The New York Times still doesn't get it, as a fawning interview with the egregious Karen Armstrong follows this piece in the Magazine, but Niall Ferguson is to be commended for this honest appraisal of how Europe is becoming Eurabia. This piece is also valuable for giving the great Bat Ye'or, the pioneering scholar of dhimmitude, some much-deserved and long-delayed recognition.
I am now in the final stages of editing Bat Ye'or's forthcoming book Eurabia, which will expand on Ferguson's themes here. (Thanks to Ruth King.)
In the 52nd chapter of his ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,'' Edward Gibbon posed one of the great counterfactual questions of history. If the French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the Battle of Poitiers in A.D. 732, would all of Western Europe have succumbed to Islam?''Perhaps,'' speculated Gibbon with his inimitable irony, ''the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.''
When those words were published in 1788, the idea of a Muslim Oxford could scarcely have seemed more fanciful. The last Muslim forces had been driven from Spain in 1492; the Ottoman advance through Eastern Europe had been decisively halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
Today, however, the idea seems somewhat less risible. The French historian Alain Besancon is one of a number of European intellectuals who detect a significant threat to the continent's traditional Christian culture. The Egyptian-born writer Bat Yeor has for some years referred to the rise of a new ''Eurabia'' that is hostile in equal measure to the United States and Israel. Two years ago, Pat Buchanan published an apocalyptic book titled ''The Death of the West,'' prophesying that declining European fertility and immigration from Muslim countries could turn ''the cradle of Western civilization'' into ''its grave.''
Such Spenglerian talk has gained credibility since 9/11. The ''3/11'' bombings in Madrid confirm that terrorists sympathetic to Osama bin Laden continue to operate with comparative freedom in European cities. Some American commentators suspect Europeans of wanting to appease radical Islam. Others detect in sporadic manifestations of anti-Semitism a sinister conjunction of old fascism and new fundamentalism.
Most European Muslims are, of course, law-abiding citizens with little sympathy for terrorist attacks on European cities. Moreover, they are drawn from a wide range of countries and of Islamic traditions, few of them close to Arabian Wahhabism. Nevertheless, there is no question that the continent is experiencing fundamental demographic and cultural changes whose long-term consequences no one can foresee.
To begin with, consider the extraordinary prospect of European demographic decline. A hundred years ago -- when Europe's surplus population was still crossing the oceans to populate America and Australasia -- the countries that make up today's European Union accounted for around 14 percent of the world's population. Today that figure is down to around 6 percent, and by 2050, according to a United Nations forecast, it will be just over 4 percent. The decline is absolute as well as relative. Even allowing for immigration, the United Nations projects that the population of the current European Union members will fall by around 7.5million over the next 45 years. There has not been such a sustained reduction in the European population since the Black Death of the 14th century. (By contrast, the United States population is projected to grow by 44 percent between 2000 and 2050.)
With the median age of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards projected to exceed 50 by 2050 -- roughly 1 in 3 people will be 65 or over -- the welfare states created in the wake of World War II plainly require drastic reform. Either today's newborn Europeans will spend their working lives paying 75 percent tax rates or retirement and ''free'' health care will simply have to be abolished. Alternatively (or additionally), Europeans will have to tolerate more legal immigration.
But where will the new immigrants come from? It seems very likely that a high proportion will come from neighboring countries, and Europe's fastest-growing neighbors today are predominantly if not wholly Muslim. A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize -- the term is not too strong -- a senescent Europe.
This prospect is all the more significant when considered alongside the decline of European Christianity. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark today, fewer than 1 in 10 people now attend church once a month or more. Some 52 percent of Norwegians and 55 percent of Swedes say that God did not matter to them at all. While the social and sexual freedoms that matter to such societies are antithetical to Muslim fundamentalism, their religious tolerance leaves these societies weak in the face of fanaticism.
What the consequences of these changes will be is very difficult to say. A creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom is one conceivable result: while the old Europeans get even older and their religious faith weaker, the Muslim colonies within their cities get larger and more overt in their religious observance. A backlash against immigration by the economically Neanderthal right is another: aging electorates turn to demagogues who offer sealed borders without explaining who exactly is going to pay for the pensions and health care. Nor can we rule out the possibility of a happy fusion between rapidly secularized second-generation Muslims and their post-Christian neighbors. Indeed, we may conceivably end up with all three: Situation 1 in France, Situation 2 in Austria and Situation 3 in Britain.
Still, it is hard not to be reminded of Gibbon -- especially now that his old university's Center for Islamic Studies has almost completed work on its new premises. In addition to the traditional Oxford quadrangle, the building is expected to feature ''a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret tower.''
When I first glimpsed a model of that minaret, I confess, the phrase that sprang to mind was indeed ''decline and fall.''
It would be easy to glibly say that the New York Times seems not to get anything as they are, as are most modern newspapers, staffed with journalists dedicated to multiculturalism, the stuff of our post-modern age.
This story is about Europe, not the New York Times. Another journalist, Spengler, of The Asia Times writes in his piece, "Why Europe Chooses Extinction," http://www.atimes.com/atimes/front_page/ED08Aa01.html, a similar explanation of how and why Europe is on the decline: because of demographics.
"Demographics is destiny," he writes. The Europeans are facing extinction as they have decided to commit cultural suicide. After recent events and the reality of demographic pressures brought on by an increase in the population of guest workers and a decline of traditional European populations, no one can dispute his claim.
Too bad many in America did not hear about Europe's dire demographic problems years go. So, even with the massive Mideast immigration into Europe, they are experiencing a population implosion? Incredible!
I can see a time, maybe not too far in to the future, where one country in the EU will try and close it's borders to all muslim immigration. The resident muslims will take the government of the day to the European Court of Justice/Human Rights - take your pick - and they will decide against the government. What then? the government of the day will decide it is such an important issue they will pull out of the EU. the economic instability, the social unrest - so begins the chaos....and the mullahs are smiling all the time....
..oh, and i live in london. so let me say, numbers 1, 2 AND 3 are all happening here!
Mr. Ferguson is resigned to the fate of Europe: decline under Islam.
I say to hell with that. FIGHT!
Anyway here is the lecture:
http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.20045,filter./news_detail.asp
Here is the video:
http://www.capitalreach.com/rt/aei2784/?espmt=2
Here's a letter I wrote to the Times:
I read the interview of Karen Armstrong by Deborah Solomon (Sunday Magazine, April 4) and I was amazed, floored, really, at Armstrong's bald assertion that "Compassion...[It] goes right across the board in all the world religions. Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar." Perhaps Ms. Armstrong would take some time and listen to (in the original, if she knows Arabic, or read translations if she doesn't) of the Friday sermons in the main mosques of the Moslem world. MEMRI publishes them on their web site (www.memri.org) and they make fascinating, if ultimately sickening, reading. Here is a quote, by no means special in any way, from one of Saudi Arabia's main mosques. The sermon was delivered by Sheikh Bandar bin Khalaf Al-'Utaibi, in a sermon at the Abu Bakr Al-Saddiq mosque in Al-Damam, April 27, 2001:
"They (i.e., the Jews) annihilated people and nations with usury. They
consume the Muslims' resources by destroying their economy, and introduce prohibited things into trade. They harm Muslims so as to bankrupt them. They seek to cause them poverty. . In their own eyes, they are Allah's chosen people, and they see others as slaves created to meet their needs."
"Their tongues never cease lying, [disseminating] abomination and
obscenity. About Allah they said: 'His hands are tied. He is poor and we are wealthy.' They brought great disasters upon Jesus and his mother, and of the Prophet Muhammad they said: 'He is a trickster and a liar.' Curses were laid upon them, one after another, and punishments too. The Jews preached permissiveness and corruption, as they hid behind false slogans like freedom and equality, humanism and brotherhood."
This kind of talk (and the level of hatred and invective is by no means
reserved exclusively for Jews) is quite typical, actually, it is the norm for these Friday sermons. Is this an example of Islam's "compassion" to which Ms. Armstrong refers?
I challenge Ms. Armstrong to find even a shred of "compassion"--at least, compassion in the sense that people in the West would recognize
it—anywhere in these Friday sermons. In fact, apart from picking out a statement here and there in Islamic writings, would Ms. Armstrong mind providing examples of how compassion is currently practiced and part of Islamic life? Do Moslems practice compassion toward, say, Jews? Is Shar'ia (Islamic Law) compassionate?
(I know you won't publish this letter; it is probably too long and the Times would not publish or even hint at this topic in any event. But when your reporters place someone on a pedestal, as a "distinguished scholar of Islam," a person whom many others call, at best, an apologist for Islam, your reporter needs to be called to account. What makes her a "distinguished scholar" of anything? Her rejected disseration at Oxford? Her work in television after she left school (1983)?, that she teaches Christianity at a small school in London and writes apologies for Islam? Does she publish in peer-reviewed scholarly journals? Teach at a well known center for scholarship? What exactly qualifies her as a "distinguished scholar of Islam"?)
Regards,
Eurabia? In the Sunday New York Times Magazine, no less? We've heard that name before from pioneer of dhimmitude studies, Bat Ye'or of Geneva, Switzerland. Niall Ferguson, formerly of Oxford and famed for his two volume history of The Rothschilds has written this Op ed jarring the Western world with the treacherous prospect that muslim majorities could emerge in certain countries before mid centuries, along with the dreaded jihad against Western civilization and modernity.
When Bat Ye'or created this neologism in a National Review On-line article in the fall of 2002, there was nary a peep. Now, in the wake of the looming faliure of the Iraq incursion, slaughter in Madrid, ritual Muslim murder of Jews in Paris and street warfare in Antwerp, even the most blase boulevadier is looking over their shoulder and saying, when?? Europe is committing demographic suicide and only the US among developed nations has a zero population group rate. But, it's Islamic intolerance, oppression of women and barbarity like honor killing of female children that will grind Eurabia into utter turmoil. Beware, Amerika, for tolerance of this Islamic fifth column could do serious harm to the tolerance, liberty and freedom we hold so precious.
Bravo to Mr. Ferguson and Brava to Bat Ye'or.
Congratulations to you, Bob on the edits of Bat Ye'or's book length version of Eurabia.
When Europe ceased finally to be Christian, it became only a matter of time before it ceased to be European. People still haven't figured out what keeps a given civilization afloat.
Hint: It isn't the secular welfare state.
As a European I take these notions very strong. In my opinion, it is a true finding that Europe is changing. However, I believe that the Europeans will wake up some day and realise what's happening. I allready did and resist muslim, arabic influence with my whole being. I do not hate muslims, I think they are misled. If there would be a god, there can be only one. The God of Christian and Jewish God = Allah. The teachings of the koran, bible and torah should in my opinion be seen as a starting point in culture and respected, but not reinforced. The majority of the muslims do not have that opinion and therefore I can not agree with them or see them as a western friendly party.
In all of these articles of the Europe-Arab alliance I do miss one thing though! If any of the writers ever talked to a caucasian (or colonial import), (post-)christian they would know that most Europeans disapprove and dislike islamic, arabic influence.
Europe will forever be alligned with the USA. We are the two lungs of western society as it is and will be. We share the same basic principles as we share the same blood and faith. If I would ever move, I would go tot the US, to meet my transatlantic brothers at the other end of the ocean. US RESPECT!!