Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Commentary - Europe's Two Culture Wars
What's going on in Europe?...
This commentary, by George Weigel is long and well thought out. It includes many thought provoking ideas. Here are just a few of them:
"Earlier this year, five days short of the second anniversary of the Madrid bombings, the Zapatero government, which had already legalized marriage between and adoption by same-sex partners and sought to restrict religious education in Spanish schools, announced that the words “father” and “mother” would no longer appear on Spanish birth certificates."
"Last October, for example, the official custodians of Dutch orthographic probity decreed that, beginning in August 2006, “Christ” will henceforth be written with a lower-case “c,” while “Jews” (Joden) will be spelled with a capital “J” when denominating nationality and a lower-case “j” when indicating members of a religion."
"At the transnational level, pressure from the EU recently brought down the governing coalition in one of the EU’s new members, Slovakia. The issue was a concordat with the Vatican stipulating that Slovakia would respect the decision of doctors who, for reasons of moral conviction, chose not to perform abortions."
"At the beginning of the 21st century, the world is still chock-full of natural resources. Europe, however, is running out of the most crucial resource—people. The overall picture is sobering enough. Not a single EU member has a replacement-level fertility rate, i.e., the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population."
"Over the next quarter-century, the number of workers in Europe will decline by 7 percent while the number of over-sixty-fives will increase by 50 percent, trends that will create intolerable fiscal difficulties for the welfare state across the continent."
"There are dozens of 'ungovernable' areas in France: Muslim-dominated suburbs, mainly, where the writ of French law does not run and into which the French police do not go."
"Sixty years after the end of World War II, the European instinct for appeasement is alive and well. French public swimming pools have been segregated by sex because of Muslim protests. 'Piglet' mugs have disappeared from certain British retailers after Muslim complaints that the A.A. Milne character was offensive to Islamic sensibilities. So have Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirls, which reminded some Muslims of Arabic script from the Qur’an. Bawer reports that the British Red Cross banished Christmas trees and nativity scenes from its charity stores for fear of offending Muslims. For similar reasons, the Dutch police in the wake of the van Gogh murder destroyed a piece of Amsterdam street art that proclaimed 'Thou shalt not kill'; schoolchildren were forbidden to display Dutch flags on their backpacks because immigrants might think them 'provocative.'"
"Pera is also blunt about Europe’s unwillingness to defend itself against radical Islam. Do Europeans understand, he asks, that their very existence is at stake, their civilization has been targeted, their culture is under attack? Do they understand that what they are being called on to defend is their own identity? Through culture, education, diplomatic negotiations, political relations, economic exchange, dialogue, preaching, but also, if necessary, through force?"
"Some would argue that it is already too late, that the demographic tipping point has been reached and that, as Mark Steyn puts it, with 'the successor population [i.e., Islam] already in place, . . . the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.'"
