The three myths of European Islam
by Martin Walker
To suggest that European civilization is too feeble and insecure to survive an Islamic population that is currently less than 5 percent of the total is a counsel of cultural despair. It ignores the example of the United States, which seems to be successfully assimilating its own Muslim minority, just as the vibrant and open American economy assimilated so many previous waves of immigrants. It also ignores the way America has shown that intelligent public policy can change society, responding to the Civil Rights movement and the urban riots of the 1960s by turning the martyred Martin Luther King into a kind of national saint, and pursuing affirmative action to the point that there is now a large and growing black middle class. Black women are now more likely to go to college that white males in the United States.
To despair about Islam's impact on Europe also ignores the degree to which European Muslims increasingly think and live like the populations they have chosen to join. An opinion poll run by the ICM group in Britain for the BBC, in the wake of the London bombings, found in a sampling of over 1,000 Muslims that almost 9 out of 10 said they would and should help the police tackle extremists in the Muslim communities of Britain. More than half wanted foreign Muslim clerics barred or expelled from Britain. More than half, 56 percent, said they were optimistic about the children's future in Britain.
An important part of the reality of Islam in Europe is that the Muslims are being changed by Europe just as much as they are changing the face of their adopted countries.
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