...While Nero Fiddled: Burning and Rioting in France and What it Means for America
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Just as Nero played on his fiddle while Rome burned around him, Europe has a turned a blind eye to a problem that has been developing for decades: mass Muslim immigration. In recent weeks, major rioting has occurred in France, where there is a large population of Muslim immigrants, mainly originating from Algeria and Morocco. The riots have largely been made up of Muslims who have not integrated into Western society. Yet, this is not a single fluke in the immigration policies of Old Europe. Rather, it is indicative of something much bigger: an escalating clash of values between the receding West and the Islamic immigrants. Demographic issues and the growing rift between the different worlds may spell disaster for Europe. We in America must learn from these events.
Europe’s first problem is demographics. To maintain a constant population in a given country, women need to have 2.1 children during their lifetime. The overall birth rate per woman in Europe, conversely, is only 1.5. A European immigrant woman, however, will currently have nearly 6.0 children on average during her lifetime. Indeed, Omer Taspinar of the Brookings Institution noted as early as 2003 that “the Muslim birth rate in Europe is three times higher than the non-Muslim one. If current trends continue, the Muslim population of Europe will nearly double by 2015, while the non-Muslim population will shrink by 3.5 percent.” In fact, no European nation currently reaches the needed 2.1 average- except largely Muslim Albania. But the native population is also aging rapidly. In France in 2000, 16% were over the age of 65. By 2050, that number will skyrocket to 27%, with 11% over the age of 80. Meanwhile, if current birth and immigration patterns hold, the Muslim population in France will shoot from 10% in 2000 to 40% in 2050.
What exacerbates this situation is the fact that much of Europe, especially France, has socialistic, cradle-to-grave welfare policies. Regardless of whether or not you agree with their social strategy, the simple economic facts are that a country must have a high enough worker-to-retiree ratio; otherwise, an even larger chunk of each taxpayer’s income will go to keeping these policies in effect. Governments consequently must highly tax its citizens to sustain these plans. In Scandinavian nations, the tax rate is already around 60%.This taxation, however, weakens the purchasing power of the consumer, and thus the economy suffers and shrinks, while the pension plans continue to give higher amounts than they can afford.
So if Europe needs more bodies to do more work and pay more taxes, but their own population is shrinking, where can they get them? The answer: Muslim immigrants. In France, for example, they draw large percentages from their former colonies of Morocco and Algeria. Europe has thus placed very open immigration laws in effect to encourage Muslims from overseas to move there- and they have. It is clear what will soon happen: European Muslims will make up the economic backbone of the country and will be close to a majority. This will give them an incredibly large voting bloc, one that does not hold the same values as the West.
These policies would not be a problem- if these immigrants assimilated into the French culture. However, a great many of them are very opposed to this. Take the Arab European League. The group’s founder, Dyab Abou Jahjah, has stated, “We do not want to assimilate. Assimilation is cultural rape. It means renouncing your identity, becoming like the others.”
Why would these people be so opposed to becoming part of the country in which they live? The answer is divergent values. In early July shortly after the London bombings, columnist Mike Thompson encapsulated the problem superbly when he wrote that, “The fatal flaw of Britain's and Europe's establishment today is not just its shameless worship at the altar of statism; rather, it is its failure to defend the region's historic, Christian-nurtured culture (the West) against Islamic-nurtured culture (the East). By liberally and uncritically opening its borders to millions of fanatical immigrant religionists, all Europe (including the insular Brits) flirts with actual cultural suicide. The advance of Islam into the heart of Europe (and England as well) is not because of Muslims' strategic skills or Islam's ‘irresistible’ appeal to Westerners. Instead, it is because Christian institutions have been hollowed out--corrupted by western liberals who demand a merry passage to self-fulfillment without the need for heavy lifting, hewing not to faith and its doctrine for good, but to secularism and its blindness to evil. As a result of watered-down tradition and values, most of Europe's churches today are as empty as the lives of their wandering and wondering ‘sheep.’ Britain's mosques, it is estimated, now host more worshipers than does the Church of England.”
The increasing secularism of Europe is very much at odds with the way Muslims see the world. By joining a society that opposes their fundamental worldview, many believe they would be going against their own religion; it would be cultural suicide for them. Journalist Amir Taheri has written that the Muslims do not want assimilation, but rather, autonomy. Moreover, these immigrants often settle together, and have the critical mass to form their own communities separate from the country in which they live. If the demographic precedents hold, Muslim immigrants (as a majority of the population and the economic muscle of the country) could legitimately form an Islamic “Republic,” effectively turning Europe from the birthplace of the Western Tradition into a new colony of the Muslim Caliphate. We already see evidence of Islam influencing European politics. Taspinar writes,“The presence of nearly 10 million Muslims versus only 700,000 Jews in France and Germany alone helps explain why continental Europe might look at the Middle East from a different angle than does the United States. Indeed, French and German concerns about a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq or Washington’s blind support for Israel are at least partly related to nervousness about the Muslim street at home.” Imagine if Muslims were no longer an interest group, but the policy-makers themselves.
Of course, there are those who don’t see any problem at all with the immigration situation. They should simply observe current affairs. First, they should witness the events in France. We are not talking about a few gangs or a group of disgruntled individuals, but a spontaneous mass movement. French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy suggested weeks ago that this is not actually a combustion, but an expansion. Sarkozy told Le Monde that 20 to 40 cars were already being set on fire each night, and that 9,000 police cars have been stoned since just the beginning of 2005.
Second, these skeptics should look at the growth of Islamic radicalism in recent decades. One of the world’s leading terror experts, Rohan Gunaratna of St. Andrews Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence and of the United Nations' Terrorism Prevention Branch points out that every major terrorist attack on the West in the past decade, with the exception of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, was carried out by a Muslim immigrant. From 1993 to 2003, there were 212 alleged and convicted terrorists in the US and Europe. Of these, 86% were immigrants and the rest were converts to Islam. This is not to say that all Muslim immigrants feel this way, but many do; enough in fact, to take the deaths of two hoodlums running from the police and turn it into nation-wide intifada. These Muslims have become a Fifth Column inside Europe- one which their home countries (in Europe) do not see.
Others surely will counter that Europe just needs even more Marxist policies and more cultural sensitivity. However, Europe has been trying this for decades- to no effect. European nations have made it a point for years to implement this multiculturalism into things like school curriculum, preaching reconciliation. However, the Islamic population wants only autonomy. There has become very much an “Us and Them” mentality for the Muslim population. And the odds of hiring a worker from such a world are low. Who would even want to invest in a Muslim business if they have to risk stoning just to see it? The facts are that the liberal economic policies have failed and led to recession. In France, young men have a 20% unemployment rate, but the cultural divide, essentially between two different worlds, makes that number jump to 40% for Muslim men. However, as author Robert Spencer writes, “Alleviating Muslim unemployment and poverty will not ultimately do anything to alter this rejection of European values by growing numbers of people who are only geographically Europeans.” Thus, this economic prosperity and even more multiculturalism will not solve the key problems; Europe will still be facing disaster.
We in the US need to learn from Europe’s mistakes and never allow our policies to mirror those of Europe. We cannot allow our culture to be sacrificed for idealism or economic expediency. Instead, we must recognize how important the Western Tradition is, rather than apologize for it. As Hoover Fellow Thomas Sowell has written, “Not all Moslems, nor necessarily a majority of Moslems, are either a cultural or a physical danger. But even ‘moderate’ Moslem organizations in the West who deplore violence and try to discourage it nevertheless encourage their followers to remain foreigners rather than become part of the countries they live in. So do our own intelligentsia and political and cultural elites. Balkanization has been glorified as ‘diversity’ and diversity has become too sacred to defile with anything so gross as hard facts. But reality is not optional. Our survival may in the long run be as menaced by degeneration within from many sources and in many ways, as was that of the Roman Empire.”
We must be vigilant about the increasing clash of values and the defense of Western culture, rather than behave like Nero with his fiddle.
