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Muslims - Europe's New Jews
By Sam Vaknin, Fri Dec 9th
They inhabit self-imposed ghettoes, subject to derision andworse, the perennial targets of far-right thugs and populistpoliticians of all persuasions. They are mostly confined tomenial jobs. They are accused of spreading crime, terrorism anddisease, of being backward and violent, of refusing to fit in. Their religion, atavistic and rigid, insists on ritual slaughterand male circumcision. They rarely mingle socially orinter-marry. Most of them - though born in European countries -are not allowed to vote. Brown-skinned and with a marked foreignaccent, they are subject to police profiling and harassment andall manner of racial discrimination. They are the new Jews of Europe - its Muslim minorities.
Muslims - especially Arab youths from North Africa - are,indeed, disproportionately represented in crime, including hatecrime, mainly against the Jews. Exclusively Muslim al-Qaidacells have been discovered in many West European countries. Butthis can be safely attributed to ubiquitous and trenchantlong-term unemployment and to stunted upward mobility, bothsocial and economic due largely to latent or expressed racism. Moreover, the stereotype is wrong. The incidence of highereducation and skills is greater among Muslim immigrants than inthe general population - a phenomenon known as "brain drain".Europe attracts the best and the brightest - students, scholars,scientists, engineers and intellectuals - away from theirdestitute, politically dysfunctional and backward homelands. The Economist surveys the landscape of friction and withdrawal: "Indifference to Islam has turned first to disdain, then tosuspicion and more recently to hostility ... (due to images of)petro-powered sheikhs, Palestinian terrorists, Iranianayatollahs, mass immigration and then the attacks of September11th, executed if not planned by western-based Muslims andsuccored by an odious regime in Afghanistan ... Muslims tend tocome from poor, rural areas; most are ill-educated, many arebrown. They often encounter xenophobia and discrimination,sometimes made worse by racist politicians. They speak thelanguage of the wider society either poorly or not at all, sothey find it hard to get jobs. Their children struggle atschool. They huddle in poor districts, often in state-suppliedhousing ... They tend to withdraw into their own world, (forminga) self-sufficient, self-contained community." This self-imposed segregation has multiple dimensions. Clannishbehavior persists for decades. Marriages are still arranged -reluctant brides and grooms are imported from the motherland towed immigrants from the same region or village. The "parallelsociety", in the words of a British government report followingthe Oldham riots two years ago, extends to cultural habits,religious practices and social norms. Assimilation and integration has many enemies. Remittances from abroad are an important part of the grossnational product and budgetary revenues of countries such asBangladesh and Pakistan. Hence their frantic efforts to maintainthe cohesive national and cultural identity of the expats. DITIBis an arm of the Turkish government's office for religiousaffairs. It discourages the assimilation or social integrationof Turks in Germany. Turkish businesses - newspapers, satelliteTV, foods, clothing, travel agents, publishers - thrive onghettoization. There is a tacit confluence of interests between nationalgovernments, exporters and Islamic organizations. All three wantTurks in Germany to remain as Turkish as possible. The morenostalgic and homebound the expatriate - the larger and morefrequent his remittances, the higher his consumption of Turkishgoods and services and the more prone he is to resort toreligion as a determinant of his besieged and fracturingidentity. Muslim numbers are not negligible. Two European countries haveMuslim majorities - Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania. Others - inboth Old Europe and its post-communist east - harbor sizable andgrowing Islamic minorities. Waves of immigration and birth ratesthree times as high as the indigenous population increase theirshare of the population in virtually every European polity -from Russia to Macedonia and from Bulgaria to Britain. One inseven Russians is Muslim - over 20 million people. According to the March-April issue of Foreign Policy, thenon-Muslim part of Europe will shrink by 3.5 percent by 2015while the Muslim populace will likely double. There are 3million Turks in Germany and another 12 million Muslims -Algerians, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Egyptians,Senegalese, Malis, or Tunisians - in the rest of the EuropeanUnion. This is two and one half times the number of Muslims in theUnited States. Even assuming - wrongly - that all of them occupythe lowest decile of income, their combined annual purchasingpower would amount to a whopping $150 billion. Furthermore,recent retroactive changes to German law have naturalized over amillion immigrants and automatically granted its much-covetedcitizenship to the 160,000 Muslims born in Germany every year. Between 2-3 million Muslims in France - half their number - areeligible to vote. Another million - one out of two - castballots in Britain. These numbers count at the polls and are notoffset by the concerted efforts of a potent Jewish lobby - thereare barely a million Jews in Western Europe. Muslims are becoming a well-courted swing vote. They may havedecided the last election in Germany, for instance. Recognizingtheir growing centrality, France established - though notwithout vote-rigging - a French Council of the Islamic Faith,the equivalent of Napoleon's Jewish Consistory. Two Frenchcabinet members are Muslims. Britain has a Muslim Council. Both Vladimir Putin, Russia's president and Yuri Luzhkov,Moscow's mayor, now take the trouble to greet the capital's
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onemillion Muslims on the occasion of their Feast of Sacrifice.They also actively solicit the votes of the nationalist andelitist Muslims of the industrialized Volga - mainly the Tatars,Bashkirs and Chuvash. Even the impoverished, much-detested andpowerless Muslims of the northern Caucasus - Chechens,Circassians and Dagestanis - have benefited from this newfoundawareness of their electoral power. Though divided by their common creed - Shiites vs. Sunnites vs.Wahabbites and so on - the Muslims of Europe are united insupporting the Palestinian cause and in opposing the Iraq war.This - and post-colonial guilt feelings, especially manifest inFrance and Britain - go a long way toward explaining Germany'sre-discovered pacifistic spine and France's anti-Israeli (not tosay anti-Semitic) tilt. Moreover, the Muslims have been playing an important economicrole in the continent since the early 1960s. Europe's postwarmiracle was founded on these cheap, plentiful andoft-replenished Gastarbeiter - "guest workers". Objectivestudies have consistently shown that immigrants contribute moreto their host economies - as consumers, investors and workers -than they ever claw back in social services and public goods.This is especially true in Europe, where an ageing population ofearly retirees has been relying on the uninterrupted flow ofpension contributions by younger laborers, many of themimmigrants. Business has been paying attention to this emerging market.British financial intermediaries - such as the West BromwichBuilding Society - have recently introduced "Islamic"(interest-free) mortgages. According to market research firm,Datamonitor, gross advances in the UK alone could reach $7billion in 2006 - up from $60 million today. The Bank of Englandis in the throes of preparing regulations to accommodate thepent-up demand. Yet, their very integration, however hesitant and gradual,renders the Muslims in Europe vulnerable to the kind oftreatment the old continent meted out to its Jews before theholocaust. Growing Muslim presence in stagnating job marketswithin recessionary economies inevitably generated a backlash,often cloaked in terms of Samuel Huntington's 1993 essay inForeign Affairs, "Clash of Civilizations". Even tolerant Italy was affected. Last year, the Bolognaarchbishop, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, cast Islam as incompatiblewith Italian culture. The country's prime minister suggested, ina visit to Berlin two years ago, that Islam is an inherentlyinferior civilization. Oriana Fallaci, a prominent journalist, published last year aninane and foul-mouthed diatribe titled "The Rage and the Pride"in which she accused Muslims of "breeding like rats", "shittingand pissing" (sic!) everywhere and supporting Osama bin-Ladenindiscriminately. Young Muslims reacted - by further radicalizing and by refusingto assimilate - to both escalating anti-Islamic rhetoric inEurope and the "triumphs" of Islam elsewhere, such as therevolution in Iran in 1979. Tutored by preachers trained in themost militant Islamist climates in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia,Pakistan and Iran, praying in mosques financed by shady Islamiccharities - these youngsters are amenable to recruiters fromevery fanatical grouping. The United Kingdom suffered some of the worst race riots in halfa century in the past two years. France is terrorized by anunprecedented crime wave emanating from the banlieux - thedecrepit, predominantly Muslim, housing estates in suburbia.September 11 only accelerated the inevitable conflict between analienated minority and hostile authorities throughout thecontinent. Recent changes in European - notably British -legislation openly profile and target Muslims. This is a remarkable turnaround. Europe supported the MuslimBosnian cause against the Serbs, Islamic Chechnya againstRussia, the Palestinians against the Israelis and MuslimAlbanian insurgents against both Serbs and Macedonians. Nor wasthis consistent pro-Islamic orientation a novelty. Britain's Commission for Racial Equality which caters mainly tothe needs of Muslims, was formed 37 years ago. Its ForeignOffice has never wavered from its pro-Arab bias. Germanyestablished a Central Council for Muslims. Both anti-Americanismand the more veteran anti-Israeli streak helped sustain Europe'sempathy with Muslim refugees and "freedom fighters" throughoutthe 1960s, 70s and 80s. September 11 put paid to this amity. The danger is that thebrand of "Euro-Islam" that has begun to emerge lately may bedecimated by this pervasive and sudden mistrust. Time Magazinedescribed this blend as "the traditional Koran-based religionwith its prohibitions against alcohol and interest-bearing loansnow indelibly marked by the 'Western' values of tolerance,democracy and civil liberties." Such "enlightened" Muslims can serve as an invaluable bridgebetween Europe and Russia, the Middle East, Asia, includingChina and other places with massive Muslim majorities orminorities. As most world conflicts today involve Islamistmilitants, global peace and a functioning "new order" criticallydepend on the goodwill and communication skills of Muslims. Such a benign amalgam is the only realistic hope forreconciliation. Europe is ageing and stagnating and can bereinvigorated only by embracing youthful, dynamic, drivenimmigrants, most of whom are bound to be Muslim. Co-existence ispossible and the clash of civilization not an inevitabilityunless Huntington's dystopic vision becomes the basic policydocument of the West.
About the author:Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - NarcissismRevisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He isa columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior BusinessCorrespondent, and the editor of mental health and Central EastEurope categories in The Open Directory Bellaonline, andSuite101 . Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
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