A lengthy article from last Saturday on this subject from Canada's 'National Post':
Europe's 70 Year Crisis
>> The refugee crisis that has gripped the European Union for more than a year is morphing into something else - a debate on the future of Europe and the role nearly 20 million Muslims will play in it.
>> She is unenthusiastic about the presence of so many asylum seekers in her country... “ I doubt that it is good for Finland… Who knows how it will work out in 10 or 20 years?”
>> “I am against the cultural ideas of Muslims. How can we possibly agree with them about their attitude toward women? If they want to be part of our lives, they have to understand us.”
>> “I am trying to figure out if they really need help. They have new clothes, the best iPhones. I’ve seen them take out wads of 100 and 500 euro notes to pay for a cup of tea...”
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>> The question of who is a German has taken on an unpredictable, potentially ominous dimension, since Chancellor Angela Merkel controversially tossed the country’s fairly strict asylum rules aside in September, and allowed about one million mostly Arab Muslim refugee claimants to enter the country.
>> A common fear is that the large number of asylum seekers, coupled with more terrorist attacks like the one in Paris in November, could exacerbate existing ethnic tensions.
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>> Frictions between Christians and Muslims in Europe are as old as Islam itself...
>> The Muslim Moors brought what was then a new religion with them when they conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711, eventually establishing a capital in Cordoba, which became the most important and advanced city on the continent.
>> After hundreds of years of fighting, the Christians finally succeeded in expelling the Moors completely in the 1500s.
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>> More recently, it has not been advancing armies, but instead a series of immigrant waves that have brought Islam to western Europe’s shores.
>> Today, there are 4.7-million Muslims in France, making up 7.5 per cent of the population, a higher percentage than anywhere else in the EU, save Bulgaria.
>> The failure to integrate those millions is written across Marseille.
>> In gritty, crime-ridden suburbs such as La Bricarde and La Castellane, North Africans known as Maghrebis represent 80 per cent or more of the population. Youth unemployment is said to be above 40 per cent, and taxi drivers regard about 25 per cent of the city as “les zones de non droit,” or no-go zones.
>> The divisions were in evidence one day last month, when a woman in a black chador came running down La Rue du Bon Pasteur shrieking that I was “not authorised” to be in the Muslim Arab quarter of the city, and that the photographer with me had taken her picture without permission.
>> Even after the photographer showed the woman, and the crowd that quickly gathered, that there were no images of her in his camera, she smacked him twice in the head, kicked his camera and threatened to attack him with a knife for trying to humiliate Arabs.
>> The tensions were made even worse this month when Jews in the city were warned not to wear the kippa after a Jewish teacher was stabbed in the street by a teen who police say claimed allegiance to ISIL.
>> “We’ve had enough. We are saturated with Arabs and things are boiling over,” He supports Marine Le Pen’s notoriously xenophobic National Front party, which has found fertile ground in the Marseille-Nice region.
>> The clashing perspectives in Marseille suggest the depth of the crisis Europe is facing.
>> How can France and other countries absorb hundreds of thousands of new Muslim refugees when the failures of the past are evident everywhere? What is the blueprint for the future when second-generation youth already feel alienated in their birth countries, and some are turning to extremism?
>> In December, the Dutch Prime Minister compared the EU to the Holy Roman Empire, warning it faces an existential threat, and will “go down if the borders are not well protected.”
>> The French Prime Minister has shared an equally apocalyptic view of the Old World’s future. Absent stringent external border controls, He predicted that voters would say “enough is enough” and toss out all their elected leaders...
>> These tensions and the chaos and mayhem that they portend can be felt everywhere in Europe today...
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>> It may seem far-fetched to outsiders, but many Europeans, and especially many French and Belgians, fear that the situation is now so precarious that the fault line they live on could erupt into civil war.
>> “We don’t want it and they don’t either, but it is possible that there could be a religious war,” says a fourth year Moroccan-Belgium medical student.
>> Europeans of every political and religious persuasion now speak bleakly about how some kind of point of no return may have already passed...
(National Post 23jan2016)
http://news.nationalpost.com/features/europes-70-year-crisis
(Play the videos at the side of the text. Best to play full screen to read the subtitles - click the double arrow symbol at bottom right of each video panel)
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