Fjordman

I still have a belief, or at least a hope, that most of Europe can be saved from Islam, although it will be a difficult fight. However, Europe is now so weak and the Islamic infiltration proceeding so quickly that it would be foolhardy to dismiss out of hand the possibility that Europe could indeed succumb to this threat.

How will it affect the New West, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, if the Old West in Europe goes Islamic? Will Western civilization survive in the New World, or will these countries, too, follow Europe's demise? After all, Western civilization in Europe has the advantage of being native to the soil, where it has grown organically for centuries, whereas it has been transplanted to Australia, Canada and the USA..

One important factor in this regard is how big the flow of European refugees from Eurabia will be, and whether they have learned their lesson regarding Islam or whether they will bring their failed ideologies with them to their new homelands.
If Eurabia indeed becomes the end result, Europe will slowly be reduced from industrialized countries to just another overpopulated Islamic failure. However, this process took centuries in most of what is now the Islamic world, and will take decades or generations in Europe. In the meantime, Eurabia would constitute an existential threat to the rest of the West, and indeed to much of the non-Muslim world. Westerners would be cut off from their civilizational roots, and some of their prized cultural treasures would simply be physically destroyed.

This would be a tremendous blow to the West, and an equally tremendous boost to morale in the Islamic world. Islam has tried, and failed to conquer the European heartland of its Western rival for more than 1300 years. It is difficult to overstate what an enormous religious victory it would represent for Muslims if they were to finally succeed in this. In addition to the psychological effect on the global Islamic community, the umma would also get its hands on the accumulated financial and technological resources of Europe. This would reinvigorate Jihad worldwide, from Thailand to Armenia. We can already now, with the European Union appeasement of the Arab world, see the dangerous potential of such a constellation.

I'm also not fully convinced that Americans, despite frequent claims to the contrary, will prove that much more resistant to Jihad than Europeans are right now. I will be thrilled if they are, but there are some disturbing signs to the contrary. A video of Osama bin Laden meeting with two 9/11 hijackers revealed that the mass murderers were motivated by a desire to avenge Muslims ... in Bosnia, where the US went to war to protect Muslims..

Westerners are told to find ways to win the hearts and minds of Muslims. Very few care to ask whether or not this feat is possible at all. What if the hearts and minds of Muslims are already occupied by Allah and Muhammad, and there is little room left for infidels? If that is the case, it means that projects aimed at giving financial assistance to Muslims are at best a waste of money, at worst outright counterproductive.

Jizya is a punishment tax that non-Muslim dhimmis according to the Koran 9,29 are supposed to pay for "protection", "in willing submission", as a sign of their inferior status to their Islamic rulers. Muslims will thus see payments from non-Muslims as a sign that you accept having been defeated and being subjugated to Islam's might. As a result, they may in fact become more aggressive and demanding, not less.

Westerners who believe that providing financial assistance to Muslims, or even bombing non-Muslims on their behalf as NATO did in the Balkans, will somehow buy them gratitude from Muslims reveal a fundamental lack of understanding of how the Muslim mind works. Muslims are fatalists. For them, everything that happens, good or bad, is the will of Allah. If something bad takes place, this is a punishment for being lax Muslims. If something good happens, for instance a bombing of Christian Serbs that paves the way for ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims in Kosovo, this is a reward for being good Muslims. Muslims will feel gratitude, but to Allah who caused this, not to the infidels who actually carried out the bombing.

If anything, Western involvement in the Balkans signaled to Muslims that the West was now weak and ripe for conquest, since we sacrificed the Christian Serbs in favor of Muslims. As a consequence, instead of a Westernization of the Balkans, we may end up with a Balkanization of the West.

Bat Ye'or has talked about a conflict between Europeans and Eurabians, with the latter holding sway for now because they dominate the media and the political establishment. This conflict is most severe in Europe because of the European Union and the number of Muslims there, but I see similar conflicts in Canada, Australia and the United States.

I sometimes wonder whether the West at the beginning of the 21st century is mired in an ideological civil war, which in Western Europe in particular is getting so serious that it could well lead to physical civil wars. I will call the contestants Westerners and post-Westerners. This makes more sense than right-wingers vs. left-wingers because although left-wingers tend to be more aggressive and open in their denunciation of the West, and although the strongest opposition is usually found among conservatives, post-Westerners have penetrated deep into the political right-wing, too.

Both Leftists and quite a few right-wingers ironically agree on the fact that only economic factors matter, and that culture does not have any significant impact. Leftists talk about economic exploitation and are frequently critical of, if not hostile to, Western culture, hence their allegiance to Multiculturalism. Some right-wingers see immigration only as cheap labor and more consumers. A country is thus one giant job-producing corporation, no different from Coca-Cola or Toyota. Not a nation with a soul, a shared history or a common culture. In opposition to these post-Westerners we have traditional Westerners, whose primary loyalty still lies with their nation state, their culture and their civilization.

It is significant that most Western nations face common challenges in upholding their national borders, and that it is considered "racist" to prefer certain groups of immigrants over others. This is becoming more and more apparent in the illegal immigration debate. The open borders activists are basically arguing that it's a "human right" to be allowed to settle in the West, not that Westerners should be allowed to preserve their own culture and decide who should settle in their lands.

Our unwillingness to uphold our physical boundaries is closely related to our unwillingness to define our cultural boundaries. In a strange way, it is the shared denial of our own historical roots or even the fact that we have a culture, the notion that we have somehow moved "beyond history" and the idea that it is "racist" to uphold your national borders that reveal the fact that Europe, North America and Australia still belong to the same civilization, despite everything.

Serge Trifkovic, author of Sword of the Prophet and the new book Defeating Jihad, points this out, too: "It is in the inability and unwillingness of the elite class to confront jihad that Western Europe and North America most tellingly certify that they share the same chromosomes, that they belong to one culture and constitute one civilization." Writes Trifkovic: "This war is being fought, on the Islamic side, with the deep conviction that the West is on its last legs. The success of its demographic onslaught on Europe enhances the image of ‘a candy store with the busted lock,’ and that view is reinforced by the evidence from history that a civilization that loses the urge for self-perpetuation is indeed in peril."

Europeans, after several devastating wars during the 20th century, seem to believe that we have moved beyond war into an age of international law and dialogue, and that war for whatever reason is evil. That is one idea that Americans most definitely do not share, and they are right. But Americans have other Utopian dreams of their own. I have warned against the dangers of "celebrating diversity" in a country that is already so diverse as the USA. Americans should celebrate their sameness and what binds them together, or they could wake up one day and find out that they are united neither by culture, religion, race nor political beliefs — perhaps not even by language due to the growth of Spanish as a semi-official second language. This could create serious internal frictions, maybe even cause the country to fall apart.

The idea that "history is bunk," that all cultures can be assimilated equally into the USA and that the United States is a universal nation that has somehow magically moved beyond all conflicts known to mankind elsewhere is wrong and dangerous. It also has implications for foreign policy.

If Americans had remembered that their cherished political system was steeped in a Western and European cultural tradition, and may not work just as well in all other cultures, they might not have embarked on the project of exporting democracy to a deeply Islamic country such as Iraq, at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. This happened because Americans believed theirs was a universal nation without any core culture of its own. If this was the case, its political system could be exported everywhere.

Five years after 9/11, Muslim immigration to the United States is higher than ever, there is still great reluctance to name the enemy among members of the political establishment and President Bush sticks to his failed strategy of exporting democracy to the Arab world while the Islamization of the West continues apace.

I hope Americans are right, that the USA will prove more resistant to Islamization than Europe, and that Western civilization will prevail in the New World even if it should die in the Old World. But I confess to having some lingering doubt.

This is excerpted from an article by Nordic blogger Fjordman that appeared in Jihadwatch on Sept. 13.