At The Gates Of Vienna

[Poetess]

At the gates of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war. As we like to say on the ideological right's side of the fence- give it to 'em!

by Fouad Ajami, Opinion Journal

In the legend of Moorish Spain, the last Muslim king of Granada, Boabdil, surrendered the keys to his city on Jan. 2, 1492, and on one of its hills, paused for a final glance at his lost dominion. The place would henceforth be known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro- "the Moor's Last Sigh." Boabdil's mother is said to have taunted him, and to have told him to "weep like a woman for the land he could not defend as a man." An Arab poet of our own era gave voice to a historical lament when he wrote that as he walked the streets of Granada, he searched his pockets for the keys to its houses. Al Andalus- Andalusia- would become a deep wound, a reminder of dominions gained by Islam and then squandered. No wonder Muslim chroniclers added "May Allah return it to Islam" as they told and retold Granada's fate.

The Balkans aside, modern Islam would develop as a religion of Afro-Asia. True, the Ottomans would contest the Eastern Mediterranean. But their challenge was turned back. Turkey succumbed to a European pretension but would never be European. Europe's victory over Islam appeared definitive. Even those Muslims in the Balkans touched by Ottoman culture became a marked community, left behind by the Ottoman retreat from Europe like "seaweed on dry land."

Yet Boabdil's revenge came. It stole upon Europe. Demography- the aging of Europe on the one hand and, on the other, a vast bloat of people in the Middle East and North Africa- did Boabdil's job for him. Spurred by economic growth in the '60s, which created the need for foreign laborers, a Muslim migration to Europe began. Today, 15 million Muslims make their home in the European Union.

The geography of Islam- and of the Islamic imagination- has shifted in recent years. The faith has become portable. Muslims who fled their countries brought Islam with them. Men came into bilad al kufr (the lands of unbelief), but a new breed of Islamists radicalized the faith there, in the midst of the kafir (unbeliever).

The new lands were owed scant loyalty, if any, and political-religious radicals savored the space afforded them by Western civil society. But they resented the logic of assimilation. They denied their sisters and daughters the right to mix with "strangers." You would have thought that the pluralism and tumult of this open European world would spawn a version of the faith to match it. But precisely the opposite happened. In bilad al kufr, the faith became sharpened for battle. We know that life in Hamburg- and the kind of Islam that Hamburg made possible- was decisive in the evolution of Mohammed Atta.

Satellite TV has been crucial in the making of this new radicalism. Preachers take to the air, and reach Muslims wherever they are. From the safety of Western cities, they counsel belligerence and inveigh against assimilation. They forbid shaking hands with women examiners at universities. They warn against offering greetings to "infidels" on their religious holidays, or serving in the armies and police of the new lands. "A Muslim has no nationality except his belief," wrote an intellectual godfather of radical Islamism.

Radical Islamism's adherents are unapologetic. What is laicite (secularism) to the Muslims in France and their militant leaders?

France grants its troubled Muslim suburbs everything and nothing. It leaves them to their own devices, and grants them an unstated power over its foreign policy decisions on Islamic and Middle Eastern matters. Trouble has come even to placid Belgium. In Antwerp, Dyab Abu Jahjah, a young Lebanese, only 32, has stepped forth to "empower" the Muslims of that country. Assimilation, he says, is but "cultural rape." He came to Belgium in 1991, and he owns up to inventing a story about persecution back home; it was a "low political trick," he says, and in the nature of things. The constitution of Belgium recognizes Dutch, French, and German as official languages. Abu Jahjah insists that Arabic be added, too.

Europe is host to a war between order and its enemies, fuelled by demography. Demographers tell us that the fertility replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. Europe is frightfully below this level; in Germany it is 1.3, Italy 1.2, Spain 1.1, France 1.7 (this higher rate is a factor of its Muslim population). Fertility rates in the Islamic world are altogether different: they are 3.2 in Algeria, 3.4 in Egypt and Morocco, 5.2 in Iraq and 6.1 in Saudi Arabia. This is Europe's neighborhood, and its contemporary fate. You can tell the neighbors across the Straits, (and within the gates of Europe) that you share their dread of Pax Americana. But nemesis is near.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004879

[Nabeela]

Blah, blah, blah.

Why aren't you banned yet, you piece of shit. Disgusting no wonder this site is going down the toilet.

[Poetess]

"Why aren't you banned yet."

We're not living under the Muslim police just yet sweetheart.