Thursday, October 19, 2006

US prophets of Europe’s doom are half wrong / Financial Times, 16 Oct 2006

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/bae746ae-5d38-11db-9d15-0000779e2340.html
Gideon Rachman
"In Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept (Doubleday) – now into its eighth printing – the American reader is told that by ignoring the threat from radical Islam: “Europe is steadily committing suicide and perhaps all we can do is look on in horror.” Tony Blankley, author of The West’s Last Chance (Regnery), warns that: “The threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s.” In The Cube and the Cathedral (Basic), George Weigel, a Catholic conservative, claims that “western Europe is committing a form of demographic suicide”. In this he echoes Pat Buchanan, who argued in his best-selling The Death of the West (Thomas Dunne) that Europe’s population is set to fall to 30 per cent of its current level by 2100, meaning that “the cradle of western civilisation will have become its grave”. "