Just now I came across this story in the Australian today with a title seeking to comfort, “Fears of Eurabian Future Unfounded.” Obviously, in the wake of the Swiss ban on minarets, debate on a topic we have discussed frequently on these pages is heating up—demographic changes, due mostly to Muslim immigration and high birth rates in Europe forewarn of a possible end to western civilization. This article attempts, for three fourths of the article, to convince us those fears are unfounded; then near the end hits the reader with this!
A paper by the US Council on Foreign Relations reports: “Most analysts say that many of Western Europe’s Muslims are poorly integrated into society. They cite closed ethnic neighbourhoods, high crime rates in Muslim communities, calls for use of sharia law, the wearing of the veil and other examples as evidence of a conflict with European values.”
The report says Muslims are more likely to be poor and live in segregated, crime-prone neighbourhoods. Many self-segregate because of language barriers and cultural mores, such as the Muslim prohibition on drinking.
Unemployment rates are up to double those for other minorities.
Bassam Tibi, a German Muslim academic who holds a professorship at Cornell University and is director of the Centre for International Affairs at the University of Gottingen, says European societies offer limited opportunities to Muslim immigrants, even those with citizenship. “In America, if you get citizenship, you’re an American,” he says, whereas Muslims in Europe are not seen as “citizens of the heart”. [I beg to differ with the good professor on his assertion about America. I have heard first hand that many Somali Muslims when becoming citizens refuse to take the oath of citizenship.]
He says many Muslim immigrants contribute to the problem by seeing themselves as members of a “transnational Muslim community” with no obligations to European society. “They themselves create obstacles. There is a mutual rejection of one another.”
Tibi hopes that Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans can learn to live in harmony, as they did in medieval Islamic Spain. [This supposed harmony in Spain* has been exagerated, and besides the Muslims ran the show.] If they can’t, he warns: “It’s a recipe for civil war”.
So, that’s how an author who was working really hard to convince us and his/her fellow Australians that the fears of a Eurabian future for Europe are unfounded ends his argument—oh well, maybe a civil war! Are you comforted?
Next! More from Australia, here.
* Update December 5th: Coincidentally our friend Always on Watch posted on the myth of harmony in Islamic Spain, here, yesterday.