Daniel Pipes wonders:

Europe has simultaneously reached unprecedented heights of prosperity and peacefulness and shown a unique inability to sustain itself...Is it inevitable that the most brilliantly successful society also will be the first in danger of collapse due to a lack of cultural confidence and offspring?

All but inevitable, says Pipes in today's New York Sun.

'Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam.' So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione, or, "The Force of Reason." And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam.

Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition and its historic values....Indigenous Europeans are dying out...Into the void are coming Islam and Muslims. As Christianity falters, Islam is robust, assertive, and ambitious. As Europeans underreproduce at advanced ages, Muslims (reproduce) in large numbers while young.

....grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilization — at least until a Saudi style regime transforms them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up. The great national cultures — Italian, French, English, and others — will likely wither, replaced by a new transnational Muslim identity that merges North African, Turkish, subcontinental, and other elements.

Unless, says Pipes, there's a "resurgence of Christian faith, an increase in childbearing, or the cultural assimilation of immigrants,...Muslim modernization..(or) immigration from other sources," such as Latin America.

Pipes, of course, always sets the Thought Police howling. He raises uncomfortable yet vital questions most mainstream commentators painstakingly avoid. Nearly every week or two now, extremist Muslims tied to terrorist groups are arrested in Europe, either for blowing something up, or planning to. As the costs of policing against anti-Western hatred escalate, we still rush to ask, "What did we do to upset them?"

Even if most Western Muslims harbor no violent aims, they also do little overall to counter their brethren's contempt for a civilization which offers them the freedom to grow and prosper; or to hate and destroy.

Leftists love to trot out tired comparisons between Islamicists and home-grown European or U.S. terorrists (i.e. McVeigh, or Basque separatists). Absurd. No comparison in scale and implications. And if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were settled tomorrrow, not a thing would change.

Given current circumstances, much tighter immigration screening and a revisiting of quotas is a rational response in Europe, and the U.S. From what nations do the highest percentages of terrorists convicted for crimes against the West come? We know the answers, but political cowardice prevents a strong response.

Hat tip: Tom Rekdal

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at May 11, 2004 09:09 AM

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