Some thoughts on Muslim assimilation

It's assumed by most western liberals that it's only fundamentalist Muslims who lash out at western culture or get angry about criticism of Islam, and that mainstream Muslims are fine with cartoons of Allah or women in short skirts.

Both right and left liberals believe that Muslims can be successfully assimilated into western culture and that this is the best way of protecting western society from Muslim militancy.

The two sides only differ in approach.

Left liberals pursue a softly-softly diplomatic strategy which seeks to appease older Muslims through a pro-Muslim foreign policy while slowing enticing young Muslims into western liberal ways through the power of consumerism and liberal education. They believe that if right liberal "hot-heads" like Dutchman Geert Wilders can be shut up then eventually the fundamentalist Muslims will mellow out and turn into semi-western moderates who'll respect women and homosexuals and support western values like freedom of speech.

Conversely, right liberals want a more overt approach which forces Muslims to swear allegiance to western values, and puts pressure on nationalistic Islamic regimes such as Iran and Libya to desist from anti-western policies.

However, there doesn't seem to be much evidence to support the idea that "moderate" Muslims are a lot more tolerant of western values than fundamentalists, so moderating fundamentalist Muslims probably won't turn them pro-western liberals

For a long time in the West we've had fundamentalist Christian minorities, like the Brethren and Mormons that are clearly more tolerant of mainstream western values than many so-called moderate Muslims.

If western religious fundamentalists acted the same way Muslim fundamentalists did, we'd see Mennonites burning cars in Washington and Exclusive Brethren burning effigies of liberal leaders in Canberra and Wellington.

Furthermore, as Samuel Huntington pointed out, the Iranian Muslims seen on television burning effigies of Salmon Rushdie or US presidents aren't necessarily backward, fundamentalist Muslims - many are educated, moderate Muslims who don't wish to live alongside western liberalism, but want to replace it with a modern, internationalist Islam.

While modern, "moderate" Islam may be less extreme than the Islamic fundamentalism of radical traditionalists like the Taleban, it's still strongly anti-Western. Islamic moderates may be more progressive and egalitarian than fundamentalists in Afghanistan and Sudan, but they still support religious interference in politics, commerce, law and scientific research and have little respect for western notions of free speech (if they did they wouldn't be so touchy about a few cartoons in a Danish newspaper).

The most worrying aspect of modern Islam though, isn't so much it's cultural incompatibility with western values as its aggressive internationalism.

Echoing the dangerous "grow or die'" ideology of radical-liberal communism, modern Islam seeks to spread itself around the globe, undermine long established cultures and knock over rival ideologies.

If moderate Muslims were particularists, with little interest in spreading Islamic views to non-Islamic countries, than you wouldn't see so many Muslims around the globe protesting about 'anti-Islamic' events in far-off countries like Israel and Denmark. Since the native Danes for example, aren't Muslims, they have no obligation to respect Allah in there own country. Only if Danes travel to Muslim countries and insult Allah do Muslims have a right to complain.

Modern liberalism is also an aggressive, internationalist ideology and there's a danger that further liberal attempts to integrate Muslims into western society will only make Muslims more globalist and therefore more determined to undermine their host nations and network with Muslims in other countries to oppose western interests.

As a globalist ideology Islam also has the potential to be much more dangerous than communism, since communism was a secular ideology that fell out of favour when it was unable to provide inspiring real-world examples of its over-hyped potential.

Rather than ambitiously attempting to assimilate Muslims in a liberal manner, some European New Right thinkers believe Muslim immigrants should actually be supported in their efforts to remain culturally distinct. In their view, Muslims should be encouraged to built their own mosques, live in distinct areas if they chose to, set up there own schools and follow their own customs where practical.

That way the host populace doesn't need to seriously compromise it's own culture to appease the Muslims, and the Muslims immigrants are taught to appreciate the thinking behind particularist polices such as immigration restrictionism.

Since liberalism also preaches equality and materialism, and reduces traditional religion to a mere lifestyle accessory, semi-westernised immigrants who are unable to compete economically are likely to blame their hosts for their NAM (non-economically assimilated minority) status and seek solace in a globalist ideology/religion. Conversely, immigrants who are able to remain culturally distinct will be less inclined to directly compare themselves with their hosts in narrowly material terms and so will have less reason to want to undermine the host culture.

Instead of seeing a war between liberalism and Islam, the European New Right sees a war between particularism and globalism in which modern Islam and post-war western liberalism are both threats that need to be contained by strengthening sovereign states and opposing globalist NGOs.

There are however a couple of areas where it is difficult to argue with the assertive assimilation approach of right liberals like Wilders. These are language and freedom of speech.

Without freedom of speech particularists will not be able to get there message across, and there will be no way to contain either Islam or liberalism's excesses.

If Muslims living in western countries find such free speech offensive then too bad.

Similarly, all immigrants, Muslim or otherwise, should have to learn to speak the language of their host nation. It simply isn't possible for a modern nation to function if a significant percentage of the population is unable to speech the dominant language.

People who can't speak English in English-Speaking countries for example, can't understand the law and culture of the country in which they live, and can only work in a limited range of jobs within there own ethnic clique. This makes them a liability to both themselves and their host country.

Islamic Immigration in Europe

Reading through Christchurch’s Press last Saturday it was pleasing to come across a relatively right-wing review of Bruce Bawer’s book, While Europe Slept: How radical Islam is destroying the West from within.

The reviewer, an Anglican vicar from Christchurch called Ron Hay, points out that Bawer says he left America partly in reaction to the Christian right. However, setting in Europe with his gay partner, he discovered that Islamic fundamentalism made its US counterpart look benign:

"Falwell was an unsavoury creep, but he didn’t issue fatwas. James Dobson’s parenting advice was appalling, but he wasn’t telling people to murder their daughters. Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imans wanted to drop a wall on me."

Bawer acknowledges both the rapid growth of aggressive Islam in Europe and Europe’s present policy could well end in disaster. Like many US critics though, he criticizes the Europeans for failing to integrate Muslim immigrants, without recognising that Europe is not the United States, or that the US has no experience of dealing with large numbers of Muslim immigrants.

In contrast to Europe, life is much cheaper in the United States, where recent immigrants can afford to buy cars to get around in, and the economy revolves around flexible labour laws and economies of scale production. Since the cost of living is cheap, people have more disposal income and there is a greater demand for domestic services. Subsequently the US is a great place for someone with limited skills to find work (or a least it was until it became swamped by central American immigrants).

By contrast, life in Europe is crowded, bureaucratic and expensive. Fewer people can afford cars and even if you have a car, the roads are crowded and difficult to navigate. Since life is more expensive, there is also much less need for hired hands like nannies and gardeners. Manufacturing firms have to be smart and innovative to compete with larger US and Japanese competitors, so they need skilled workers who can work with minimum supervision.

Furthermore, since every country has its own language and customs it is difficult to move around and seek out opportunities in other parts of the EU. Europeans countries also tend to have generous and intricate welfare systems, which are largely paid for in advance, and many people feel they should not be extended to recent arrivals.

All this means Europe does not have the ability to accommodate large numbers of immigrants, particularly if they are unskilled and do not understand local laws and customs.

Perhaps the biggest concern though is reproduction differences. In some European countries Muslim immigrants are having three times are many children as indigenous Europeans. As the problems in Palestine show, major differences in reproduction rates between ethnic groups will eventually lead to serious conflict, and the only solution is to keep the different groups apart.

The Europeans do have a right to demand that immigrants adhere to local values, but while you can make it compulsory to learn the local language in schools, its not really possible to force people to integrate if they don’t want to. Just because non-English speaking European immigrants responded to aggressive assimilation policies in the United States during the first half of the 20th Century, does not mean non-European Muslim immigrants will respond in the same way.

Since many Muslim immigrants appear unwilling or unable to integrate, the only options are to curtail further Muslim immigration, introduce voluntary repatriation schemes, and increase incentives for indigenous Europeans to have more children.

A major reason why European birth rates have fallen so low, is the high cost of housing in western Europe, and the dire shortage of housing in Eastern Europe (a legacy of Soviet-era mismanagement). Economic libertarians may loathe to admit it, but subsidised housing was a major factor in the demographic growth that occurred in Europe and Australasia after the end of WWII. (It’s an interesting irony that many baby-boomer libertarians might not have existed if it wasn’t for state subsidised housing!).

If the EU started an ambitious programme to provide more subsidised housing in Eastern Europe, it would help to ease the overcrowding in parts of Western Europe, while providing housing and work opportunities for young Eastern Europeans who are presently flooding west and competing for the limited number of low-skilled jobs with low-income Europeans and recent Muslim immigrants.

Some thoughts on John Gray's "Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern"

In Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern John Gray makes some excellent points about the naivety of the liberal right in believing that the world can be re-made in a western image.

However, while he acknowledges the cultural distinctiveness of the West he denies westerners the opportunity to protect themselves by limiting immigration.

Gray succinctly states that globalisation is not making the world more uniform:

"As societies throughout the world become more modern, they do not thereby become more similar. Often they move further apart. In these circumstances, we need to think afresh about how regimes and ways of life that will always be different can come to coexist in peace."

This is sort of thinking that traditional U.S conservatives have been promoting for the last one hundred years but is a message that Liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to Tony Blair, have been consistently ignoring. Most of the World is not like the West and doesn’t want to be like the West.

In military affairs Gray takes the traditional conservative view that enemies can never be eliminated, only contained:

"There cannot be tolerance so long as terrorism is unchecked. Dealing with it is a precondition of any kind of civilised existence and requires courage, skill and - at times – ruthlessness. Yet in the new kind of conventional war that is now being fought there is no prospect of victory."

The neo-conservative idea that threats like terrorism and drugs can defeated in all out, short-term offensives is another utopian idea with a very short shelf life. Another vital point that Gray makes is the importance of overpopulation in global problems:

"The human prospect is shaped by rising human numbers, mounting competition for natural resources and the spread of weapons of mass destruction …Interacting with historic ethnic and religious enmities, they argur conflicts as destructive as any in the twentieth century."

Unfortunately, on the topic of immigration Gray backs down from his post liberal position and criticises ‘far right’ political parties that seek to promote limited immigration. Surely, if western culture is unique, and is threatened by global overpopulation and terrorism, then the West is perfectly entitled to try and limit immigration from non-western countries.

The eminent scientist Gareth Hardin has made a very strong argument that countries need to be made responsible for their own overpopulation problems and that lack of border controls will set up a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation where countries pass their overpopulation problems onto their neighbours.

If Gray expects to be taken seriously by conservatives then he needs to address Hardin’s hard-headed argument. Furthermore, contrary to what Gray suggests, political parties don’t have to play on ‘racist fears’ of voters to win support for limited immigration policies.

Opinion poles indicate that most people already support limited immigration. The reason we don’t have limited immigration policies in place already is because political parties are deliberately putting big business interests ahead of majority interests.

Gray himself acknowledges that western businesses are a key factor in driving immigration:

"Remember Voltaire’s quip: ‘The comfort of the rich depends on abundant supply of the poor."

In type-casting limited immigration advocates as ignorant populists, Gray alienates the kind of people that are most likely to take his other, more hard-headed, arguments seriously. Its high time self-styled iconoclasts like John Gray stopped squirming around politically sensitive issues like immigration and reveal what they actually think.

Demography and the Middle East

In blogosphere debate on armed conflict in the Middle East, one factor is conspicuously absent from most discussions - demography. Given the huge demographic problems that the region faces this appears to be a big oversight.

Most countries in the Middle East have young, rapidly expanding populations, while the regions resources are in steady decline. Water is becoming scarcer while oil and gas are very unequally distributed. Many countries like Egypt are already dependent on grain producers like Australia and the U.S for basic grain supplies.

Traditional conservative Lawrence Auster argues that the primary reason for Islamic terrorism is the Islamic religion itself. He points out that many other developing countries have reason to dislike the West but you don’t see Nigerians or Burmese, for example, attacking US airliners. In terms of explaining the suicide attacks on Westerners, Auster’s cultural explanation is very plausible. Historically suicide attacks are quite a rare form of conflict yet are commonly carried out by young Muslims.

In terms of explaining the high general level of violence in the Middle East the cultural theory is more limited. Although, Islam may be a more aggressive religion than say Buddhism, only a relatively small proportion of the world’s huge Muslim population is actively engaged in terrorism. Furthermore, much of the conflict in the Middle East is between Muslims rather than between Muslims and non-Muslims.

The most common reasons for war are not culture or religion but disputes over resources. When you combine a shortage of resources with a large population of young aggressive males the chances of violence are greatly increased. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was a classic resource war where large numbers of Iranians died attacking oil rich Iraqi. Only a country with a large surplus population of young males could tolerate such losses.

The current instability in Iraq has provided unemployed males from overpopulated countries like Pakistan, Iran and Jordan an opportunity to practice ‘’low risk’ terrorism against Americans and pro-Americans. Only well-educated, suicidal Muslims are willing to strike at Westerners on their home territory.

However, in the chaos of Iraq, terrorists with more limited training and courage have an excellent chance of inflicting damage on their enemies without losing their lives in the process. The good work the US and UK are doing in foiling attacks on the West is being undone by their blunders in Iraq.

The enormous losses Iran sustained in the conflict with Iraq have had a significant effect on the nation’s demographic policies. Iran, alone among Middle Eastern countries, has implemented a major population control program. Sadly, this policy has not been acknowledged by Western governments, or held up as good example for other Middle Eastern countries.

Ironically, the wealthiest country in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, has one of the most irresponsible attitudes to population control. If Saudi Arabia followed Iran’s example, and implemented a responsible population policy, it would be a great example for many other Middle Eastern states.

As well as supporting population control policies, Western governments need to send a firm message to nations in the Middle East that they can’t export their demographic problems to the developed world. There is no place for large numbers of Middle Eastern Muslims in western countries.