The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam - Douglas Murray - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14878102
Rich wrote:If we are to return to the values of the enlightenment, then we have to abolish votes for women.


I don't have a problem with this claim either. Although I would probably abolish voting, so it would be a moot point.
#14878126
I don't have a problem with this claim.

Abandoning the Enlightenment Project would also mean tearing up the US Constitution, as well as repudiating the American Revolution and all its consequences. Would you have a problem with that, VS? :)
#14878617
skinster wrote:Isn't the OP meant to have a link attached?

Also, I didn't read it properly because I remembered how Douglas Murray is a racist twat. :)


He's 'racist' guys, better throw his book on the nearest sharia-compliant book burning pile. You wouldn't want to be associated with a racist, now would you? :lol:

---


Here's the section on 'The Netherlands', (somewhat) explaining why a substantial portion of the Dutch automatically mock anything to do with these so-called 'European Muslims'.

8 Prophets without honour

When labour in the Netherlands was scarce, in the 1960s, immigration into the country had mainly come from Morocco and Turkey. The immigrants brought their wives and families and by the 1990s the continuing immigration and higher birth rates among these communities meant that they were growing at a faster rate than any other community in the country. The Dutch government’s policy had been to emphasise ‘integration without prejudice to everyone’s own identity’. The few people in public life who objected to the government’s immigration and integration policies during this period were not treated kindly. In the 1980s one maverick politician, Hans Janmaat, proclaimed that the Netherlands was full and expressed himself opposed to the multicultural model, insisting that immigrants should either assimilate into the Dutch way of life or leave. Not only was Janmaat politically shunned but in 1986 left-wing activists set fire to a hotel in Kedichem in the south of the country, where his small party was holding a meeting. Janmaat’s wife was among those forced to jump from the building to save their lives. She lost a leg in the process.
Perhaps in part because of its reputation as the most liberal country in Europe (thanks to its legalisation of soft drugs and liberal attitudes towards sexual minorities) by the 1990s Holland was beginning to experience tensions with its fastest-growing minority group. During this period a number of politicians privately agreed that the increasing number of Muslims in the Netherlands presented problems too large for any one political party to address, that mass immigration and integration in Holland were not working, and that simply attacking those who raised concerns would no longer address the problem. Free expression was an early clash-point. On 5 October 1990 a Muslim religious leader said in a radio programme on a Dutch-subsidised radio station in Amsterdam, ‘Those who resist Islam, the order of Islam or oppose Allah and his prophet, you have permission to kill, hang, slaughter or banish, as it says in the Sharia.’

In 1991 the head of the Dutch Liberal Party (VVD), Frits Bolkestein, gave a speech and wrote a follow-up article in which he voiced what some other leaders from across the political spectrum were also beginning to worry about. Bolkestein noted that Islam is ‘not only a religion, it is a way of life. In this its vision runs counter to the liberal separation of church and state.’ He also highlighted the differences between Islamic attitudes towards women and that of Dutch law and custom. While recognising that the new populations in Holland were clearly not going to go anywhere, Bolkestein concluded that real, full integration into Dutch life was the only answer to the questions he was raising. But there was a final problem: ‘The problem is that we cannot afford to be wrong.’1 Both speech and article were greeted with huge amounts of criticism. Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers called the article ‘dangerous’ while another minister accused its author of being ‘insulting to the Muslim community’. One prominent opinion journalist claimed that it would ‘fan racist sentiments’.2

In a culture where ideas still matter, the sociologist Paul Schnabel’s 1998 book The Multicultural Illusion: A Plea for Adaptation and Assimilation brought many of these issues further into the acceptable mainstream; as in 2000 did the essay ‘The Multicultural Drama’ by the academic and Dutch Labour Party member Paul Scheffer.3But the public and the politicians were still at a wild divergence. A survey carried out in 1998 discovered that already about half of Dutch people thought that ‘Western European and Muslim ways of life are irreconcilable.’4 The leadership of Bolkestein and others gave their country the advantage of going relatively early through the issues that every other Western country would stumble through in the decade ahead. Nevertheless among the political class there remained a serious reluctance to tackle the problem. In the end it took a popular pundit and professor from the political left to make this discussion normal.

Until he got onto the subject of Islam there was nothing remotely ‘right wing’ about Pim Fortuyn. A Marxist university professor and a gay man, Fortuyn was also a high-profile advocate of promiscuity and almost every other libertarian attitude. Only once he got onto the subject of Islam did he become ‘right wing’. His 1997 book Against the Islamisation of our Culture focused on the range of challenges that he said Islam posed to Dutch society.5 All were issues that had until then been campaigning points of the political left.

They included the fact that Islam had not achieved the separation of church and state which had been the achievement of Dutch Christianity – a separation that gave the Dutch not only freedom of speech, freedom of the press and other human rights but without which the public space had no guard against clerical intrusion based on ‘holy’ texts. Another of Fortuyn’s principal objections to Islam was the difference in attitude towards the sexes. He argued that Muslim women in Holland should have the same right to emancipation as all other Dutch women. And he seized with fury upon Islamic attitudes towards sexual minorities. Dutch society had led the world in passing legislation and creating a culture in which equality between men and women and between heterosexuals and homosexuals had become the norm. The practices of Muslim-majority countries demonstrated, with varying degrees of austerity, that these principles were not compatible with Islam. Yet despite these obvious clashes, Dutch society was trying to pretend that its own tolerance could coexist with the intolerance of the fastest-growing portion of Dutch society. Fortuyn felt that it could not.

Through his newspaper columns and on popular television programmes, Fortuyn became a master not only at expressing his own views, but also at teasing out the views of other people. On a television discussion show he acted as flamboyantly as he could in front of a Dutch Imam until the Imam exploded in rage over Fortuyn’s homosexuality. Mainstream Dutch politicians also told him what they thought of him. During a television debate in 1997 about his ‘Islamisation’ book the leading Labour Party politician and former cabinet minister Marcel van Damn told Fortuyn, ‘You are an extremely inferior human being.’6 It was only a taste of the vitriol to come.
By the time of the 9/11 attacks in America, Dutch society had been around the central parts of this discussion several times and Fortuyn had begun to devote his energy to politics. He was expelled from the party he had joined when he described Islam as an achterlijk (‘backward’) culture, but promptly started his own political party, Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF). Because of its voting system Dutch politics, more than perhaps any other country in Europe, is comparatively easy for new outsider parties to break into. In a matter of weeks in the lead-up to the 2002 national elections Fortuyn upturned the whole of Dutch politics.

Unrestrained by colleagues, he increasingly warned of the threat to Dutch identity, and in particular to the country’s liberal identity. He warned that multiculturalism was not working and was instead seeing the growth of parallel societies, especially in the growth of Muslim ghettos. He warned that it was ‘five minutes to midnight’ and that Holland had only this brief window to turn itself around. Combined with an innate showmanship and a refusal to play the media’s games on its own terms, in the run-up to the 2002 election it looked as though the population was willing to trust Fortuyn with their country. His political opponents threw everything they had at him. They said that he was a racist. They said that he was Hitler. The more moderate opponents compared him to Mussolini. In a television interview shortly before he died Fortuyn talked of the threats to his life that were coming in and said that if anything were to happen to him his political opponents, who had so demonised him, should take some of the responsibility for lining up the assassin.

They didn’t, of course. Just over a week before the election, as Fortuyn was leaving a radio interview in Hilversum a man in his thirties shot him in the head repeatedly at close range. The nation took a deep breath for fear that the killer might turn out to be a Muslim. But the culprit turned out to be a far-left vegan activist who at his subsequent trial explained that he had killed his victim because he felt Fortuyn was targeting Muslims. In the aftermath of the murder the Netherlands went into mourning, and in the ensuing election voters gave Fortuyn’s party the largest number of seats, a gift it repaid by petty infighting and a total inability (perhaps inevitable given the swiftness of their rise) to deliver on its mandate.

The Dutch public’s desire to deal with their challenges at the ballot box were thwarted. And although those who picked up his political mantle included Geert Wilders (who left the main VVD ‘liberal’ party also to form a party of his own), none of Fortuyn’s successors were able to pick up the working-class and young entrepreneurial vote that Fortuyn had been able to appeal to. Although the murder of the man who would later be voted the greatest Dutchman of all time shuttered one part of electoral politics, it did, however, allow the debate to widen in the society as a whole. It was not sustainable to believe that Fortuyn was a fascist and that a large proportion of the Dutch public supported a fascist.

One of those who continued to speak out in the vacuum left by Fortuyn was the filmmaker Theo van Gogh. As well as being friends, the two had appeared on television together many times, not least on van Gogh’s show ‘A Pleasant Conversation’, at the end of which the presenter would hand his guest a cactus. After Fortuyn’s murder van Gogh worked on a film about the murder and also continued to write books and articles. His 2003 book Allah weet het Beter (Allah Knows Best) included a cover image of van Gogh wearing a Muslim head-robe and staring out as a mimic of the fundamentalists of Islam.

In television appearances and public debates van Gogh took on the most outspoken Islamists in the Netherlands, including on one occasion the Hezbollah-trained extremist Dyab Abou Jahjah, who he described as ‘the pimp of the prophet’. After that event (which stopped when Jahjah refused to be on a stage with van Gogh) Jahjah’s retinue were heard saying, ‘We’ll get that fat pig and cut him open.’7 Around this time, at public events, including book-signings for Allah Knows Best, van Gogh started to become nervous for his own security. Then in 2004 he made a short film calledSubmission about the mistreatment of women within Islam. The script was written by a young Somali immigrant to the Netherlands, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and around the time that the film was screened on Dutch television at the end of August the threat to the film’s makers grew. Van Gogh refused to accept the security that was offered. It was his view, according to those closest to him, that any Islamist assassins would be unlikely to target ‘the village idiot’.8

Village idiot or not, an assassin did catch up with him as he cycled to work in Amsterdam on the morning of 2 November 2004. Mohammed Bouyeri shot van Gogh, slit his throat and stabbed him in the chest. In his dying moments van Gogh said to Bouyeri, ‘Can’t we talk about this?’ The knife stuck into van Gogh’s body included a threat to the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was immediately spirited out of the country by the Dutch security service, while a number of other Dutch critics of Islam, including the Iranian-born academic Afshin Ellian, were also put under police protection. For a period even the most careful critics of elements of Islam – like the Dutch academic Paul Cliteur – silenced themselves. Politicians, academics, journalists and others had learnt the tough lesson that criticising Islam, in the manner in which Dutch society was able to criticise every other religion, was at the very least something that changed your life and was also – unless you had police protection – likely to be deadly. The country that in the past had fostered religious doubt and produced rationalist thinkers like Spinoza, was now very anxious on the subject of religion.

This fact put even more pressure on the few people who were not willing to play by the assassin’s rules. Among those willing to continue to defy the extremists was the young Dutch woman of Somali origin who had fled to Holland ten years before to escape a forced marriage. Hirsi Ali was in every way a model migrant. Having arrived in the country she claimed and was given asylum, and while working basic factory jobs she learned the Dutch language and was soon able to apply to university. She studied at the University of Leiden whilst working with other immigrants as a translator. Just over a decade after arriving in the Netherlands she received her MA in Political Science, worked as a researcher and entered the country’s Parliament as an MP for the Liberal Party. It was a meteoric immigrant success story. Her success was due to her intelligence, charisma, hard work and exceptional personal bravery. But the swiftness of her rise to prominence also occurred because Dutch society desperately needed immigrant success stories. Yet it seemed to come as a shock to some on the left in particular, that this immigrant refused to say the things they expected of her.

Hirsi Ali herself would later write that the 9/11 attacks caused her to ‘investigate whether the roots of evil can be traced to the faith I grew up with: was the aggression, the hatred inherent in Islam itself?’9Six months later she read a book on atheism she had been given several years earlier and dared to admit that she was no longer a believer.10 In her own time she announced her evolving thoughts in public. But the Dutch media-class in particular seemed intent on pushing her – trying to make her say things they would not say. One interviewer pressed her to use that same crucial word Fortuyn had used, achterlijk. Was Islam backward compared to Dutch society? There seemed to be two movements pushing at Hirsi Ali. One, broadly coming from the political left, wanted her to say things for which they could then attack her. Another – coming from left and right – wanted her to say things in order to free things up for everybody else. It was harder to accuse a black woman of racism than it was a white man. Nevertheless the supporters of the status quo found a way around this by claiming that Hirsi Ali did not know what she was saying because she was ‘traumatised’ by her experiences – experiences they insisted were wholly uncommon.

As a victim of female genital mutilation (a subject about which she would write graphically in her autobiography),11 someone who had as a teenager believed death was a suitable punishment for Salman Rushdie, had fled a forced marriage and understood at first hand the challenges of integration, Hirsi Ali tackled the most brittle issues. A sign that the coming years were not going to go well was that this exemplary immigrant found herself assailed not just by a large proportion of the Dutch political class but with extraordinary vitriol by the country’s Muslim community.

Early in her public career a friend had asked Hirsi Ali, ‘Don’t you realise how small this country is, and how explosive it is, what you’re saying?’ As she recounted her response in her autobiography, ‘Explosive? In a country where prostitution and soft drugs are licit, where euthanasia and abortion are practised, where men cry on TV and naked people walk on the beach and the pope is joked about on national TV? Where the famous author Gerard Reve is renowned for having fantasized about making love with a donkey, an animal he used as a metaphor for God? Surely nothing I could say would be seen as anything close to “explosive” in such a context.’12 But it was. Hirsi Ali had put her finger on the sorest point of Dutch society. A people who liked to think of themselves as tolerant and open and decent were wondering whether this tolerance and openness and decency had gone too far. How could they enforce any limits? Hirsi Ali was telling them that there were limits and she was living proof of some of them. And so in spite of the threats to her life both before and after the murder of her colleague van Gogh, she believed that ‘some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice’.13
#14878619
Potemkin wrote:But it's merely a matter of the Europeans losing 'faith' in the Enlightenment, there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Enlightenment Project, which is that its tolerance must itself become intolerant if it is to survive in a world of tribal feuds, ethno-nationalist hate, religious fanaticism and class conflict. The Europeans, if anything, have too much 'faith' in Enlightenment values, to the extent that they think that if only they are tolerant enough towards those who hate and despise them, then they can transform their enemies into friends. This is lunacy, of course, and is almost a form of religious mania itself. The Europeans were once fanatical Christians, and now they are fanatical liberals. In the Middle Ages, they waged war to spread Christianity, which worked because their Christian faith was intolerant; now, they wage war to spread liberalism, which doesn't work because imposing liberalism and democracy at the point of a sword negates liberalism and democracy. Only the illiberalism of a theocracy, of an imperium, or of Communism will save Europe now. In my opinion, the world being what it is and neo-liberalism being what it is, the Enlightenment Project is unlikely to survive the 21st century.


Potemkin idea about Enlightenment. It seems Pote sees Europe history as binary. Before Enlightenment, Europe was religious; today it's rational, secular and will not compormise her hard won liberalism. Murray offers to view the reality as it is. Europe today is religious and illiberal, you just don't count the "new Europeans" as European like you. This self perception may last few more years but in the future Europe will be seen as the sum of its population. To say the American Christians will not take this trend doesn't mean America will abandon its constitution.

Excerpt


THE STRANGE DEATH OF EUROPE: IMMIGRATION, IDENTITY, ISLAM - DOUGLAS MURRAY

There is, for instance, the dilemma that Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde posed in the 1960s: ‘Does the free, secularised state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee?’2 It is rare to hear this question even raised in our societies. Perhaps we sense the answer is ‘yes’, but we do not know what to do if this is the case. If our freedoms and liberties are unusual and do in fact arise from beliefs that we have left behind, what do we do about it? One answer – which dominated in Europe for the final years of the last century – was to deny this history, to insist that what we have is normal and to forget the tragic facts of civilisation as well as life. Intelligent and cultured people appeared to see it as their duty not to shore up and protect the culture in which they had grown up, but rather to deny it, assail it, or otherwise bring it low. All the time a new orientalism grew up around us: ‘We may think badly of ourselves but we are willing to think exceptionally well of absolutely anyone else.’
Then at some point in the last decade the winds of opinion began gently at first to blow in the contrary direction. They began to affirm what renegades and dissidents suggested in the post-war decades and admit, grudgingly, that Western liberal societies may in fact owe something to the religion from which they arose. This admission was not made because the evidence changed: that evidence was there all along. What changed was a growing awareness that other cultures now increasingly among us did not share all of our passions, prejudices or presumptions. The attempt to pretend that what has been believed and practised in modern Europe is normal has taken repeated blows. Across some rather surprising learning moments – a terrorist attack here, an ‘honour’ killing there, a few cartoons somewhere else – the awareness grew that not everybody who had come to our societies shared our views. They did not share our views about equality between the sexes. They did not share our views on the primacy of reason over revelation. And they did not share our views on freedom and liberty. To put it another way, the unusual European settlement, drawn up from ancient Greece and Rome, catalysed by the Christian religion and refined through the fire of the Enlightenments, turned out to be a highly particular inheritance.
While many Western Europeans spent years resisting this truth or its implications, the realisation came anyway. And although some people still hold out, in most places it has become possible to acknowledge that the culture of human rights, for instance, owes more to the creed preached by Jesus of Nazareth than it does, say, to that of Mohammed. One result of this discovery has been a desire to become better acquainted with our own traditions. But whilst opening up a question, it does not solve it. For the question of whether this societal position is sustainable without reference to the beliefs that gave birth to it remains deeply relevant and troubling to Europe. Just because you are part of a tradition does not mean you will believe what those who originated that tradition believed even if you like and admire its results. People cannot force themselves into sincere belief, and that is perhaps why we do not ask these deeper questions. Not only because we do not believe the answers we used to give in reply to them, but because we sense that we are in some way in an interim period of our development and that our answers may be about to change. After all, how long can a society survive once it has unmoored itself from its founding source and drive? Perhaps we are in the process of finding out.
#14878624
This book is seriously killing me:

There seemed to be no end in sight to such legal and physical attacks and so nobody flinched in 2015 at a passing mention in a piece in The Atlantic magazine to ‘Europe’s endless, debilitating blasphemy wars’.2 Despite a couple of decades of warning, from the Rushdie affair onwards, no one in any position of authority or power had predicted this wave of events. No one who had opened up the borders of Europe to mass migration from the third world had ever thought about it as a Muslim issue. No one had prepared for the possibility that those arriving might not only not become integrated but might bring many social and religious views with them, and that other minorities might be the first victims of such lack of foresight. No one in a position of influence had expected that an upsurge in immigration would lead to an increase in anti-Semitism and gay-bashing. No one who had ever nodded through the lax immigration policies had ever predicted the emergence of Muslim blasphemy as one of the major cultural and security issues of twenty-first-century Europe. All those who had warned about it had either been ignored, defamed, dismissed, prosecuted or killed. Rarely, if ever, even after the facts changed, did the actual victims receive much sympathy.

What mainstream politicians and much of the media had in fact done, right up to and throughout the 2000s, was encourage a sense that the people in Europe who were shouting ‘fire’ were the actual arsonists. Efforts to silence the people who raised their voice – whether through violence, intimidation or the courts – meant that three decades after the Rushdie affair there was almost no one in Europe who would dare write a novel, compose a piece of music or even draw an image that might risk Muslim anger. Indeed, they ran in the other direction. Politicians and almost everybody else went out of their way to show how much they admired Islam.

Of course, in the aftermath of large-scale terrorist attacks – in Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Paris in 2015 – governments had to do something and had to be seen to be doing something. Most proved able to address the specific counter-terrorism aspects of the problem. But they remained hopeless prisoners of their own and their predecessors’ policies and continued to be caught in a language game entirely of their own invention. In June 2007 two car bombs were left in the centre of London by a doctor in the NHS and another Muslim who was a PhD student. The first device was left outside a popular nightclub on ‘ladies night’. This nail-packed bomb was placed outside the glass frontage. The second car bomb was placed down the road from the first, to blow up people fleeing from the first blast. Fortunately, a passerby noticed smoke coming from the first car and both bombs were discovered before they could detonate. The new Labour Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, said that it would be wrong to describe such attacks as ‘Islamic terrorism’ because these terrorists were in fact behaving contrary to their faith. Henceforth, she said, it would be more appropriate to describe such events as ‘anti-Islamic activity’.3


:lol: :lol: :lol:
#14878632
^ continue

For many years it was the presumption of people who might describe themselves as some form of liberals that the lessons of the Enlightenment – the glories of reason, rationality and science – were so attractive that they would eventually succeed in persuading everyone of their values. Indeed, for many people in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Europe the nearest they had to a creed was a belief in human ‘progress’ – a belief that mankind was on an upwards trajectory, propelled not only by technological progress but by an accompanying progress of thought. The presumption grew that because we were more ‘enlightened’ than our ancestors and knew more about how we got here and what the universe around us consisted of, we could also avoid their errors. The attractions of knowledge acquired through science, reason and rationalism were expected to be so self-evident that, like liberalism, it was assumed that life would be a one-way street. Once people began to walk that way and enjoyed the benefits for themselves it was impossible to believe that anybody (least of all anybody acquainted with its pleasures) would choose to walk back down that street.

Yet in the era of mass migration the people who believed this began to notice before their eyes, in ones and twos and then in larger movements, that there were indeed people walking back down that street. A whole current of people were flowing the other way. People who thought that the battle to acknowledge the fact of evolution was over in Europe discovered that whole movements of people had been brought in who not only did not believe in evolution but were determined to prove that evolution was untrue. Those who believed that the system of ‘rights’, including women’s rights, gay rights and the rights of religious and minorities were ‘self-evident’, suddenly saw ever-larger numbers of people who believed not only that there was nothing self-evident about them but that they were fundamentally wrong and misguided. So the liberal awareness grew that it was possible that one day there would once again end up being more people walking against what was presumed to be the current of history than walking with it, and that as a result the direction of travel might in time change for everyone and that liberals would be outnumbered. And what then?

If that fear did ever arise, it did next to nothing to still the instincts of many liberals. Indeed, while liberals in the Western European democracies spent years discussing increasingly niche aspects of the women’s rights and gay rights movements, they continued to argue for the importing of millions of people who thought such movements had no right starting in the first place. And while in the second decade of the present century the question of non-binary, transgender rights began to preoccupy those who thought in terms of social progress, those same people campaigned to bring in millions more people who did not think that women should enjoy the same rights as men. Was this a demonstration of belief in enlightenment values? A belief that the values of liberalism are so strong, so all persuasive, that they must in time convert the Eritrean and the Afghan, the Nigerian and the Pakistani? If so, then the daily news from Europe in recent years must stand at the very least as a rebuke to their presumption.
#14878889
Douglas Murray is factually incorrect when he claims that only recent migrants from Europe had a net positive contribution. Recent migrants from outside of Europe also made a net contribution.

Here is the actual study mentioned in the OP:
http://www.cream-migration.org/publ_upl ... _22_13.pdf

The chart on page 41 shows he is wrong.

Also, he completely omiited the fact that non-immigrants were the largest drain on the economy.
#14880837
@The Sabbaticus

Read the books of Mark Steyn.

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It - 2006
After America: Get Ready for Armageddon 2011
Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight of the West -2009



Something he wrote in 2005 after the first French"youth" (euphemism for Muslims) riots. So prophetic

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/ ... phy-stupid


It’s the demography, stupid

My colleague Rod Liddle writes elsewhere in these pages about the media’s strange reluctance to use the M-word vis-à-vis the rioting ‘youths’. I’m sure he’s received, as I have, plenty of emails arguing that there’s no Islamist component, they’re not the madrasa crowd, they may be Muslim but they’re secular and Westernised and into drugs. It’s the lack of jobs; these riots derive from conditions peculiar to France, etc. As one correspondent wrote, ‘You right-wing shit-forbrains think everything’s about jihad.’ Well, it’s true there are Muslims and there are Muslims: some blow up Tube trains and some rampage through French streets and some claim Mossad’s put something in the chewing gum to make Arab men susceptible to the seduction techniques of Jewesses. Some kill Dutch film-makers and some complain about Piglet coffee mugs on co-workers’ desks, and millions of Muslims don’t do any of the above but apparently don’t feel strongly enough about them to say a word in protest. And it’s also true that it’s better to have your Peugeot torched than to be blown apart on the Piccadilly Line. But what all these techniques — and those of lobby groups who offer themselves as interlocutors between bewildered European elites and ‘moderate’ Muslims — have in common is that they advance the Islamification of Europe.

Just for the record, I don’t think everything’s about jihad. Rather, I think everything’s about demography. It wasn’t a subject I took much interest in pre-9/11.

Now go back to that bland statistic you hear a lot these days: ‘about 10 per cent of France’s population is Muslim’. Give or take a million here, a million there, that’s broadly correct, as far as it goes. But the population spread isn’t even. And when it comes to those living in France aged 20 and under, about 30 per cent are said to be Muslim and in the major urban centres about 45 per cent. If it came down to street-by-street fighting, as Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, points out, ‘the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one’ already, right now, in 2005. It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the 8th century, the ‘Islamic world’ stretched from Spain to India, yet its population was only minority Muslim. Nonetheless, by 2010, more elderly white Catholic ethnic frogs will have croaked and more fit healthy Muslim youths will be hitting the streets. One day they’ll even be on the beach at St Trop, and if you and your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of Ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their ‘grievances’.

And that’s the optimistic scenario. More likely, those Continental demographic trends will accelerate, as they did during the decline of the Roman Empire, when the imperial capital’s population fell at one point as low as 500. Some French natives will figure that they don’t have the stomach for the fight and opt for retirement elsewhere. The ones who don’t will increasingly be drawn down the old road to the neo-nationalist strongmen promising to solve the problem. That’s why I call it the ‘Eurabian civil war’. The de Villepin-Chiraquiste tendency will be to accommodate and capitulate, but an unreconstructed minority will not be so obliging and will eventually act. Meanwhile, it will be the Muslims who develop a pan-European identity, if only because many have no particular attachment to France or Belgium or Denmark and they’ll quickly grasp that crossborder parties and lobby groups will further enhance their status. The European Union is already the walking dead, but the Eurabian Union might well be a goer.

It’s remarkable to me how many European commentators cling to the old delusions mocking Bush for being in thrall to his own Texan version of Osama-like fundamentalism. I look on religion like gun ownership. That’s to say, New Hampshire has a high rate of firearms possession, which is why it has a low crime rate. You don’t have to own a gun and there are sissy Dartmouth College armsare-for-hugging types who don’t. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stumptoothed knuckle-dragging neighbours do. If you want to burgle a home in the Granite State, you’d have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world pantywaist’s pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who’ll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his $70 TV. That’s the way it is with religion. A hyper-rationalist might dismiss the whole God thing as a lot of apple sauce, but his hyper-rationalism is a lot more vulnerable in a society without a strong Judaeo-Christian culture. American firearms owners have a popular slogan: ‘If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.’ Likewise, if you marginalise religion, only the marginalised will have religion. That’s why France’s impoverished Muslim ghettos display more cultural confidence than the wealthiest enclaves of the capital.

So what can be done? For the political class, the demography’s becoming an insurmountable obstacle. When your electorate’s split between a young implacable ethnic group and elderly French natives unwilling to vote themselves off their unaffordable social programmes, there aren’t a lot of options your average poll-watching pol will be willing to take. And the trouble with the social democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything. At the very least, European citizens should recognise that the governing class has failed, that the conventional wisdom has run its course, and that it is highly unlikely that those culturally confident Muslims will wish to assimilate with anything as shrivelled and barren as contemporary European identity.

As evidence of anti-Europeanism in America, Timothy Garton Ash has quoted on several occasions — and, indeed, preserved in book form — a throwaway line of mine from April 2002: ‘To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France’s Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be.’ That may be ‘anti-European’ (though I don’t regard it as such) but so what? What matters is whether the assessment is right, and after the last couple of weeks that prediction looks better than the complaceniks’ view that there’s nothing wrong with the EU that can’t be fixed by more benefits, more regulation, more taxes, more immigration, more unemployment, more crime and more smouldering Citroëns. If you carry on voting for the Euroconsensus, you’re voting for a suicide pact. M. de Villepin put it very well: ‘What does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere?’ The Euroconsensus leads nowhere. Time to try elsewhere.
#14880929
Pants-of-dog wrote:Douglas Murray is factually incorrect when he claims that only recent migrants from Europe had a net positive contribution. Recent migrants from outside of Europe also made a net contribution.

Here is the actual study mentioned in the OP:
http://www.cream-migration.org/publ_upl ... _22_13.pdf

The chart on page 41 shows he is wrong.

Also, he completely omiited the fact that non-immigrants were the largest drain on the economy.


Yes, social spending on 'natives' tends to be higher for obvious reasons. They're the ones that created the social welfare system in the first place and are now draining it as pensioners, as pursuant to the system. These non-EEA immigrants also have a different 'age structure', which means that things are going to get worse once they too hit the same pension age. The study claims that these people will 'move away to their own countries' at that point (but the UK system most likely guarantees that their pensions will be paid out in these countries). Also, they claim that the non-EEA immigrants have yet to reach their full economic potential, but haven't been able to substantiate this claim with anything, other than their pro-immigrant fever dreams.
#14881402
The Sabbaticus wrote:No, you didn't, otherwise you wouldn't have asked me for things that were explicitly mentioned in the report itself.


When I cited the chart that disproves Murray’s false claims, I mentioned the page number. Could you please show the same amount of rigour in your argument and specify which pages support your specific claims? Thank you.
#14881959
@The Sabbaticus

The new Labour Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, said that it would be wrong to describe such attacks as ‘Islamic terrorism’ because these terrorists were in fact behaving contrary to their faith. Henceforth, she said, it would be more appropriate to describe such events as ‘anti-Islamic activity’.3


An EU guidelines from a decade ago

BERLIN, April 11, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The European Union is set to remove derogatory terminology about Islam like “Islamic terrorism” and “fundamentalists” in its new lexion of public communication to make clear that terrorists are hijacking the religion, an EU official revealed on Tuesday, April 11.

“Certainly ‘Islamic terrorism’ is something we will not use … we talk about ‘terrorists who abusively invoke Islam’,” the official told Reuters.

The official, speaking anonymously because the review is an internal one that is not expected to be made public, said the point of using careful language was not to “fall into the trap” of offending and alienating citizens.

“You don’t want to use terminology which would aggravate the problem. This is an attempt … to be aware of the sensitivities implied by the use of certain language,” he said.

“It is to help us understand what we are saying and try to avoid making mistakes,” he said of the lexicon, who is expected to be adopted initially in June.

EU counter-terrorism chief Gijs de Vries said that terrorism was not inherent to any religion, and praised Muslims for opposing attempts by terrorists abusing Islam.

“They have been increasingly active in isolating the radicals who abuse Islam for political purposes, and they deserve everyone’s support. And that includes the choice of language that makes clear that we are talking about a murderous fringe that is abusing a religion and does not represent it,” he told Reuters.

Omar Faruk, a Muslim British barrister who has advised the government on community issues, said there was a strong need for a “new sort of political dialogue and terminology”.

“Those words cannot sit side by side. Islam is actually very much against any form of terrorism … Islam in itself means peace,” he said.

The widespread use of the expression “just creates a culture where terrorism actually is identified with Islam. That causes me a lot of stress,” Faruk added.

Misinterpreted Jihad

“Islam is actually very much against any form of terrorism … Islam in itself means peace,” said Faruk.
The lexicon, which would set down guidelines for EU officials and politicians, will reconsider other terms like “Islamists” and “jihad,” which is often used by groups like Al-Qaeda to mean a holy war against the infidels.

“Jihad means something for you and me, it means something else for a Muslim. Jihad is a perfectly positive concept of trying to fight evil within yourself,” said the EU official.

Acclaimed British writer Karen Armstrong wrote in the Guardian newspaper of Britain that the world jihad was stereotyped as merely meaning holy war.

“Extremists and unscrupulous politicians have purloined the word for their own purposes, but the real meaning of jihad is not ‘holy war’ but ‘struggle’ or ‘effort’. Muslims are commanded to make a massive attempt on all fronts – social, economic, intellectual, ethical and spiritual – to put the will of God into practice,” she wrote.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted in April last year a resolution calling for combating defamation campaigns against Islam and Muslims in the West.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that seeing Islam as a “monolith” and distorting its tenets are among the many practices that now make up the term Islamophobia.

“Too many people see Islam as a monolith and as intrinsically opposed to the West. Caricature remains widespread and the gulf of ignorance is dangerously deep,” he said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest US Muslim civil liberties, has called for issuing an annual report on Islamophobia across the world on a par with the global anti-Semitism report.



https://archive.islamonline.net/?p=15465

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