Required Reading
Reuel Marc Gerecht has an article on Europe’s homegrown Islamists for the Weekly Standard. A sample:
What was once unquestionably an import has gone native, mutated, and grown. Some of what the Europeans are now confronting–and for the United States this is very bad news–is probably a locally generated Islamic militancy that is as retrograde and virulent as anything encountered in the Middle East. “European Islam” appears to be an increasingly radicalizing force intellectually and in practice. The much-anticipated Muslim moderates of Europe–the folks French
scholar Gilles Kepel believes will produce “extraordinary progress in civilization,” a new “Andalusia” (the classical Arabic word for Moorish Spain) that will save us from Osama bin Laden’s jihad–have so far not developed with the same gusto as the Muslim activists who have dominated too many mosques in “Londonistan” and elsewhere in Europe. Moderates surely represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe, but like their post-Christian European counterparts, they usually express their moderation in detachment from religious affairs.
Though Europeans often fail to see it, the secularization of the Muslims living in their midst has been, by and large, a great success. It explains why Muslim activists gain so much attention, be they arch-conservatives, like the devotees of the Tabligh movement in Britain and on the continent who espouse segregation in Europe, or “progressives,” like the Switzerland-based intellectual Tariq Ramadan, who refuses forthrightly to declare the Muslim Holy Law null and void as a political testament for Muslims in a European democracy. The moderates have abandoned the field. They have become European. The militants, who perhaps should be seen as deviants from a largely successful process of secularization, are the only ones left ardently praying.
We’re still a long way off from Eurabia, and that day may never come. If enough of Europe musters the will to fight the radicals, and to keep turning the majority of Muslims into Europeans.
Anyway, read the whole thing and all that.
Stephen,
Mr. Gerecht wrote an intersesting article with many valid observations, but his money quote, “Their dispute with the world isn’t imported from the Middle East: It is truly modern, aimed against American imperialism, capitalism, etc. ” gave away the game.
He uses the US and our so called imperialism and culture to blame this on us. It’s the bad old American’s fault.
Yawn. Yea, sure, right, whatever. But what he fails to mention is that perhaps another and even bigger root cause for the alienation of many second generation muslims who’s parents immigrated from abroad is that after 30 to 40 years, they have not assimilated into manistream society because the Europeans don’t want to assimilate them. Maybe, just perhaps they are the racist, chauvinistic closed society that they always accuse us of being. Ask a French or Russian Jew about that.
Just perhaps these morons are railing against their blank future in Europe?
Gerecht goes on to say, “They exist in a militant reality abandoned by the extreme left, where the young live only to destroy the system. . .”
C’mon Reuel, you can do better than that. Even a cursory examination would reveal to any casual observer that the only thing these two movements might share is an inchoate rage against “the establishment.” They couldn’t be more philosophically apart.
And I didn’t see the extreme left in the 60′s & 70′s embracing the death cult of suicide bombing and random mass terror. They still had some western judeo-christian/Greco-Roman values. Basically, they still embraced life, not death.
I still have to subscribe to the theory that this is a clash of cultures and though the suicide bombers may be European or second generation Asian, the ideology that they embraced couldn’t be less European.
It seems to me this is just another passage in a long chronicle of denial on the part of Europeans, or at least some Europeans, to face the growing threat in their midst.
The demographics are against the Europeans and it won’t be that much longer before the growing muslim population reaches a critical mass and we do have Eurabia.
Furthermore, after decades of passivity, decadence and utter fecklessness in the face of events, I have my doubts as to whether they have the desire or ability to save themselves and regenerate Europe, with or without the muslim influx.
These are the same folks who stood and stared at their shoes while the Serbs commited genocide in Bosnia.
I don’t want to sound bleak about Europe, I hope that I’m mistaken. I really do. But I don’t hold out much hope for them unless there’s a mass epiphany and I don’t see too many Oriana Fallacis out there.
Maybe if there is any hope, it may lie in Eastern Europe? I don’t know.
Anybody who saw Tony Blair mush-mouthin’ his way through the press conference with John Howard yesterday knows things are going to get worse in Britain before or if ever they get better.
Although the Brit-in-the-street seems to get it, their leadership seems to have morphed “We will fight them on the beaches” into “We will engage them constructively in a limicole context…”
Thank God for unsophisicated Australians.
That’s a big ‘if’ Stephen, and Tim, check in with Steyn, there is no European culture for immigrants to assimilate into even if they were so desposed which they apparently aren’t
Multiculturalism is a euphemism for divide and conquer. In the US, we had and hope we will have again soon, a melting pot. We
Though Europeans often fail to see it, the secularization of the Muslims living in their midst has been, by and large, a great success.
From everything I’ve heard, from many different sources, this is a rather questionalbe statement. If this is untrue, it undermines most of his argument.
RPD – It’s untrue allright. Check fjordman.blogspot.com. It’s written by a Norwegian and has frequent comments by other Northern Europeans and what they are reporting is disturbing and distressing.
“Though Europeans often fail to see it, the secularization of the Muslims living in their midst has been, by and large, a great success.”
Yeah, right, that’s why there’s been hue and cry against the use of terror from the likes of these secular Muslims, nee Arabs.
Search anywhere and it’s nearly impossible to come up with prominent Arab Muslims, or prominent Muslims anywhere, denouncing the use of terror. All we get are white guys telling us Islam is a religion of peace.
As Steven den Beste commented elsewhere the other day, “a thing is what a thing does.” So far as I can tell, Islam tacitly endorses the wanton killing of non-Muslims.
Until the “moderates” start denouncing the “fundamentalists,” we need to be wary of the “secular” Muslims in society. If Muslims want to change the perception of Islam, its leaders need to clean house of the fanatics.
Secular society, however, may be screwed: If a London newspaper willfully employs a “journalist” who is a member of a terror-supporting Islamist group, it’s a good sign that a society has gone too far in the wrong direction.
I read about a book where they discussed Muslim immigrants living in poor neighborhoods in the UK. Here they are in “liberal” Britain, and they’re seeing the fallout of liberal permissiveness on the dumb and poor. Naturally, they reject it, because who wants their kids to grow up as single parents on drugs? This environment makes many immigrant parents even more socially conservative than they were in their home countries, which naturally feeds into radical islam. It’s easy to see Western society as ridden with filth when one lives in Western society’s ghettos.
Couple of points:
1. Homicide bombers are almost always affluent, and quite often western educated. Even in Palestine. Two of the London bombers came from millionaire families. This is not a poverty, lack of education issue at all–in fact negative correlation.
2. I saw a recnet poll of UK muslims, and a 7 country poll was recently taken of muslims. In the UK, support of homicide bombing was 16%. In the 7 country poll, it was 18%. Within the margin of error statistically–support is virtually identical in two sample areas. This shoots to hell the notion that lack of democracy and suppression is fueling the anger. Sadly. (Not sure what it portends for Iraq, Lebanon, etc with fledgeling democratic movements). The only good news: the support in the 7 country poll had come down over the last year.
How to explain the silence of the “moderate” muslims? I am convinced that the religion itself tacitly teaches, from birth, that non-believers are inferior and discriminatory behavior to non-believers is acceptable and perhaps even commendable. This treatment is indubitably codified in the Koran and Islamic law.
Therefore, moderate muslims view homicide bombing as an extreme variant within a contimuum of an otherwise universally accepted moral standard. IOW, homicide bombing is just behavior from essentially good boys gone a little too far. Boys will be boys.
If you really parse the words, most of the objections to date from moderate muslims have been voiced for the collateral muslim victims, not the infidel victims or the bombing itself. (To a certain extent the post 7/7 comments have mitigated this though.)
Required reading?
Where do YOU get off telling me what to read?
Don- You don’t so well with human interaction, do you? Reading someone’s blog is listening to their opinion, and Stephen seems to think the story should be required reading. Capiche?
Personally I think Stephen is being extremely overoptimistic.
Why would anyone think an American Muslim would not be the same as an Arab Muslim, or a Persian Muslim, or a French Muslim? A muslim is a Muslim.
The same can be said for Jews. An Americn Jew is the same as a Brit Jew who in turn is the same as a Dutch Jew. Why would they be different just because they lived in different places?
Jo,
The point isn’t that all muslims are bad. Let’s not drift into blind hatred of some group.
The point is that many of these folks haven’t been assimilated into the cultures of the countries to which they immagrated to.
In the period around one hundred years ago, the US was inundated by a tidal wave of immagrants. A greater influx than we are seeing now. My father’s parents were among them.
Because of the theory of the ‘melting pot’ where folks learn the English language, American history, customs and traditions and the responsibilities of citizenship, they blended in enough to be Americans and not only did they contribute much of value (see Stephen’s summer penne recipe), their children were thoroughly Americanized.
Thanks to ‘multiculturism’ that’s not happening today. Also, Europeans, though they don’t want to admit it are far more stratified by race and class and their societies culturally speaking are far more static than ours.
In college, I knew many Pakistani, Indian and other students. Those that were born here were as American as you and I and would be as out of place in the ‘old country’ as we would be.
Europe has far deeper problems and this is just one of its more virulent manifestations.
Rod Stanton
richard mcenroe – The # of Jews that support the Democratic Party is far less today that it was 70 years ago. Many Jews today are Republican because they do get it. I know first hand.
Why Rhetoric Matters, redux: a few closing thoughts
Will Femia of MSNBC's Clicked links to my piece criticizing western leaders and media sources for providing rhetorical cover for terrorists, an argument prompted by London bomber Shehzad Tanweer's purported admission to a cousin that "…
erp – Most European countries have held on to their cultures, and I don’t believe Mark Steyn said that there was no “European culture”. You go to France, you know at once everything is extremely French and everything is done the French way. Same with Spain.
You may be referring to Britain, which is not technically “European”. In the British case, it is true that the hard left has manipulated British culture out of Britain for reasons of their own – although what those reasons are is baffling.
Great post, hepzi.