EURABIA? HMMPH! AN ABSURD CONCEPT!

In an article in The Brussels Journal, journalist Paul Belien paints a picture of a Europe destined to disappear before a tide of Islamists and non-Europeans. He writes that Muslims will outnumber, by outbreeding, the European natives, and that in twenty-five years immigrants will take over from a population that has neither the will nor the spirit to resist.


Wikipedia entry for the author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Belien
Link to the front page of the Brussels Journal: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/
The article in question: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1609/print


That point of view is unnecessarily defeatist.


A generation from now, many of those Muslims will be European - much more European than their more noisy elements seem at present.

[They are more likely to blend into the overwhelming majority and common culture than blend into each other - on the way to sameness with an Algerian, for instance, a Pakistani will have to go through English and French first. A Dutch Moroccan will need German to speak to a Berlin Turk. And your average Somali in Rotterdam has nothing in common with a Bengali in Warsaw. Not even religion unites them, even though they claim that in common. The idea of a pan-Islamic Umma is an abstract concept that only grabs your loyalty if you speak the same language as whoever else is in your mob.]


There are already intellectuals, professionals, scholars, and businessmen of Muslim background - some of the best writing in Dutch today is by people of Turkish or Moroccan extraction. Their writing is secular, and humanist. And while they appreciate their parents culture and history, to them it is mostly something they know second or third-hand; they read about it, in Dutch, from an academic pov.
Hell will freeze over before they think of "returning" to the back of the Riff mountains or Anatolia.
If they were forced, by rising European xenophobia and intolerance, to do so, they would upset the applecart in North Africa and Asia Minor. They are too European.


The other tendency that is often overlooked is that underneath that flinter-thin veneer of civilization, most Europeans are still too darn close to the homicidal maniacs that they were for twenty centuries.
Europe has indeed experienced peace longer than ever before..... As a continent. As individual countries, much of Europe has experienced civil discord and repression: Spain was a brutal dictatorship until the seventies, along with Portugal and Greece. All of Eastern Europe was under the boot of Stalin and his successors until the eighties. Northern Ireland has barely had ten years of peace. The Balkans haven't even had that.
The Dutch didn't start getting over the loss of their empire till the seventies. The French still hold on to a few scraps of empire, and fought savagely in Indochina and North Africa till barely one generation ago. The British have sent troops overseas fairly regularly, even up to the present. Europeans are less removed from organized violence than we think.

Underneath that seeming calm (remember, flinter-thin veneer), the average European has less tolerance towards otherness than many Americans. The likelihood of ethnic bloodshed is probably greater than when anybody still felt any guilt over the Jews.


Turkish and Moroccan neighborhoods conveniently concentrate the probable victims of future pogroms, in combustible substandard housing, away from the limelight. The Banlieus of Paris will never be economically developed - any Arab living there who wants a better life will have to yank himself out of that environment and into the middle-class. And there is no other way to do that than by becoming middle-class. That same Arab will not look kindly on thuggery and goon-style behaviours from his kindred; they more than anything else will be a hindrance, and a threat to his family's wellbeing and future. And he knows that. Boy does he know that. The cries for a stronger police come loudest from the people on the verge of escaping poverty. They do not want the open doorway and the beckoning brightness to be shut off by Abdoullah the high-school drop-out or Iftakar the drug-dealer and petty-thief. Heck, they won't even admit that Abdoullah is their cousin, or Iftakar their former classmate.


Meanwhile, in the small towns of Europe, the inhabitants beat the crap out of anything too foreign. And shut off their society from weirdoes, freaks, and outsiders.

Trust me - I grew up in liberal, tolerant, humanist Holland. You do NOT want to be an immigrant in the country districts of that society. Those folks simply haven't discovered lynching yet; when they do, they'll take to it like they were to the manner born.

Every week, there are reports of immigrants being persecuted, beaten up, harassed out of their homes, threatened........
Pogrom doesn't seem to be a Dutch word.... Yet.
Other Europeans aren't any better. They too will discover the meaning of that practice, even if they have to invent a different word for it.

[Perhaps the term Serb will become a verb - even though many people seem to have forgotten that the Serbs committed mass-Hutu in the Balkans. It's worth speculating about.]


I do not fear for the Europe I know. It was not a very pleasant place to begin with, and that which was indeed pleasant will quite probably survive. The immigrants have already enriched the host countries - not only by their cheap labour, but also culturally.
As just one facet of that change, English food nowadays is even half-way edible (both Chicken Tikka Masala and Vindaloo compete for British National Dish), the Dutch certainly would face gustatory boredom were it not for Indonesian, Surinamese, Turkish, and Moroccan influences, and the best that can be said for German and Scandinavian cuisines is that they do not particularly offend (well, other than 'Curry Wurst' - that offends beyond all reason).

More Europeans today speak English than ever before, and European horizons have expanded enormously.
The world has become a different place. That is all. There is no deluge.

Now if only the twentieth century would finally penetrate to the provinces, things would be perfect.