"It is clear that western societies have sublimated their culture to accomodate [sic] new ones. Christmas trees and prayer rooms in schools, for example. And it is a powerful argument..."
The writer misses the point.
We are in a new era of massive global migration, but there is nothing new about migration over time changing the norms and practices of a society. It's just happening more quickly now, just as everything else is happening more quickly with ever-speeding technological (and that driving economic) change.
Take just one example, Britain. We could equally well choose just about any other old European country, but Britain is very familiar.
In the era BCE, Britain was populated by Celtic and other tribes.
Starting with the Emperor Julius Caesar's expeditions in 55 BCE and extending beyond Emperor Claudius's invasion of 43 CE, Britain began centuries of becoming a Romanized society.
After the fifth century CE, the Anglo-Saxon tribes - Germanic people began to conquer. Britain became an Anglo-Saxon country then for hundreds of years.
In 1066, as we all learned in school, the Normans conquered Britain, and it became a Norman society for centuries.
There were many other changes of varying importance over the centuries in Britain, but these big steps in each case meant an entirely new culture and language and political norms and even religion being established.
People have gone from speaking Celtic languages to Latin to German to French, and they now speak the true hybrid, English.
The nation state as we know it is a relatively new thing, mainly a product of the 19th century. Most of human history has not even known nation states, but empires and kingdoms which viewed any new people or territory as a fair gain.
Already in many respects, the 19th century concept of nation state is fraying at the edges. Europe once defined its modern states by language and culture, but already we see them becoming migrant states, the kind of states we have always had in the New World.
This is an unavoidable consequence of a globalized world with relatively cheap transportation and communication and huge movements of goods and services around the planet.
Taking a view anything like the writer of this comment, despite the reasonable tone of most of his remarks, is to enter into a debate defined by the Anders Breveiks of this world.
The only response that makes any sense in the Norwegian response, not the response of the United States or that garrison state Israel, which is fighting a pointless and losing battle with the forces of modern society.
Breveik is a kind of modern murderous Luddite - the people who used to smash machines in the Industrial Revolution in order to keep things as they were - only he smashed people hoping to keep things as they were.
Whether violent or not, these are futile, doomed-to-lose battles.
The future we already have glimmers of: A world of multi-cultural states amongst which a great deal of human migration occurs (just as goods and services move now), and it will require more international governance and treaties, all of which will slowly erode the nation state as we've known it.
There is no alternative, unless you want to build fortress states and give up the economic potential of globalism, but even if you do that, you will have to surrender in the end because the forces at work are real and simply overwhelming.
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"Therefore, the fiction that they are Muslim therefore they breed is plain WRONG!"
Of course, the notion is garbage.
Promoting that nonsense is just one more aspect of the Islamophobia being vigorously promoted by special interests.
Any decent economist or demographer can refute the nonsense.
Demographic Transition, the phenomenon of falling birth rates in response to falling death rates, is an established fact.
The death rates fall through the growing prosperity of economic development and all that that entails. Then people automatically have fewer babies since almost all will survive.
The theory explains why countries like Canada or France or Britain cannot replace their own population. Migration is essential unless you want economic decline.
And Israel, too, a western implant with western concepts, cannot replace its population, and it is surrounded by poor nations with high birth rates.
Which only goes to prove how much more intelligent would have been a policy of assisting your neighbors instead of attacking them and spending unholy amounts on the military.
The United States, too, acts quite stupidly in this regard. It should have been dropping dollars on places like Afghanistan or Iraq instead of bombs.
