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imomusThere are few things more annoying than that breed of American right-winger who tells us -- at every opportunity -- that Europe is about to become a Muslim state. It's a meme circulated in right wing circles in Europe too -- in the idea of Eurabia, for instance, or in the book Londonistan by right wing pundit Melanie Phillips. These people have in common that they take Europe's current state of ethnic and religious pluralism and project it into a future where it becomes, suddenly, its opposite. Where one group -- the Muslims -- takes over, turning diversity into monoculture: a European muslim superstate. There's only one problem. The figures just don't add up.
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This argument is based on demographic statistics. "They" are breeding faster than "us", or immigrating and failing to integrate with "our" values, and therefore becoming a "state within a state". (Odd that Americans, who built their 20th-century pre-eminence on immigration, are so reluctant to see it happen elsewhere.) But -- as the BBC's statistics programme More or Less valuably showed this weekend -- the statistics used to create a sense of panic about Europe's racial and religious diversity are simply wrong. Here's the BBC's fact check on the Muslim Demographics video above:
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The really puzzling thing, for me, is how an argument so much posited on the fact of there being a "stark choice" between conflicting systems ends up taking so many of its cues from "the enemy". The blurb for the Muslim Demographics video, for instance, says "Islam will overwhelm Christendom unless Christians recognize the demographic realities, begin reproducing again, and share the gospel with Muslims." The message is that we must live as they live, otherwise we will be forced to live as they live.
A similar "let's copy the Muslims" philosophy comes through in the documentary Jesus Camp. Here's the trailer:
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Again, it's basically "let's be like them before they rise up and force us to be like them". The "them" is a reductive stereotype. As one of the trainers in the Jesus Camp doc puts it: "Where should we put our focus? I'll tell you where our enemies are putting it. They're putting it on the kids. You go to Palestine and they're taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to Bible camps and they're putting hand grenades in their hands." A few seconds later we're seeing teachers in a Bible camp asking children: "How many want to be those who would give up their lives for Jesus?" A child's voice says "We're being trained to be those who'd be God's army." Hey, let's avoid falling under the yoke of Islamist terrorists by becoming something even worse!
The theory behind the Eurabia argument is as wrong as the statistics it's based on, and the praxis is illogical -- be like them so that we don't have to be like them. As a European who adores the strong and healthy Muslim presence here in Europe (and who even married, at one point, into a Muslim family), I'd like to advise these American right-wingers to cultiver their own jardin. You know, that superstate built on immigration and the idea that, wherever you came from, you're an American when you get to America. It's the same here: whoever is in Europe is a European by definition.
Resisting the Eurabians will be difficult, but ultimately I am optimistic. Sure, the Muslim Demographics video has had over ten million YouTube views and the BBC correction has had -- at the time of writing -- only 40. But growth rates on the BBC video are healthy. It is reproducing strongly. I believe that by 2050 the BBC vid will overtake and overwhelm the viewership -- and ethos -- of the Muslim Demographics film and rule it with a fist of iron. Well, a calculator of stainless steel, anyway.
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This argument is based on demographic statistics. "They" are breeding faster than "us", or immigrating and failing to integrate with "our" values, and therefore becoming a "state within a state". (Odd that Americans, who built their 20th-century pre-eminence on immigration, are so reluctant to see it happen elsewhere.) But -- as the BBC's statistics programme More or Less valuably showed this weekend -- the statistics used to create a sense of panic about Europe's racial and religious diversity are simply wrong. Here's the BBC's fact check on the Muslim Demographics video above:
[Error: unknown template video]
The really puzzling thing, for me, is how an argument so much posited on the fact of there being a "stark choice" between conflicting systems ends up taking so many of its cues from "the enemy". The blurb for the Muslim Demographics video, for instance, says "Islam will overwhelm Christendom unless Christians recognize the demographic realities, begin reproducing again, and share the gospel with Muslims." The message is that we must live as they live, otherwise we will be forced to live as they live.
A similar "let's copy the Muslims" philosophy comes through in the documentary Jesus Camp. Here's the trailer:
[Error: unknown template video]
Again, it's basically "let's be like them before they rise up and force us to be like them". The "them" is a reductive stereotype. As one of the trainers in the Jesus Camp doc puts it: "Where should we put our focus? I'll tell you where our enemies are putting it. They're putting it on the kids. You go to Palestine and they're taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to Bible camps and they're putting hand grenades in their hands." A few seconds later we're seeing teachers in a Bible camp asking children: "How many want to be those who would give up their lives for Jesus?" A child's voice says "We're being trained to be those who'd be God's army." Hey, let's avoid falling under the yoke of Islamist terrorists by becoming something even worse!
The theory behind the Eurabia argument is as wrong as the statistics it's based on, and the praxis is illogical -- be like them so that we don't have to be like them. As a European who adores the strong and healthy Muslim presence here in Europe (and who even married, at one point, into a Muslim family), I'd like to advise these American right-wingers to cultiver their own jardin. You know, that superstate built on immigration and the idea that, wherever you came from, you're an American when you get to America. It's the same here: whoever is in Europe is a European by definition.
Resisting the Eurabians will be difficult, but ultimately I am optimistic. Sure, the Muslim Demographics video has had over ten million YouTube views and the BBC correction has had -- at the time of writing -- only 40. But growth rates on the BBC video are healthy. It is reproducing strongly. I believe that by 2050 the BBC vid will overtake and overwhelm the viewership -- and ethos -- of the Muslim Demographics film and rule it with a fist of iron. Well, a calculator of stainless steel, anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-09 04:36 pm (UTC)They certainly don't and that's not what the BBC programme claimed. Obvious examples where that didn't happen include North America, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand. When the Chinese government send in Han Chinese to its border states, it isn't in the hope that they will "converge" with the local population. In fact, in many places around the world, political structures were put in place to stop convergence. You would have to be ambivalent about that because you have hinted on more than one occasion that you don't altogether approve of "convergence".
Your basic point in this piece - that there is unforgiveable scaremongering about an islamic population explosion in Europe - is well worth making but you tie yourself up in knots a little. The BBC programme undermines the statistical claims of the YouTube video but it doesn't replace them with the kind of certainty you think it does. One of the major points they make is just how uncertain the business of making population predictions is.
Personally, I agree with kumakoji that I wouldn't care to live in Britain if politics and social policies became heavily influenced by a significant Muslim population. As you point out, such a population could have a wide racial mix so that's not a particular issue. The problem is rather the primary value that population might give to religious belief. I actually think you are kidding yourself if you think your values would easily align with such a shift. Consequently, I don't think I would join you in seeing no problems if the predictions of these alarmists came to fruition. One of the worst policies the Blair government put forward was the promotion of faith-based schools because that gives too much prominence to religion and is even one potential barrier to sharing values.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-10 08:36 am (UTC)I don't know about Singapore or Taiwan, but the other three you've mentioned are European settler states, which are a completely different thing to post-colonial immigration to European nation states.
IIRC there's a Italian far-right political party who got into trouble for a poster showing a picture of a Native American with the caption along the lines of "they allowed immigration too".