Immigrants

J. Peder Zane, in the Charlotte NC News & Observer, says, “If we're lucky, the clash of civilizations will not end with a bang but a whimper, not with a mushroom cloud but the cry of the baby that brings a Muslim majority to Western Europe.”

It could happen by mid-century.  It “appears inevitable.”  We have our immigrants, always have had them, and have a formula for handling and absorbing them.  It’s called assimilation.  Europe has no comparable experience and no formula. 

Zane points to Bruce Bawer’s “indispensable” new book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (Doubleday, $23.95, 247 pages), which I happen to be reading.  Bawer moved to Amsterdam to get away from a spoiled love affair — with his male partner.  It looked great to him, until he ran into immigrant Muslims.  His story starts with gay-bashing on the street with onlookers doing nothing. 

It continues with a devastating account of politically correct blindness to Europe’s enemy within, not just of gays like himself but of all Western values.  Women are 4th-class citizens in Muslim enclaves.  The enclaves are often left to themselves by government and become laws unto themselves.

It’s a tough book, full of warning.  It also offers stark contrast between a relatively open society, ours, and a relatively closed one, European.  Europe’s media are often subsidized by government or government-owned.  People much more reflexively approve what authorities do.  Public sentiments, however, are contradicted regularly in private conversation.