The rise of Islam
led to one the most quintessential examples of a clash of civilizations. It was
the growing power of the Muslim world that propelled the center of Christian
power to shift from the Mediterranean to the northern lands of Charlemagne. As
the Roman Empire crumbled, the only source of defense Christendom had against
the rising tide of Islam would come from newly converted Nordic peoples. It was
Charlemagne’s own ancestor, Charles “The Hammer” Martel who led his Frankish
army to victory over the Umayyad Caliphate at the Battle of Tours in southern
France in 732. The threat of Islamic dominance created the very idea of
Christendom that would unite Europeans against a common arch-enemy. From this
conflict would arise seven bloody crusades and 1,400 years of continuous Jihad.
Caldwell then
returns to the post-war period of mass immigration of Muslims into Europe. He
highlights the growing proportion of young Europeans with foreign born parents
in all countries in Western Europe. At the time of Caldwell’s writing, the
total Muslim population of Europe was about 20 million including native
populations in the Balkans. He cites the U.S. National Intelligence Center’s
claim that this number is expected to double by 2025. The sheer scale of the
immigration over such a short period of time has been creating conditions of
social and cultural conflict. An example of how this change in demographics is
changing national characteristics is the situation in Austria. Experts from the
Vienna Institute of Demography claim that Islam will become the majority
religion of people in Austria under the age of 15 by the middle of the century
and that the percentage of Catholics would drop from 90% of the population in
the twentieth century to under 50% in the twenty-first.
As I mentioned in
my previous post, parallels exist between the situation of African-Americans
and the immigrant populations in Europe. Large apartment housing projects,
constructed to house industrial workers, turned into breeding grounds for crime
and lawless zones. Most examples of this type of conditions are found in
France. There are, as Caldwell writes, “areas where the police would not go –
more from reluctance to provoke unrest than from fear or indifference.” Contrary
to the views of European elites of new immigrants as an enriching and
revitalizing force, these ghetto-like areas of crime were a direct result of
the massive influx of new citizens who became isolated from the rest of
society. Caldwell compares the 1995 French film La Haine (“Hate”) to the American West Side Story in that they both contained unrealistic depictions
of violence that was contrary to the actual situation of brutal gang violence.
Caldwell then
deals with the issue of ethnic segregation. Multiculturalist lobby groups
attempted to argue that London was becoming less segregated, claiming that a
neighborhood should not be considered segregated simply due to the lower number
of native white residence. Caldwell claims this argument is wrong because:
A neighborhood with no
native English people can be diverse, but it cannot be integrated you define
your terms so that any neighborhood with a large number of minorities in it can
be called “mixed,” then any increase in minority population will result in an
increase in mixed neighborhoods, which can be presented as a boon for social
harmony, no matter whether the new-comers integrate or not.
This use of statistics by social
science was interpreted by many natives as a way of “bullying people into disbelieving
what they were seeing with their own eyes.”
The
question is now “whose fault was this isolation?” Although non-Europeans are
well represented in many professions, the most recent generations seem to be
falling back into “parallel worlds.” That is, the process of assimilation seems
to be going in reverse in some places. Caldwell quotes a journalist saying “A
lack of job qualifications is readily excused by alleged discrimination on part
of the Germans – and the result is a growing aggressiveness from, say, young
Turks, which then leads to rejection in fact.” This is one of the great
problems with societies dealing with multiculturalism. The same problem is faced
in the United States, where a cycle of discrimination leads the minority group
to perceive even greater levels of discrimination, breeding distrust and
strengthening the pervasiveness of “ethnic islands.” A solution to the problem
of different people simply living next to each other to a situation where
different people actually develop intimate bonds remains evasive and all
attempts of forcing interactions has proved ineffective. The level of prejudice
faced by the initial wave of immigrants and refugees in Europe was minor
compared to the history of discrimination faced by the waves of immigrants to
the United States. The children of immigrants in Europe are viewed with more
suspicion today than their foreign-born parents were when they arrived. Consecutive
generations seem to become more isolated and ideologically separatist than the
ones before. Caldwell asserts: “that is where Islam came in.”
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