Ralph Peters jumps ugly with Mark Steyn over Eurabia

With all due respect, Janos, but reality is that throughout Germany and France neo-nationalist and openly xenophobic slash racist political parties are on the rise. Combine that w/ the fact that recent surveys in Germany show that a majority perceive Israel to be “the biggest threat to world peace”, and that “Muslims in general are prone to terrorist activities”, and there you have your rise of old-school fascism. And don’t forget the technological sophistication Europe has achieved in actively monitoring “terrorist activities”, i.e. wide-spanning surveillance of its citizens. For instance, soon a federal law will pass in Germany that will enable law enforcement to access all telecommunication records (incl. internet access) up to 24 months after the face w/o any court order.

But who am I to point this out? Let’s see what Mark Steyn himself has to say about this:

John Hawkins: You’ve said that the Muslims in Europe are much more alienated than the Muslims in the Middle East. Why do you think that is?

Mark Steyn: I think it’s because they have a miserable life and they see that other people don’t and I think it’s also because they are put in an almost continuous kind of conflict intention between their fair and the wider society.

I mean, one shouldn’t generalize, there are certain ways of dealing with Muslims, but in France, they deal with them by housing them in these grim, dehumanizing residential areas on the fringes of their cities that are the worst things I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen Soviet housing on the other side of the Iron Curtain – and it wasn’t as bad as where the French put their Muslims. It’s public housing, you know, — it’s not even, they don’t even do the thing they do in Britain where they call it Winnie Mandela House and they put some little decorative sculpture thing out in front for the yobbos to kick over and deface. They don’t even bother with that in these French suburbs. They’re just called, you know, dwelling unit number six million and eighty three and they’re like prisons.

The guys in Gitmo, for example, that Dick Durbin makes a big fuss about, actually live in nicer accommodations than a lot of these Muslims do in Clichy-sous-Bous.

And I think they have higher employment rates because of the employment protectionism there. Again, this is a particular to France; in other words, there’s no economic opportunity there, not compared to the opportunities that a Muslim has if he happens to be living in Baltimore or in Chicago. It’s a very different situation and they are up against states that are much more at ease with racism.

France and these other countries are not multicultural states as America or Canada or whatever understands, and they are up against states that are much more at ease with racism. So it seems perfectly normal to the French to have Muslims doing all the menial jobs, but not to have any Muslims in your legislature or prominent positions in life.

…(Muslims) adopted then the characteristics of a kind of sub-class and at the same time they then merge with the worst features of the host society. You can be in a northern English town after 9 o’clock at night on a Saturday night and these tattooed gangs of Pakistani skinheads came rolling through town. You think, what the hell is this? It’s like some futuristic dystopian thing cooked up by some mad lab scientist in which he’s taken the worst pathologies of the western world and the worst pathologies of the Muslim world and fused them together.

So you have this grotesque license, the sense of license and self gratification that your ordinary English yobbo would have merge with the sort of basic misogyny of the Muslim community and it produces something quite terrifying in these rape gangs they’ve now got in Scandinavia and France and Belgium and places. I think it’s that the western world impacts on a lot of young Muslims in ways that make them far more alienated, far more fiercely Islamist in effect than to some goat herder in Afghanistan.

John Hawkins: Why do you think Europeans have had a much more difficult time assimilating Muslims than the United States?

Mark Steyn: Generally speaking, Britain and commonwealth countries have a similar attitude to nationality that the U.S. does. Britain was the first nationality to be defined not by, well, certainly the first since Rome, but the first to be defined not by blood and ethnicity. In other words, if you were born in Kingston, Ontario, Kingston, Jamaica, or Kingston, on Thames England, you were a British subject and the Crown didn’t distinguish between you and any particular – and that’s not an ancient thing, by the way.

The 1948 British Nationality Act made a quarter the world’s population British subjects. You know, let me say, they’re not all pure bred Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, or Welshmen. They’re mostly, you know, all kinds of goofy Quebecers and…. people in Papua, New Guinea, all kinds of people, but they were British and in law they were British as anybody else was.

Now that’s not the way they do it in, say for example, in Denmark. In Denmark or Germany, in Germany there were ethnic Germans and there were Turkish guest workers who found it very hard no matter how many generations they were there to become eligible for German citizenship and even when the law changed, the Germans still saw citizenship as essentially a matter of race. I think that’s true of Scandinavian countries, too, so these aren’t multicultural societies. They’re much more like bi-cultural ones. I think I say in the book at some point that it’s like imagining, you know, the Mayflower in colonial New England 30-40 years after the Mayflower’s docked and all the old ones are getting a bit long in the tooth and they suddenly notice that everybody young in town is called Achmed and Kalid and Mohammed. It’s a bi-cultural society and bi-cultural societies are always the most unstable.

Niko on November 26, 2006 at 7:23 PM

Janos, I’d like to have some of what you smoke.

Reality check.

A study based on a survey of 5,000 people found that 9 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that a dictatorship can in certain circumstances be a preferable form of government, and 15.1 percent agreed with this: “We should have one leader to rule Germany with a strong hand for the good of everyone.” (…) The survey, conducted in May and June, found that more than a quarter of respondents agreed with certain xenophobic statements. The rate in eastern Germany was even higher at about a third. (…)

A total of 11.6 percent agreed with the statement “If Hitler hadn’t exterminated Jews he would be seen as a great statesman today.” (…)

A total of 36.9 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: “Foreigners only come here to exploit our welfare state.” Anti-Semitism seems more widespread in western Germany than the east, with 15.8 percent of westerners agreeing with the statement: “The Jews are more prone than other people to use nasty tricks to get what they want.” Just under 6 percent of easterners agreed. (…)

Many pensioners and people in early retirement, and many unemployed people hold far-right views. But they added that “the group of people with far-right views is recruited from all levels of society.”

Niko on November 26, 2006 at 8:15 PM

Oh, and Janos, since you were asking for manifestations of “will” on behalf of Europeans (presumably white Europeans), you might want to read this.

A former government spokesman on Wednesday suggested that dark-skinned visitors to Germany should consider avoiding the eastern part of the country where racism runs high. “There are small and medium-sized towns in Brandenburg, as well as elsewhere, which I would advise a visitor of another skin colour to avoid going to,” said Uwe-Karsten Heye, who now leads an anti-racism organization called “Show Your Color.” “It is possible he wouldn’t get out alive.” (…)

Heye also said there was an increasing tendency in the country to look the other way when it comes to right-wing violence. His comments about “no-go” areas in Germany came as a response to a question about whether tourists from Togo or the Ivory Coast should feel comfortable travelling anywhere in Germany. (…)

The uproar comes just weeks after an apparently racist attack against an Ethiopian-German in the Brandenburg state capital of Potsdam, just outside of Berlin. Almost a month after the attack, the victim remains in hospital with severe head injuries.

Seems like an awful lot of will to me. The will to swing baseball bats and smash immigrant skulls, that is.

Niko on November 27, 2006 at 2:58 AM