Monday, February 26, 2007

Night is falling on Europe

From The American Thinker:

Although European elites imagine that their political and social models are so obviously attractive that they will be adopted by the rest of the world, ordinary Europeans don't seem to think so. In fact, demographic trends suggest that most Europeans don't even believe in the European ideal in sufficient numbers to want to pass it on to the next generation.

According to the European Commission, the average birth rate for the European Union as a whole is now 1.4 children per woman, which is well below the 2.1 replacement rate. By way of example, the country with lowest fertility rate in the world is Spain, where women have an average of only 1.07 children.

As a result, deaths will start out-numbering births in every member state of the European Union by as early as 2010. But some countries have already reached that point. According to Germany's Federal Statistics Office, more people died in that country in 2005 than were born. And Germany's demographic decline is the norm, not the exception in Europe. Indeed, Europe's population is forecast to decrease by more than 100 million by 2050.

[. . .]

Europe, however, is also a magnet for immigration: It will attract up to 1 million newcomers this year. But the European experience with immigration is quite different from that of America. Part of the reason is that many immigrants to Europe end up on welfare, while in the United States, almost all immigrants take one or more entry-level jobs and work their way up the economic ladder. Welfare is simply not the American way.

The Muslim population of Europe has more than doubled since 1980, and according to some estimates, there are some 25 million Muslims living on the continent today. Demographers predict that this figure may double by 2015, and that the number of Muslims could outnumber non-Muslims in all of Western Europe by mid-century. This prompted Princeton University's Bernard Lewis to tell the German newspaper Die Welt that ‘Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.'

This reality is already influencing European foreign policymaking and does not auger well for the future of transatlantic relations. Indeed, many analysts believe that the steady weakening of Europe is the underlying cause for the widespread anti-American and anti-Israel bigotry found among Europe's elites, many of whom are bowing to pressure from Muslim residents as a way to buy a fake peace with radical Islamists. Says Fouad Ajami, a well-known authority of the Arab world: ‘In ways both intended and subliminal, the escape into anti-Americanism is an attempt at false bonding with the peoples of Islam.'

History shows that when Islam takes over another culture that it will keep some things which it finds useful and destroy the rest, as they did with the mathematics developed by the Hindu civilization which they conquered (we call them Arab numbers because they transmitted them to the West, not because they invented them).

If this pattern holds in Europe we can expect the latter half of the 21st century and the first half of the 22nd century (at least) to feature an Islamic European Union governed under sharia law by Wahhabi mullahs who regard Osama bin Laden as a shining example of Muslim piety and possess the excellent naval shipbuilding capacity of Italy, the military aircraft industry of France and the aircraft carriers and nuclear submarine fleet of the United Kingdom. Along with the arsenal of nuclear weapons owned by the UK and France.

And we can add the land warfare capability of Germany into the mix. The only reason that the M1 Abrams main battle tank is superior to the German Leopard is that the Leopard is a maintenance hog compared to the M1 (the flaw in a great deal of German technology is over engineering).

It will take at least two generations for the marital traditions which still lay latent under the surface of European society to completely fade. During that time the Eurabian caliphate will command a near First World armed service armed with First World military technology.

Imagine the IRES (Islamic Republic of Europe Ship) Mohamed Atta, a nuclear submarine, slipping into the Chesapeake Bay and launching nuclear cruise missiles at New York, Washington DC, Baltimore and Boston. Maybe you have trouble believing that the mullahs wouldn't commit suicide by starting a full scale nuclear war but are you really willing to bet millions of American lives on the sanity of men like Mullah Omar?

Of course it really isn't a "bet" because that implies that we could make a choice. The truth is that things are out of our hands. There is really nothing we can do to force the European people to reclaim their Christian faith and with it the lost hope which lies at the root of their failure to reproduce. America has no power to reach into the European psyche and rekindle a sense of pride in the achievements of their culture. We cannot convince them that despite all the sins of European colonialism that it still left the world a better place.

In other words no one outside of Europe can make the Europeans believe that their culture deserves to survive and is worth fighting for. If they cannot find the will to continue within themselves there is nothing for them except for decline and dhimmitude.

America cannot afford to bet that the Europeans will do what no nation in the history of the world has done before and pull themselves back from so steep a decline and loss of faith in themselves. It behooves us to build up other alliances, principally with India, a nation which has suffered terribly at the hands of Islam in its past, which lives under the threat of a nuclear armed Muslim neighbor with which they have a history of belligerence and whose Hindu population nurtures the bone-deep hatred of Islam which all free people will need to develop if they are to have a hope of survival in this new millenium.