organized to deny him the post. Details of the case were reported in the weekly newspaper L'Express. The name of the unjustly treated candidate was Robert Redeker.

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Other Articles

Robert Spencer: Holland's Cassandra

Fjordman: Recommendations for the West

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The Popular Reaction

22 Jun 06: Many Europeans are waking up to the problems of politico-cultural decay and Muslim subversion. It remains to be seen whether they have the critical mass to do something about it. Also, will any backlash lead to the persecution of innocents? There is a tightrope to walk here. (I begin with a lot of articles from Robert Spencer's Dhimmi Watch archives, but these refer to articles in the worldwide press.)

Europe in General

Dhimmi Watch: French and Germans dislike Turkish membership in EU

Dhimmi Watch: Crisis in Europe: French Reject EU Constitution

Dhimmi Watch: Palestinian support 'crashes' in Europe

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Europe's Immigration Quagmire

Youssef Ibrahim: Europe Is Growing Skeptical Of Dialogue With Muslims

Ralph Peters: The Eurabia Myth

Zachary Shore (IHT): Europe's quiet integration

Germany

Dhimmi Watch: German police want strict integration law

Dhimmi Watch: Germany to deport hundreds of jihadists

Dhimmi Watch: Germans to put Muslims through loyalty test

London Times: Neo-Nazis join quiet march to poll victory

France

Dhimmi Watch: France 'to expel radical imams'

Dhimmi Watch: French leaders tilt right

Dhimmi Watch: Interior Minister aims for 25,000 expulsions in 2006

Dhimmi Watch: French Daily Publishes Prophet Mohammed's Cartoons

Dhimmi Watch: Dalrymple: Viva Voltaire

Dhimmi Watch: Relative anti-dhimmitude in France

Dhimmi Watch: Fitzgerald: Why we need reconciliation with France

BBC: Paris airport bars Muslim staff

Video: Le Pen: The End of our Civilization (in french)

England

Srdja Trifkovic: Interview with BNP chairman Nick Griffin

Daniel Pipes: Behead Islamists?

BBC: Cartoons protester found guilty

Other Countries

Dhimmi Watch: Most Dutch say Islam incompatible with Western society

Financial Times: Hirsi Ali Dispute Brings Down Dutch Government

Belgium: Islamic centre staff jailed for inciting race hatred

Dhimmi Watch: Denmark's Rasmussen: Eurodhimmis "disgraceful"

Dhimmi Watch: Spain's Aznar: Europe likes appeasement very much

Article Excerpts

REVIEW OF MARK STEYN'S AMERICA ALONE
Josef Joffe, NY Sun, 13 Dec 06 issue

This book is a relentlessly funny and felicitous polemic, but as in any polemic, its sparkling insights don't quite add up to a watertight brief. Sentences are honed to the sharpest, wittiest point, but, in the end, they leave you breathless and with a sense of du trop. You begin to scratch your head once your look past the sheer delight of reading.
Eurabia? There are only 20 million self-righteous and embittered Muslims in Europe — and 430 million soi-disant Euro-weenies. It will take a while before the former overwhelm the latter — a couple of hundred years at least. Meanwhile, these secular and Christian folks are not amoebae or lemmings, driven to their demise by forces they neither understand nor control. If September 11, 2001, was no wake-up call, July 7, 2005, in Britain was, and so were the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam and a spate of foiled terror attacks since then.
Those Euros are beginning to see multiculturalism as an unforeseen passport to 'parallel universes' in their inner and outer cities; they are taking a hard look at their mosques, and what is taught in them; and they are tightening up on immigration. The new buzzword is 'integration', which is a more correct moniker for 'assimilation'.
Nor is America as exceptional as Mr. Steyn would have us believe. Berkeley is more like Berlin than Boise when it comes to the siren call of multiculturalism and 'Otherism'. There is altogether too much guilt and too little pride in the West. But what a magnificent civilization it remains. It may run out of babies, but will it also run out of spunk?

The British National Party (22 Jun 06):The BNP or British National Party is a bit problematic. Wikipedia has the following to say about it:

According to its constitution, the BNP "stands for the preservation of the national and ethnic character of the British people and is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples. It is therefore committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948". To achieve this aim, the BNP advocates the use of "firm but voluntary incentives" to remove ethnic minorities from the UK[3]. Membership of the party is restricted to "Indigenous Caucasians".

This sounds a bit like LePen in France and goes farther than I would like. What is worth preserving in Europe is its political and cultural heritage, not its genetic makeup. Now I agree that people from some parts of the world, such as the Middle East, present a clear danger to this heritage. And it so happens that those people are correlated with a certain genetic makeup, as one would expect. However, I see no problem presented by Asians, whether from India, China, Japan or almost any other Asian country, unless they are Muslim. Many Muslims may also be quite decent and make fine citizens, but they need to be carefully screened. On the other hand, I don't see the BNP agenda as particularly evil. Britain is fairly small, unlike the US, so I see nothing egregious in trying to preserve this society, including its ethnic makeup, much as one would wish to preserve Tibet (alas!). Europe doesn't need to follow the example of the American melting pot; we had (have?) a special destiny. (Likewise, I wish for India to remain predominantly Hindu/Buddhist. Some people are worth preserving!) However, I think Britain would be a much more interesting place if it remains open to other cultural influences, and even allows a modest level of intermarriage, as it has in the past. That said, I quite agree with the fears of the BNP against being inundated by a flood of foreigners, even if they were all peaceful, friendly Tibetans! The BNP may go too far, but they are not to be excoriated. A more modest and flexible version of their program may be necessary to preserve the Britain that I, for one, would like to preserve. Unfortunately, due to the disease of political correctness, the BNP does not seem to have many highly educated members, which should be a severe liability.

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The Business View

23 Jun 06: Just as in the debate in America over Hispanic immigration, many businessmen in Europe benefit from the cheap immigrant labor, and they form a powerful political group. Naturally, they have an optimistic view about integrating the immigrants, as expressed in the following article from the business-oriented Economist magazine.

The Economist: Integrating Europe's Muslims Can Be Done

Although I am fairly optimistic about integrating Hispanics in America, I must regretfully predict a long protracted nightmare in Europe. I have studied the militant Islamic ideology enough to know that it is hard-wired into their basic scriptures and traditions, as I have discussed elsewhere on this page. This breeds a hostility and contempt towards non-Muslims which tends to erect an insuperable barrier towards true assimilation. In addition, the Islamic mentality suppresses critical reasoning, which is essential to the Western liberal democratic ethos. It seems like suicide to allow so many Muslims to flood in, without any checks or screening (though that may now be changing). The best one can hope for, it seems, is for Muslims to abandon Islam as they slowly become educated, if that ever happens. I doubt that Islam can be 'reformed', since this would require editing or 'interpreting' the basic scriptures beyond recognition. Muslims must outgrow their ideology. Until then, one can expect ever increasing friction, crime and violence (as seen recently throughout France), with growing islands of medieval Sharia where the democratic state is powerless. This is already happening.

Here is my fairly-informed speculation regarding the sociological dynamics of the current immigration debate, in both Europe and America. The businessmen and political elites have not studied Islam and do not know it. At most, they may have seen a syrupy 'Islam is Peace' whitewash on left-oriented public television. They have met Muslim businessmen in their dealings, who seemed polite enough, but these coat-and-tie types do not represent the masses, and anyway people wear masks when behaving in an official capacity. And of course, without sounding too leftist, I think it is fair to say that businessmen are mostly interested in making money, and the reduced labor costs of immigrants are an irresistible temptation. The opposition to immigration in Europe is coming from middle and lower economic strata of natives who have actually met ordinary Muslims in the streets. I believe that this face to face confrontation counts for more than resentment over displaced jobs. When face to face, you can tell if someone is hostile, and the Muslims are indeed hostile to the West, which they wish to exploit rather than embrace. This is totally different from the attitude of non-Muslim Asians, for example. The elites, on the other hand, such as the businessmen or EU officials, are isolated from the street reality in their fancy neighborhoods. There seems to be an ever widening split between elites and commoners in both Europe and America. Again, without sounding too leftist, I think it is fair to assert that corporate money exerts a huge influence over the political process, which is why even Democrats like Clinton (either one) are so favorable to globalization and to Wall Street. Thus, the native middle and lower-middle class majority may simply not be able to use democracy to assert their will on this issue, at least not until something in the process ruptures. The commoners are further divided by a clever appeal to ethnic resentment, often cloaked as political correctness, in the lowest, generally minority, strata of society. In this way, the Republicans in America have split the Democrats, and business interests have triumphed even beyond the considerable influence that money alone can buy.

If my analysis is correct, then the brilliant civilization of Europe is condemned to become another Islamic cesspool within a century or so. Remember that the native birthrate in Europe is declining, often below sustenance levels, while the Muslim immigrants are busy procreating at state expense. However, my analysis is incomplete. For one thing, I have omitted the debilitating effect of socialism, which has compounded the problems. For example, we have seen how French students went on strike for guaranteed state jobs, despite Europe's economic stagnation. And the declining native birthrate means that aging Europeans (and Americans) need the immigrant labor for all kinds of menial jobs, including nursing care in old age. How sad! For the record, I am in favor of a certain amount of intelligent and responsible 'socialism', such as scholarships, universal health care, easy loans for housing, and the like. Unfortunately, human nature does not seem able to walk the razor's edge of responsible government assistance. Perhaps we need those greedy businessmen to crack the whip, but we could at least expect them to care enough to preserve our civilization!

Daily Mail: Britain 'more corrupt that many African countries'

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Other Articles

Timothy Lehmann: Nicolas Sarkozy on Man and God in France

Theodore Dalrymple: The Specters Haunting Dresden

Gerard Baker: Europe Pathetically Caves In to Islamist Threat

Julia Gorin (FPM): Hollywood propaganda on the Serbs

George Szamuely: Still Slandering Serbia

Nebojsa Malic: Empire's Kosovo policy a wreck

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The Bigger Picture

The Future of France

Introduction (22 Apr 07): Having admitted in this recent note that I may have been swayed by too much neocon conservative thinking when I first wrote this page, I am now trying to make amends by seeking out more sophisticated sources than the screaming and very right-wing FrontPageMag. France is of particular interest to me, because it is central to Europe, and because I once went to French schools (back when they were the real thing). We start off with lengthy excerpts from two articles that appeared today, in the heat of the French election. One might suspect that the second article from Commentary is probably only a more polished version of neocon propaganda, but it still seems like a good article to me, notwithstanding the usual implicit conservative lambasting of any form of government regulation of the economy. (The author does admit that life expectancy is greater in France today than in the US.) The first article, however, is by Tony Judt, a leftish Jewish academic who has distinguished himself lately by admitting that the Jewish Lobby, or at least its neocon AIPAC version, has become too much of a sacred cow in America. There's some honesty for you, more than from, say, Alan Dershowitz, who also considers himself something of a 'liberal'. Sadly, Judt's prognosis for France isn't optimistic either. I wish the French well. They have many excellent qualities unappreciated by some of our own troglodyte politicians, not the least being intelligence, wit and energy.

FRANCE LOOKS AHEAD WITH TREPIDATION
Tony Judt, NYT, 22 Apr 07

But is the French situation really so dire? From every quarter one hears calls for 'reform' to bring France more in line with Anglo-American practices and policies. The dysfunctional French social model, we are frequently assured, has failed.
In that case there is much to be said for failure. French infants have a better chance of survival than American ones. The French live longer than Americans and they live healthier (at far lower cost). They are better educated and have first-rate public transportation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in the United States or Britain, and there are fewer poor people.
Yes, France has high youth unemployment, thanks to institutionalized impediments to job creation. But the comparison to American rates is misleading: our figures are artificially lowered because so many dark-skinned men aged 18 to 30 are in prison and thus off the unemployment rolls.
Meanwhile, recall what Jacques Chirac has done. In 1995 he became the first president to acknowledge openly France's role in the Holocaust ... However low his political fortunes, Mr. Chirac forbade his supporters to ally or compromise with Jean-Marie Le Pen's racist and xenophobic National Front ... Conscious of Europe's links to the Muslim world — and the cost of rebuffing and humiliating Islam's only secular democracy — Mr. Chirac has steadfastly supported Turkish admission to the European Union, an unpopular stance among his conservative constituents.
[. . .]
Let's not forget the hysterical Francophobia of 2003: not just the imbecilities of 'freedom fries' but xenophobic outbursts from Congress, the Bush administration and the mainstream American press, where prominent commentators called for France to be thrown off the Security Council and offered to let French 'weasels' hold our coats while Americans once again did their fighting for them. It wasn't only Americans who objected. ... But in all of this, he has been proved right. By standing up to Mr. Bush and instructing his representatives at the United Nations to block a rush to an unprovoked war, the French president saved both the honor of the United Nations and the credibility of the international community.
[. . .]
Mr. Sarkozy's admiration and knowledge of the United States appear confined to its economic growth rate. He opposes Turkish membership in the European Union in the most intolerant terms: 'If you let 100 million Turkish Muslims come in, what will come of it?' And his Gaullism is tainted by a weakness for rightist catchwords — 'nation' and 'identity', not to mention 'scum' when referring to rioting minority youths — with which he hopes to outflank Mr. Le Pen.
Segolene Royal, the socialists' candidate, has a Joan of Arc complex (in her declaration of candidacy last October she spoke of hearing 'calls' and accepting 'this mission of conquest for France'), and she practices what could be called a 'soft' demagogy. On crucial issues — the European Union Constitution, Turkish admission to Europe — she has avoided commitment, promising instead to 'listen to the people'. Many of Ms. Royal's socialist supporters manage to be both anti-American and anti-European...

CAN FRANCE BE SAVED?
Michel Gurfinkiel, Commentary, May 2007

Books about 'national decline' and the 'growing national crisis' have been best-sellers in France for at least the past four years. The first and still the most trenchant was La France qui Tombe ('Falling France', 2003), by Nicolas Baverez, a lawyer and a graduate of the immensely prestigious Ecole nationale d'administration (National School of Public Administration, or ENA). The same year saw the publication of Le Grand Gaspillage ('The Great Waste') by the distinguished Sorbonne historian Jacques Marseille, followed by the same author's La Guerre des Deux France ('The War of the Two Frances', 2004) and more recently Les Bons Chiffres Pour ne pas Voter Nul en 2007 ('The Right Figures for a Sensible Vote in 2007').
[. . .]
All in all, the French population grew by 25 percent in the fifteen years between 1945 and 1960, leading Michel Debre, General de Gaulle's first prime minister, to draw up plans for a '100-million-person France' by the year 2000. It did not materialize. By the late 1960's, France had swung, just like all other largely Caucasian nations, from baby boom to an even more drastic baby bust. The overall birthrate fell below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Thanks to the generous natalist incentives of the French welfare state, and to the much higher degree of immigration from overseas countries with very high birthrates, the decline was not as pronounced as in other European countries; nevertheless, by 2007 France's population stood at only 63 million. According to the UN, it is likely to be no higher than that in 2050. True, most other European populations are also forecast to decline sharply; by these standards, stasis may sound like good news. But the French population as a whole is aging...
The immigrant and post-immigrant community is estimated today at more than 15 million. It is much younger than the native French population, and it tends to have a much higher birthrate. In all likelihood, then, its share of the population will rise dramatically over the next two decades, to the point where the 63 million people forecast for France in 2050 may inhabit a southern-Mediterranean, African, Islamic country that also happens to include native French enclaves.
NOTE: Previously the article had pointed out that the birthrate had fallen since Napoleon's defeat, until it was almost zero by thge end of the 19th century. This shows that demographics are not immutable.
[. . .]
Classic French society — the one that lasted from the revolution to the end of the 20th century, that is on display in the pages of the great French novelists, and that features in the work of the great film-makers from Renoir to Truffaut, from Chabrol to Sautet — was based first and foremost on strong nuclear families. As designed by Napoleon's civil code, divorce was allowed in principle but very difficult to obtain in practice; legitimate children, although strictly equal among themselves, were favored over natural ones; fathers wielded greater authority than mothers. French society rested also on a pervasive but highly respected state apparatus that included the military forces and the civil service as well as the school system, the universities, and a whole array of state-run industries and workshops; on the franc, a gold-related currency; on special arrangements in religious matters according to which a secular government and a large free-thinking minority coexisted with a nominally Catholic majority and other faiths; on a very substantial class of small farmers, and an even more substantial urban working class with a distinct socialist or Communist subculture; on the predominance of Paris, the 'city of lights'; and finally on a broad and vitally important middle class, comprising (in the words of Louis Chauvel) 'senior civil servants, academics, engineers, entrepreneurs and tradesmen, executives and bureaucrats, craftsmen and shopkeepers', all sharing a common education and a common culture and committed to the maintenance of the national heritage.
[. . .]
All that is now gone. The main contributing factor is probably the disintegration of the family. The divorce rate has grown from 12 percent in 1970 to almost 40 percent in 2005; 20 percent of all French couples are unwed; one third of all mothers are living alone; 40 percent of all children are born to unmarried parents. Indeed, the 'recombined family' has become the French sociological and ethical norm, the result of successive unions and separations in which children wander from home to home under arrangements of 'shared parental authority' and must learn to get along with a host of similarly forlorn children produced by the companions of their biological parents. In order to keep up with the trend, the civil code itself has been revised — thus accelerating the process. Full equality has been introduced between fathers and mothers, between legitimate and natural children, between married and unmarried couples; although same-sex marriages are still not legal, same-sex civil unions are.
A series of other, analogous disruptions has affected every aspect of the French way of life. While the state has grown inordinately, most of its rule-making functions have all but disappeared. Everybody knows that the ultimate seat of power, in terms of laws and regulations as well as in terms of judicial recourse, is now the EU rather than the French Republic ... In most urban areas, school premises have been effectively consigned to teenage thugs who make a point of constantly challenging and humiliating female teachers and principals. State universities, once outstanding, have steadily deteriorated ... As far as religion is concerned, the Catholic Church collapsed in the late 1960's and has never recovered: according to one recent poll, only 51 percent of the French own to being Catholic, and only 17 percent of these observe Catholic rituals. ... Agriculture, industrialized and now EU-sponsored, still plays a sizable role in the French economy, but farmers have virtually vanished as a class (constituting only 3 percent of the working population), and whole sections of the countryside have reverted to fallow land and untended forests. ... The French middle class, Chauvel sums up, is haunted by 'a sense of impending doom'. ...
Finally, as if all this were not bad enough, there is crime. Until the 1960's, France was largely a safe country: people like my parents would slip their keys under the doormat or just leave the door unlocked. It is now an extremely unsafe country, rife with violent assault, arson, armed robbery, and murder, often savage. ...
[. . .]
France is still indisputably one of the richest and most economically successful countries in the world. It has a GDP of $2.2 trillion. Its per-capita national income is above $30,000. In other words, it is in the same league as Japan and Germany, two much more populous countries. ... Whereas most big French companies have been profitable for years, the French GDP has been growing very slowly or not at all. What this means is that French industry and services derive the bulk of their revenue from activities overseas rather than from the domestic economy. ... As for those remaining at home, they are not able to provide enough jobs for the present working population of approximately 30 million. And so about 9 percent of French residents are unemployed — roughly twice the rate in Britain, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, Japan, or the United States.
How do the French cope with this? Simple: they rely on an ever-expanding welfare state that takes care of the unemployed, the poor who are beyond any prospect of a viable job, the uneconomical state-run companies, and the supernumerary petty civil servants or 'public-convenience' workers. And this does not count the various handouts and incentives, usually in the form of tax rebates, bestowed by the government on companies that agree not to shut down and move elsewhere. ... All in all, the state budget now eats up 54 percent of the nation's GDP, while taxation absorbs 44 percent of real income. ... In fact, the true public debt amounts to something like 2.7 trillion euros, or 130 percent of GDP. Marseille warns that it may double over the next fifteen years.
[. . .]
There are strange, outlandish, Pinochet-like authoritarian elements in the 1958 constitution and in the way that constitution is interpreted. The president can bypass the regular lawmaking procedures and call a referendum on any legislation or even on any constitutional change he favors. Under Article 16, he can declare a state of emergency and rule as a near-dictator for a period of months. ...
But what really undermines France as a democracy is the constitution behind the constitution: that is, the role played by the non-elected state bureaucracy. ... The 1958 constitution was drafted by Michel Debre, a fervent Gaullist who had also been the main architect of the ENA. No French constitution since the Second Empire so drastically enhanced the executive branch or downgraded the legislature. Even more pertinent, however, was its preferential treatment of civil servants and enarchs over elected politicians. ... The logic of 'enarchization' was overwhelming. It has been estimated that since the 1970's, 70 percent of all members of parliament have been civil servants of some sort, including university professors — almost all universities are state-run — and high-school teachers. ... What gave the civil servants even more absolute power was their control of the economy. Ever since 1936, many large companies had been gradually nationalized, from banks and insurance companies to railways and airlines, from mining companies to the steel industry, from radio, TV, and media agencies to aviation and cars.

But suppose a reforming, anti-statist president were actually elected. Who would assist him in carrying out his declared program, when enarchs and other state servants are all there is?

Website: Segolene Royal

Website: Nicolas Sarkozy

BBC: Royal v Sarkozy: The policies

New Yorker: Round One of the Battle for France

John Nichols: In France, Running Against Bush

Eric Pape: Sarkozy's Strategy: The Right Makes Might

Christopher Hitchens: Le Pen rises again

BBC: Sarkozy wins French presidency

Breitbart: Sarkozy win paves way for radical reform

Jim Hoagland: Sarkozy's Dangerous Strengths

Dominique Moisi: The Right Revolution For France

Tim Hames: Sarkozy in historical context

SARKOZY WIN COMES FROM UNLIKELY SOURCE
Jamey Keaten, My Way News, 7 May 2007

PARIS (AP) — Nicolas Sarkozy won the women's vote and fared well among blue-collar workers, even though his rival for the French presidency was a woman and a Socialist.
It was one of the surprising subplots in Sarkozy's resounding election victory over Segolene Royal — and shows his vision of pro-market reforms and scaling back immigration appeals to a wide audience.
Sarkozy's ability to attract votes from a broad spectrum of the public is an early indication he may be able to overcome his image as a polarizing force and achieve crucial popular support for pushing through his ambitious program of overhauling France's welfare system.
Sarkozy even tallied nearly 44 percent of the vote in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris, where a wave of rioting erupted in late 2005 while he was interior minister and infuriated many there by calling troublemakers 'scum'.
[. . .]
Experts said Sarkozy was able to steal working-class votes from the left by playing up his tough cop image and by pounding away at the theme that he believes in rewarding hard work.
[. . .]
Perhaps most striking was the 52 percent of the women's vote he captured against 48 percent for Royal, which indicated the campaign transcended gender issues and became truly a choice between ideas - the tough-love message of Sarkozy against Royal's more nurturing vision.
[. . .]
Sarkozy is as critical of Iran's nuclear program as is the U.S., and he has chided the French press for its anti-American tone. But he will not be in lockstep with Washington: He has called the Iraq invasion a mistake and says the Bush administration should do more on global warming.
According to the Ipsos poll, Sarkozy cruised in his traditional electoral base: 82 percent of small business owners, and 67 percent of farmers voted for him. Befitting a conservative, he won 61 percent of votes by those over age 61, and 68 percent among voters 70 or older.
Royal's best showing was among 18- to 24-year-olds, but Sarkozy tallied 57 percent among the 25- to 34-year-old tranche.
The Ipsos poll of 3,609 adults was conducted by telephone Sunday. The agency did not provide a margin of error, but it would be about plus or minus 1.6 percentage point for a survey of that size.

HISTORY LEAVES THE FRENCH SOCIALISTS BEHIND
James Pinkertion, Newsday, 8 May 2007

Up there in conservative Valhalla, Burke keeps up. 'And look here', he continued, reading from yesterday's Financial Times, citing one French analyst: 'The left is not credible on so many issues, from the 35-hour work week to immigration and law and order.' Putting the paper down, he said with finality, 'That's always the problem with the left.'
'What do you mean?' I asked.
'The left prides itself on principles, abstractions and secular universalisms,' he answered. 'That's why the left fell in love with international organizations, such as the United Nations and the European Union. And it's on such internationalism that the left stumbled — '
'And you', I interrupted, 'always supported nationalism over internationalism. That's why you sympathized with the American Revolution, as well as rights for the Irish and subcontinent Indians.'
'That's correct', he answered with a smile. 'Quiet and prudential nationalism is the way most people — what you would call 'the silent majority' — prefer to live their lives. Why? Because the nation is an extension of the family; that's what you call, today, 'self-determination'.'
'But specifically', I queried, 'what's Sarkozy's task?'
'He must modernize his economy, in keeping with the verities of hard work and thrift. He must protect the French from ruffians in their midst. And he must safeguard his country from two alien dogmas: the border-flattening beliefs of the globalizers and the mortal danger of Islam, threatening to extinguish the glory of Europe forever.'
Burke was fading. My seance was coming to an end, but my ghostly visitor still had more to say: 'If Sarkozy follows in the tradition of his predecessor, Charles DeGaulle, America will be irritated sometime, but potentially better off.'
'For all his flintiness, DeGaulle was ultimately a friend to America, quietly warning your John F. Kennedy, for example, against involvement in Vietnam. And I see that, in the decades since, other impetuous presidents of yours have made the same plunge into distant quagmires, too far from hearth and home. The truly conservative statesman is always cautious, especially when dealing in blood.'