Rightank

Mark Steyn on the problem European demography and its Islamic transformation:

Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose–as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

The collapse Steyn writes about is not a military collaspe, but a volatile societal collapse beckoning for eruption:

What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there’s something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe’s track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they’re flying planes into buildings for they’re likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ‘em over? . . .

To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA’s got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: Its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition.

If you’re European, you have reason to fear. The amalgamation of “like-minded” states called the European Union won’t save you from the festering population deficiency and Muslim immigration boom influx are facing. The engendered socialism lauded and instilled by the Euro elite has sedated the masses from thinking about the future and what type of European (say Algerian Muslim) is supposed to be counted upon to provide welfare’s suckle thirty years down the road. More Steyn:

What does the Islamification of Europe heed for Americans, apart from the need to promote and reward stable families–two parent, male-female households–from raising children to sustain the American population?

What will London–or Paris, or Amsterdam–be like in the mid-’30s? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

Steyn’s last question answers itself (No!) and raises a good point for Americans to ponder: Can our society remain free if religion, particularly Christianity, is stripped from the public square? What will happen if America’s religious demographic is prevented from expressing itself politically?

To deny American’s political character is to deny its religiousity. The adulation of secularism in our law and in our law-making institutions will cripple our will and resolve. An unfettered and allegiant resolve is what we will need to confront the growing crawl of Islamofacism. Eurabia, I’m afraid, is only the beginning.

William F. Buckley, Jr. on the French riots:

My view is unorthodox, Mr. Buckley says of the violence roiling the French suburbs. It seems to me that a very hard dose of market discipline would distract the attention of the young revolutionaries from their frolics, traditional and otherwise, and my sense is that if they had to worry about how to eat, and buy food, they would stop screwing around and face reality. If these people didn’t wake up in the morning thinking about what cars to burn–instead of work–they might not be having these problems.

Combined with the radical Islamicism, this socialist cocktail that Buckley rightly criticizes is harbinger of things to come in France and other European nations with significant Muslim populations.

Erstwhile, the riots continue.

Shortly after this summer’s London bombings, The Financial Times created an interactive map showing the Muslim population levels within Europe. If you click on France, you’ll find a fascinating bit on France writen by John Thornhill:

Nobody knows for sure how many Muslims there are in France. Because of a strict insistence on the secular nature of the republic, state officials are not allowed to ask a citizen’s faith when conducting a census.

But Islam is estimated to be the second-biggest religion in France with about 5m followers, out of a total population of 60m.

. . .

In theory, French insistence on secularism makes state institutions blind to race or religion and eases integration of immigrant communities. In practice, many Muslims feel subject to unofficial discrimination. The unemployment rate in many Muslim communities is far higher than the national average, while their level of representation at the top of political, legal, business and media professions is disproportionately low.

Yazid Sabeg, a French Algerian businessman who has championed positive discrimination as a means of redressing these imbalances, has warned that without radical change France is in danger of creating a “social and political atom bomb.”

Alarmed at the influence of radical imams, who came from abroad and did not speak French, the government created the French Council of the Muslim Religion in 2002 as an intermediary between the state and Muslim communities.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who has twice served as interior minister, has even advocated state support for mainstream Muslim associations and mosques to deter the extremist fringe. However, this argument is still bitterly resisted by secularists.

Two points. First, the social and political atomic bomb has exploded in France. Second and more significant, the secularist predilections of the French elite have prevented their government from exterminating the terrorist rant of Wahabbi clerics and immams from their borders who have provided the needed bile and jihadist rhetoric that propels young, easily malleable Muslims to violence and self-destruction.

Indirectly, France’s secularist handicap is a lesson of the danger in maintaining the First Amendment falsity of a separation of church and state. Taken to an extreme, religious separationism would not only prevent the United States from providing support to (e.g., tax-exempt status) or procuring assistance from (e.g., faith-based initiatives) religious organizations but would bar any attempt by federal, state, or local governments to expel–based upon their religious expression–the terrorist spite that froths from the radical elements of Islam.

The French elite may value their secularity greatly but their immigrant Muslim population does not–which is why the Parisian suburbs are burning red accompanied the arabic battlecry “God is Great” instead of the peaceful greeting of “Bonjour, can I have another pastry?”

Theodore Dalrymple has an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal about the burnt car collection of the French rioters/thugs and why the reaction is the fruit of the wretched socialism of France:

When it comes to rioting, there’s no 35-hour week in France.

It may be difficult nowadays to get people in what the French call the Hexagon to work on Friday afternoons, but not to riot, at least not in the “sensitive” quartiers that surround most towns and cities. The productivity of the rioters has been increasing rapidly of late, and France looks like it will be breaking its record for burnt-out cars: 1,295 on Saturday night alone and 750 on Friday night, 500 the night before, and 300 the night before that. This year so far, the tally is 29,000. If the trend of the last few days continues, geometric progression being what it is, it won’t be long before the rioters will have to go to Germany or the Low Countries to express their social conscience in a practical way.

. . .

A Martian observing France dispassionately, without ideological preconceptions, would come to the conclusion that the French had accepted with equanimity a kind of social settlement in which all those with jobs would enjoy various legally sanctioned perks and protections, while those without jobs would remain unemployed forever, though they would be tossed enough state charity to keep body and cellphone together. And since there are many more employed people than unemployed people in France, this is a settlement that suits most people, who will vote for it forever. It is therefore politically unassailable, either by the left or the right, which explains the paralysis of the French state in the present impasse.

The only fly in the ointment (apart from the fact that the rest of the economies of the world won’t leave the French economy in peace) is that the portion of the population whom the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, so tactlessly, but in the secret opinion of most Frenchmen so accurately, referred to as the “racaille” — scum — is not very happy with the settlement as it stands. It wants to be left alone to commit crimes uninterrupted by the police, as is its inalienable right.

Read the whole thing.

The riots in France are disgusting. The French share alot of the blame for their refusal to assimulate the immigrants who have entered their country. Appeasement doesn’t work against terrorists and dictators and it certainly doesn’t work in dealing with massive immigration sans acculturation.

The French reaction has been slow, but at least they have finally decided to arrest some of the thugs. Unfortunately, the jihadists aren’t settling for the burning of cars and businesses:

In a particularly gruesome incident, attackers doused a 50-year-old woman on crutches with a flammable liquid and set her afire as she tried to get off a bus in the suburb of Sevran, judicial officials said.
The bus had been forced to stop because of burning objects in its path. She was rescued by the driver and hospitalized with severe burns.

What kind of monstrousity is raging within these youth that would cause them to do such a thing to a defenseless woman? The same type of monstrousity that fuels suicide bombers and spit-filled hatred that spews from the sewers of many terror-inciting mosques around the globe.

Today some 2,000 French have marched for peace near where the rioting took place. Alot of good that’s going to do. March and they’ll stop the violence. Yeah right. Bullets and blood are the armaments of peace when you are fighting an enemy with a terrorist mindset. The French better start shooting before it’s too late.