Daily Ramblings:
The Times, They Are ...02/28/2005 11:23:07 am
Via LGF, two links to articles in the
"Times," one New York and one UK, that
together are as good a primer as any on the
burgeoning battle of fanatical Islam and decadent
secularism in Europe. From the NY Times, "More Dutch Plan
To Emigrate As Muslim Influx Tips Scales."
Those leaving have been mostly
lured by large English-speaking nations like
Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where they say
they hope to feel less constricted.
In interviews, emigrants rarely
cited a fear of militant Islam as their main
reason for packing their bags. But the killing of
the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a fierce critic of
fundamentalist Muslims, seems to have been a
catalyst.
"Our Web site got 13,000
hits in the weeks after the van Gogh
killing," said Frans Buysse, who runs an
agency that handles paperwork for departing
Dutch. "That's four times the normal
rate."
Mr. van Gogh's killing is the
only one the police have attributed to an Islamic
militant, but since then they have reported
finding death lists by local Islamic militants
with the names of six prominent politicians. The
effects still reverberate.
The UK's Sunday Times Magazine probes more deeply than the Old Gray Lady, and while starting
in the Netherlands, ultimately examines the problem
Europe-wide, and conveys a sense of countries where
voters are completely at odds with their own
politicians and bureaucrats on the subject of Muslim
immigrants, and where their own leaders are in turn
at crossed purposes with the increasingly powerful EU
bureaucracy. All in all, the only ones who seem to be
focused on results are the radicalized immigrants and
sons of immigrants themselves - who are moving in a
very pointed direction.
"The young are open to
everything," says Uzeyir Kabaktepe, the vice
president of the Turkish Milli Gorus mosque in
Amsterdam. "If you give them pure Koran,
they become extremist. All doors close for them.
'Everything else is black,' they think, 'but I'm
white and I'm going to paradise.' Those who see
black and white think they are angels, they think
they are flying. If a Dutchman speaks to them on
the street, they think 'he's a Zionist' or 'he's
a Satan'. We give the Koran, not pure, but with
explanations. We make them debate with each
other. We show them that some of the dark ones,
the infidels, are religious people too."
The Moroccans, he says, are
different. "They brought their ideas to
Europe with them, and they don't budge," he
claims. "Democracy for Arabs is Satanic,
it's from the West, against God's word. Idiot
imams came who said the Dutch and everything to
do with them — schools, society — are
devils. They said: get a second wife, from
abroad, so the devils pay the social money for
them ...
Safiyeh M, a Dutch Moroccan
divorcee with two children, says there is
"one little group that won't adapt. It's
always 'damn Dutch, damn Jews, damn infidels'.
They can't do anything in Morocco. They'd get
squashed. So they try it here".
Political correctness and an
unwillingness to face the problem continue to guide
the EU government's attitude.
Opacity is an EU hallmark. Its
Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia
commissioned a report to analyse who was behind a
wave of anti-Semitic attacks in 2002. When it
found that most of the perpetrators were young
Muslims of Arab descent, and "were only
seldom from the extreme-right milieu",
its methodology was questioned and it was
shelved. Not much stomach for debate there.
It's safe to say that the glorious
new 500 odd page EU constitution isn't likely to
inspire a lot of solidarity and sense of shared
fundamental values across Europe either. And what
fundamental values are shared anyway?
Confusion abounds on issues
with historic implications. The European
Commission recently recommended that talks for
Turkish membership of the EU should go ahead. Yet
Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the chief architect of
the proposed EU constitution, opposed this on the
precise grounds that it was "incompatible
with European culture, which is Christian".
Or was Christian. Europeans
have largely opted out of Christendom at the time
of both a new federalism and a Muslim challenge.
The number of French who say they attend church
regularly has shrunk to 7.7%. Though 90% of
Italians call themselves Catholic, fewer than 30%
go to Mass. In Spain, only 14% of young Spaniards
are churchgoers, a 50% decline in less than four
years. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor,
Archbishop of Westminster, has said that
Christianity in Britain is "almost
vanquished".
Cardinal Adrianis Simonis of
Utrecht believes that the "spiritual
vacuity" of Dutch society has left the
Netherlands open to an Islamic cultural takeover.
"Today we have discovered that we are
disarmed in the face of the Islamic danger,"
he said recently. He linked this to "the
spectacle of extreme moral decadence and
spiritual decline" that Europe offered to
young people.
Not so much a brave new world, but
a new world in which you're going to have to be very
brave.
Or there's always New Zealand.
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