Sunday, 26 November 2006
 

A Tale Of Two Europes

They Report, You Decide (with update from Mark Steyn)
John Hinderaker

Most of our readers are aware of Mark Steyn's "Demography is Destiny" theme, which he has elaborated in much of his recent writing. Steyn thinks that low birth rates among Europeans, in particular, will inevitably lead to their replacement on the European continent by Muslims who are reproducing at a far faster rate. Steyn pursues the theme in today's article in the Chicago Sun-Times, Quartet of Ladies Shows Where We're Headed. He contrasts Fatma An-Najar, the 64-year-old Palestinian grandmother who became a suicide bomber, with Katharine Jefferts Schori, the new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church:

An-Najar gave birth to her first child at the age of 12. She had eight others. She had 41 grandchildren. Keep that family tree in mind. By contrast, in Spain, a 64-year old woman will have maybe one grandchild. That's four grandparents, one grandchild: a family tree with no branches.

Meanwhile, what of the Episcopalians?

Bishop Kate gave an interview to the New York Times revealing what passes for orthodoxy in this most flexible of faiths. She was asked a simple enough question: "How many members of the Episcopal Church are there?"

"About 2.2 million," replied the presiding bishop. "It used to be larger percentage-wise, but Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than other denominations."

Is that a death wish, or what? As Steyn points out, "Here's the question for Bishop Kate: If Fatma An-Najar has 41 grandchildren and a responsible 'better educated' Episcopalian has one or two, into whose hands are we delivering 'the stewardship of the earth'? If your crowd isn't around in any numbers, how much influence can they have in shaping the future?"

Steyn's logic is persuasive to me, but Ralph Peters isn't buying it. He thinks that, far from taking over Europe, that continent's Muslims "will be lucky just to be deported:"

Have the Europeans become too soft for that sort of thing? Has narcotic socialism destroyed their ability to hate? Is their atheism a prelude to total surrender to faith-intoxicated Muslim jihadis?

The answer to all of the above questions is a booming "No!"  ...

It's true that the Europeans have historically been willing to act much more harshly that Americans when they have felt threatened. But I wouldn't start sending the Marines to Brest just yet.

To comment on this post, go here.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn comments:

I don’t know whether Mr Peters is referring to my book, because, as usual when this particular columnist comes out swinging, he prefers to confront unnamed generalized opponents: thus, he refers to “a rash of pop pundits” predicting Europe will become Eurabia. Dismissing with airy condescension “a rash” of anonymities means you avoid having to deal with specific arguments.

Had he read America Alone, for example, he would know that ...

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Ralph Peters jumps ugly with Mark Steyn over Eurabia
Allahpundit

Two princes of political punditry clash over who’ll be liquidating whom on the continent 20 years from now. We’ll always have Paris, Peters asserts: if push comes to shove, white Europeans will fire up those crematoria they’re so fond of. Au contraire, replies Steyn, commenting at Powerline: there are as we speak as many Muslims as natives in some areas of Europe, and in any case it’s not the total numbers on each side that matter, it’s the men of fighting age. ...

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A Tale Of Two Europes
Dan Riehl

Mary Steyn looks at four contemporary women to give life to his main theme these days, the Islamification of Europe:

[...]

And Ralph Peters looks at History and Hitler to say not so fast:

[...]

One can't invoke history if the population you are talking about is detached from it. Only here a few hundred years, the US is already losing touch with the rugged individualism that helped make it such a great Nation. I imagine European education is providing the same disservice to young Europeans, in spades.

It's hard to look back to one's history for inspiration when you've been taught to detest, not just it, but the principles for which it stood. Europe is increasingly multi-cultural and Peters doesn't account for that watering down.

Muslims have the very opposite going on. They aren't just remembering their history - the radical elements are in a time warp, still fighting the same battles from it long after Europeans have fled the field. ...

Contributed by Bill Faith on November 26, 2006 at 12:35 PM in France, Germany, Great Britain, Islamism Delenda Est | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Friday, 24 November 2006
 

Commentary magazine on
the Islamification of British patriotism
Allahpundit

Krauthammer took Sacha Baron Cohen out to the woodshed today for working so hard to make Americans look like anti-semites when he could have simply donned a yarmulke, strolled through any of the more “diverse” precincts of London — or Paris or Brussels or Berlin — with his cameraman and let us watch the real thing unfold. How bad has it gotten? Spend ten minutes with this long, incisive, and relentlessly depressing essay from Commentary magazine about bipartisan “anti-Zionist” feeling in Britain and see for yourself. Quote:

The loathing of Israel, once confined to oppositional groups, has penetrated to the very core of the British establishment. At the height of the Lebanon war, two peers of the realm reportedly came to blows within the hallowed precincts of the House of Lords. Apparently, Lord Janner, a prominent spokesman for Jewish causes, said something about Israel’s right to self-defense that so enraged the octogenarian Field Marshal Lord Bramall that he was moved to assault his seventy-eight-year-old interlocutor. One might have supposed that, like misogyny, anti-Semitism had ceased to be a characteristic vice of the English upper class; this incident suggests that it is back with a vengeance…

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Allah’s England?
By Daniel Johnson

The oldest Jewish cemetery in England is in Mile End, in the heart of the East End of London. It was created exactly 350 years ago on the orders of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, who, overruling his own council, officially readmitted Jews to England for the first time since their expulsion in 1290. I came across it recently while visiting Queen Mary University, where I had once taught history, to give a public lecture.

The disused cemetery is now marooned on the Queen Mary campus, which is itself an island in the East End, an area long since abandoned by Jews and now populated mainly by Muslims. With its graves dating back to the 1660’s, Mile End is thus a reminder both of the continuity of Jewish life in Britain and of its precariousness. And the reminder is timely, for today the atmosphere in England has become less hospitable for Jews than at any time since Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts marched through the East End in the 1930’s.

You do not have to go far from Queen Mary University to discover one reason why Jews—and not only Jews—are feeling insecure. Less than a mile away stands the East London Mosque, whose chairman, Muhammad Abdul Bari, is also secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain. This makes him, in effect, the chief spokesman for British Muslims. On the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Bari told the Sunday Telegraph:

Some police officers and sections of the media are demonizing Muslims, treating them as if they’re all terrorists—and that encourages other people to do the same. If that demonization continues, then Britain will have to deal with 2 million Muslim terrorists—700,000 of them in London.

In fact, far from demonizing Muslims, the police have gone to inordinate lengths to accommodate their sensitivities. Scotland Yard now consults self-appointed community leaders like Bari before mounting anti-terrorist operations in “Muslim areas”—thereby risking the possibility that secret information might leak out and compromise public safety. Since the London bombings of July 7, 2005, which killed 53 people, the police have been obliged to keep thousands of Muslims under surveillance while investigating up to a hundred separate conspiracies to commit terror. But rather than expressing shame that such unprecedented measures have been necessary, “moderate” Muslim leaders like Muhammad Abdul Bari have responded with thinly veiled blackmail. As often as not, British support for Israel is invoked as high on the list of Muslim grievances. The message is simple: unless Britain withdraws that support, every Muslim will become a potential suicide bomber.

Such implicit threats have had their effect on the non-Muslim majority. At a dinner after my lecture, a professor remarked, as if it were a generally accepted platitude: “Of course, the only terrorist state in the Middle East is Israel.” Nobody contradicted him. The delegitimization of Israel in the British academic world has become one aspect of a new and more powerful wave of outright anti-Semitism, a phenomenon that has been greatly accelerated by the response to last summer’s war in Lebanon. ...

Contributed by Bill Faith on November 24, 2006 at 11:18 PM in France, Germany, Great Britain, Islamism Delenda Est | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack