Go back to sleep, won't you? "Why Fears Of A Muslim Takeover Are All Wrong: Analyzing the forecasts of an emerging 'Eurabia,' hostile to America and western values," by William Underhill for Newsweek, from the July 20 issue (thanks to James):
To listen to Europe's far right, it would be easy to conclude that the continent is poised for another round of bitter conflict with a centuries-old adversary.
"Far right" -- thus Newsweek signals to its enlightened, forward looking readers that they are not to think this way. This is no new "bitter conflict with a centuries-old adversary." Only the "far right" thinks there is. And we are not those benighted, neofascist souls, now, are we?
"The first Islamic invasion of Europe was stopped at [the battle of] Poitiers in 732. The second was halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Now we have to stop the current stealth invasion," argues Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, which claims that Islamic doctrine encourages terrorism.
Yes, Wilders "claims" that. Of course all enlightened Newsweek readers know that that isn't true. Wilders made it all up. Never mind, for example, that in March 2009, five Muslims accused of helping plot the September 11 attacks, including the notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, wrote an “Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations.” In it they quote the Qur'an to justify their jihad war against the American Infidels. “In God’s book,” asserts the letter, “he ordered us to fight you everywhere we find you, even if you were inside the holiest of all holy cities, The Mosque in Mecca, and the holy city of Mecca, and even during sacred months. In God’s book, verse 9 [actually verse 5], Al-Tawbah [the Qur'an’s 9th chapter]: Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush.”
Never mind also that Osama bin Laden’s communiqués have also quoted the Qur'an copiously. In his 1996 “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” he quotes seven Qur'an verses: 3:145; 47:4-6; 2:154; 9:14; 47:19; 8:72; and the notorious “Verse of the Sword,” 9:5. Bin Laden began his October 6, 2002, letter to the American people with two Qur'an quotations, both of a martial bent -- 22:39 and 4:76.
One Muslim website wrote some time ago: “The truth is that a Muslim who reads the Koran with devotion is determined to reach the battlefield in order to attain the reality of Jihad. It is solely for this reason that the Kufaar [unbelievers] conspire to keep the Muslims far away from understanding the Koran, knowing that Muslims who understand the Koran will not distance themselves from Jihad.”
So it would appear that there are significant numbers of Muslims -- since, after all, Al-Qaeda alone is a worldwide movement -- who believe that Islam encourages terrorism. Maybe they're getting Islam horribly wrong, as we hear claimed every day, but in any case it is they who are finding in Islam justification for violence and terrorism. Non-Muslims like Wilders are merely reporting on that fact. But never mind. Newsweek knows better. Wilders is the one who makes this pernicious claim, and since he is "far-right," he must be wrong. In fact, he is simply engaging in "rabble-rousing":
It's rabble-rousing stuff. But underlying Wilders's polemic is an argument shared by many more mainstream right-leaning thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe, its will sapped by secularism and anything-goes tolerance, has allowed decades of mass immigration without serious challenge. Too feeble to defend their own values, governments have been ready to appease Muslim opinion and must expect the worst. The argument has been gaining ground for some time—fed by alarmist and highly speculative projections from writers like the Canadian Mark Steyn, author of the bestselling America Alone—that immigration and high birthrates could mean that Muslims will make up 40 percent of Europe's population by 2025. Similar and very public warnings have come from American diplomat Timothy Savage, who claimed that forecasts of a Muslim majority in Western Europe by midcentury "may not be far off the mark" if present trends continue, which would heighten the risk of conflict. The British historian Niall Ferguson has written that "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." And the American journalist Christopher Caldwell forecasts that an "anchored" and "confident" Islam looks likely to impose its will on an "insecure" and "relativistic" European culture. The gloomiest commentators, including Steyn and the conservative American writer Tony Blankley, talk of an emerging "Eurabia" hostile to American interests and in thrall to Islam....
See how Newsweek wants you to relax? They want to make sure you don't take any of those writers seriously, and so Underhill has filled that paragraph with code words to warn readers away from these people -- probably many of his casual left-leaning readers will find this magic working upon them without their even realizing it's happening. Wilders is engaging in "rabble-rousing" "polemic." And even "more mainstream" thinkers who subscribe to the same views are "right-leaning." Steyn's work is "alarmist and highly speculative." Timothy Savage "claimed" that predictions of Muslim majorities in Western European countries may be close to correct (but still wrong, evidently). Ferguson and Caldwell get off without sly editorial digs, but the clipped quotations from them, presented without the supporting evidence they adduce, sound, well, alarmist and highly speculative. And Steyn (again) and Tony Blankley (who is -- gasp! -- a "conservative," a word that the mainstream media uses only for bloodthirsty mullahs and other gargoyles) are "gloomiest" of all.
By these semaphores Underhill tells us that he doesn't buy any of their analysis, and doesn't want you to, either.
Underhill then presents some evidence of the emerging Eurabia and the emerging resistance to it, only to sweep it all aside.
But all this obscures a simple fact: the rise of a Eurabia is predicated on limited and dubious evidence. A much-cited 2004 study from the U.S. National Intelligence Council outlines a number of possible scenarios. Its most aggressive is that the number of Muslims in Europe could increase from roughly 20 million today—about 5 percent of the population—to 38 million by 2025. But that projection turns out to be attributed to "diplomatic and media reporting as well as government, academic, and other sources." In other words, it's all speculation based on speculation—and even if it's accurate, it would still mean the number of Muslims will represent just 8 percent of the European population, estimated by the EU to be 470 million in 2025. Indeed, if there is a surge ahead, its scale looks overstated. "There is a quite deliberate exaggeration, as has often been pointed out—but the figures are still being cited," says Jytte Klausen, an authority on Islam in Europe at Boston's Brandeis University....
So relax. What can a tiny minority do? Never mind that a small group of Bolsheviks was able to gain power in Russia and transform the society utterly. Underhill has no time for historical analogies.
[...] Fertility rates remain higher among Muslim immigrants than among other Europeans, and Muslims may continue to arrive in Europe in large numbers. But the alarmists assume that past patterns are sure to hold. "The worst of the scaremongering is based on the assumption that current behavior will continue," says Grace Davie, an expert on Europe and Islam at the University of Exeter in Britain.
See? It's all just "scaremongering." Never mind that the concerns about Eurabia aren't solely based on demographics, but upon an increasingly assertive Muslim population in Western Europe that refuses to accept the governing authorities or secular society, and boasts openly about its intention to impose Sharia upon the land as soon as it is able.
[...] Moreover, the myth of Eurabia implies the existence of a united Islam, a bloc capable of collective and potentially dangerous action. The truth is that there are no powerful Muslim political movements in Europe, either continentwide or at the national level, and the divisions that separate Muslims worldwide, most obviously between Sunnis and Shiites, are apparent in Europe as well. Each major nation in Europe has drawn Muslim immigrants from distinct regions of the Islamic world, often former colonies, with different traditions and outlooks. A British Muslim from Pakistan would struggle to communicate with a French Muslim from Algeria. A second-generation Muslim from Turkey living in Germany will have little in common with a newly arrived Moroccan across the border in Belgium. Sharp differences exist even within national frontiers. In Germany, more than one in 10 Muslims are Alawites, who aren't even recognized as coreligionists by the more orthodox.
Here again, this matters not a whit. The point is not that all Muslims in Europe will work together, in a coordinated fashion, to establish Sharia in Europe. It only need take some to do so, and some are already working on that.
RSS Feed
