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Nov, 21, 2008
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Caroline B. Glick:
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Elliot B. Gertel:
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Caroline B. Glick: The perils ahead
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Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: How Bush and Obama together could change the Middle East dynamic
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Nov, 12, 2008
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by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Tyrannical Co-Workers
Michael Doyle: High Court to consider today donated monuments that may have religious messages in public parks
Nov, 11, 2008
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Will Obama stop government officials considering institutionalizing financial jihad?
Jonathan Tobin: They Will Decide Their Own Fate
Nov, 10, 2008
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Barry Rubin: A letter to the president-elect from a Middle East realist
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Caroline B. Glick: Livni's Obama strategy
Nov, 6, 2008
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: How I tricked a classroom of apathetic students into grasping the fallacy of moral relativism
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Nov, 5, 2008
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Bruce Weinstein: 'Religulos': Bad title,even worse movie
Nov, 4, 2008
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Treasury Dept. submits to Shariah law
Frida Ghitis: A surprise for Obama in the Middle East
Nov, 3, 2008
Jonathan Rosenblum: Who says Jews are Smart?
Jonathan Tobin:
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Oct. 31, 2008
Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Our Immutable Noble Essence
Caroline B. Glick: Running against Bush
Oct. 30, 2008
Jonathan Rosenblum: The End of the Special Relationship?
Steve Lipman: 'Kid Kosher' Gets A Title Shot
Oct. 29, 2008
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: GET US THE TAPE THE L.A. TIMES REFUSES TO RELEASE, AND WE'LL GIVE YOU CASH!
Dr. Ari Korenblit: Making The Write Choice for President
Oct. 28, 2008
Mona Charen: Denial runs through American Jewry
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Sell-off to capitalism or sell-out to Islam?
Oct. 27, 2008
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by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Are tax deductions for charitable donations moral?
Jonathan Mark: The Mystery Of The Arab-American Vote
Oct. 24, 2008
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Caroline B. Glick: Testing Obama's mettle
Oct. 23, 2008
Daniel Pipes: Obama Would Fail Security Clearance
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Jonathan Tobin:
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Oct. 17, 2008
Jonathan Rosenblum: Sukkos and the Great Meltdown
Caroline B. Glick: The disappearance of law
Oct. 16, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
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Cal Thomas: Blaming the Jews (again)
March 22, 2007
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Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)
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Jewish World Review
May 11, 2004
/ 20 Iyar, 5764
The human comedy of the coming Muslim Europe
By
Daniel Pipes
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
"Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam." So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione ("The Force of Reason"). And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam.
Two factors mainly contribute to this world-shaking development.
- The hollowing out of Christianity. Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition or its historic values. The numbers of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the past two generations to the point that some observers call it the "new dark continent." Already, analysts estimate Britain's mosques host more worshippers each week than does the Church of England.
- An anemic birth rate. Indigenous Europeans are dying out. Sustaining a population requires each woman on average to bear 2.1 children; in the European Union, the overall rate is a one-third short, at 1.5 per woman, and falling. One study finds that, should current population trends continue and immigration cease, today's population of 375 million could decline to 275 million by 2075. To keep its working population even, the EU needs 1.6 million immigrants a year; to sustain the present workers-to-retirees ratio requires an astonishing 13.5 million immigrants annually.
Into the void are coming Islam and Muslims. As Christianity falters, Islam is robust, assertive, and ambitious. As Europeans under-reproduce at advanced ages, Muslims do so in large numbers while young.
Some 5 percent of the EU, or nearly 20 million persons, presently identify themselves as Muslims; should current trends continue, that number will reach 10 percent by 2020. If non-Muslims flee the new Islamic order, as seems likely, the continent could be majority-Muslim within decades.
When that happens, grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilization (the jahiliya?) at least until a Saudi-style regime transforms them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up. The great national cultures Italian, French, English, and others will likely wither, replaced by a new transnational Muslim identity that merges North African, Turkish, subcontinental, and other elements.
This prediction is hardly new. In 1968, the British politician Enoch Powell gave his famed "rivers of blood" speech in which he warned that in allowing excessive immigration, the United Kingdom was "heaping up its own funeral pyre." (Those words stalled a hitherto promising career.) In 1973, the French writer Jean Raspail published Camp of the Saints, a novel that portrays Europe falling to massive, uncontrolled immigration from the Indian subcontinent. The peaceable transformation of a region from one major civilization to another, now underway, has no precedent in human history, making it easy to ignore such voices.
There is still a chance for the transformation not to play itself out, but the prospects diminish with time. Here are several possible ways it might be stopped:
- Changes in Europe that lead to a resurgence of Christian faith, an increase in childbearing, or the cultural assimilation of immigrants; such developments can theoretically occur but what would cause them are hard to imagine.
- Muslim modernization: For reasons no one has quite figured out (education of women? abortion on demand? adults too self-absorbed to have children?), modernity leads to a drastic reduction in the birthrate. Also, were the Muslim world to modernize, the attraction of moving to Europe would diminish.
- Immigration from other sources. Latin Americans, being Christian, would more or less permit Europe to keep its historic identity. Hindus and Chinese would increase the diversity of cultures, making it less likely that Islam would dominate.
Current trends suggest Islamization will happen, for Europeans seem to find it too strenuous to have children, stop illegal immigration, or even diversify their sources of immigrants. Instead, they prefer to settle unhappily into civilizational senility.
Europe has simultaneously reached unprecedented heights of prosperity and peacefulness and shown a unique inability to sustain itself (one demographer, Wolfgang Lutz, notes that "Negative momentum has not been experienced on a large scale in world history").
Is it inevitable that the most brilliantly successful society also be the first in danger of collapse due to a lack of cultural confidence and offspring? Ironically, creating a hugely desirable place to live would seem also to be a recipe for suicide. The human comedy continues.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading."
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JWR contributor Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the author of several books, most recently Militant Islam Reaches America.
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© 2004, Daniel Pipes
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