They inhabit self-imposed ghettoes, matter to derision and even worse, the perennial targets of much-correct thugs and populist politicians of all persuasions. They are mostly confined to menial employment. They are accused of spreading crime, terrorism and disease, of being backward and violent, of refusing to suit in.

Their faith, atavistic and rigid, insists on ritual slaughter and male circumcision. They almost never mingle socially or inter-marry. Most of them – nevertheless born in European countries – are not allowed to vote. Brown-skinned and with a marked international accent, they are matter to law enforcement profiling and harassment and all method of racial discrimination.

They are the new Jews of Europe – its Muslim minorities.

Muslims – in particular Arab youths from North Africa – are, without a doubt, disproportionately represented in crime, which includes dislike crime, largely towards the Jews. Completely Muslim al-Qaida cells have been uncovered in several West European countries. But this can be safely attributed to ubiquitous and trenchant long-expression unemployment and to stunted upward mobility, the two social and economic due mainly to latent or expressed racism.

Moreover, the stereotype is wrong. The incidence of greater education and skills is greater among Muslim immigrants than in the common populace – a phenomenon recognized as “brain drain”. Europe appeals to the best and the brightest – pupils, scholars, researchers, engineers and intellectuals – away from their destitute, politically dysfunctional and backward homelands.

The Economist surveys the landscape of friction and withdrawal:

“Indifference to Islam has turned initially to disdain, then to suspicion and extra not too long ago to hostility … (due to photographs of) petro-run sheikhs, Palestinian terrorists, Iranian ayatollahs, mass immigration and then the assaults of September eleventh, executed if not prepared by western-based mostly Muslims and succored by an odious regime in Afghanistan … Muslims tend to appear from weak, rural areas most are unwell-educated, several are brown. They frequently face xenophobia and discrimination, occasionally created even worse by racist politicians. They discuss the language of the broader society possibly inadequately or not at all, so they uncover it difficult to get employment. Their young children struggle at faculty. They huddle in weak districts, frequently in condition-equipped housing … They tend to withdraw into their personal earth, (forming a) self-ample, self-contained neighborhood.”

This self-imposed segregation has various dimensions. Clannish behavior persists for decades. Marriages are still arranged – reluctant brides and grooms are imported from the motherland to wed immigrants from the similar area or village. The “parallel society”, in the words and phrases of a British authorities report subsequent the Oldham riots two yrs ago, extends to cultural habits, religious methods and social norms.

Assimilation and integration has several enemies.

Remittances from overseas are an crucial part of the gross national product and budgetary revenues of countries these types of as Bangladesh and Pakistan. Consequently their frantic endeavours to retain the cohesive national and cultural identity of the expats. DITIB is an arm of the Turkish government’s business office for religious affairs. It discourages the assimilation or social integration of Turks in Germany. Turkish firms – newspapers, satellite Tv set, food items, garments, vacation brokers, publishers – thrive on ghettoization.

There is a tacit confluence of passions in between national governments, exporters and Islamic corporations. All three want Turks in Germany to continue to be as Turkish as possible. The extra nostalgic and homebound the expatriate – the larger sized and extra regular his remittances, the greater his usage of Turkish items and providers and the extra prone he is to vacation resort to faith as a determinant of his besieged and fracturing identity.

Muslim numbers are not negligible. Two European countries have Muslim majorities – Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania. Other folks – in the two Outdated Europe and its post-communist east – harbor sizable and developing Islamic minorities. Waves of immigration and beginning rates three moments as substantial as the indigenous populace increase their share of the populace in practically every single European polity – from Russia to Macedonia and from Bulgaria to Britain. One particular in 7 Russians is Muslim – above twenty million people today.

In accordance to the March-April issue of Foreign Policy, the non-Muslim part of Europe will shrink by 3.five p.c by 2015 although the Muslim populace will possible double. There are 3 million Turks in Germany and a further twelve million Muslims – Algerians, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Egyptians, Senegalese, Malis, or Tunisians – in the relaxation of the European Union.

This is two and one half moments the number of Muslims in the United States. Even assuming – wrongly – that all of them occupy the lowest decile of cash flow, their merged yearly getting electrical power would total to a whopping $150 billion. Also, current retroactive alterations to German regulation have naturalized above a million immigrants and immediately granted its a great deal-coveted citizenship to the 160,000 Muslims born in Germany every single calendar year.

Involving 2-3 million Muslims in France – half their number – are suitable to vote. Another million – one out of two – solid ballots in Britain. These numbers count at the polls and are not offset by the concerted endeavours of a potent Jewish lobby – there are barely a million Jews in Western Europe.

Muslims are becoming a very well-courted swing vote. They may well have determined the previous election in Germany, for occasion. Recognizing their developing centrality, France recognized – nevertheless not with out vote-rigging – a French Council of the Islamic Religion, the equal of Napoleon’s Jewish Consistory. Two French cabinet members are Muslims. Britain has a Muslim Council.

Both of those Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president and Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor, now take the issues to greet the capital’s one million Muslims on the celebration of their Feast of Sacrifice. They also actively solicit the votes of the nationalist and elitist Muslims of the industrialized Volga – largely the Tatars, Bashkirs and Chuvash. Even the impoverished, a great deal-detested and powerless Muslims of the northern Caucasus – Chechens, Circassians and Dagestanis – have benefited from this newfound recognition of their electoral electrical power.

Although divided by their typical creed – Shiites vs. Sunnites vs. Wahabbites and so on – the Muslims of Europe are united in supporting the Palestinian cause and in opposing the Iraq war. This – and post-colonial guilt thoughts, in particular manifest in France and Britain – go a long way towards detailing Germany’s re-uncovered pacifistic backbone and France’s anti-Israeli (not to say anti-Semitic) tilt.

Moreover, the Muslims have been participating in an crucial economic part in the continent considering the fact that the early nineteen sixties. Europe’s postwar miracle was launched on these low-cost, plentiful and oft-replenished Gastarbeiter – “visitor staff”. Objective scientific tests have constantly shown that immigrants contribute extra to their host economies – as consumers, investors and staff – than they ever claw back again in social providers and general public items. This is in particular accurate in Europe, the place an ageing populace of early retirees has been relying on the uninterrupted flow of pension contributions by more youthful laborers, several of them immigrants.

Company has been shelling out awareness to this rising marketplace. British economic intermediaries – these types of as the West Bromwich Constructing Society – have not too long ago released “Islamic” (desire-no cost) home loans. In accordance to marketplace research firm, Datamonitor, gross developments in the Uk by yourself could attain $7 billion in 2006 – up from $sixty million today. The Bank of England is in the throes of planning laws to accommodate the pent-up need.

Nonetheless, their extremely integration, even so hesitant and gradual, renders the Muslims in Europe susceptible to the kind of therapy the old continent meted out to its Jews just before the holocaust. Expanding Muslim existence in stagnating work marketplaces inside of recessionary economies inevitably generated a backlash, frequently cloaked in terms of Samuel Huntington’s 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs, “Clash of Civilizations”.

Even tolerant Italy was afflicted. Final calendar year, the Bologna archbishop, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, solid Islam as incompatible with Italian lifestyle. The country’s key minister advised, in a check out to Berlin two yrs ago, that Islam is an inherently inferior civilization.

Oriana Fallaci, a popular journalist, printed previous calendar year an inane and foul-mouthed diatribe titled “The Rage and the Pride” in which she accused Muslims of “breeding like rats”, “shitting and pissing” (sic!) everywhere and supporting Osama bin-Laden indiscriminately.

Youthful Muslims reacted – by further radicalizing and by refusing to assimilate – to the two escalating anti-Islamic rhetoric in Europe and the “triumphs” of Islam in other places, these types of as the revolution in Iran in 1979. Tutored by preachers qualified in the most militant Islamist climates in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Iran, praying in mosques financed by shady Islamic charities – these youngsters are amenable to recruiters from every single fanatical grouping.

The United Kingdom suffered some of the worst race riots in half a century in the past two yrs. France is terrorized by an unprecedented crime wave emanating from the banlieux – the decrepit, predominantly Muslim, housing estates in suburbia. September 11 only accelerated the inevitable conflict in between an alienated minority and hostile authorities during the continent. Current alterations in European – notably British – legislation brazenly profile and concentrate on Muslims.

This is a extraordinary turnaround. Europe supported the Muslim Bosnian cause towards the Serbs, Islamic Chechnya towards Russia, the Palestinians towards the Israelis and Muslim Albanian insurgents towards the two Serbs and Macedonians. Nor was this consistent professional-Islamic orientation a novelty.

Britain’s Fee for Racial Equality which caters largely to the demands of Muslims, was fashioned 37 yrs ago. Its Foreign Office environment has hardly ever wavered from its professional-Arab bias. Germany recognized a Central Council for Muslims. Both of those anti-Americanism and the extra veteran anti-Israeli streak assisted sustain Europe’s empathy with Muslim refugees and “freedom fighters” during the nineteen sixties, 70s and 80s.

September 11 put paid to this amity. The danger is that the brand of “Euro-Islam” that has begun to arise lately may well be decimated by this pervasive and unexpected distrust. Time Journal described this blend as “the regular Koran-based mostly faith with its prohibitions towards liquor and desire-bearing loans now indelibly marked by the ‘Western’ values of tolerance, democracy and civil liberties.”

These kinds of “enlightened” Muslims can serve as an invaluable bridge in between Europe and Russia, the Middle East, Asia, which includes China and other spots with substantial Muslim majorities or minorities. As most earth conflicts today contain Islamist militants, international peace and a functioning “new get” critically depend on the goodwill and conversation skills of Muslims.

These kinds of a benign amalgam is the only sensible hope for reconciliation. Europe is ageing and stagnating and can be reinvigorated only by embracing youthful, dynamic, driven immigrants, most of whom are bound to be Muslim. Co-existence is possible and the clash of civilization not an inevitability until Huntington’s dystopic eyesight results in being the simple plan document of the West.