Posted on 04/21/2010 1:11:05 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Our pal Right Girl notices that respectable European publications are beginning to sound awfully like America Alone. For example, the Belgian weekly Le Vif/L'Express:
With a rapidly growing population, the capital of Belgium is already one of the most multicultural in Europe. Muslims are already a majority in some neighborhoods...
You don't say. And where's that likely to lead?
Brussels, overwhelmingly Muslim in 20 years? It can't be totally ruled out... Today, families with children - 'Whites' and of the middle class - are leaving the 19 municipalities of the Brussels Region, attracted by the convenience and low prices of the Walloon Brabant, Flemish Brabant and Hainaut provinces. The birth rates of immigrants, which is slightly higher than that of natives, and the international immigration (mainly through family reunification), compensate for this exodus and reinforces it. In reality, Brussels is experiencing what French demographer Michèle Tribalat calls a "process of demographic substitution". One population replaces another.
Which is pretty much what I said in America Alone - although my comparison of the native European exodus with the "white flight" from failing US cities in the Seventies seems more relevant than rosy-hued paeans to the "low prices of the Walloon Brabant".
Unlikely as it sounds, my book is required reading at some colleges, and the other day I was taking some questions from students who were a bit skeptical of the thesis. And one of them asked how critics refuted my argument. Well, there's been a bit of nitpicking about the rate of demographic transformation from people who say it's absurd to think Europe will be semi-Muslim by 2030 or 2050 - a line of attack which concedes implicitly that that's where the Continent's headed, and we're merely quibbling about the date of arrival. But far more common on the progressive left is to deny there's anything worth arguing over. The more militant types, as Right Girl says, cry that it's racist even to raise the question. But the more benignly deluded do as various interviewers from Canada to Australia have done and respond: "So what if Europe becomes Muslim? What would be wrong with that?" Robert Voorhamme, Antwerp's alderman for education is a bit like that, explaining why there's nothing to worry about in the news that over 40 per cent of elementary school students choose Islam for their religious studies class (versus 31.5 per cent for "non-confessional morals" and 26.5 per cent for Catholicism):
'People see a threat where there is none,' says the alderman for education... 'It is a statement that the composition of our school population is changing. But that is not a reason to be schizophrenic and to exclusively aim at students who choose Islam for their religion class subject. Has anybody ever seen it as a threat that children choose Catholic religion, or for morals class?'
(Flemish original here.)
Well, whether or not it's a threat, it surely means something. I take a particular interest in Belgium because my mother grew up not far from Antwerp. If you had said to her in 1960 that within 50 years 40 per cent of the city's elementary school children would be Muslim, she and most other Belgians would have thought you were nuts. If you'd said it in 1970 or 1980, likewise. Yet it's happened, and it's now estimated that by 2012 a majority of grade-schoolers will be Muslim. Which means that in ten years' time Antwerp may not yet technically be majority Muslim, buts its energy, its character, its culture, its cusine increasingly will be.
Here's my question for the left - for women, gays, "progressives" generally: Which currently Muslim city would you wish to live in? I don't just mean visit, or pass through for a couple of years. I love Amman and Cairo, but that's in part because I know I have a return ticket to New Hampshire. So in which Muslim city would you like to live permanently? Make your life, build a career, raise your kids. And, if you're having trouble answering, why do you think Brussels and Antwerp - and many other European cities - will turn out any different? At best, they'll be like Kuala Lumpur, living on the inheritance of the past and the commercial acumen of the non-Muslim population, but with hardcore Islamization remorselessly nibbling in from the edges. For a while, you'll be able to take advantage of "the low prices of the Walloon Brabant", but cultures in retreat quickly run out of places to retreat to.
On a related theme, consider Holy Week in Cordoba.
our culture is collapsing too
I love latin cities but how many of us really wanted to live in Mexico City or Guadalajara forever.
Bogota or Caracas and so on.
Exact same thing happening here in places.
Just as the Aztlan claim is "not unreasonable"?
My apologies. Too quick on the trigger...
Welcome to Brazil, USA. All you can do is move to a walled enclave or the country with lots of guns and dogs.
What do you think would happen to Christians who tried a similar stunt in Turkey in the Hagia Sophia former cathedral?
Would they make it out alive, with their heads attached?
They’d have a better chance in Turkey than in most other Muslim countries, but I wouldn’t recommend they try it.
FWIW, I believe Hagia Sophia has been a secularized museum for more than 80 years. It is not presently a mosque or a church.
The Aztlan claim actually is unreasonable. If anybody has a prior claim to the American SW, it's the descendants of the Indians who were living here for many centuries, not those who base their claim on a grant by the Spanish King. (What gives him the right to control the land?)
The Mexican government held loose and largely theoretical claim over the area for at most 25 years, 1821 to 1846. I think it is entirely unreasonable to claim that this 25 year claim should have greater weight than 175+ years of effective American rule.
ping for later
Sorry Rummyfan, I meant to ping myself.
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