[Newsbot]

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: Flea problems (click to view)
Date: January 5, 2010
So we now know that the underpants Christmas bomber guy spent some time training in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, which of course now makes Yemen the Big New Scary Important Country We Must All Care About.

Or maybe not. Quips Mark Steyn:

The 9/11 killers were mostly Saudi. But the Shoebomber was a British subject. So were the Heathrow plotters. And the Pantybomber was educated in British schools — first in Togo; then at University College, London — and there is plenty of evidence he was radicalized while in the U.K. So three of the four circles of homeland-security hell with which the public are tortured are British in origin.

In his very fascinating book about Muslim immigration, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, author Christopher Caldwell identifies Britain as the EU country most plagued by organized terrorist extremism within its borders. British Muslims are, in short, some of the world's most dangerous, because the country harbors such an active and vibrant underground (and in some cases, not even so underground) network of militant recruiters, preachers, and ideologues. Plus all the access to modern technology and communications that only a true global city like London can offer.

So the real country to watch in the coming days is not the P.D.R.Y., but the good old U.K. It's easy to point fingers at the crazy backwards Yemenis for failing to do something about all the Al-Qaeda in their midst, but what's Gordon Brown's excuse?

[Ombrageux]

Well, we all know what Mark Steyn's solution to this is.

[Psudo]

Ombrageux wrote:

Well, we all know what Mark Steyn's solution to this is.

Effective.

[martin14]

Personally, I think Britain has already been lost, short of a colossal
reverse in policy and the expressions of the people.

Too many are too afraid to speak out and force the government to do something.



Other European countries are in a similar situation; however, you can
see the right slowly coming back into European politics.
As the pendulum swings, we will see if it has a tangible impact.
I'm personally not that hopeful, but I think I'll be dead by the time it
gets really out of hand.


The East European countries will be the last to fall, some of them may even
leave the EU before to try and escape.

Gordon Brown has no excuse; all parties in Britain have no excuse.
They simply don't have the balls to do anything, lost in their 4 year vision
of the world.

The West will fall.. it may up to the Chinese to defeat Islam...

[ShepherdsDog]

Huntingdon postulated that this was the way things were going to go this way as early as 1973. He later expanded on his paper with his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in 1996.

Truth be told, if forced to chose between the two evils, I'd rather live under an authoritarian Confucian system than an Islamic one. As long as you don't rock the boat too much, the Chinese system lets you alone and allows for a large degree of egalitarianism.

[fire_i]

The saddening fact about British muslim extremists is how they prove access to education, which is probably the main path towards integration of immigrants to a society, sometimes just isn't enough. It takes only a few extremists to create a hundred more.

I'm not capable of thinking of a good and fair solution Britain could go for, but if there's one thing Canada can do, it's to learn from their mistakes ; so much as I hate to say it, it's true that immigrants from several specific countries have to be watched more closely, even if they already arrive well-educated and seem easy to adjust at first.

Isolated incidents caused by single individuals will always happen, especially since the advent of the internet (I'm mostly thinking about random shootings here - those are the work of all kinds of different people whose single common point is a warped mind), but the generalization of extremism *can* be stopped ; the point is to prevent dangerous extremists, notably those with authority (imams), from actually being able to propagate their views through or beside the mainstream system.

You can hardly stop someone who deliberately seeks extremism from reaching it, but reasonable awareness can be sufficient to prevent it from slipping in the ears of those that simply try to live their life. Disable extremists from the getgo, and you get rid of the sparks that light the barrels of powder... as it seems that so much as integration and education do wonders in virtually all cases, you simply can't get rid of every single barrel (the best one can do is therefore to make sure deeply problematic individuals, even if they can't really clearly be identified, de facto remain isolated to avoid organized incidents).

Finding the source of extremism before it gets the chance to generalize is what the UK has failed to do, and now there's little short of a general cleanup to solve their problem.

[Ombrageux]

Why don't people say explicitly what will happen to the UK? That it will be "Islamized" along with the whole of Europe? People talk of Muslims the way they used to speak of Jews: a rootless, selfish, "eternal" minority that necessarily undermines the roots of "Western civilization".

Let us be clear, at least about the UK, those who speak about it (Caldwell, Steyn, Bauer and the rest of the Eurabia cottage industry) do it not for a sense of a balanced view of race relations in Europe, but as sensationalist race baiters (which is an easy avenue to book sales). We can have a discussion about terrorism committed by British Muslims. This can be talked about rationally and without alarmism as we once talked about the "homegrown" terrorism of other kinds past and current, from the secessionist movements of ETA and Irish Republican Army to the Red Brigades and Red Army Faction in Italy and Germany respectively.

What is not acceptable is portraying the UK (and the rest of Europe) haplessly being taken over by some mythical Muslim majority. France is 10% Muslim. Germany, after half a century of "mass immigration" has a "whopping" 1 in 20 residents who are Muslim. These kind of apocalyptic scenarios are the most ridiculous with regard to the UK, although they are popular because narratives of Europe infertility and inaction with regard to Muslim relentless immigration/procreation segway easily into neocon narratives about European "appeasement" of Islam in the GWOT. In short, the takeover of Europe by Muslim immigrants is punishment for its lack of faith in the American crusade (never mind that most European governments (not necessarily the peoples) followed the United States of America into both wars in Afghanistan and Iraq). Very compelling narrative, one can see why it would appeal to neoconservative Americans and neo-Fascist Europeans.

But, in the UK, such phantasmagoria can only be based on pure, unalloyed ignorance (if not lying) and I think both are at work. The fact remains that the U.K. has many sources of mass immigration: Ireland, France, Eastern Europe, the West Indies and India as well as Muslims from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Most ethnic minorities in the UK aren't even Muslims at all.

In truth, the "Islam" issue as used in the Eurabia industry is just a proxy for race, a way of obfuscating the debate about immigration, a way of putting a simple and misleading narrative in front of a complex reality. This wouldn't be so problematic - we need simplifications to engage with a world that is too complex - if it weren't for its hateful implications.

More on Caldwell's book and Muslims in Europe in general can be found here.

[Zipperfish]

Ombrageux wrote:

Well, we all know what Mark Steyn's solution to this is.

I don't.

[Ombrageux]

Steyn:
* If Muslims reach 20% of population we will lose our democracies.
* We must remain democracies at home (and we're not uncomfortable with imposing democracy abroad regardless of domestic or international opinion or law).
* Assert unsubstantiated notion that will happen within 40 years in most of Europe.
* Do the "math".

[Zipperfish]

Ombrageux wrote:

Steyn:
* If Muslims reach 20% of population we will lose our democracies.
* We must remain democracies at home (and we're not uncomfortable with imposing democracy abroad regardless of domestic or international opinion or law).
* Assert unsubstantiated notion that will happen within 40 years in most of Europe.
* Do the "math".

Thanks.

There is merit to the fact that you shouldn't overwhelm a succcessful culture through immigration from cultures that are far different than your own. That's a recipe for conflict. France is seeing this, and to some extent, England. Mind you the lesson from the various immigrant influxes to teh US show that the conflict tends to attenuate out over time.

20th century Western morality would dictate that "It's OK to protect your culture, but you shouldn't protect your race." It's a tenuous and thorny divide between race and culture. Race and culture are like flesh and blood--different but messy to separate. However, I've noticed early in the 21st century that racism is coming into vogue agaion. Freedom adn equlaity are becoming less the moral virtues than security and authority.

The white/Christian race is, in fact, in decline. I'm not an expert, but I gather that having less children is common with affluent societies. All the other races are increasing in number. Muslims in particular. Maybe that's the big fear. I mean, Muslims don't offer much of a military threat. Even as a security threat, terrorists are more of a problem than a crisis when you look at the statisticss. The barbarians aren't exactly at the gates of Rome yet.

I live in a neighbourhood with lots of Muslims, primarily from Iran (Persians) and Iraq (Arabs). I have yet to see a naqib or a burqa. I see headscarves quite a bit, but even those aren't ubiquitous. A lot of the teenage girls are out on the beach in the summer time in their two piece bikinis. Culturally these Muslims are a lot different than Somali or Pakistani Muslims. I'm fine with them in my neighbourhood. I've never had any issues.

[Rhoffman]

Nice..... wow..... I can't believe that I still remembered having this account. It's been forever since I last posed here, as I didn't even know that the site was active again.

As for the situation itself, way too many people see a Muslim and automatically assume that they're a dangerous outsider that wants to undermine society. In the work that I do, I've seen it from a veteran's group that wants to protest the construction of a new mosque in the area and of a local Muslim constituency group regularly dealing with harassment issues even though they've been members of the community for about three decades and play an active role in the local chambers of commerce and village and township offices in the area. When an entire subset of the population is constantly being refuted when assimilating into our culture (and yes, for the most part, there is a great deal of assimilation) only to have their "outsider" status thrown in their faces at every step along the way, it's not that surprising that discontent and support for fanaticism grows.

However, let me be very, very clear.... I'm not giving an excuse for domestic terrorism or anything of the like, nor am I implying that it's all whitey's fault.

[JJ]

Re: Ombrageux

I think you are focusing too much on the strict numbers game. A big point of the Eurabia set is that the European majorities are so emasculated by their own smothering culture of political correctness and racial insecurity that they remain incapable of utilizing the power that being the majority culture would ordinarily afford. And this becomes uniquely dangerous because Islam, is, in fact, a particularly aggressive minority culture due to the uniqueness of their religious beliefs and the politics of the post-9/11 world.

It's also worth noting that what makes Europe's domestic Islamic problem unique from other experiences with domestic terrorism on the continent is that Muslims are only there because the governments of Europe imported them. Muslim immigration is the direct result of specific government policy, and it seems reasonable that the majority should be allowed to decide whether or not they want to reexamine it.

[Ombrageux]

The numbers game is important because Caldwell, Steyn et al use sensationalism to spread their books. Caldwell's book cover is one of a Islamic crescent suggestively eating the circle of European stars. Mark Steyn's America Alone has hapless North America surrounded by lands overtaken by Islamic flags (presumably Europe and Latin America). The spread of the notion of this "congenitally subversive minority" will one day become the majority and destroy "the West" can only lead to the conclusion that the number of Muslims (whether born in Europe or immigrants) must be limited or - better yet - reduced. I let you imagine where you think this logic leads one to. (Conveniently, we have examples of it in Bosnia and Kosovo, where the conflict was hardly caused by the fact the Muslims of those countries were somehow "fundamentalist" or even religiously motivated (about as relevant as Catholic/Protestant theory and practice are to Northern Ireland).)

Second, there are numerous stereotypes about Europe and its Muslims. The fact is, we have very little religiously-motivated terrorism in Europe, even in the UK. It is an issue, but if we consider that Muslims have been in Europe in fairly large numbers for half a century, we can see that the "terrorism issue" has been almost negligible.

The reality is that it is a red herring. The far more important one is one of classical race relations, which differ from country to country. To generalize, however, the concerns of young European Muslims are not so different from the issues facing minorities everywhere in the West: identity, racism, emasculation, job prospects, marginalization, unemployment, etc. (not to mention RnB and Hip-Hop). These are real and serious issues that need to be addressed, but Caldwell and Steyn make their livings off being extremely selective. There are similar problems among many ethnic minorities in Europe and North America including West Indian immigrants and their descendants, African-Americans and Roma. (Incidentally, most Third World migrants from rural areas are conservative in the extreme, and not just Muslims. It is in China that they used to bind women's feet until Mao's cultural revolution ended the practice. In India, widows are often expected to have "non-lives" or else throw themselves on their husband's funeral pyre. There is also the inglorious caste system. Muslims hardly have a monopoly on being reactionary. There is no reality some commentators can't overcome with a little selective generalization.)

By isolating Muslim discontent and problems without context or comparison, the Eurabians successfully pander to their audience's prejudices and demonize a minority. It also contributes to the impression that somehow White Europeans are "giving in" or "bending over backwards" for the newcomers, which if one knows anything about the history of immigration and race relations in Europe, is literally meaningless if not ass backward. Muslim Europeans were considered a temporary, irredeemably foreign presence not warranting rights for a very long time in most countries. It is only in the 1980s that we even began to see non-Whites treated as even theoretically part of the national community in France and the U.K. In Italy and Germany there still is some difficult separating national identity from notions of "blood and soil". There is no question as to who has been "bending over".

[CanadianJeff]

It really is the truth I feel that people are so afraid of being intolerant that they easily allow others to be intolerant of them if it means they aren't the ones being called a racist.

In fact this is a bit of a rant but I'm really sick of people using the word racist every two minutes in some spots like it's common.

It really degrades how powerful the word really is and where it should really be used...against those radical sons of b*^*es that would kill your family and sexually abuse your children because you don't believe in the same magical figment of the so called "holy word" that 20 million religions claim they have and only they have.

THAT is real racism. If your not middle eastern then these idiots will gladly blow you up or kill you for the sake of it.

We need to stop tollarating ourselves to death and start holding accountable any governments who follow these stupid extreme laws in the Qu'ran. If your not a friend of the idea of gender equality, open and honest communication, freedom of choice and that life is worth protecting then you need to get the hell out of Canada before we lock up your rear end and throw away the key.

Sorry but I needed to get that out. All this extra security is just plain stupid when you think about how easily the problem really is.

[Ombrageux]

I do like that the cartoon portrays the problem of Islamic terrorism as akin to that of fleas. Because unless (until?) they go nuclear that's about the scale of the thing: a minor irritant that is waaaay down the list of things that will kill you.