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By: Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom
Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
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About
The David Horowitz Freedom
Center
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Forget the
Syrian Civil War for a moment. Even without the Sunnis and Shiites competing to
give each other machete haircuts every sunny morning, there would still be a
permanent Muslim refugee crisis.
The vast majority of civil wars over the last ten years have taken place in
Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also some of the poorest in the world.
And Muslim countries also have high birth rates.
Combine violence and poverty with a population boom and you get a permanent
migration crisis.
No matter what happens in Syria
or Libya
next year, that permanent migration crisis isn’t going away.
The Muslim world is
expanding unsustainably. In the Middle East and Asia,
Muslims tend to underperform their non-Muslim neighbors both educationally and
economically. Oil is the only asset that gave Muslims any advantage and in the
age of fracking, its value is a lot shakier than it used to be.
The Muslim world had lost its old role as the intermediary between Asia and the West. And it has no economic function in the
new world except to blackmail it by spreading violence and instability.
Muslim countries with lower literacy rates, especially for women, are never
going to be economic winners at any trade that doesn’t come gushing out of the
ground. Nor will unstable dictatorships ever be able to provide social mobility
or access to the good life. At best they’ll hand out subsidies for bread.
The Muslim world has no
prospects for getting any better. The Arab Spring was a Western
delusion.
Growing populations
divided along tribal and religious lines are competing for a limited amount of
land, power and wealth. Countries without a future are set to double in
size.
There are only two solutions; war or
migration.
Either you fight and take what you want at home. Or you go abroad and take what
you want there.
Let’s assume that the Iraq War had never happened. How would a religiously and
ethnically divided Iraq
have managed its growth from 13 million in the eighties to 30 million around
the Iraq War to 76 million in 2050?
The answer is a bloody
civil war followed by genocide, ethnic cleansing and migration.
What’s happening now would have happened anyway. It was already happening under
Saddam Hussein.
Baghdad has one of the highest population
densities in the world. And it has no future. The same is true across the
region. The only real economic plan anyone here has is to get money from the
West.
Plan A for getting money out of the West
is creating a crisis that will force it to intervene. That can mean
anything from starting a war to aiding terrorists that threaten the West.
Muslim countries keep shooting themselves in the foot so that Westerners will
rush over to kiss the booboo and make it better.
Plan B is to move to Europe.
What's This?
And Plan B is a great plan. It’s the only real economic plan that works. At
least until the West runs out of native and naïve Westerners who foot the bill
for all the migrants, refugees and outright settlers.
For thousands of
dollars, a Middle Eastern Muslim can pay to be smuggled into Europe.
It’s a small investment with a big payoff. Even the lowest tier welfare
benefits in Sweden
are higher than the average salary in a typical Muslim migrant nation. And
Muslim migrants are extremely attuned to the payoffs. It’s why they clamor to
go to Germany or Sweden, not Greece
or Slovakia.
And it’s why they insist on big cities with an existing Muslim social welfare
infrastructure, not some rural village.
A Muslim migrant is an
investment for an entire extended family. Once the young men get their papers,
family reunification begins. That doesn’t just mean every extended family
member showing up and demanding their benefits. It also means that the family
members will be selling access to Europe to
anyone who can afford it. Don’t hike or raft your way to Europe.
Mohammed or Ahmed will claim that you’re a family member. Or temporarily marry
you so you can bring your whole extended family along.
Mohammed gets paid. So
does Mo’s extended family which brokers these transactions. Human trafficking
doesn’t just involve rafts. It’s about having the right family
connections.
And all that is just
the tip of a very big business iceberg.
Where do Muslim
migrants come up with a smuggling fee that amounts to several years of salary
for an average worker? Some come from wealthy families. Others are sponsored by
crime networks and family groups that are out to move everything from drugs to
weapons to large numbers of people into Europe.
Large loans will be repaid as the new migrants begin sending their new welfare
benefits back home. Many will be officially unemployed even while unofficially
making money through everything from slave labor to organized crime. European
authorities will blame their failure to participate in the job market on racism
rather than acknowledging that they exist within the confines of an alternate
economy.
It’s not only individuals or families who can pursue Plan B. Turkey wants to
join the European Union. It’s one solution for an Islamist populist economy
built on piles of debt. The EU has a choice between dealing with the stream of
migrants from Turkey moving
to Europe. Or all of Turkey moving into Europe.
The West didn’t create this problem. Its interventions, however misguided,
attempted to manage it.
Islamic violence is not
a response to Western colonialism. Not only does it predate it, but as many
foreign policy experts are so fond of pointing out, its greatest number of
casualties are Muslims. The West did not create Muslim dysfunction. And it is
not responsible for it. Instead the dysfunction of the Muslim world keeps
dragging the West in. Every Western attempt to ameliorate it, from humanitarian
aid to peacekeeping operations, only opens up the West to take the blame for
Islamic dysfunction.
The permanent refugee crisis is a
structural problem caused by the conditions of the Muslim world.
The West can’t solve the crisis at its source. Only Muslims can do that. And
there are no easy answers. But the West can and should avoid being dragged down
into the black hole of Muslim dysfunction.
Even Germany’s
Merkel learned that the number of refugees is not a finite quantity that can be
relieved with a charitable gesture. It’s the same escalating number of people
that will show up if you start throwing bags of money out of an open window.
And it’s a number that no country can absorb.
Muslim civil wars will continue even if the West never intervenes in them
because their part of the world is fundamentally unstable. These conflicts will
lead to the displacement of millions of people. But even without violence,
economic opportunism alone will drive millions to the West. And those millions
carry with them the dysfunction of their culture that will make them a burden
and a threat.
If Muslims can’t reconcile their conflicts at home, what makes us think that
they will reconcile them in Europe? Instead of
resolving their problems through migration, they only export them to new
shores. The same outbursts of Islamic violence, xenophobia, economic malaise
and unsustainable growth follow them across seas and oceans, across continents
and countries. Distance is no answer. Travel is no cure.
Solving Syria
will solve nothing. The Muslim world is full of fault lines. It’s growing and
it’s running out of room to grow. We can’t save Muslims from themselves. We can
only save ourselves from their violence.
The permanent Muslim refugee crisis will never stop being our crisis unless we
close the door.
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