"Eurabia" is hate speech

One of the pet projects of the Islamophobe industry is to issue dire warnings about how the tide of muslims in Europe is rising and threatening to wipe out European culture. There have been numerous factual rebuttals to this propaganda, but few have gotten wide exposure beyond the blogsphere. That is why i am glad to see this piece in Newsweek, which points out the hypocrisy of Eurabia being a call to defend "western values" when the idea itself is hostile to everything the West nominally stands for:

[T]he rise of a Eurabia is predicated on limited and dubious evidence. A much-cited 2004 study from the U.S. National Intelligence Council outlines a number of possible scenarios. Its most aggressive is that the number of Muslims in Europe could increase from roughly 20 million today-about 5 percent of the population-to 38 million by 2025. But that projection turns out to be attributed to "diplomatic and media reporting as well as government, academic, and other sources." In other words, it's all speculation based on speculation-and even if it's accurate, it would still mean the number of Muslims will represent just 8 percent of the European population, estimated by the EU to be 470 million in 2025. Indeed, if there is a surge ahead, its scale looks overstated. "There is a quite deliberate exaggeration, as has often been pointed out-but the figures are still being cited," says Jytte Klausen, an authority on Islam in Europe at Boston's Brandeis University.

Coming up with a reasonable estimate for the percentage of Muslims now living in Europe, let alone making projections for the future, is a virtually impossible task. The number of illegal immigrants is unknown and, in a sign of the sensitivity of the issue, many countries including France and Germany do not even tally census data on the religion of legal residents. It is true that the Muslim minority is destined to grow steadily in Europe, especially given the youthful profile of today's immigrants. Fertility rates remain higher among Muslim immigrants than among other Europeans, and Muslims may continue to arrive in Europe in large numbers. But the alarmists assume that past patterns are sure to hold. "The worst of the scaremongering is based on the assumption that current behavior will continue," says Grace Davie, an expert on Europe and Islam at the University of Exeter in Britain.

For the number of Muslims to outnumber non-Muslims by midcentury, it would require either breeding on a scale rarely seen in history or for immigration to continue at a pace that's now politically unacceptable. More likely, new controls will slow Muslim immigration. The birthrate for Muslim immigrants is also likely to continue to decline, as it has tended to do, with greater affluence and better health care. There is no Europewide data available, but one study says fertility rates among Turkish-born women in the Netherlands fell from 3.2 in 1990 to 1.9 in 2005, barely above the figure for native-born Dutch. Over the same period, the equivalent figure for Moroccan-born women in the Netherlands dropped from 4.9 to 2.9. Also, fertility rates are edging upward in some Northern European countries, which would offset some of the Muslim growth. Bottom line: given the number of variables, demographers are loath to make predictions about the number of Muslims in Europe in the years to come. "You would almost have to make it up," says Carl Haub, the senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. And the idea of a Muslim majority any time soon? "Absolutely absurd."

The terrible thing about Eurabia however is not that it's simply wrong, but that it's as insidious as the blood libel against the Jews, in that it fosters and amplifies ethnic and religious hatred against all muslims by lumping them together with single, diabolical intent. Eurabia shares much with the hoary old canard about "Jew York City", in that it hinges on a fundamental racism at its core:

Racism is, then, a critical element--perhaps a dominant concept--relative to these concepts. If European Muslims or New York City Jews are inherently subversive, undermining legitimate decisionmaking processes in political and social life, how can anyone who belongs to either category be allowed to participate at all? Eurabia and Jew York City are, at their roots, concepts which demand the ghettoization of the groups from which they take their names, their exclusion from any non-subordinate role. These terms' use is a good marker for some sort of highly exclusionary racism.

No one denies that there are extremist muslims in Europe, but the vast majority of muslims (that is, a tiny minority of Europeans overall) are not out to impose Shari'a on their neighbours' daughter. And just as anti-Semitism drives violence against synagogues and Jews themselves, the wages of Eurabia are violence against mosques and muslims:

A BRAVE caretaker was hurt as he risked his life to save a mosque torched by arsonists in the second petrol bomb attack in a week.

Mohamed Koheeallee, 62, raced to tackle 7ft flames at the Greenwich Islamic Centre in Plumstead Road at 12.15am on Tuesday.

Grabbing a bucket of water, he extinguished the fire as it spread inside but when he opened a fire exit, he was engulfed by flames burning his arm and his face.

Choking with smoke inhalation and despite his injuries, he carried on dousing the fire until the mosque was safe but when he tried to tackle the source of the blaze he was pushed back by its intensity.

Cause and effect, just as with the Obsession DVD and subsequent attack on the mosque in Ohio. Increasingly, muslims are the new Jews, in Europe. Given that anti-semitism in the muslim world is largely a European export, this makes for some interesting ironies.

Related: Muslims are Orcs. Also see Randy MacDonald's definitive, data-driven debunking of Eurabia along with Scott Martens' followup. Also I've written numerous times on Eurabia myself at the previous site.