Rioting perpetrated by Parisian "disaffected youth" in 2005...
Yep, I'm sure they'll be much happier over here. -- jtf
Thursday, February 15, 2007
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org
The State Department Pushes European Muslims’ “Integration”
According to an inconspicuous article in the Washington Times the State Department is concerned about a “nativist surge” in Western Europe, and is seeking to counter it by creating “a position to coordinate efforts to reach out to European Muslims and help them better integrate into society.” Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said U.S. embassies and consulates in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries will introduce programs tailored to local conditions. The program will be managed by Farah Pandith, until recently a staffer on the National Security Council and a native of Srinagar (Kashmir), who moved to the State Department last week to head the new effort.
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The growing Muslim presence in Europe is “a fascinating issue . . . that the American government is just now trying to get its mind around,” Mr. Fried says. “It’s a huge problem, we are thinking about it seriously, and we’ve tried to do some intellectual framing-up.” The conclusion of that framing-up is strictly orthodox-liberal: Muslims in Europe are experiencing a “process of alienation” due to “no sense of integration” in their host societies—and that is Europe’s fault, according to Fried: “Europe has to learn to do that. You have a weird nativist surge in Western Europe, and a kind of odd panic: Aliens are here, they don’t accept our values, they are a threat to our way of life and turn to radicalism.” Foggy Bottom’s solution is to bring American Muslims to Europe to meet with their counterparts and try to “break down stereotypes” and help them end their “self-isolation.” Fried insists that he has not found strong anti-American feelings among European Muslims during his travels, even though many disagree with U.S. policies: “I don’t get big speeches.” he said. “They say, ‘We want to live in Europe. Can you help us out? Do you understand us? We want to be good Muslims and good Europeans.”
Mr. Fried is dangerously deluded. His implied view that America has been successful in integrating “her” Muslims into the societal mainstream—so successful, in fact, that the model is ready to be exported to Europe—is not supported by facts. For the time being, America is in far better shape than Europe, but it would be dangerous to assume that this is so because Muslims have better assimilated into American culture. It would be an even greater folly to hope that America’s economic, political and cultural institutions act as a powerful source of self-identification that breeds personal loyalty and commitment to the host-society that is so evidently absent among the Muslims in Europe. As we shall see, there is ample evidence that Muslims in America share the attitudes and aspirations of their European coreligionists.
There are three reasons why things are not as bad in America.
First of all, Muslims do not account for much more than one percent of the population of the United States, in contrast to Western Europe where their share of the population is up to ten times greater. They like to pretend otherwise, of course, and groups such as the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Student Association, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American Muslim Council (AMC), and the Harvard Islamic Society routinely assert that there are between 4.5 and 9 million Muslims in the United States. It is remarkable that these sources do not provide any empirically verifiable basis for their figures. Impartial studies currently place their number at between 2 and 4 million. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) polled more than 50,000 people in 2001 and found the total American Muslim population to be 1.8 million.
The second difference is in the fact that Muslim enclaves in Europe are ethnically more homogenous. Most Muslims in France, Spain and Belgium came from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. In Germany and Austria they are mostly Turks. In Britain they are overwhelmingly from the Indian Subcontinent. Their group cohesiveness based on Islam is additionally reinforced by the bonds of ethnic, cultural and linguistic kinship. In the United States, by contrast, neither Arabs nor Sub-Continentals enjoy similar dominance within the Muslim community, which is therefore not equally monolithic.
And finally, there are proportionately fewer U.S. citizens among Muslims in America. In France and Britain, by contrast, most Muslims are citizens of those countries and feel free to act assertively (or even criminally) without any fear of deportation. As permanent residents they continue to refrain from statements and acts that may make them excludable under current laws. But as soon as they gain citizenship, some among them soon rediscover the virtues of sharia and jihad.
On the whole, Muslim immigrants in the United States do not have different attitudes to the host-society from their coreligionists in Europe. The image of America in the Muslim world is far more negative than that of any European country: 81 percent of Pakistanis dislike America while only 10 percent have a favorable image of it. Furthermore, sizable percentages of Muslims all over the world—73 percent in Lebanon, which is considered ripe for a “Cedar Revolution” and has a large Christian minority!—believe that suicide bombings can be justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies.
That baggage comes to the West with the Muslim immigrants and it is transmitted to their Western-born children. In a survey of newly naturalized citizens, 90 percent of Muslim immigrants said that if there were a conflict between the United States and their country of origin, they would be inclined to support their country of origin. In Detroit 81 percent of Muslims “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that Shari’a should be the law of the land. The picture becomes even more disturbing if we look at the incidence of terrorist threats America faces from the ranks of that one percent of its citizenry.
Fried’s assertions reflect a structural problem at the heart of this nation’s decision-making: the refusal of the American elite class to accept that Islam as such, traditionally interpreted, poses a threat, and not some allegedly aberrant variety of it. The enemy is well aware of the opportunity provided by this failure. It sees the liberal mindset as his most powerful secret weapon, while despising it at the same time. The MAS Chicago chapter’s Web site states matter-of-factly that Western secularism and materialism are evil, and that Muslims should “pursue this evil force to its own lands” and “invade its Western heartland.”
The outcome of the misnamed war on terror will depend on our ability to halt this ongoing invasion. The precondition is to accept that a practicing Muslim who comes to the US cannot be “absolutely and entirely” loyal to the United States by definition. The basis of the social and legal order and source of all obligation in Islam is the Kuran, the final revelation of Allah’s will that is to be obeyed by all creation. His divine sovereignty is irreconcilable with popular sovereignty, the keystone of democracy. Politics is not “part of Islam,” as this would imply that, in origin, it is a distinctly separate sphere of existence that is then eventually amalgamated with Islam. Politics is the intrinsic core of the Islamic imperative of Allah’s sovereignty.
The result of that imperative is that among some three million Muslims in the United States of America there are sufficient numbers of terrorist sympathizers and active human assets to justify expenditure of some $300 billion annually in direct and indirect homeland security costs, excluding military operations abroad. That money would not need to be spent if America had been prudent enough to devise a sane immigration policy back in the days of Lyndon Johnson. The tangible cost of the presence of a Muslim man, woman and child to the American taxpayer is at least $100,000 each year. The cost of the general unpleasantness associated with the terrorist threat and its impact on the quality of our lives is, of course, incalculable.
Srdja Trifkovic is the foreign-affairs editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and director of The Rockford Institute's Center for International Affairs.
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