THE EURABIA SPECTATOR: The River of No Return
Columns, Essays and
"THE EURABIA SPECTATOR" GEORGE NEUMAYR The River of No Return WE WANT THE RIVER OF ISLAM to enter the riverbed of secularism?" France's prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said in...
...Turkey Moves Closer to EU After Retreat on Adultery Law" and "A Tough Adultery Law Could Block Turkey's Entry to EU" were a few of the non-satirical September headlines in European newspapers...
...The question now is: When will the river of Islam swamp secular Europe...
...But historians will record that it was French secularism that created the conditions for secular Europe's demise by insisting that Europe embrace millions of Muslims who had no intention of embracing secularism...
...Bolkestein noted that in 1683 at the battle of Vienna Europeans defeated the Ottoman Turks...
...Its stated purpose was to bring Islam into line with "French values...
...It was slipped into a phrase about Europe's "cultural, religious and humanist heritage...
...Vatican Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has warned that Turkey's entrance into the EU could supply one of the final nails in Christian Europe's coffin...
...But historians will record that it was French secularism that created the conditions for secular Europe's demise by insisting that Europe embrace millions of Muslims who had no intention of embracing secularism...
...It is certainly self-delusion...
...As mosques spread and Gothic cathedrals emptied, French secularists fined authors who warned of the coming crisis and consigned to cultural oblivion the traditional protector of Europe—the Catholic Church...
...At the latest, following current trends, Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population at the end of the 21st century...
...Modern France carries the same attitude to Islam, imagining Parisian muftis issuing Voltairean fatwas and Muslims replacing their headscarves with berets, and when they don't, tolerance gives way to force...
...The fundamentalists are working toward a shock, one that is dangerous for the equilibrium of the state...
...But Chris Patten, the European Union's external affairs commissioner, says that Christian Europe is already dead...
...So how can Europe object to Turkey joining it...
...Bringing millions of Muslims into the country (against conservative criticism deemed "intolerant"), then criminalizing Islamic headscarves fits the pattern of French history since its Revolution: "Reason" produces chaos, the chaos then justifies the suspension of reason in favor of Napoleonic force...
...AFFARIN CAN PLAY DUMB and act like secular France didn't flood Eurpe with Islam...
...Consequently, most Muslims regard the council as a stooge-ridden joke...
...Muslims aren't fooled by "French Islam...
...Ratzinger calls this "self-hatred...
...Frits Bolkestein, a Dutch European Union official, said in September that Turkey's joining the EU would mean a Europe "Islamized" and likely to "implode...
...Europeans marry late and have few or no children...
...The religion that inspired Charles Martel to protect France against the Islamic invasion of the eighth century at the Battle of Tours was denied by Jacques Chirac even one historical mention in the founding documents of the European Union...
...The European secularists like Chirac who think that they can ride the tiger of Islam will be eaten by it...
...No joke...
...If Bernard Lewis is right about Islamic demography, he said, lifting the Islamic siege of Vienna will "have been in vain...
...Some have taken to the streets to protest the ban on headscarves...
...Turkey, he said, "has always represented another continent in the course of its history, in permanent contrast with Europe...
...The fear among European diplomats is not that an Islamic country of 70 million people might hasten the Islamization of Europe but that Turkey might criminalize adultery...
...The "Copenhagen criteria" is the EU's non-satirical measure for determining whether Turkey possesses the cultural qualifications to enter Europe...
...Sarkozy "reaped jeers and whistles," according to Time, when he "used a speech before more than 10,000 Muslims at an UOIF convention...
...But there's strong immigration: Turks in Germany, Arabs in France and Pakistanis in England...
...To which the European left responded: So what...
...France established the "French Council for the Muslim Religion" in 2003...
...France's ban on Islamic headscarves in public schools is a clumsy and last-ditch attempt to control an ascendant religion that threatens French secularism...
...others are simply turning to global Islam for money to finance private schools...
...NOVEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 37...
...One European editorial savaging Bolkestein for this speech was titled, "Open the Gates of Vienna...
...The thinkers of the French Revolution thought that they could rearrange class according to "reason...
...Former Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said no Imams who held views "contrary to the values of the Republic" could serve on the council...
...After the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF), which is associated with terrorist groups, picked up a sizable number of seats on the council in 2003, French officials were left sputtering that they didn't like the election results...
...As the representative of a secular state, I am not in favor of religious references...
...Europe will be a part of the Arab West," he said in an interview with the German newspaper Die Welt during the summer...
...The UOIF, said Malek Chebel, a Muslim anthropologist, to Time, "has endless money, great numbers of the faithful on their side, and they have time...
...In other words, secularize it...
...I certainly don't think we can say no to Turkey on the grounds that we are a Christian club," he has said...
...Historian Bernard Lewis predicts that Muslims will dominate Europe before the end of this century, turning Europe into an appendage of North Africa and the Middle East...
...Raffarin's question is a little late...
...France's prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said in September, alluding to the prospect of Turkey joining the European Union...
...When Pope John Paul II mildly suggested to him and other European leaders that the European Union constitution should acknowledge Europe's Christian roots if only as a matter of history, Chirac haughtily responded, "There has never been that kind of reference in the treaties...
...France is not changing Islam...
...France's desperate project to spread a "French Islam" is an admission of this crisis, not a solution to it...
...THE EURABIA SPECTATOR GEORGE NEUMAYR The River of No Return 0 WE WANT THE RIVER OF ISLAM to enter the riverbed of secularism...
...So far it has produced a dramatic backfire in the kidnapping of French journalists Christian Chesnot and George Malbrunot by Muslim terrorists who demand that the ban be rescinded...
...to vow that women must remove their veils for the photographs on their French identity cards...
...The river of Islam is already gushing through Europe—and secular France, home to over 5 million Muslims, released the floodgates...
...It hasn't...
...As Raffarin should know, France steered the river of Islam into Europe's riverbed of secularism, arrogantly assuming it would come out secular on the other side...
...Islam is changing France...
...This was itself a measure of Islam's hold on France and a sign that the terrorists had already won...
...GEORGE NEUMAYR French rationalism is justly famous for producing irrational outcomes...
...That is, France formed the council to take Islam out of the "cellars and garages," and it has...
...They know that Frenchifying Islam means removing Islam from Islam, and they are resisting it...
...Very few of them vote in the council's elections, and those who do tend to favor the extremists, which has led Time to conclude the "council could present as many problems as it solves...
...Now radical Islam can operate out of the French government...
...The terrorists succeeded in driving Jacques Chirac into the arms of Hezbollah, Hamas, Yasser Arafat, and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood as he asked them for help in rescuing the jour36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2004 nalists...
...The final text contains only the most oblique reference to religion...
...v. George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator...
...They only caused bloodshed...
...Europe's secular decadence is so advanced and comic that its only real objection to Turkey entering the European Union is that it might raise the continent's moral standards...
Vol. 37 • November 2004 • No. 9
