As Muslims Call Europe Home, Dangerous Isolation Takes Root

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Walled Off

As Muslims Call Europe Home, Dangerous Isolation Takes Root

In France, 'Political Islam' Preaches Intolerance; Challenge to Secularism
Push for Virginity Certificates

By IAN JOHNSON and JOHN CARREYROU
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 11, 2005; Page A1

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Europe is undergoing a massive population shift -- some say the largest in more than a millennium -- as Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa cross the Mediterranean in search of work and a better life. The Muslim population of Europe is increasing dramatically; in countries like France, it is already about six million, or 10% of the total, and could easily double in percentage terms in the coming 20 years.

Declining birthrates mean that Europe needs these immigrants to stay vibrant. And indeed, many of them have integrated successfully, gaining education, wealth and prestige. Yet across the continent, some of Europe's Muslims are drifting off into separate troubled societies. In some European cities, nearly half of Muslim youths drop out of high school and unemployment rates are high. Racism is on the rise, helping to drive Muslims back into their communities. The situation was crystallized in a report last year by the French domestic intelligence agency, which surveyed 630 communities with a heavy concentration of Muslim migrants. Half of them, the report said, are "ghettoized" along religious lines.

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A network of terrorists drawn from the fringes of Europe's Muslims staged spectacular attacks in Madrid and the murder of a Dutch filmmaker last year. Four of the lead actors in the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. became drawn to terrorism in one of Germany's radical Muslim communities. Laying the groundwork for such radicalization is the seductive idea of political Islam, which preaches a Utopian view of society where all citizens are part of a just and fair "umma," or community of Muslims. In this world, the separation of religion and politics is heretical, and Europe's Muslims -- now representing between 5% and 10% of the continent's population -- need to be walled off from Western culture.

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A turning point was 1989. The Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War -- an event that many Muslims saw as due in part to the actions of Islamic holy warriors, the mujahedeen, who through the 1980s had fought the Soviet Union to a standstill in Afghanistan. That was also the year Iran's paramount leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a religious opinion, or fatwa, calling for the death of the British writer Salman Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" in part criticized and satirized Islam. Fatwas are traditionally only valid in the Islamic world, so Khomeini's fatwa implied something profound: Europe was part of the Islamic world. It was a revolutionary change that now is accepted by many Islamic theologians and thinkers.

The trend accelerated in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet, allowing young people to plug into a growing pan-Islamic movement that was inspired by orthodox Muslim groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and backed by wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich states. Girls began to wear headscarves and boys collected audio and videotapes of preachers who advocated a stripped-down form of Islam that emphasized the culture's past glories and a handful of simple religious regulations.

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The effect on Paris's banlieues was dramatic. People living and working there recount how personal freedoms were restricted as the new ideology took hold... Others notice similar changes. Jocelyne Clarke, a teacher at a high school in Aubervilliers, says it is becoming harder to organize field trips and cultural outings with her students because Muslim boys and girls refuse to mix with the other sex. Some Muslim students have walked out of class during readings of Voltaire because the 18th-century author was scornful of religion in his writings, she says.

Two years ago, the city council of Aubervilliers gave in to Muslim associations' demands that it close off the municipal pool to men at certain times of the week so that Muslim women could bathe in private, in keeping with the Quran's admonition that women dress and behave modestly. The city council also agreed to put up curtains over the pool's big bay windows, which give onto the street. In Saint-Denis, El Mostafa Ramsi says junior high-school students brought to tour the neighborhood's famous basilica, where most of France's kings are buried, have refused to enter the church on the grounds that it is "an impure place."

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Write to Ian Johnson at [email protected] and John Carreyrou at [email protected]

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112103551842081687,00.html

[applegrove]

1. And as long a muslim leaders start to diminish the human rights

of the people under them with Sharia Laws and the like imposed on the unwilling - the Europeans are going to look elsewhere for immigrants.

That is what happens when you mess up the place that gave you a home. No matter what was done Empires 50 years ago... nobody is going to hand there country over to people who ignore rule of law if they have any power whatsoever.