If Europe Goes on Like This, It Will Become Eurabia

Many thanks to Anton for translating the following essay from the Basler Zeitung:

The Muslim share of the European population is rising inexorably without integration

Arab refugees are changing Europe — not the other way around.

by Bassam Tibi
April 5, 2018

May we talk freely about the consequences of Islamic immigration to Europe without censorship or self-censorship? Is it possible and permissible to raise a contradiction — by reference to three world-renowned experts — Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye’or and Walter Laqueur — against the ruling narrative in a substantive debate? These three thinkers represent the thesis of a future Eurabia in Europe. Finally, can conclusions be drawn from statistics that predict an increasing Arab-Islamic share of the resident population of Europe?

Among the limitations imposed by the prevailing narrative of the fundamental right to freedom of speech and of science in relation to the pending issue is the charge of Islamophobia. This term was forged in Iran in the early 1980s to stifle any critical discussion of Islam and Islamism; it was exploited as a reproach and taken over by the left. The French writer Pascal Bruckner argues against this trend. He speaks of a fictional Islamophobia whose central victims are those who do not join in the lamented attempt to make the theme of “Islamic immigration and its consequences” taboo.

Demographic trend

Under the title “Islamic immigration and its consequences,” I have published a book that is kept secret by all German-speaking media. I belong among the victims. Arguments can now be defamed — but it is more effective to silence them through the media. What about the statistics?

At the beginning of this century, in 2004, the mentioned restriction of the freedom of speech and of science in relation to our topic was not yet as strong as it is today. The daily newspaper Die Welt published an interview with the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis on July 28, 2004 entitled “Europe will be Islamic at the end of the 21st century”. In the same year, in an article published in the US weekly magazine Weekly Standard (issue 4/2004) by Financial Times editor Christopher Caldwell coined the term “Islamic Europe”.

A year later, the Egyptian-born Jewish author Bat Ye’or published the much acclaimed book Eurabia in the United States. In it she speaks of a massive demographic and cultural trend to transform Europe into an Islamic-Arabian entity. The prophetic statements in this book have been enormously topical since the refugee crisis of 2015/2016.

I always feel reminded of this book when I hear the immigrant “new Germans” (Herfried Münkler, political scientist) in many German cities in public transport and public places today, speaking very loudly in a primitive, disturbing Arabic — even for me as a native Arabic-speaking Syrian. Arabic is a beautiful and highly civilized world language, but only if you master it through education. Educated Arabs speak a different Arabic than I’ve heard so often on the streets in Germany since 2015 that I think I’m in an Arab country.

Arabic is such a well-differentiated language that one can determine a speaker’s background both geographically and socially. The Arabic that I hear in Europe today is not the language of educated Syrian engineers and doctors whom the representatives of the Willkommenskultur [welcoming culture] would have us believe [the immigrants are]. I hear a peasant or a slum Arabic. As a civilized Syrian, I do not know polygamy from either my Damascene family or in the circles I frequented during the first 18 years of my life.

The newspaper Welt am Sonntag reports in the article “Punishable but tolerated” (January 28, 2018) of the introduction of polygamy by many Syrian refugees, such as a Syrian who in the context of family reunion has brought four wives and 23 children to Germany at the expense the taxpayer and is being remunerated accordingly. The article adds, “This is not an isolated case.”

Statistical forecasts

Now I want to talk about the statistics. At the end of November 2017, the US Pew Research Center in Washington and New York published statistical forecasts for the year 2050, which were distributed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 30 November. According to the article, the “proportion of Muslims in the Federal Republic will increase from 6.1 percent in 2016 to 20 percent in 2050”. As a Syrian and a Muslim, I have no objection if these people become Europeans and do not bring the conflicts and violence of the Middle East to Germany. The fact is that the Arab refugees are changing Germany, not the other way round. To begin by averting any objection to prejudice and panic, I emphasize emphatically that I am not arguing against the people who are fleeing, but against the possible consequences that negatively affect Europe.

Regardless of the cited statistics, and more than a decade earlier, the Egyptian-born journalist Bat Ye’or, now living partly in Switzerland and partly in the UK, published the provocative book Eurabia. The world authority Walter Laqueur argues similarly in his book The Last Days of Europe. He writes: “The decline of Europe is regrettable; it slows down …” And he adds that Islamic Europe will “differ greatly from what we know and appreciate.” Laqueur, like Bat Ye’or, has Jewish roots and emphasizes his sympathy for refugees, because he himself was one three times in his life. In the preface to his book, Laqueur defends himself against being “considered right-wing” as the left-green narrative used to do with dissenters.

Threat not perceived

In the following I want to elaborate on the book Eurabia. In it, the author claims that with Islamic immigration a “transformation of Europe into a Euro-Arabia” is taking place. The former Oxford and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson praises the book by Bat Ye’or with the following sentence: “Later historians will one day consider the coinage of the word Eurabia to be prophetic.”

Bat Ye’or wonders why European media propagate a welcoming culture. “Muslim migrants pouring into Europe are welcomed as the creators of Eurabia.” So the threat is not perceived. How is Eurabia different from Western Europe? Ye’or replies, “Less European.” That seems to be the goal of the left-leaning European multiculturalists, who reject European identity and even ostracize its defense as racism.

According to Bat Ye’or, Eurabia would be the result of “Europe’s Islamization”. As a Jew, she is concerned by the fact that in Eurabia a combination of anti-Americanism and hatred of the Jews is expressed. “Anti-Semitism is the face of the future Muslim Eurabia.”

Ye’or draws attention to the evil propaganda methods used against the critics of this scenario. Any resistance against the increasing influx of Muslim migrants from Arab and Muslim countries to Europe would be branded as racism and defamed.

A decade before the Pew statistics, Ye’or introduced demographics as an argument. Between the middle of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, the total number of Arabs increased from 80 to 320 million. Today we can speak of about 400 million Arabs, of which 50 percent are under 20 years old. These only see a prospect for the future when fleeing to Europe. That’s why Bernard Lewis in the quoted interview has suggested that Europe will be Arab-Islamic by the end of the 21st century. Ye’or also states: “Integration has generally failed.” Instead, “Islamization” is taking place.

Bat Ye’or also defends her diagnosis from defamation by emphasizing that she has no reservations about Muslims, but against concessions to the religious and political norms of Muslim immigrants. She is also against Muslim immigrants’ refusal to integrate into European culture. In such a development, immigrants do not become European, but Europe becomes less European through cultural Arabization.

An island of freedom

Now I come to the question posed at the outset: why I, as an immigrant from Syria, would fight for a secular Europe rather than Eurabia and take the same stance as Bernard Lewis and Bat Ye’or. Already in 1998 I answered this question in the dedication of my then-published book “Europe without identity?”. The dedication was intended for my Jewish teacher Max Horkheimer. From him I learned that Europe is an “island of freedom” in an “ocean of tyranny”. This is the dedication.

In light of the refugee crisis of 2015/2016, I published a new edition of this book with the new subheading “Europeanization or Islamization”. The country from which I come (Syria) is an illustration of this “ocean of tyranny”. There the ruling Alawite Shiites and the Sunnis have been killing each other for seven years. This will continue in the years and decades to come. The Swedish-Italian UN diplomat Staffan de Mistura suspects that resolving the Syrian conflict is more difficult than ending the Thirty Years War.

This is not taking place only in Syria, but also in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Afghanistan. This propagates to all Middle Eastern countries. Europe can not stop the demographic explosion in these countries by taking in millions of refugees without perishing. The Middle Eastern “ocean of tyranny” reached Europe as Eurabia.

What conclusions can be drawn from the above Eurabia discussion? The fact is that the Islamic share of the European population will continue to rise without integration. The fact is that the EU has no policy to deal with this phenomenon that threatens its existence. It is also a fact that this is not “political asylum” but a migration of peoples.

Moralizing does not continue

The first conclusion is that moralizing does not solve this problem; it is just as damaging as the opposite polarization and Islamophobia. Europe needs a policy that fulfills two tasks: on the one hand to transform the migration of peoples that is taking place from an illegal migration into an orderly immigration. This regulation includes quotas and a numerical restriction by host countries according to their capacities. In addition, every immigration must be accompanied by an integration policy. Otherwise, parallel societies will emerge, which in the long term will help transform Europe into Eurabia.

For that reason, I have restrictively argued in several articles in the Basler Zeitung for the integration of Muslims as citizens, as individual citizens, and against the designation of minorities who have minority rights and who will behave differently if they become the majority.

Bassam Tibi is Professor Emeritus of International Relations in Göttingen. He writes regularly for the Basler Zeitung about Islam, the Arab world and questions of integration. His current books are Islamic History and German Islamic Studies (2017) and Islamic Immigration and its Consequences (2018).

27 thoughts on “If Europe Goes on Like This, It Will Become Eurabia

  1. “This regulation includes quotas and a numerical restriction by host countries according to their capacities.”

    WRONG ! Any solution involving coercion will fail. It is fundamentally wrong to FORCE countries to take anyone.

    Persuasion -> good
    Coercion -> evil

    If the Germans want to voluntarily abolish the country, they can. But to use FORCE on other countries to take people the Germans invited is not only wrong, it is a casus belli

    This professor is completely wrong in their prescription. More force is not the answer – and the citizens will show this is the case.

    Of course, the politicians are well aware of the situation. This is by design. When the citizens chafe and cry for relief the evil politicians that engineered the situation will demand more power (such as the abolition of sovereign border control) in order to fix a problem designed to result in that outcome.

    Why are professors so utterly out-of-touch these days ?

    • I don’t think Tibi was advocating using force on countries. Let us recall that there is quite enough migration into West European countries as a semi-voluntary action. He doesn’t address the concerns of countries such as Hungary, who set their acceptable quota as zero.

      There is an issue that Tibi dances around: should immigration serve the interests of the host country or of the immigrants? You can set “quotas” consistent with the “ability of the country to absorb immigrants” but that leaves the implicit assertion that there are some immigrants who face real persecution that do not have a right to enter some Western country. The logical conclusion of that is that validly, it might be that absolutely no immigrants have the right to immigrate simply because of persecution claims.

      Tibi complains that the bulk of the immigrants are not the upper-class Syrians he identifies with, who don’t take the core tenets of Islam too seriously. But, do upper-class, Muslim Syrian immigrants represent a desirable population for a European country? Do upper-class Christian Syrian immigrants provide a net benefit to a host country? Large influxes of immigrants of any persuasion bring the risk of organized crime. The Italian mafia is, of course, very, very Catholic. So, are Syrian Christians, or Russian Jews, or Israeli Jews, immune from the pull of identity-based organized crime groups?

      All this to say, I think Tibi can be completely on the wrong track, without thinking him to have bad faith. But, the only sensible policy for any Western nation, or perhaps any nation in the world at this point, is no immigration whatsoever. If people are being shot, or starved, or massacred, it’s simply not our responsibility. People who crash the borders and throw away their identity papers, should be shipped to any country willing to take a bribe to accept them.

  2. .

    How successful have the Musses been?

    http://www.spiegel.de/INTERNATIONAL/Al-Qaida
    August 12, 2005 03:53 PM
    .
    The Future of Terrorism: What al-Qaida Really Wants.
    .
    If there is anyone who might possibly have an inkling as to what al-Qaida are up to, it is the Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein. He has not only spent time in prison with al-Zarqawi, but has also managed make contact with many of the network’s leaders. Based on correspondence with these sources, he has now brought out a book detailing the organization’s master plan.
    .
    By Yassin Musharbash

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/the-future-of-terrorism-what-al-qaida-really-wants-a-369448.html

    • Worth a read: surprisingly close to the reality so far for 13 year-old predictions.

  3. I read this title in my blog feed and it provoked the thought — “is the headline writer aiming to be awarded ‘DUH OF THE YEAR’ honors?”

    And then I saw it was you Baron, and thought an autoimmune disease, even a social one, is not cognizant. Duh indeed. Lambs to the slaughter.

  4. The usual answer I’ve seen is “The children of the immigrants are becoming assimilated and secularized and having fewer children of their own.”

    Does that really seem to be the case, or is it wishful thinking?

    • If the UK experience is anything to go by it is worse than wishful thinking.
      I have always lived in a multi-cultural City in the UK. Back in the 1980s for example the hijab was almost never seen and I cannot recall EVER seeing a niqab or Burkha.
      Today the converse is (almost) true. The Hijab is ubiquitous, except where it is replaced by the niqab or Burkha.
      Neither are these “old biddies” under the wraps, from the children in tow and their speed of movement these are the “children of the immigrants” who far from “becoming assimilated” are becoming ever more separatist in nature.

    • The statistics prove the exact opposite. The younger generation of Muslims are 3x as fascistic as their grandparents who first came to the UK. And considering how many children Muslims have, that’s an awful lot of fascists.

      This Policy Exchange survey was done by the kind of “moderate Muslims” who are held out as the fantasy of what younger Muslims will be like.

      https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/living-apart-together-british-muslims-and-the-paradox-of-multiculturalism/

      The survey results then prove how atypical are those whose names appear on the survey. That survey is ten years old. It is never mentioned. Later surveys are what get talked up (the numbers are shocking, but not as shocking as they were before many Muslims decided to conceal their true views).

      These surveys are designed to conceal how horrific are views of the younger Muslims. How to structure a survey such that it would conceal these awful views? In the responses to questions like “should gays be killed” instead of providing “yes/no” as options, the surveys provide options such as “yes/no/don’t know/refuse to say”. In this way survey designers have discovered they can reduce the number of respondents who make a positive commitment to the fascistic views.

      Since Muslims are conscious of being spied on by the state, many of the fascistic bent will choose the “don’t know/refuse to say” options. For instance, when I went to Tower Hamlets (their library had multiple copies of Reliance of the Traveller), the computers in the library each had a large notice above saying “The Police record everything you look at or write on this computer”. You can be sure that such notices will only appear in libraries where there are lots of Muslims in the UK. Thus, we should regard as unreliable all these surveys with anything other than “yes/no” options, because Muslims are primed to believe the state is spying on them.

  5. Ah, but I know people who “know better” than Bassam Tibi, but when asked to explain or justify their “correct” views are silent because they don’t discuss with a “racist” like me either my ideas or those of another “racist” like Mr. Tibi.

  6. Our real troubles begin when one of the nuclear EU countries puts an Islamist in charge of the military

    • I’ve had this very thought about France since I was a boy. Terrorists don’t need to steal or build such weapons, they will inherit them.

  7. Bad news boys and girls, Europe is no longer facing a defensive action. They lost already! Sad to say, but it’s all over but the flowers and the crying. Europe is gone. Gon-zo-la. Poof. Way of the dodo. Extinct, kaput, naught, nil, neutered and nullified.
    As I recall the reconquest of Spain took 700 years of hard fighting. And that was back when European men still had stones and European women were happy about that. Now? Really? Are gentle, sensitive European Soy-Boys going to drive out the barbarians by raw force? More likely the savages will put them in dresses and use them as girl-friends.
    A reconquest is the only hope for civilization in Europe, and for anything distinctly European in the world.
    And by the way, nice people llike Bassam Tibi, the author, who are far more interested in their own spotless innocence than they ever were in the threat THEY KNEW was coming, have been no help at all. Worse, the savages have been wearing them as camouflage. And they have allowed it.
    The only men with real aggressive fighting spiriit in Europe have bbeen driven to the edges of society as football hoolighans, biker gangs and the like. That’s all that Europe has left. And high status Euros have the brazen gall to look down on their last defenders.

    • “nice people llike Bassam Tibi, the author, who are far more interested in their own spotless innocence than they ever were in the threat THEY KNEW was coming, have been no help at all. ”

      Actually, the worst of Tibi is that he promotes the idea that the plight of a refugee creates an obligation of a potential host country to accept the refugee. He coats the assumption with qualifications that the country should only accept the number of refugees it can be comfortable with. But, it’s becoming more apparent that the comfortable number of refugees for most or all countries is zero.

      Which means, especially in the future, a significant number of people will simply have to be thrown to the wolves. There’s nothing that can be done to help them, other than mass, involuntary sterilization. And, it’s not the business of a national government to take actions like that in another country. An international organization might consider that in its purview, which is exactly why international bureaucracies funded by tax dollars from real countries are so toxic.

      • @Ronald B. :
        good luck with cancelling the UNHCR convention of 1951:-))

        1. for the sake of legal clarity/hygiene, let us distinguish refugees from country-shopping welfare migrants.I am not aware that Tibi addresses this, by the way, even for those coming from his homeland of Syria
        2. you write as if Kelly Greenhill had never written “Weapons of Mass Migration” in 2011:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FN52gOzD24

        • ” you write as if Kelly Greenhill had never written “Weapons of Mass Migration” in 2011:”

          From what I can surmise from summaries of her book, she makes the case that countries will purposely cause situations of mass migration for political or strategic purposes, taking into account the fact that the target countries have laws that make them vulnerable to mass migration movements.

          So, I don’t see where that invalidates my assertion that countries in the future, to survive, will have to not concern themselves with the fate of the masses of people subject to violence or starvation.

          Perhaps you could actually make a case with details, rather than simply making an unsupported statement and giving a link to a 40-minute video.

        • I just listened to the entire video, and it totally confirms my earlier assumption: that it will have to be the target countries that determine they will not be victimized by mass migration, whether used as policy by other countries or whether spontaneous.

          Israel was the subject of a coercion attack by Hezbollah and the PA to mass unarmed migrants on its border. Israel responded by putting land mines and machine guns along its border. A few, very few, of the invaders were killed, and the movement fizzled out. They knew that Israel was serious, and no one wants to just get killed.

          It kind of reminds one of the vignette in “Camp of the Saints” where the barges were passing by Egypt. Egypt put out gunboats and told the barges to avoid Egyptian waters. The barges knew Egypt was perfectly willing to sink them, so they did, in fact, avoid Egyptian territory in their journey.

  8. You do NOT fight your way into positions of power in modern EUropian states by either ignorance or stupidity.
    Hence–they (the leadership) are NEITHER ignorant NOR stupid. They know what they are doing. They know exactly what they are doing.
    So-through EUrope’s multitudes of political “parties” they create and keep the electorate impotent and unable to vote clearly and simply against islamozation. (See ‘Germany’ as an example–who exactly do they vote FOR to eliminate islamizteion?)
    The ‘leadership’ WANT what they are getting…..so, why?

    One explanation is conversion–the leaders became secret muslims. This is most likely true in France and especially in England.

    Another is simply BRIBERY. There is unimaginable amount of $$$$$ spent on all facets of immigration–thousands alone per head to cross the Med.–more for cellphones and new clothing–tolls, food, transportation. Ya think some gets into leadership’s pockets?
    Ya think??

    The last is simple BOREDOM.
    Think Scandinavia.
    (North Sea) Oil–the good life.
    No new worlds to conquer, and political stagnation.
    Feminized EVERYTHING. (OUTLAW THE non-SITZPINKLER!)
    An IKEA culture (?)
    Everybody stare into the nearest mirror and see just how goody good they all are. ” We’ll help a buncha “refugees” and ‘elevate’ them to civilization”–to make us feel good about ourselves.

    Well–nobody ever asked those “them”, OR what they thought “civilization” even was.
    Guess what?

    They/we are about to find out.

    • As we proved in the Introduction to Mohammed’s Koran – the elite have known for centuries that the true and proven nature of Islam is war, subjugation, terror.

      So, what in Islamizing Europe, they are not ignorant. They know what the consequences will be.

      One of the consequences of an Islamized Europe will be the end of democracy. Do you think that the anti-democratic, pro-globalist elite want to preserve democracy or would they be delighted if the people of Europe said “we don’t want to have elections any more”.

      • I haven’t read “Easy Meat” or “Mohammed’s Koran” yet (getting there, getting there) but I do wonder if these globalists will have access to the sort of life to which they are accustomed WITHOUT democracy. I mean, there’s a limit to what a feudal structure will offer in terms of life’s luxuries, whether that be the ballet or an Apple phone.

        By the way, I REALLY like your author bio on Amazon. It succinctly sums up my horror of Islamization, especially the sentence “by the end of the twenty-first century over two thousand years of culture will be replaced by the lifestyle of a seventh-century desert tribe.”

        As a devoted Anglophile obsessed with the English Eighteenth Century, I’m sick whenever I think about what you guys are about to lose. Now why don’t your “elites” think about all of that, or are they too uneducated?
        Plum McCauley

  9. “Bat Ye’or also defends her diagnosis from defamation by emphasizing that she has no reservations about Muslims, but against concessions to the religious and political norms of Muslim immigrants. ”

    In the real world, that’s a distinction with no practical difference.

    • We don’t fall over ourselves to distinguish National Socialists from National Socialism.

      So why do we fall over ourselves to distinguish Muslims from Islam?

      • Because doing so preserves an element of piety, political correctness being the new virtue. As long as one can mount one’s critique behind a qualification (a distinction between Muslims and Islam), a person can express his or her concerns without exposing themselves to the accusation of heresy (racism).

  10. @Anonymous: yes, that silence is striking. Currently I suspect it is the way the class war between middle and working class plays out in Western countries.

    My theory is as follows: already 100 years ago, the difference between well-off, liberally-minded, cosmopolitan careerists who moved where the job took them and local, rural/city working class people who did not and could not travel was in their attitude to the Nation and Race.

    It is true that communist parties promoted international solidarity according to Workers of the World Unite but before 1975 this was theoretical insofar as there was minimal welfare immigration of Muslims to European countries and political Islam got going only with the Khomeini revolution of 1979 in Iran and the Saudi export of Wahabism at the request of the USA.

    After all, Rudyard Kipling wrote of the White Man’s Burden whereas his contemporary, gay novelist EM Forster wrote:”If I have to chose between my country and my friends, I hope I would choose my friends.”

    So I suspect that the PC teacher or pastor falls silent in your presence because articulating their own fears for the future to you would mean publicly admitting identification with/membership of a lower social class.

    For example, there has been mass abuse of proletarian White girls over decades by Muslims in the UK at Rotherham and currently Telford, with the so-called Labour Party and police ignoring it.

    And I think the ignoring is only secondarily their anxiety about the Muslim Labour vote in the UK, 68% of Muslims.

    Because their Guardian-reading contempt for low-class girls as such is also important.

    As an anecdote: recently there was a video clip of a middle-class German rapefugee welcomer at the edge of a patriotic demo in east Germany: she sneered to the camera about the patriots “getting social welfare benefits right and left from the government”.

    The fact that in Germany, a “crimigrant” gets financed out of funds into which he never paid a cent, whereas German employees experience monthly wage deductions for age pension, unemployment and illness and hence have a legal claim on their benefits in case of need was seemingly quite beyond her.

  11. “there has been mass abuse of proletarian White girls over decades by Muslims in the UK at Rotherham and currently Telford, with the so-called Labour Party and police ignoring it.”

    So, the Conservative Party has been raising a ruckus over the grooming gangs? The Conservative Party has been proposing immigration barriers? The Conservative Party has been limiting the influence of Muslims?

    Fact: the entire political establishment of Britain, like the Deep State in the US, is a roughly homogeneous mass with slightly different flavors between Labor and Conservative. The US Democrats oppose a tax cut, while the US Republicans more-or-less favor a tax cut, while making up for it with massive deficits. But, where it counts, war and immigration, the Republicans and Democrats speak with one voice, certain brave individuals like Nunes and Cruz excepted.

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