In the video below, what we’re seeing is civilizational colonization, not immigration. Muslim men in France are literally driving women out of public spaces. Imagine a suburb of France that was majority Calvinist asserting the authority of Calvin’s “Institutes” over the Enlightenment inspired French Constitution in this way. The Anglo-French Enlightenment constitutes a civilization, and one of the things our civilization means is women’s equality, which includes access to cafes and streets without harassment or intimidation. Blacks fought for a similar right in the American South in the 1950s and 60s. Immigrants who come from Islamic dominated parts of the world shouldn’t be able to abuse Anglo-French tolerance for freedom of religion to trump hard won individual rights. It can’t be allowed to simply take over a community in this way, leaving no room for non-Muslims to live freely, according to their own lights. If this is allowed, France will become essentially a balkanized country where women are free in some areas and not in others. If you seek to immigrate to a liberal democracy, then you’re breaking the social contract if you don’t respect individual autonomy and choice. It should be a condition of entry that you agree to respect women’s autonomy and the autonomy of people whose beliefs are not your own. Otherwise, you’re colonizing the host country, not assimilating to it. You’re exploiting the law to make of yourself, locally, the law.
Prometheus Unbound 
So glad you’re coming around on this issue. I recall when we were both on the other side. I came to view Islam differently eventually. A tough transition to make, but the realization that many opposed to Muslim immigration aren’t motivated by bigotry, but are opposing it is important. Not saying the white supremacists aren’t also on that side, but they’re far less of a threat to free society than the Muslim hoard.
That is absolutely ignorant hogwash. I’m an actual French person, living in France and I can tell you that beyond any doubt the video is not representative of life in France. Not least of which because of the actual numbers. There is no Muslim “hoard”.
Yeah, I certainly believe you’re French.
Is that your way of participating in a discussion without presenting an argument?
Meh, I read your “arguments” below, which pretty much consist of putting words in other people’s mouths and calling anyone a bigot who disagrees with you. I’m doing you the favor of telling you directly that you’re not worth real debate.
Real debate consists of evidence- and in this case numbers.
That’s the aspect none of the geniuses proposing bigotry has had the decency to verify.
In a population of 65 million, we have an estimated 10% who are technically Muslim. I say technically because that number refers to ethnic Muslims. Of that 10%, only 33% say they’re practicing believers. But only 20% claimed they go regularly to mosque. That means we’re talking about 1.3 million people who go to mosque in a country of 65 million. Does look like much of a takeover, does it?
correction to last line: *Doesn’t* look like much of a takeover, does it?
Put another way, how toxic that such a small number of people are causing such problems! Really though, conflating arguments about religion and ethnicity? Using self reported mosque attendance as a proxy for identifying the numbers? Well I guess you’re forced into that since your country refuses to allow direct collection of religious data. Here’s what self reported polling looks like in a countries that don’t prevent that sort of data collection:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1510866/Poll-reveals-40pc-of-Muslims-want-sharia-law-in-UK.html
Click to access worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4730825.ece
Or maybe you’d prefer a more easily digestible form?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTp18arMLFc
Goodness- it gets worse and worse.
Let’s first dismiss the obvious. The conflation of religion/ethnicity/nationality isn’t some sort of unique thing that I pulled out of a hat. When we talk of racial profiling, that’s what we’re talking about. People don’t, after all, walk around with armbands that tell others what their religion is. When racial profilers stop a brown person named Mohammed, that he might be an atheist is irrelevant. So let’s not pretend there’s no conflation between the two things. Read through the following link and you’ll see what I mean:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_France#Estimations_based_on_people.27s_geographic_origin
France doesn’t collect religious data ITSELF (as a government) because it’s a secular state, genius. It allows any private company to collect whatever data it wishes, including religious. So what other means other than self-identification do you suggest when you say “Using self reported mosque attendance as a proxy for identifying the numbers”? Should each individual brown person be investigated to check if they attend mosque?
As for your data, it’s been widely dismissed because it was taken, in great part, in authoritarian countries with a history of persecuting non-conformists. So in essence your entire comment was an exercise in wasting people’s time as you’ve presented no actual evidence that contradicts anything I’ve said.
Like I said, you’re not worth the effort. Thought I’d give it a try regardless, but you’re the sort who lacks the capacity for self questioning.
What self questioning? You haven’t even been capable of comprehending the numbers. Or making a coherent argument for that matter.
France is not being colonised. We’re a secular country with secular laws. Burqas are prohibited. Overt religious symbols are banned from schools and government offices.
What self questioning do I need to do to know those facts?
It is civilisational colonisation as a *result* of immigration. You could make a similar film in parts of Birmingham.
https://t.co/3lrmecuhzN Read this
Titled: Europeans greatly overestimate Muslim population, poll shows
Indeed. The one consistent number we see is that once in Europe people stop frequenting religious institutions. In fact only 30% of French “Muslims” go to mosque at all.
The issue is one of culture rather than religious observance. Muslims comprise about 7% of Oxford’s population, but as the Operation Bullfinch investigation showed, their impact is disproportionately greater. It is a taboo subject for feminists and their friends in the Regressive Left.
What does that mean exactly? That people who come from Muslim cultures aren’t capable of integration? That’s another ridiculous myth. There are Muslims well integrated into all parts of French society, for example. From government to business to the world of culture.
I shan’t labour the point as I have detailed the issue on my own blog. Look up Operation Bullfinch, Oxford and tell me that it has nothing to do with their culture.
Because a particular case defines an entire culture? Should we then say Operation Yewtree is evidence that pedophilia is characteristic of thee British culture and people?
Operation Yewtree is characteristic of a 1970’s celebrity culture. Operation Bullfinch and similar cases in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Derby, Aylesbury and other English towns define a culture which is predominantly (though not exclusively) Muslim in origin, in that it relates to how men from pre-industrial societies in South Asia and East Africa treat pubescent girls. But it doesn’t surprise me that you indulge in whataboutery. It is a characteristic of those who will not face up to the truth.
Hilarious! What’s this new form of thinking called? Selective logic? The mathematical equation is only true if it’s in accordance with your political position?
Don’t be ridiculous, logic is math. If Muslim child abuse cases are an indictment of Islamic culture then that same formula has to apply to the systemic child abuse in the Catholic church- or in football.
To prove Islam is a causal factor, rather than contributing or incidental, you have to do much better than what you’ve done here with this bargain basement thinking.
In essence what you’re doing is re-packaging the garbage arguments the Christian Right has used against gays and women’s rights for the past 30 years. All you’ve done is direct them at Muslims.
‘In essence what you’re doing is re-packaging the garbage arguments the Christian Right has used against gays and women’s rights for the past 30 years’. No I have not. I have said that the causal factor is the way that girls are treated in those societies where Islam is the dominant culture. Still, your way of thought is typical of how the Regressive Left is in denial.
Why don’t you go ahead and call me a Social Justice Warrior? You know, one of those appalling people who believes in fairness and social justice. As opposed to those who believe in racism, discrimination and bringing back the rubbish of the Christian Right.
Your argument, if you want to call it that, uses defective logic. The problems with Islam are the same as those with other Abrahamic religions; adherence to their tenets is dangerous and destructive. A veil is a symbol of oppression, but systematically oppressing women doesn’t begin or end with a veil. In fact my mother and grandmother both grew up in a world where women were told what they could wear by **Christians**, and I’m only 38 years old.
It’s a genocide
Hi Santi
I’ve tracked down a long comment I made here six years ago. In it I said “….. muslims do not come to Australia (or other countries) as ‘immigrants’ – they come as colonisers.”
I find it somewhat depressing to now re-read the post (August 16, 2010 – ‘Fareed Zakaria …etc’) and numerous comments. “Depressing” because nothing said or done by muslims here (or anywhere else) over the past six years has given me any cause to modify my opinions.
Your then extended response in defence of muslims included “ Colin’s idea is especially jarring ….”.
Can I infer from this post that, as Andrew suggests, you now have a more realistic appreciation of the issue. No?
Colin,
I think Huntington’s book has swayed me.
I’ve always found myself going back and forth in my own mind, trying to reconcile my personal experience with Muslims who attend mosque, but don’t cover, hold professional jobs, etc., and the obviously problematic beliefs that accompany so much that makes the news. I’m also a very strong believer in the Anglo-French Enlightenment, First Amendment rights, the value of checks and balances to power, and the United Nations’ International Declaration on Human Rights. And so, much as a loathe so much of what goes on within religion, I would never want to legally hinder its open and private practice. Individual conscience is a high priority in my worldview, in terms of weighing competing goods. There has to be some compelling interests to mess with it.
Having said that, I do think the preponderance of the evidence is that Islamic and Confucian civilizations are never going to liberalize in the way the West is liberal. (And now, even the West is becoming less liberal.) I think this translates into Western countries having to figure out how to limit immigration wherever it appears that it can tip the balance of power away from liberalism in a society and toward illiberalism. I don’t know what that number is. I know of no society on the planet where there is a Muslim majority that is accompanied by democratic and liberal mores, with solid protection for individual conscience in matters of religion, homosexuality, feminism, etc.
Trump is banging the gong far too nervously when it comes to Islam in the United States (Muslims are, at most 2% of the population), but in Europe, I do think there’s serious evidence that Islamic civilization is generating pockets of concentration where it is beginning to erode Anglo-French Enlightenment values (in Birmingham, Paris, etc.), and changing European social behavior surrounding free speech. (Charlie Hebdo, etc.)
Disneyland Paris is an inanity, for example, but attendance at the park seems to be declining because people are less happy to gather in public because of terrorist concerns. However stupid, people have a right to be in public in a safe way.
http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2016/11/15/disneyland-paris-sees-record-low-attendance-amid-terrorism-concerns.html
I have been aware in broad outline of Huntington’s theories for some years, but not got around to reading his book. (Probably because of a general scepticism regarding predictions. They usually turn out to be wildly wrong. I’m old enough to remember taking the Club of Rome’s 1972 predictions seriously at that time! ). Looking at some summary points to refresh my memory, his mooted Sinic/Islamic axis against the West seems to me to be far more improbable now than it might have appeared 20 years ago. O t o h, he underestimated the threat now posed by Islam. On that score I’m with Sam Harris (otherwise not much of a fan).
Estimates of Muslim percentages appear pretty unreliable, but it seems we have a ‘density’ in Aus. around 3 times that in the US and that is enough that they are wielding some political influence. Still well short of the density in France of course.
Apologists for the acceptance of large numbers of refugees, such as The Economist, extol the economic benefits for European countries with their ageing and declining populations. That seems intuitively reasonable. However, they never mention the costs. Not even the direct costs, such as vastly increased security measures, let alone the harder-to-measure indirect costs such as inconvenience and compromised lifestyles. In that context, the measurable economic impacts outlined in the link you give are interesting. I don’t think the equivalent type of cost has arisen here in Aus; but the scale of terrorist incidents here has been far smaller (even relative to our small population) than those in Europe.
Bottom line is that I am opposed, even if the net economic benefit could be demonstrated to be positive, to accepting as immigrants those who are unlikely to be prepared to integrate into our Western cultures.
Colin,
In terms of economic context, I completely agree with you. If Islamic civilization was to begin to fundamentally change American or Australian culture, of course the economic benefit of having more people in these countries would not be worth the trade-off.
I think, in the United States, conservatives have vastly over-reacted to the consequence of Hispanic immigration to American culture. As a Californian who has dated, worked with, lived with, and befriended Hispanics (Mexican and Central American, mostly) more or less my whole life, I see the bridge between the white middle class and the Hispanic middle class as close to nonexistent (mostly Protestant vs. Catholic–both of which are part of Western civilization). One of the factors in my own having of children and getting married was walking through a Hispanic market in California when I was single and seeing all the happy Catholic families with their children, and thinking, “I could do that.” Hispanics have good family values and are hard working people. In my view, if that’s what white conservatives are really concerned about, and not race, then they should embrace Hispanic immigration.
Ironically, Trump’s wall and harsh immigration policies, however, may have the effect of keeping Islamic civilization from ever making a significant demographic dent in the trajectory of American culture, which, if Huntington’s thesis is correct, is probably a good thing.
On the other hand, fifty years from now, we may all be surprised (not you and me, of course, because we’ll be dead) at the petering out of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. There is some evidence (Iran, for instance), that Muslim mosque attendance is plummeting, etc. It may at some point become the case that Islamic civilization breeds very little fanaticism, incorporates liberal democracy, etc.
I still think liberal democracy will make a comeback globally over the next fifty years, and that reactionary forms of nationalism and religion are still on the wane, though vocal and insistent in the current Zeitgeist (the broken wheel squeaks loudest).
Capitalism and science are inherently disruptive–and products, we should recall, of Enlightenment liberalism. It was Voltaire in his letters on England who seems to have been the most effusive early voice of cosmopolitanism and the breaking down of borders via trade, for instance. That process isn’t going away because the nationalists and religionists are not turning their guns on capitalism–though, perhaps, science somewhat (surrounding global warming, vaccination, evolution, etc.). It’s easy to close borders and breed suspicion and resentment of foreigners and cosmopolitan elites, but nobody wants to kill the capitalist or scientific gooses that lay the golden eggs (not Putin, not Trump, not the mullahs or Iran, not the Communist Chinese, not the Hindu nationalists, etc.), yet they are both, ironically, fundamentally problematic for nationalism and religion.
I know those Club of Rome books, by the way. My dad used to read them. I still have one or two of the old paperbacks in my garage somewhere (The Limits to Growth, with something if I recall tied around a globe on the cover, perhaps ropes, like a Prometheus bound image, etc.).
As for Huntington, get a copy or listen to it on audible, and be amazed. 90% accuracy (my estimate). Not bad for a book written around 1990. If you have a different impression down the road after having a look, let me know. : )
Santi
It seems to me that a country, by definition, needs borders. If natural features, stakes in the ground, intermittent patrols suffice – well and good. If outsiders are not respecting those borders, however, then fences, walls, mine-fields, whatever need to be installed. I think it was that underlying perception that Trump tapped into. As to whether it was more specifically Hispanic immigration that caused concern – it is a bit presumptuous from where I sit to have an opinion. However, if that concern was based on an assumption that Hispanics would never integrate and would represent a significant threat to your society it would seem to me to be overblown. Everyone seems to have their own theory as to why he won. Depends on their individual biases! I note that Sam Harris contends that it was specifically T’s anti-Muslim stance that won it for him. Meanwhile Harris expressed a preference for HRC – cognitive dissonance is rampant in your society at the moment!
I’ve long seen societies/cultures as being in competition, in the Darwinian sense of ‘survival of the fittest’, and to that extent related to Huntington’s overarching thesis. As to the detail – I’ll plan to look again.
In the meantime I am totally absorbed reading Becker’s “The Denial of Death”. I finally got around to it, prompted by your introduction/summary of TMT which you posted a few years ago and which appealed to me then. I hadn’t expected the book to be as comprehensive and convincing as it is, or that internalizing its full import would actually prove quite unsettling – in a pleasing fashion!
The Denial of Death book is excellent, I agree. Glad you found it via what I wrote about it a few years back. It has spawned (perhaps you’ve already noticed this) a mini-following among academics. Two of the books elaborating on the thesis include “In the Wake of 9/11” and “The Worm at the Core.” Also a DVD which is good: “Flight from Death.” All of them, I’m guessing, can be readily found at Amazon.
As for borders and Trump, I think Harris’s cognitive dissonance on Islam and Trump is perhaps overshadowed by larger considerations (Trump having nuclear weapons at his disposal, his paranoia should we ever have a Cuban missile-style crisis, etc.). Lots to worry about with Trump, and Hillary would have dealt with Islamic terrorism okay. Here’s the DVD, but you may have to find the right region for your player.
https://www.amazon.com/Flight-Death-Immortality-Gabriel-Byrne/dp/B0009NZ77E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484683798&sr=8-1&keywords=flight+from+death+dvd
And here is the best of the books spawned by the Denial of Death book, which also has an Audible version:
https://www.amazon.com/Worm-Core-Role-Death-Life/dp/1400067472/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484683927&sr=8-1&keywords=worm+at+the+core