In my essay about the retreat of the Western world order, I mentioned the possibility of civil strife in the West caused by runaway immigration. This is no longer just a theoretical possibility. It is pretty clear to anybody following the developments in Europe that the situation in France is starting to become rather serious. President Jacques Chirac threw out part of a youth labor law that triggered massive protests and strikes, bowing to intense pressure from students and unions. The unemployment rate for youths under 26 is a staggering 22 percent nationwide, but soars to nearly 50 percent in some of those troubled areas with many Muslim immigrants. French Jews are leaving the country in ever-growing numbers, fleeing a wave of anti-Semitism. Nidra Poller, American ex-pat writer and translator in Paris, has written some appalling stories about aggressive anti-Semitism, such as the murder and brutal torture of French Jew Ilan Halimi early in 2006.

Muslim blogs are calling for violence against the Jews, the whites and the well-to-do. They say, “We must burn France, as Hamas will burn Israel.” The growth of the Islamic population is explosive. According to some, one out of three babies born in France is now a Muslim. Around 70% of French prisoners are Muslims. Hundreds of Muslim ghettos are already de facto following sharia, not French law. Some have pointed out that the French military are not always squeamish, but there are estimates that 15% of the armed forces are already made up of Muslims, and rising. How effective can the army then be in upholding the French republic? At the same time, opinion polls show that the French are now officially the most anti-capitalist nation on earth. France has chosen Socialism and Islam. It will get both, and sink into a quagmire of its own making. Some believe France will quietly become a Muslim country, others believe in civil war in the near future:

The French Disease

Within 20 years, one person out of four in France will be Muslim, and almost certainly poor and angry. So the French disease progresses. It is chronic becoming terminal. On the way toward collapse, there will be no civil war, just moments of harsh violence. The population will change. People with a high level of productivity will choose exile. People with a low level of productivity will immigrate. Jews and Christians will leave. Muslims will arrive.

The unreported race riot in France

Fredric Encel, Professor of international relations at the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration in Paris and a man not known for crying wolf, recently stated that France is becoming a new Lebanon. The implication, far-fetched though it may seem, was that civil upheaval might be no more than a few years off, sparked by growing ethnic and religious polarization.

I’m not sure which of these scenarios is scarier. People keep talking about the nukes that the Iranians may get, but what about the hundreds of nuclear warheads the French have? Will they be used to intimidate the rest of the West? How do we handle an Islamic France, still the heartland of the European continent, with Muslim control of hundreds of nukes? And how do we handle a Bosnia or Lebanon with a population much larger than either of these countries, and with hundreds of nuclear warheads at stake?

If Muslim immigration continues, the impending fall of France could mark the starting point of the Balkanization of much of Europe, perhaps later even North America. I fear this is a world war. Maybe future historians will dub it the Multicultural World War. Just as WW1 was caused by Imperialism, WW2 by Fascism and the Cold War by Communism, this one will be caused by Multiculturalism. The term “the Multicultural World War” has been coined by Fjordman. I find this to be more accurate than “The Islamic World War” because what will cause this world war is Western cultural weakness, through Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration, rather than Islamic strength. As poster DP111 says, this world war may very well be in the form of a global civil war, where you get a succession of civil wars instead of countries invading other countries. Multiculturalism and uncontrolled mass-immigration destroy the internal cohesion of the decadent West, which will slowly fall apart as it has lost the will to defend itself and the belief in its own culture. The wars in the Balkans in the 1990s will in hindsight be seen as a prelude to the Multicultural World War. Rather than a Westernization of the Balkans, we get a Balkanization of the West.

I guess there is some poetic justice in the fact that the country that initiated and has led the creation of Eurabia now gets consumed by its own Frankenstein monster, but we should not gloat over this. The downfall of France is very bad news for the rest of the West. Again, what happens to their nukes and military resources? As stated in the book “Eurabia” by Bat Ye’or, the merger of Europe and the Arab-Islamic world has been encouraged by the French political elite in particular at least since the early 1970s, with a vision of creating a united Europe and Mediterranean basin under French leadership, in what has basically been a French dream since the age of Napoleon, the great hero of current French PM de Villepin. Several prominent French leaders stated quite openly in 2005 that the proposed EU Constitution was basically an enlarged France. Justice Minister Dominique Perben said: “We have finally obtained this ‘Europe à la française’ that we have awaited for so long. This constitutional treaty is an enlarged France. It is a Europe written in French.” Education Minister François Fillon stated: “This Constitution allows the French ambition to assert itself in the big Europe that General de Gaulle hoped and prayed for.” The French dream of an enlarged France. What they may get is a France carved into tiny pieces.

My personal belief is not that we are witnessing the final triumph of Eurabia, but rather the last spasms of the Eurabian Union. There will be at least as big changes in Western Europe over the coming generation as there were in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall. There will be the downfall and disintegration of an anti-democratic, bureaucratic superstate, the European Union instead of the Soviet Union, and there will be the downfall of “soft Socialism” in the shape of the Multicultural welfare state in the West just as you had the downfall of the “hard Socialism” in the East. The difference is that the downfall of Communism in the East happened through a relatively bloodless “Velvet Revolution,” whereas the downfall of Multiculturalism in the West may turn out to be anything but bloodless. And it will come, sooner than many people think. Multiculturalism, cultural Marxism and the idea of forced cultural equality, will collapse just as Communism, the idea of economic Marxism and forced economic equality fell.

The difference is that when Communism was discredited in Eastern Europe, it was still Poles who lived in Polish cities, Bulgarians who lived in Bulgarian cities etc. When the veil of Multiculturalism disappears, it will be Pakistanis who live in London, Turks who live in Berlin, Algerians who live in Paris and Moroccans who live in Amsterdam. And then the show begins.

Europe may not be finished yet, but she will go through a painful period of transition even if we do get a rebirth here. It should be noted that a revolution doesn’t usually come when the oppression is at its worst, but when the grip of the authorities and their totalitarian ideology, in this case Multiculturalism and Political Correctness, seems to be slipping. This was the case with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and it will be the case with the European Union now. I see increasing signs that the idea of Multiculturalism is on the retreat. Even Germany’s and Europe’s largest newspaper ran a series about the collapse of Multiculturalism recently.

I am not alone in predicting such a turbulent scenario. Prominent critic of Islam in Denmark, Lars Hedegaard, is quoted in Bruce Bawer’s book “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within” in support of this dark view:

“If there’s any hope,” Hedegaard suggested dryly, borrowing a line he knew I’d recognize from 1984, “it lies in the proles.” Yet we both knew that the “proles” –  if they did take over the reins from the elite – might well lead Europe back down the road to fascism. He did admit that he was glad to be living in Denmark and not elsewhere in Western Europe: “If there’s any place where there’s hope, it’s got to be this country.” But Hedegaard didn’t hold out much hope even for Denmark. “Unless they build up a cadre of intellectuals in Europe who can think,” he said, America “can kiss Europe good-bye.” The Continent’s future, he predicted, “is going to be vastly different than we imagine.. It’s going to be war. Like Lebanon,” with some enclaves dominated by Christians and others by Muslims. There will be “permanent strife,” and no one will have the “power to mollify or mediate… It will be more gruesome than we can imagine.” When the horror comes, he warned, the journalists who helped to bring it about will “wag their heads and flee – and leave it to those who can’t flee to fight it out.”

The population movements we are witnessing now are the largest and fastest in human history. In Europe, they can only be compared to the period often referred to as the Migration Period, following the disintegration of the Roman Empire. However, during the 4th and 5th centuries, the total human population of the world was in the order of 200 million. Today, it is 30 times larger than that, and still growing fast. We also have communications that can transport people anywhere on earth within hours, and media that show ordinary people how much better life is in other countries. On top of that, the Romans didn’t have human rights lawyers advocating that millions of barbarians be let into their lands. Is it a coincidence that the last time we had migrations like this was when large parts of the European continent suffered a complete civilizational breakdown? Is that what we are witnessing now? The second fall of Rome?

Both Thailand and the Philippines, countries where the Muslim population is not much larger than it is in some Western European countries, are facing war. Countries such as France, Holland and Sweden could soon reach a point where the Muslim population will create something akin to civil war, as it already has in the above-mentioned nations. The Islamic world is now at war with most of the major powers on the planet at the same time, from the USA to India and from Russia to Western Europe. It is a real possibility that we will get a full-blown world war because of these events. If so, I don’t think this will happen 50 years from now, but within the coming generation.

There are several possible scenarios:

1. Eurabia

The EU continues its transformation into a continent-wide organization with clear totalitarian leanings, and a very pro-Islamic stance. Europe’s fate is sealed when Turkey is allowed into the Union, and becomes its largest member. Historian Bat Ye’or, who first coined the term “Eurabia”, thinks that Europe’s ties with the Arab-Islamic world are now so firmly entrenched and established that Eurabia is an irreversible fact. Europe will cease to be a Western, democratic continent, and will become an appendix to the Arab world. Eurabia will become a global center for Jihad activities, as the dhimmi taxpayers and infidel Western technology give a boost to the Ummah. Muslims will be heavily concentrated in the major cities, and the dhimmi native population will retreat into the countryside. The old nation states will thus slowly die, as their major cities, which constitute the brain and “head” of its culture, are cut off from the rest of the body. Europe’s decline into Eurabia will be speeded up by the fact that millions of educated natives with the means to it will move to the USA or other nations. There will be no major war in Western Europe, as its civilization is already dead and very few will bother fighting for it.

The only violence will be sporadic Islamic terror attacks to induce fear, and occasional Muslim mob assaults in European streets to remind the dhimmis who is boss. It is conceivable that the center of European civilization will move from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, but even Eastern Europe will be put under severe pressure from Muslims, both in the Middle East and in the West. The basic rule is that the areas Muslims have taken into possession remain in Islamic hands, while the native population and culture is slowly eradicated. If this holds true for us today, then parts of Western Europe are already lost, and will indeed become Eurabia as Bat Ye’or predicts. There are not too many instances I know of where areas once under the sway of Islam have been reclaimed by infidels. The most obvious is of course Spain and the Iberian Peninsula, where the Reconquista took quite a few centuries. I know the Sikhs have kicked Muslims out of Punjab, India. Parts of present-day Israel could be counted, although Arabs and Muslims are trying very hard to wipe Israel off the map. And maybe some of China’s Western provinces could be included. Islam has not been eradicated there, but it is visibly retreating as Chinese authorities are suppressing any signs of rebellion.

What these examples have in common is that both the Christians in Spain, the Sikhs in India and the Jews in Israel were fighting Islam with powerful religious convictions of their own. The Chinese are not usually very religious, but they have an equally strong, even ruthless nationalism and belief in their own civilization. If history is any guide, today’s decadent, bored, post-religious and post-nationalist Europe will be no match for Islam, unless it rediscovers a belief in its own culture and a will to defend it. This will have to happen soon, or the Islamic demographic conquest of much of the continent will be an irreversible fact, anyway. The result of this will then either be Eurabia or a Pakistanization of Europe, the way we have already seen for generations in the Balkans.

2. War

Personally, I think this alternative is at least as likely as the above “Eurabia” scenario. It also contains several sub-scenarios, partly depending upon when the eventual war starts, and partly on whether there is still some Western pride and resistance left in Europe underneath the self-loathing and Multiculturalism:

The Pakistanization of Europe

Muslims aren’t numerous enough to control the entire continent. In the event of war, there will be mutual ethnic cleansing and Muslims will seize parts of Western Europe. For instance, a belt stretching from parts of Germany via Belgium and Holland to France, but maybe even regions within certain nation states. All of Europe will not be lost, but some parts will, and many others will be deeply damaged by the fighting. Many of our cultural treasures will burn. How things will go from there is difficult to predict. Perhaps this new “Pakistan” in the heart of Europe will be the source of constant instability and the staging ground for Jihad incursions into infidel areas, just as Pakistan is to India now. Perhaps we will see a slow reconquest of this area, possibly taking generations or even centuries. Muslim de facto control of hundreds of French nuclear warheads will make the situation a lot more dangerous.

Of course, it could be more than one Muslim region. Kosovo and in part Bosnia are functioning as Islamic bridgeheads in Europe at this moment. There could be several mini-Pakistans created all over the place. In fact present day Kosovo walks, talks and looks like a mini-Pakistan. The “zones” in France sound suspiciously like Muslim “mohallas” in India although the situation is not as bad as in France.

Reconquista – The Second Expulsion of the Moors

Muslims strike too early, before they are ready to seize control over major chunks of Europe. They overestimate their own power, and underestimate the strength that is still left in Europe. It will start, as these things always do, before anyone is ready. Everyone, the Islamists, the proto-dhimmis, the neo-nationalists, the sleepwalking middle class, thinks they have more time than they do. It may start more or less by accident, like WWI, through the act of a fringe player unaware of the forces involved or the stakes of the game. Once a full-blown civil war starts in one country, it can, and probably will, spread to other countries. Given the European Union’s borderless nature, it is unlikely that war will be limited to one nation only. This will create a domino effect, and Muslims will be expelled from Europe yet again, after major bloodshed and millions of dead across the continent. This will result in the collapse of the EU. The Arab world will support the Muslims and will prolong the war, but they won’t win it.

Cultures collide: Muslim immigrants will be expelled from Europe unless they reverse the growing perception of them as a social threat

The Muslims refused to assimilate. They were expelled. This was the story in Europe 400 years ago. We are watching the sequel today. In the clash of cultures between secular Europeans and extremist Muslims, there can ultimately be no compatibility or compromise, only loss by one side or the other of the absolute values it holds dear. European capitulation on European soil, where they remain the dominant majority, is unlikely.

Global Civil War

Europe has been the primary staging ground for one cold and two hot world wars. It could become a major battlefield in an Islamic or Multicultural world war, too. A world war is already simmering, with Muslims clashes against Russia, Europe, Israel, China, India, the USA and Southeast Asia. Once the fighting starts in Europe, it could spread outside the continent and ignite a world war. This is the scenario of “global civil war”.

3. Western Rebirth in Europe

We should discuss the possibility of whether the Islamic threat will force the West to rethink its values and regain its strength. Can this be done, and how would this take place? Is it possible to avoid both major war and Eurabia or is this wishful thinking by now? The growth of Eurabia is closely tied to the growth of the EU. Perhaps we could derail Eurabia by dismantling the EU? This would require that Europe regain her old, cultural and religious dynamic and repel Islam. Just as Islam isn’t the cause of Europe’s current weakness, but rather a secondary infection, it could have the unforeseen and ironic effect of saving Europe from herself. By quite literally putting a dagger at Europe’s throat, the Islamic world will force Europeans to renew themselves or die. Europe will go through a turbulent period of painful, but necessary revival, and will arrive chastened on the other side.