Brussels, We Have a Problem

(A real inconvenient truth…)

The next few paragraphs may seem disconnected, but if you read them, as well as the excerpts that appear afterwards from other much more talented and famous writers than moi, this column should eventually make sense. I’d like to dedicate this column to the street canvassers for the ACLU and the Democratic National Committee who told me privately what their higher-ups won’t publicly acknowledge: Their belief that the European Welfare State propped up by a bunch of hack politicians who promise everyone goodies to get elected is far superior to our work hard and get ahead thing some dreary old white men came up with over 200 years ago.

I think it was around 1994 that I put out a photocopied book that was intended to raise awareness about the Earth’s overpopulation crisis. It was titled Thank You For Not Breeding, and consisted of work done by myself and other “alternative” (i.e. “unknown”) cartoonists. Apparently a lot of people agreed with me, as a woman who worked at City Lights Books in San Francisco remarked that it sold exceptionally well there. I forgot how I became so concerned about the subject, but do recall driving my friends (and pretty much everyone else around me) crazy with my constant preaching about how the planet is doomed unless we stop procreating because the food supply will run out because of overpopulation and more diseases will result because of it and more pollution will result because of it and more wars will be waged because of it and we can’t support all these people because we’re an automated society and there aren’t enough jobs to go around and this and that and this and that. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

The people who influenced me to think this way were most likely influenced by a man named Paul Ehrlich, a professor both of population studies and biological sciences at Stanford University. Ehrlich became well known with his 1968 book The Population Bomb (co-authored by his wife Anne Ehrlich), in which he predicted impending ecological destruction. A big thank you to discoverthenetworks.org for collecting the following predictions made by Paul Ehrlich:

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines… hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." (1968)

"Smog disasters" in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)

"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." (1969)

"Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." (1976)

“Falling temperatures will cause the ice caps to sink into the ocean, producing "a global tidal wave that could wipe out a substantial portion of mankind, and the sea level could rise 60 to 100 feet." (1970)

(Ehrlich then switched from predicting an impending Ice Age to predicting Global Warming, saying, "The population of the U.S. will shrink from 250 million to about 22.5 million before 1999 because of famine and global warming.")

Well, I think it’s safe to say that Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which was taken as gospel by so many a generation ago, is, quite possibly, one of the stupidest books ever written. (No wonder this guy is an esteemed member of academia.)

Another really stupid book, much less famous but much more recent, is Why Europe Will Rule the 21st Century by Mark Leonard. The reason why Europe won’t run the 21st Century is primarily because it’s run by people like Mark Leonard. Leonard may want to hedge his bets and title his next book Why Europe Will Exist in the 21st Century.

*****

A while back I was driving in my car and felt a little down. So I did what I usually do when I need a good laugh. I turned on KPFA, the flagship station of our American taxpayer-funded Pacifica Radio Network, which, naturally, spouts anti-Americanism 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I caught the tail end of some show (it wasn’t “Democracy Now” but another agitprop drone-a-thon with “Democracy” misleadingly placed in the title) and heard the two guys hosting it giggle about how they’d much rather live in Sweden than the United States because, like, in Sweden there are 40 political parties and only 2 brands of soap whereas us stupid Americans have 40 brands of soap but only 2 political parties. A lot of teenagers suffering from acne might disagree with that. Washing with a bar of Clearasil or Neutrogena as opposed to Dial would do more for their complexions than some fiery “Stop Zits Now” rhetoric from any politician, no matter how charismatic or “progressive” he or she might be. When did we start thinking that the not-smart-enough-to-succeed-on-Wall Street-and-not-good-looking–enough-to-succeed-in-Hollywood dolts who dither away in politics can solve all our problems? Was Thomas Edison a politician? Was Samuel Morse?

Oh wait; this paper is distributed in the Bay Area, Santa Barbara and Santa Monica.

Was Bob Dylan a politician? Was Neil Young? Huh? Huh?

*****

Call me old fashioned, but I think there is a difference between accidentally hitting civilians in a war and intentionally targeting them with terrorism. What’s that? Oh, my last name. Yeah, well, I don’t just blame the Mahomedan. It doesn’t matter to me if the hero of my adolescence, John Lennon, gave money to the Irish Republican Army with royalties he earned writing songs about peace and love. The carnage of a London department store strewn with the severed limbs of old ladies and little kids is too horrific to imagine. Though recent underreported news stories suggest that some people now living in our country would actually welcome such scenarios occurring on our side of the pond. Unlike most enlightened progressives, these people have something to kill and die for. And they’ve got religion, too.

They don’t want to give peace a chance. They keep on playing those mind games.

Damn. I pushed it too far. I should have quit after “And they’ve got religion, too.” Oh well.

(And now the excerpts from more talented and famous writers…)

From “Who's ugly now?” by Mark Steyn in The Spectator, May 4th 2002:

The rise of the anti-immigrant parties in France, Belgium, et al. is supposedly due to crime. It's true there seems to be a lot of it over there. You're six times more likely to be mugged in London than in New York. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has a worse crime rate than Harlem. In the Los Angeles Times, Sebastian Rotella was perplexed: 'As crime has dropped in the United States in recent years, it has worsened in much of Europe, despite generous welfare states designed to prevent US-style inequality and social conflict.'

'Despite'? Try 'because of'. In December in this space, I lent my support to Mickey Kaus, the thinking conservative's thinking liberal, who advanced the theory that welfare causes terrorism. Among the examples I cited was Zacarias Moussaoui, the socalled '20th hijacker', who became an Islamofascist nutter while living on welfare in London. What else is there to do all day? Go down the pub? Lie on the floor listening to Capital FM? If you're putting in a ten-hour grease-monkey shift at Fat Dave's Auto Body, you're too wiped out to wipe America out. But in the fetid public housing of London, Paris, Frankfurt and Rotterdam the government will pay you to sit around the flat all day plotting world domination.

It's a scheme worthy of a Bond villain: flood high-unemployment Europe with unassimilated low-skilled young men, whom the state is obliged to put on welfare just to keep them from rioting, and hey presto, your enemies will be funding their own downfall - ON HER MAJESTY'S SOCIAL SERVICE. Say what you like about that so-called 'American Taleban', John Yoko Ashram Fonda Country Joe and the Fish Walker Lindh, but at least his loopy Marin County parents put him through terrorist training school on their own nickel and not at the taxpayers' expense. At the moment, alongside the ranks of Europe's terrorist welfare queens, Jihad Johnny has the distinction of being the West's only private-sector Islamabaddy.

It's gradually beginning to dawn on US Europhiles that the Continent has done everything the American Left has wanted for years and it doesn't seem to be working out. Thanks to Erfurt and Nanterre, you're currently outpacing the Yanks at high-scoring gun massacres. At the last attempted US massacre, at the Appalachian School of Law in West Virginia, there were a couple of gun-totin' students on hand to pin down the would-be mass murderer until the cops arrived. But in Europe - 'a gun-control utopia', as the Los Angeles Times sees it - there's no one to stop the corpses piling up.

From America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It, a book by Mark Steyn (Regnery, 2006) available at SteynOnline.com and bookstores everywhere:

My old – very old – friend George Abbott, the director of On The Town, Damn Yankees and Pal Joey, died in 1995 at the age of 107 while working on a revival of The Pajama Game. A few years earlier, in his late nineties, he’d given up playing tennis because all his partners had died. That’s the position America is facing in respect of its transnational social life: it’ll be turning up to the G8, Nato, the EU-US summit only to find that all its partners have died.  

The single most important fact about the early 21st century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population – ie, no growth, no decline; just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010 – you need a Total Fertility Rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That’s what America has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than any of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handguns, more UN peacekeepers, etc) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38, Japan 1.32, Russia 1.14. These countries – or, more precisely, these people – are going out of business.

There’s nothing wrong with old folks: speaking for myself, if I’m at some soiree, I’d much rather Doris Day provided the evening’s musical entertainment than the latest caterwauling gangsta rapper; I’d rather date Debbie Reynolds than Angelina Jolie. But even to put it in those terms is to become aware of how our assumptions about a society’s health – about its innovative and creative energies - are based on its youthfulness. Picture the difference between a small northern mill town where the mill’s closed down and the young people have moved away and a growing community in the Sun Belt. Which has the bigger range of stores and restaurants, more work opportunities, better school choice? Which problem would you rather have - managing growth or managing decline?

So what happens when the whole nation – and in Europe the entire continent – has a profile closer to the decrepit mill town than the Sun Belt suburb?

And, if you’re anti-capitalist, don’t console yourself with the thought that you don’t need all those businesses anyway. Big Government depends on bigger population: Americans have a relatively smallish government compared to Canada and Europe, but the US Social Security system assumes a 30 per cent population growth between now and 2075 or so and, even then, expects to be running a deficit after 2017. Now imagine you’re Spain and you’ve

Germany’s downward spiral in population is no longer reversible, the country’s federal statistics office said Tuesday. The birthrate has dropped so low that immigration numbers cannot compensate.

LifeSiteNews.com,     11/9/06

got even bigger public pensions liabilities and a population that’s going to be halving every 35 years. The progressive left can be in favor of Big Government and population control but not both. That mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital – and that’s before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.

True, birth rates are falling all over the world, and it may be that eventually every couple on the planet decides to opt for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage - and those societies with expensive social programs dependent on mass immigration will be in the worst predicament. It’s no consolation for the European Union with its deathbed birth statistics if the Third World’s demographics are also falling: they’re your nursery, they’re the babies you couldn’t be bothered having; if their fertility rate goes the same way yours has, that will be a problem for you long before it’s a problem for them. Unless it corrects course within the next five to ten years, Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. By the next century, German will be spoken only at Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering’s Monday night poker game in Hell. And long before the Maldive Islands are submerged by “rising sea levels” every Spaniard and Italian will be six foot under. But sure, go ahead: worry about “climate change”.

More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation.

In the 14th century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent’s population; in the 21st, a larger proportion will disappear – in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in. One can cite examples of remote backward tribes who expire upon contact with the modern world, but for the modern world to expire in favor of the backward tribes is a turn of events future anthropologists will ponder, as we do the fall of Rome.

From “Oh, Those ‘Mischievous Muslims’! What a Bunch of Merry Pranksters!” by Don Feder (DonFeder.com) in GrassTopsUSA.com, October 31, 2006:

On leaving a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, the leader of Tibetan Buddhists told reporters that we can’t hold all Muslims responsible for the misdeeds of a few.

The Lama: "Nowadays, I often express that due to a few mischievous Muslims’ acts we should not consider all Muslims as something bad. That is very unfair."

Expanding on this dazzling analysis, the Dalai Lama continued: "A few mischievous people you can find from all religions – among Muslims and Christians and Jews and Buddhists. To generalize is not correct."

O.K., now I know this will get me scratched from the invite list for Richard Gere’s New Year’s Eve party, but I just gotta ask: When was the last time a bald guy in a saffron robe threatened to kill someone he believed had insulted the Buddha?

While we’re at it, when was the last time a gang of Talmudic scholars tried to blow up anything? Did the Vatican put out a fatwah on "DaVinci Code" author Dan Brown? The last holy war committed in the name of Christianity was over 800 years ago. If Hindus behead hostages, I’ve somehow managed to miss it.

"A few mischievous Muslims" makes kidnapping, torture, beheadings, bomb plots, mass murder and death threats sound like schoolboy pranks. It’s September 11, 2001, and some high-spirited Muslim merrymakers just crashed two planes into the World Trade Center, slaughtering 3,000 innocents. What a lark!

Here are some recent examples of Muslim high-jinks:

*In Iraq, Father Paulis Iskander, a Syrian-Orthodox priest, was kidnapped by a few Muslim pranksters. After good-naturedly torturing him, they beheaded the priest. This was in retaliation for Pope Benedict XVI’s quote of a 14th century Byzantine emperor. Jihadists apparently missed the Catholic-Orthodox schism (1054 AD) -- or maybe all Crusaders look the same to them.

*There are 1 million Assyrian Christians in Iraq – but not for long. They’ve been targeted by every side in the civil war. On September 24th, two bombs exploded in St. Mary’s Cathedral in Baghdad. Earlier, a church was bombed in Basra.

*Muslims celebrated their holy month of Ramadan by racking up an impressive body count -- more than 1,600 dead in 280 separate terror attacks in 17 countries. As I recall, for my bar mitzvah, I didn’t kill anyone. But I did hurt someone’s feelings on Passover, once.

*In a recent column, former New York Mayor Ed Koch reports on a meeting he had with Pope John Paul II in the early 1990s. Forthright fellow that he is, Koch asked the Pope why the Vatican didn’t recognize Israel (it did a few years later), Koch says John Paul II replied: "It will happen someday, but it can’t happen now. I have a responsibility to the Catholics who live in Koranic lands and who would be in danger if we recognized Israel." This wasn’t paranoia. John Paul knew exactly what happens when Muslims get testy.

*In Germany, the government is starting to crack down on an estimated 5,000 Islamist websites that are "spreading hatred" and "hawking terror." I see, those few mischievous Muslims must all be web-site designers and computer geeks.

*Then again, perhaps they’re all involved in mass communications. The American-Muslim TV network, broadcasting in six states to a potential audience of two million, says its mission is "to improve the image of Muslims in the United States." Recent programming included the broadcast of an anti-Semitic/anti-Christian sermon, with the supplication: "May God destroy them."

*In Atlanta, Ethiopian immigrant Khalid Adem is on trial for circumcising his then-two-year-old daughter. Female genital mutilation is all the rage among African Muslims.

*Islamic funsters tend to be particularly hard on the ladies. There are as many as 300,000 runaway girls in happenin’ Iran, some as young as 9. It’s estimated that 86% of the runaways were rejected by their families after they were raped. In Prophet-land, rape is shameful – for the victim.

*Islam’s rhetorical war against the hated Zionist entity continues. In Karachi, Pakistan, a few mischievous Muslims – well, 6,000 to be exact – marched through the streets shouting "Death to Israel! Death America." That’s how Muslim merrymakers celebrate Al-Qods Day (or Jerusalem Day).

*His Naziness Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (president of 68 million waggish Iranians) continues to assure us that Israel will be "wiped from the map," the Holocaust is a "myth," and any nation that sides with the Jewish state will face the "boiling wrath" of adherents to the religion of peace.

*On October 24, the Taliban announced it was planning attacks on civilian targets in Europe, in revenge for the invasion of Afghanistan that resulted in toppling its regime. A Taliban commander observed on Sky News television: "It’s acceptable to kill ordinary people in Europe because these are the people who have voted in the government…. We will kill them and laugh over them." Like the Dalai Lama said, these guys have a sense of humor.

*As noted earlier, there is no freedom of conscience in Islam (or freedom of anything else). In Ethiopia, in July, a mischievous Muslim mob attacked a group of Christians in the city of Henno. The victims included two prominent Christians who had converted from Islam. The Muslim scamps used knives, stones and metal bars to reinforce the point that – like the Syndicate – there’s only one way out of this organization.

*The Afghans who kidnapped Italian journalist Gabriele Torsello have offered to exchange him for Abdul Rahman, a Christian convert forced to flee the country. His own family wants Rahman dead. Bring back Rahman so we may instruct him in the finer points of Sharia, the abductors of Torsello plead.

*In Britain, there are veiled threats over the suggestion by Tony Blair and others, that some Muslim chicks stop dressing like they just stepped off a camel caravan (full face veil).

*Perhaps the Brits are thinking that if their homegrown Sons and Daughters of Allah were more assimilated, they wouldn’t be subjected to high-spirited pranks like the 2005 London transit bombings (52 commuters dead) or the foiled August plot to blow up 10 U.S.-bound jetliners (with a potential death toll exceeding 9/11)

*Across the Channel, Robert Redeker (a French high-school philosophy teacher) is a marked man, since the publication of his September 19 piece in Le Figaro, wherein he called the Koran "a book of extraordinary violence" (Hello, Dalai!) and observed that Mohammed was "a pitiless warlord, pillager, massacrer of Jews and polygamist" – in other words, a 7th century Arabian rascal. E-mail death threats started pouring in the day the article ran. One naughty website published a map showing the exact location of his home, along with photos of Redeker and his workplace. (An e-mail amusingly informed the teacher: "You will never feel secure on this earth. One billion, three hundred million Muslims are ready to kill you.")

*All it took was one guy named Mohammed to murder Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, for making a movie about the treatment of women in the wacky world of Islam. Van Gogh was shot, stabbed and had his throat slashed. A note by the killer, pinned to his body, read, "I did what I did purely out of my beliefs."

*A spokesman for a French police union says Muslim youths are waging a "civil war" against the gendarmes. The Gallic intifada that started last November never really stopped. At one point last year, disaffected "youth," as the French press discretely calls them, were torching 1,300 cars a night, to cries of "Allahu Akbar." Rioting spread to 300 French cities and spilled over into Belgium and Germany. Now, whenever French cops go to housing projects they are assaulted with everything from stones to guns to Molotov cocktails. Nearly 2,500 officers have been injured this year.

To return to the Dalai Lama’s daft observation, while it is undoubtedly true that most Muslims don’t want to jihad us – there are enough who do. In a 2005 survey by The Daily Telegraph, one quarter of British Muslims said they had at least some sympathy with their coreligionists who murdered 52 random Brits in the July commuter bombings. One-quarter of a million is more than “a few.”

From “The Rape of Europe” by Paul Belien in BrusselsJournal.com, October 25, 2006:

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be

“Muslims have a dream of living in an Islamic society,” declared a Danish Muslim leader in 2000. “This dream will surely be fulfilled in Denmark . . . We will eventually be a majority.” AT-shirt popular among young Muslims in Stockholm reads: “2030 — then we take over.”

-- From the 2006 book "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within," by Bruce Bawer, a gay American who moved to Europe in 1999 to escape what he believed to be the narrow-mindedness of the Christian right in America. (The Bible-thumpers don’t seem so intolerant now.)

prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics. The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families. Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other major European cities.

Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization. “The dominant ethos,” he told De Volkskrant, “is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated. She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death.”

In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared “humanist”) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

*****

Epilogue: Well, there you have it: The feel-good column of the year. Maybe you shouldn’t put off that trip to Europe you’ve always wanted to take any longer. Hey, I just thought of something. That picture of the European Union flag pictured in this article…  I should have altered it by removing the stars and replacing them with crescent moons. Get it? Actually, that might have been dangerous to my health. Those were great excerpts from Paul Belien, Don Feder, and Mark Steyn, weren’t they? Don’t forget to buy Steyn’s critically acclaimed bestseller America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Oh, and I suppose I should commend Paul Ehrlich for the excerpts of his wisdom, too.

Another book on this subject is Londonistan by MelaniePhillips. If you think America’s politicians are spineless, wait until you read how the ones in Britain have turned our mother country into a politically correct basket case overrun by immigrants who refuse to assimilate. England doesn’t have talk radio like we do, so there’s no media outlet to confront it, only the monotone multi-cultural cheerleading of the BBC. To get an idea of what that’s like, picture America getting its information solely from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Scary.

And boring.###