Europe -- Islamofascism or Eurofascism, unless Sane Europeans Act Fast Enough
The President of Iran recently said that within a dozen years Europe will become a Muslim continent.
I don't think that this will actually happen, and certainly not within "a dozen years." The numbers just don't add up. The reason I don't think that it will happen is that I think that Europe will have a major backlash against Islam.
Think about it. The European Muslim immigrant community aggressively avoids assimilation. This means that European non-Muslims rarely interact with European Muslims in any mode other than the economic or the confrontational. Thus the European Muslims are not building a protective layer of European non-Muslims who have a history of friendships in the Muslim community.
At the same time, the preachers urge, and the young men execute, unprovoked assaults, rapes and murders against European non-Muslims. Mostly young European non-Muslims. And each one of them beaten, raped or murdered has friends and family, who afterwards are likely to fear and hate Muslims.
No immigrant community has ever behaved like this before, unless they first conquered the natives in war. There is a good reason. What the European Muslims are doing is likely to call a major pogrom down on their heads.
The European regimes are trying very hard to appease the Muslim immigrants, which is making the problem worse. The immigrants are taking the European official behavior to mean that the Europeans are spineless, that they have already been conquered. And the European masses are increasingly losing faith in the institutions of their own liberal democracy.
Meanwhile, that younger generation whose teenage experiences have included a friend raped or beaten by Muslim gangs is getting older, and moving into the institutions of the larger society. While the older generation, whose youth included decolonialization and hence the expectation of having to give way before Third World demands, is dying out.
The best possible outcome, from a humanitarian point of view, would be if this leads to merely conservative (*) governments within the framework of liberal democratic regimes. These conservative governments will then close off further Muslim immigration while providing incentives for Muslims already in the country to begin emigrating -- simply cutting welfare benefits, while enforcing the existing laws upon such communities, might be sufficient (**).
What is also possible is that the appeasers will hang on to power long enough, with the aid of the votes of the Muslim minority, that the European majority (which will no longer consider the Muslim votes legitmiate) will lose all faith in liberal democracy, and will support some sort of fascist coups (***). The new fascist regimes will then more or less violently drive out, or even massacre, the Muslims -- to the cheers of a now-thoroughly anti-Muslim population.
One scary but likely possibility is a "split outcome," in which some countries stay democratic, some go Eurofascist, and some go Islamofascist. This outcome would smash the EU, and make an actual war, possibly a genocidal one, in Europe highly probable.
Such is the outcome that the EU risks by its refusal to deal with the issue now, while it can still be done humanely and democratically.
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(*) What the Europeans would call "liberal" as opposed to "labour" or "social-democratic."
(**) This issue, by itself, might wreck the EU.
(***) Keep in mind that democracy in Europe, outside of Britain, is only skin-deep.
I don't think that this will actually happen, and certainly not within "a dozen years." The numbers just don't add up. The reason I don't think that it will happen is that I think that Europe will have a major backlash against Islam.
Think about it. The European Muslim immigrant community aggressively avoids assimilation. This means that European non-Muslims rarely interact with European Muslims in any mode other than the economic or the confrontational. Thus the European Muslims are not building a protective layer of European non-Muslims who have a history of friendships in the Muslim community.
At the same time, the preachers urge, and the young men execute, unprovoked assaults, rapes and murders against European non-Muslims. Mostly young European non-Muslims. And each one of them beaten, raped or murdered has friends and family, who afterwards are likely to fear and hate Muslims.
No immigrant community has ever behaved like this before, unless they first conquered the natives in war. There is a good reason. What the European Muslims are doing is likely to call a major pogrom down on their heads.
The European regimes are trying very hard to appease the Muslim immigrants, which is making the problem worse. The immigrants are taking the European official behavior to mean that the Europeans are spineless, that they have already been conquered. And the European masses are increasingly losing faith in the institutions of their own liberal democracy.
Meanwhile, that younger generation whose teenage experiences have included a friend raped or beaten by Muslim gangs is getting older, and moving into the institutions of the larger society. While the older generation, whose youth included decolonialization and hence the expectation of having to give way before Third World demands, is dying out.
The best possible outcome, from a humanitarian point of view, would be if this leads to merely conservative (*) governments within the framework of liberal democratic regimes. These conservative governments will then close off further Muslim immigration while providing incentives for Muslims already in the country to begin emigrating -- simply cutting welfare benefits, while enforcing the existing laws upon such communities, might be sufficient (**).
What is also possible is that the appeasers will hang on to power long enough, with the aid of the votes of the Muslim minority, that the European majority (which will no longer consider the Muslim votes legitmiate) will lose all faith in liberal democracy, and will support some sort of fascist coups (***). The new fascist regimes will then more or less violently drive out, or even massacre, the Muslims -- to the cheers of a now-thoroughly anti-Muslim population.
One scary but likely possibility is a "split outcome," in which some countries stay democratic, some go Eurofascist, and some go Islamofascist. This outcome would smash the EU, and make an actual war, possibly a genocidal one, in Europe highly probable.
Such is the outcome that the EU risks by its refusal to deal with the issue now, while it can still be done humanely and democratically.
===
(*) What the Europeans would call "liberal" as opposed to "labour" or "social-democratic."
(**) This issue, by itself, might wreck the EU.
(***) Keep in mind that democracy in Europe, outside of Britain, is only skin-deep.