The hard core may comprise 1% of British Muslims
From the desk of Timothy Garton Asha:
Of course we cannot take the comparison too far, but one basic feature is the same: beside the hard core of fanatics there is a penumbra of people who could go either way. In Germany, they were (and are) called the Sympathisanten, the "sympathisers". Among European Muslims, they might very roughly be correlated with those who, in surveys, refuse to condemn suicide bombings, although that figure is inflated by attitudes to Palestine. One analyst estimates that while the hard core may comprise 1% of British Muslims, the penumbra of Sympathisanten, the could-go-either-way group, is perhaps 10%.
If you look at the biographies of actual jihadist assassins over the last six years, from the September 11 bomber, Mohammed Atta, radicalised in Hamburg, to Mohammed Bouyeri, murderer of Theo van Gogh, you find again and again the same story: young men who were first attracted to a modern, western way of life, quite different from that of their parents, but then angrily rejected it in favour of a violent, extremist version of political Islam. Fortunately, there are also people who travel the other way. Read Ed Husain's book The Islamist for an illuminating account of how one young British man was sucked in to extremist Islamism, but then turned away from it, while still remaining a Muslim. So much now depends on whether the 10% veer towards the barbaric 1%, or, like Husain, rejoin the civilised majority. (This is not a clash of civilisations; it is a clash between civilisation and decivilisation.)
SIMON KUPER: Europe can feel at home with 16m Muslims
When Italians immigrated to France in the late 19th century, many French believed these often undereducated, religious newcomers would never integrate. Some Italians were killed in race riots, write Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse in their book Integrating Islam*. Later, Portuguese, Polish or Jewish immigrants were deemed “unable to integrate” into France, but they did.
Now the European Union’s 16m or so Muslims are often considered unassimilable. Fifty years after they began arriving in Europe, their rates of joblessness and incarceration remain high. A very small number are fundamentalist terrorists, as in the recently foiled plot in Germany. Muslims also traditionally have more children than native Europeans. Hence the American neo-conservative Norman Podhoretz, in his new book**, predicts that western Europe will be “conquered from within by Islamofascism”. <Registeration Needed>
