Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald exposes the fallacies of Deux-Rivisme:
"…still did not fully understand the complexities of the Mediterranean." -- from this article, describing Josep Borrell, president of the European ParliamentPerhaps Josep Borrell can begin to understand the complexities of the Mediterranean starting with the following:
In France successive governments over the past 35 years thought that France, and through France Europe, could be strengthened, could become a counterweight to mighty America, if there were some kind of alliance with the newly-rich and therefore newly-powerful (so it was felt) Arabs. They believed in the policy of "Deux-Rivisme," in which both banks (rives) of the Mediterranean would be seen to have much in common, with the only thing dividing them of importance being the Mediterranean itself. In other words, a feature of geography, and not much more, divided France from, say, Algeria.
That was the theory. On that theory, the French allowed millions of Algerians, and large numbers of Moroccans and Tunisians, to settle within Metropolitan France. The promoters of this policy never thought to ask themselves what Islam was all about, even as millions of Muslims made their taciturn way into France. Of course they were there for economic reasons. Of course it was easy for the French to assume, without more, that these Muslim Arabs would in the end integrate into society, just the way the Portuguese immigrants in the 1950s had, or the Vietnamese immigrants. It was not to be. The strength of the belief-system of Islam, which works against integration, works against acceptance of Infidel neighbors and against loyalty to the institutions of the Infidel nation-state, its laws, its customs, its understandings. But this was not made clear to the rulers by those they counted on for advice. A case of criminal negligence, at all levels of government.Yet these deux-rivistes are still in power, and it is they who danced to the Arab tune (Mr. Josep Borrell should be sent, posthaste, a copy of Bat Ye’or’s seminal Eurabia). They were hoping, in many cases, to be able themselves, or to have their friends, relatives, and business associates recycle petrodollars, which would naturally be directed to those toward whom the Muslim Arabs felt had done the most to promote Arab interests and the Muslim agenda. And that included giving the Arabs a large say in who taught what about Islam, and where, in France. And this too had consequences.
The deux-rivistes -- of whom Dominique de Villepin is a perfect example, with his gush about Islamic greatness, his conceit that because he was born in 1953 in Sale, next to Rabat, he therefore "understands" the Arabs -- are coming a cropper today. But they still do not realize it. Nor do those who in other countries parroted the same nonsense, the nonsense which says: the only real division between Europe and North Africa is that pesky Mediterranean sea.
No, that sea is the least of it. There is a gulf that divides North Africans from Europeans. That gulf is called Islam. That is what Josep Borell should be studying -- but who can he trust to guide him through the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and understand their effect on Believers, when a small army of apologists for Islam has been deployed all over Western Europe, and now constitutes an army of occupation that controls much of what it is possible to learn about Islam, and what is off-limits for investigation and discussion?
In the 1970s, at the end of his life, the distinguished French scholar of Islam Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq foresaw the terrible consequences of the heedlessness of French immigration policy, and the madness of believing that any Euro-Arab Dialogue could lead to anything but another occasion in which the persistent, relentless, and cunning Arab side would wear down or trick the European side and gain every advantage. And that is exactly what happened, and happens still. The Arabs and Muslims were given a large say in how Islam would be perceived and taught in France and elsewhere in Europe, and they took full advantage of that. Meanwhile, those who had nothing like the scholarly background of Dufroucq, Abel, Fagnan, and other French Orientalists, managed to rise high as advisors on Islam. Deplorable and missing-the-point researchers (conductors of state-supported "recherches" on this and on that) such as Gilles "Wrong Again" Kepel and Olivier "Always Wrong" Roy rose high and are still in place, misleading yet another group of French leaders who, no matter what good grades they may have obtained at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), never learned to think for themselves.
The assumption is that the European elites are stupid, rather than simply sociopathic.
The true threat to the European elites is not as much from Muslim immigrants, but from their own middle classes. The elite want their successors to be their own children (or whoever else they hand pick). They do not want smart, energetic upstarts from out of the middle class displacing them.
For over a thousand years in Europe, the stable social order was an elite nobility which ruled in luxury over a submissive peasantry.
The EU Elites have already gotten their 'booty' from the estate. They are sitting pretty with their townhomes in the major cities and country houses in the suburbs and the generous pensions. Why should they care about the indigenous peasants? Let them eat cake. They do have cake don't they?
At another thread I found the following:
"[Olivier Roy spoke recently at the]the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His point came out of the recent experiences in France with the day-after-day riots by Islamist youths. They are not connected at all to their parents' countries, he said, but support a worldwide "ummah" of believers. They are "deterritorialized," and it is highly unlikely that they will take part in the French nation or culture because "If you are French, you can't be a Muslim."
I post this here because it shows an Oliver Roy quite different from the Olivier Roy described in my article above as "Oliver "Always Wrong" Roy" and, if that is really his new understanding, is 180 degrees different from the Olivier Roy who has been so uncomprehending of Islam, and so sympathetic to many of the local manifestations of Jihad (falling, for example, for all that "Palestinian people" stuff, and demonstrating the usual miscomprehension of the Lesser Jihad, that against Israel). I hope this represents a change in Roy's views. It would be a very dramatic change. But reality eventually has to break in. One never knows -- do one?