As Europe Lies Dying

The French government has demonstrated in the past few days that it is nothing but a weak and impotent collection of liberal buffoons. They simply haven't a clue how to handle the riots because, being Leftists... they've been doing everything right all along, and... this shouldn't have happened! Predictably, to the left of these liberals, the Greens, Communists, and human rights groups think the problem is not the gangs of arsonists but "the system"...law and order, and the police. Its also comical the way the left-wing press in the U.S. continues to call the rioters "youths," which is evidently the politically correct term for violent disaffected Muslim immigrants. Mark Steyn isn't bridled by such inanities and calls it the way he sees it... and his view isn't a fun read.

"More than three years ago, I wrote about the "tournante" or "take your turn" — the gang rape that's become an adolescent rite of passage in the Muslim quarters of French cities — and similar phenomena throughout the West: "Multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture — the subjugation of women — combine with the worst attributes of Western culture — license and self-gratification. Tattooed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of northern England areas are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort." Islamofascism itself is what it says: a fusion of Islamic identity with old-school European totalitarianism. But, whether in turbans or gangsta threads, just as Communism was in its day, so Islam is today's ideology of choice for the world's disaffected.

Some of us believe this is an early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war. If the insurgents emerge emboldened, what next? In five years' time, there will be even more of them, and even less resolve on the part of the French state. That, in turn, is likely to accelerate the demographic decline. Europe could face a continent-wide version of the "white flight" phenomenon seen in crime-ridden American cities during the 1970s, as Danes and Dutch scram to America, Australia or anywhere else that will have them.

As to where Britain falls in this grim scenario, I noticed a few months ago that readers had started closing their gloomier missives to me with the words, "Fortunately I won't live to see it" — a sign-off now so routine in my mailbag I assumed it was the British version of "Have a nice day". But that's a false consolation. As France this past fortnight reminds us, the changes in Europe are happening far faster than most people thought. That's the problem: unless you're planning on croaking imminently, you will live to see it."
http://jewishworldreview.com/1105/steyn110905.php3

Steyn feels the "biculturalism" of Europe makes disaster there a certainty. One way he suggests France might be fixed would be to go truly "multicultural" but he then laments:

But a talented ambitious Chinese or Indian or Chilean has zero reason to emigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancient regime of indolent geriatrics.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/11/15/do1502.xml

To an American conservative the question immediately arises, Why don't the Europeans rise up and address this problem? And fix it? The answer ofcourse is that these Europeans are a later version of the lazy, inattentive Americans who have let our culture slouch towards the liberal mediocrity that has made us what we are today... but a shadow of the World War II generation.

Steyn once said to Hugh Hewitt that the advantage of living in North America is that these bad things will happen in Europe first. Its a wonder that more conservatives in the media and government aren't pointing to Europe and screaming about the obvious and sad results of electing inept, multicultural-loving Leftists to government. As Europe continues to lose its identity its time to pay attention to events across the ocean and hold tight to ours.