The crescent and the conclave - the Islamicization of Europe

[Dover]

The crescent and the conclave
By Spengler

Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity. The reported front-runner at the Vatican conclave that began on Monday, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of the few Church leaders unafraid to raise the subject. <1> Hedonistic dissipation well may have condemned the existing Europeans to infecundity and extinction, but that does not prevent Europe from getting new ones. It has been done before.

Europe in the 8th century was a depopulated ruin. The loss of half the Roman Empire's population by the 7th century left vast territories open to Islam, which rapidly absorbed the formerly Christian Levant, North Africa and Spain. By converting successive waves of invading pagans - Lombards, Magyars, Vikings, Celts, Saxons, Slavs - Christianity reinvented Europe, and held Islam at bay.

Now that John Paul II has been buried, Catholic voices are sounding the alarm about the coming Islamicization of Europe. In the future imagined by John Paul II's biographer George Weigel, "The muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from the central loggia of St Peter's in Rome, while Notre-Dame has been transformed into Hagia Sophia on the Seine - a great Christian church become an Islamic museum." <2>

Misjudging the impact of Islamic immigration upon Europe may have been the signal error of John Paul II's reign. Against the bitter opposition of Catholic traditionalists, John Paul II visited mosques, kissed the Koran for the news cameras, and held more than 50 audiences with Muslim representatives. The late pontiff saw Muslims as prospective allies against secularism, and believed that the popular piety of Islam offered something of a bulwark against the soulless direction of the modern world. <3> In particular, John Paul II seemed impressed by the fact that the Koran acknowledges the Virgin Mary, a point emphasized in the Second Vatican Council's ecumenical statement, Nostra Aetate. No pope in recent history identified more with the popular folk-religion of Catholicism. He canonized more saints than any of his predecessors, and lent papal authority to the Cult of Fatimah...cont'd

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GD19Aa01.html

Responses to this article (Letters to the Editor):

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Letters.html

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. conversion?

Muslims regard Christians as "people of the book"-at least the moderate and liberal ones do. If Benedict decides to try forced conversions, he'll be driving some European Muslims into the arms of the Wahhabists.

[aneerkoinos]

2. Horrible crap

Horrible, anti-Islam bigoted hallucinating crap. I don't see much point posting this to DU, even with responses included.

[SweetLeftFoot]

3. Factually incorrect too

The Celts invaded Europe before the then pagan Romans did ...

[Igel]

6. He has a very strange definition of Europe going.

Apart from the Magyars, who came from east of the Volga, all the groups he mentions as repopulating Europe were already kicking around there by 1000 BC. Albeit the Slavs were towards the eastern edge of the territory, and the Germanic tribes on the northern edge.

I'm not altogether sure that the Celts got to Europe before the Italic speakers; there are some interesting lexical and grammatical parallels causing some linguists, older, mostly, to posit an Italo-Celtic language subgroup, but it's unclear if that predates their immigration into Europe or no. It's just possible they immigrated at the same time.

I think the LaTene culture is widely taken as being either "European Indo-European" or Celtic. Or maybe this is an outdated view these days.

[Wright Patman]

4. I don't know if Pope Benedict

wants to return us to the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages.

Oh well. I've always thought the next step on the time continuum after "postmodern" was probably to start over with "prehistoric."

[Bridget Burke]

5. This article is an intellectual muddle....

Anti-Catholic & Anti-Muslim at the same time. There are also some historical inaccuracies.