Hat tip to Fred over at GAR for sending me this most excellent and important article from Bruce Bawer author of ‘While Europe Slept’. Bawer’s book is one of the first ones to analyze the effects of mass Islamic immigration to Europe and warn of its likely and current threat to western liberal democracy. It is a must read as is this article. Also, on the agendas and views of this site page on Vlad, at the bottom of the page is a link to a PDF of a speech given at Pim Fortyne’s memorial service which is also a must read. Bruce refferences Pim near the end of this article. Do read and pass on. Some articles are worth the effort to get through more than a few paragraphs and this is truly one of them even though I do not agree 100% with is assesment of the BNP or VLams Belang in belgium.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124043553074744693.html

PINION: FEDERATION FEATURE
APRIL 23, 2009
Heirs to Fortuyn?

Europe’s turn to the right

By BRUCE BAWER

When the New Left emerged in the 1960s, something else was born that would mark American elites for decades thereafter: the notion that social-democratic Western Europe was far superior to the capitalist United States. Pity the poor American professor whose every junket to a European academic conference was marred by his continental colleagues’ sneering over cocktails about his nation’s shame du jour—Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq—or about American racism, capital punishment or health care. For much of the American left, Western Europe was nothing less than an abstract symbol of progressive utopia.

This rosy view was never accurate, of course. Europe’s socialized health care was blighted by outrageous (and sometimes deadly) waiting lists and rationing, to name just one example. To name another: Timbro, a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all but five U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine. But in recent years, something has happened to complicate the left’s fanciful picture even further: Western European voters’ widespread reaction against social democracy.

The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The more significant one is that over the past three decades, social-democratic Europe’s political, cultural, academic and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history. According to Foreign Affairs, Muslims in Western Europe numbered between 15 million and 20 million in 2005. One source estimates that Britain’s Muslim population rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to two million in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of Western Europe as a whole during that period. According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth 10 times that of the rest of the country’s population.

Yet instead of encouraging these immigrants to integrate and become part of their new societies, Western Europe’s governments have allowed them to form self-segregating parallel societies run more or less according to Shariah. Many of the residents of these patriarchal enclaves subsist on government benefits, speak the language of their adopted country poorly or not at all, despise pluralistic democracy, look forward to Europe’s incorporation into the House of Islam, and support—at least in spirit—terrorism against the West. A 2006 Sunday Telegraph poll, for example, showed that 40% of British Muslims wanted Shariah in Britain, 14% approved of attacks on Danish embassies in retribution for the famous Mohammed cartoons, 13% supported violence against those who insulted Islam, and 20% sympathized with the July 2005 London bombers.

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