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Europe’s advisors are telling it to finish killing itself
Frederick Kempe’s article in the Wall Street Journal, “Modern Islam’s European Stage,” exemplifies the emergent conventional wisdom. This conventional wisdom claims that Europe is suicidal because it refuses to see the necessity of … integrating its Muslims. Kempe writes that like a man tumbling down to his doom without realizing it, the French and the Europeans
continue to live in denial over the dangers posed to themselves and the world from their common inability to integrate growing Muslim minorities.Take that in. The path to Europe’s survival is to integrate millions of unassimilated and unassimilable Muslims. Kempe’s authority is Olivier Roy, author of Globalized Islam, the thesis of which is that Islamic extremism results from the encounter between Western society and the alienated Muslims living in it, who, seeking an identity, opt for jihadism. According to Roy, the solution for Europe is U.S.-style integration, in which moderate Muslims would be included in the system, much as minority role models such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have been included in America. The key error made by Roy and his acolytes (who also include Francis Fukuyama) is that they have no grasp of Islam as a divinely authoritative, binding, and unchangeable doctrine. Instead, they see it only as a “culture,” the members of which, like those of other cultures, can, they presume, be “integrated” in the host society. The fact that Kempe adduces the examples of Powell and Rice as proof that the U.S. has successfully integrated (or, in American usage, assimilated) its black population shows how superficial is his grasp of the problem. As the profound and ongoing black hostility toward white America demonstrates, even when Islam is not part of the picture, the successful integration of distinct racial/cultural groups into a majority culture—meaning integration in which the majority culture maintains its identity, coherence, and confidence—is highly problematic and most likely impossible. Successful integration becomes absolutely impossible when the thing to be integrated is not a culture or an ethnic group but the world-conquering religion of Islam. And indeed there is a whole lot of integrating for the French to do. Kempe points out that not a single Muslim member representing mainland France sits in the 577-member French National Assembly. Think of the wonderful reforms France’s elite can now engage in to get more Muslim members into the National Assembly, and, ultimately, assure that their numbers be proportional to that of France’s Muslim population. The future laid out by Roy, Kempe, and now Chirac is clear: the more threatening the Muslims in Europe become, the more the Europeans will bemoan their own inadequate efforts to integrate them, and the greater such efforts they will make. It is Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society as applied to Europe: the worse a minority behaves, the more the majority blames itself.
Pace Kempe, the suicide of France does not consist in France’s failure to integrate its Muslim population. The suicide, which is a continuing process, has consisted in France’s mass admission of Muslims in the first place. The “integration” of those millions of Muslims—which Chirac, Roy, Kempe, Fukuyama et al. see as the key to French and European survival—will only be the completion of the suicide. Email entry |