Is Europe about to be overrun by Muslims? A number of prominent European and US politicians and journalists seem to think so. The historian Niall Ferguson has predicted 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.”
According to Christopher Caldwell, a US columnist with the Financial Times, whom the Observer recently described as a “bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties,” Muslims are already “conquering Europe’s cities, street by street.”
So what if Muslims account for only 3 percent to 4 percent of the EU’s total population of 493 million? In his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It? — which was featured on Start the Week, excerpted in Prospect, commended as “morally serious” by the New York Times and has beguiled some liberal opinion-makers as well as rightwing blowhards — Caldwell writes: “Of course minorities can shape countries. They can conquer countries. There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today.”
Apparently it’s not only Islamist revolutionaries, but also rapidly breeding Muslims who are transforming Europe into “Eurabia.” The birthrates of Europe’s Muslim immigrants are actually falling and converging with national averages, according to a recent survey in the Financial Times; but “advanced” cultures, Caldwell claims in his book, “have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to ‘primitive’ ones.”
As the Daily Telegraph, quoting Caldwell, asserted earlier this month, Britain and the EU have simply ignored the “demographic time bomb” in their midst.
Caldwell is convinced that “Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation,” and, he wonders — though Muslims don’t despise Europe as much as Palestinians hate Israel — didn’t the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat call the wombs of Palestinian women “the secret weapon” of his cause?
Caldwell stops short of speculating what Europe would or should do to atone for its folly of nurturing a perfidious minority. The Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, whom Martin Amis has hailed as a “great sayer of the unsayable,” does not hesitate to spell it out in his bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It:
“In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography — except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out — as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em,” Steyn wrote.
Bruce Bawer, whose book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, suggests that European officials, who are “in a position to deport planeloads of people everyday,” “could start rescuing Europe tomorrow.”
There are now even politicians ready to do the “unsayable.” Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders, whose party was one of the big right-wing winners of June’s elections to the European Parliament, proposes expelling millions of Muslims from Europe. A separate ministry for this purpose is advocated by Austria’s extreme-right parties, which gained an unprecedented 29 percent of the popular vote last year.
Many European politicians and commentators are reluctant to denounce the headscarf as, in French philosopher Andre Glucksmann’s description, a “terrorist operation,” or to see the Somali-Dutch polemicist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, presently employed by a US neoconservative think tank, as Islam’s Luther.
RSS