Europe’s doom 39

(This post arises out of an interesting and important argument in the comments on the video Getting nowhere, posted below.)

Are there areas in Europe where Muslims have established small “states within a state”? And if so, are they “no-go areas” into which police forces fear to enter and enforce the law of the land?

Daniel Pipes has given much well-informed thought to the subject of Islam in Europe. On the “no-go areas” he wrote in November 2006:

They go by the euphemistic term Zones Urbaines Sensibles, or Sensitive Urban Zones, with the even more antiseptic acronym ZUS, and there are 751 of them as of last count. They are convienently listed on one long webpage, complete with street demarcations and map delineations.

What are they? Those places in France that the French state does not control. They range from two zones in the medieval town of Carcassone to twelve in the heavily Muslim town of Marseilles, with hardly a town in France lacking in its ZUS. The ZUS came into existence in late 1996 and according to a 2004 estimate, nearly 5 million people live in them.

In a series of updates he subsequently cited examples of such problematic “no-go areas” in France, Britain, and Germany.

Muslim enclaves exist, and Muslim populations are increasing, and Muslim power is growing in Europe.

So is Europe becoming an Islamic continent? Will the Europeans allow this to happen? If they’d rather not, what will and what can they do to prevent it?

In 2007 Daniel Pipes wrote that Europe faces “stark options” in dealing with the immense problem that the Muslim presence gives rise to.

Europe’s long-term relations with its burgeoning Muslim minority, the continent’s most critical issue, will follow one of three paths: harmonious integration, the expulsion of Muslims, or an Islamic takeover. Which of these scenarios will most likely play out?

He takes his third scenario, “Muslims Rule”,  first, sets out the case that has been made for it, and sums it up in these words:

This first argument holds that Europe will be Islamized, quietly submitting to the dhimmi status or converting to Islam, because the yin of Europe and yang of Muslims fit so well: low and high religiosity, low and high fertility, low and high cultural confidence. Europe is an open door through which Muslims are walking.

His second scenario is “Muslims Rejected” :

This scenario has indigenous Europeans – who do still constitute 95 percent of the continent’s population – waking up one day and asserting themselves. “Basta!” they will say, and reclaim their historic order. …

For years, Muslims have worried about just such incarceration and brutalization, followed by expulsion or even massacres. Already in the late 1980s, the late Kalim Siddiqui, director of London’s Muslim Institute, raised the specter of “Hitler-style gas chambers for Muslims.” Shabbir Akhtar warned in his 1989 book, Be Careful With Muhammad that “the next time there are gas chambers in Europe, there is no doubt concerning who’ll be inside them,” meaning Muslims. A character in Hanif Kureishi’s 1991 novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, prepares the guerilla war that he expects will follow after “the whites finally turned on the blacks and Asians and tried to force us into gas chambers.”

But it is more likely that European efforts at reclamation will be initiated peaceably and legally, with Muslims – in keeping with recent patterns of intimidation and terrorism – being the ones to initiate violence. Multiple polls confirm that about 5 percent of British Muslims endorse the 7/7 bombings, suggesting a general readiness to resort to force.

However it happens, a European reassertion cannot be assumed to take place cooperatively.

Thirdly he considers “Muslims Integrated”:

In the happiest scenario, autochthonous Europeans and Muslim immigrants find a modus vivendi and live together harmoniously. Perhaps the classic statement of this optimistic expectation was a 1991 study, La France, une chance pour l’Islam (“France, an Opportunity for Islam”) by Jeanne-Hélène and Pierre Patrick Kaltenbach. “For the first time in history,” they wrote, “Islam is offered the chance to waken in a democratic, rich, laic, and peaceable country.” That hopefulness lives on. An Economist leader from mid-2006 asserts that “for the moment at least, the prospect of Eurabia looks like scaremongering.” Also at that time, Jocelyne Cesari, associate professor of Islamic studies at the Harvard Divinity School, claimed a balance exists: just as “Islam is changing Europe,” she said, “Europe is changing Islam.” She finds that “Muslims in Europe do not want to change the nature of European states” and expects them to adapt themselves into the European context.

Such optimism, unfortunately, has little foundation. … Those polls of British Muslims for example, find that a majority of them perceive a conflict between their British and Muslim identities and want Islamic law instituted.

The possibility of Muslims accepting the confines of historic Europe and smoothly integrating within it can virtually be dismissed from consideration.

Having dismissed Muslim integration as unlikely, he is left with the alternative of Muslims rejected or ruling. Which it will be, he cannot predict:

As the American columnist Dennis Prager sums them up, “It is difficult to imagine any other future scenario for Western Europe than its becoming Islamicized or having a civil war.” Indeed, these two deeply unattractive alternative paths appear to define Europe’s choices, with powerful forces pulling in the contrary directions of Muslims taking over or Muslims rejected, Europe an extension of North Africa or in a state of quasi-civil war.

Which will it be? The decisive events that will resolve this question have yet to take place, so one cannot yet make the call. Decision-time is fast approaching, however. Within the next decade or so, today’s flux will end, the Europe-Islam equation will harden, and the continent’s future course should become apparent.

Correctly anticipating that course is the more difficult for being historically unprecedented. No large territory has ever shifted from one civilization to another by virtue of a collapsed population, faith, and identity [Rome? – JB]; nor has a people risen on so grand a scale to reclaim its patrimony. The novelty and magnitude of Europe’s predicament make it difficult to understand, tempting to overlook, and nearly impossible to predict. Europe marches us all into terra incognita.

In 2009 he considered another possible development:

A reader, Chris Slater of Upper Hutt, New Zealand, writes me to predict a fourth outcome as most likely: “larger existing Muslim areas will re-create themselves into independent national entities” and “by the middle of the twenty-first century nearly all western European countries will be riven by the creation of Islamic city states within their borders. For the sake of brevity they will be referred to as ‘microstates,’ that is, autonomous conurbations defined by the Islamic beliefs of their citizens.”

Slater foresees boundaries being formed “around existing Muslim centres of population, initially in France, Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, followed rapidly by Britain, Norway, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Spain. Dates for eastern European states, particularly Orthodox, may be more difficult to predict, although Russia, with 15 percent of its 143 million people professing Islam, may well lead many western European countries in having an independent Islamic state. By the end of this century this process will affect every non-Islamic state throughout the world.”

These microstates will enjoy a “monopoly on legitimate violence,” impose their own autonomous legal order, and form alliances among themselves. They will feature such Shar’i customs as polygyny, no-interest finance, huddud punishments, Islamic ways of dress, family “honor” codes, bans on criticism of Islam, and so on. Arabic and the dominant immigrant vernacular will enjoy more currency than the host country’s language. Street names will be changed, statues removed, churches and synagogues converted to mosques.

Slater sees this outcome this as “the only way to avoid the destruction of both the national cultures and, indeed, European civilization from total domination by the cultures of Muslim immigrants.”

But this scenario Pipes considered to be as unlikely as integration.

We think that Muslim rule is the most likely scenario; and that microstates, forming now as “no-go” areas, will be an intermediate phase on the way to complete Islamic domination.

There are new political parties in Europe which understand, as the old established parties do not, the threat of Islamization. (A new one has just come into existence in Germany, called Die Freiheit.) But what can they do at this late stage? Limit immigration? It’s too late for that to make a significant difference. Expel Muslims? Where to? Many, after all, have been born in Europe, and there are thousands of European converts. Resort to massacre? Most unlikely: the Holocaust, even though it does not inhibit persecution of the Jews or hostility to the State of Israel, does stand as too recent an act of shame to allow Europeans to commit cold-blooded murder on such a scale again in this century.

The low fertility rate of the Europeans cannot be reversed in time to prevent their nations dwindling, while that of the Muslims amongst them means there’ll be a Muslim majority within 50 years, barring some casus fortuitus to prevent it.

There remains the possibility of civil war.