steynonline/6520/young-turks Young Turks. by Mark Steyn August 13, 2014. A Tweet from Yasmina Haifi: ISIS heeft niets met Islam te maken ...is vooropgezet plan van zionisten die bewust Islam willen zwart maken Which translated into English means roughly: ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. Its a preconceived plan by Zionists who want to deliberately blacken Islams name. Who is Yasmina Haifi? Shes an official at the Dutch Ministry of Justice who serves as project leader at the Netherlands National Cyber Security Center. And she thinks Isis is a Zionist plot to make Islam look bad. She could be right. On the other hand, maybe Yasmina Haifi is a Zionist plot to make Islam look bad - or at any rate deranged. Presumably the many Dutch Muslims out on the streets holding pro-Isis demonstrations would disagree with her - because they surely wouldnt be demonstrating in favor of a Zionist front group, would they? Unless, of course, theyre also in on the Zionist plot... Look at Yasmina Haifi in the photograph at right - shes not a burqa-wreathed crone, but a modern western career woman in a foxy red jacket with just a hint of cleavage. And yet she cannot bear the truth about her religion and what is done in its name. So she takes refuge in the laziest conspiracy of all. In the Netherlands, an extremist Muslim supports Isis because its chopping the heads off infidels, but a moderate Muslim opposes Isis because its a Zionist front group. This is the human capital with which the Netherlands has chosen to build its future. ~Let us turn to Sundays Turkish presidential election. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Prime Minister and the most consequential leader since Atatürk, won big time. The heir to Atatürk - or at any rate the candidate of his old party - was a fellow called Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, who came a distant second. Bringing up the rear was the Kurdish guy. This is the electoral map: Erdoğan carried the yellow constituencies, the Kemalist opposition the blue, and the purple is the Kurdish south-east. This map rang a vague bell with me. Seven years ago, I wrote about Turkish demography in National Review. The supposedly moderate Islamist Erdoğan had just canceled trade deals with Israel, and frosted out the US ambassador because he was Jewish; a new edition of Mein Kampf was prominently displayed at the airport bookstore. In 2003, Id passed a rather boozy evening with an extremely convivial former Turkish foreign minister, who, midst brandy and cigars, professed his admiration for the tough hombres hed known in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. A mere four years later, the new Turkey was starting to look like any old cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan stan of the month rather than the nation that gave women the vote before France did and had been Israels best friend in an otherwise hostile region for half-a-century. A trickle of Who lost Turkey? stories had begun appearing in the American conservative press, and I would have joined them - except that I knew the answer. This is from my National Review column of April 16th 2007: Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there have been two Turkeys — the Turks of Rumelia, or European Turkey, and the Turks of Anatolia, or Asia Minor. Kemal Atatürk was from Rumelia and so were most of his supporters, and they imposed the modern Turkish Republic on a somewhat reluctant Anatolia, where Atatürks distinction between the state and Islam was never accepted. In its 80-year history, the population has increased from 14 million to 70 million, but the vast bulk of that population growth has come from Anatolia, whose population has migrated from the rural hinterland to overwhelm the once solidly Kemalist cities. That map of the 2014 Turkish election is my 2007 column in one handy graphic: Eastern, Asian, Islamic Turkey has overwhelmed Western, European, secular Turkey. Heres another snapshot of what happened - a 2013 graphic of Turkish birth rates, showing fertility declining as you move from east to west: The birth rates of the Kurdish south-east will eventually cause Erdoğan a few headaches, but there wont be many Kemalists around by then. The term Young Turks comes from the Ottoman Empires would-be reformers at the beginning of the 20th century. The trouble is the Young Turks are now Old Turks, and youth, energy and numbers are on Erdoğans side. As I concluded in that column seven years ago: Atatürks modern secular Turkey has simply been outbred by fiercely Islamic Turkey. Thats a lesson in demography from an all-Muslim sample: No pasty white blokes were involved. Even in a society dominated by one of the most forceful personalities of the 20th century, demography proved destiny. Atatürk, the name bestowed on Kemal by the Turkish parliament, means Father of the Turks. Alas, he wasnt father of enough of them. And the men who were had other ideas. The chances of Turkey ever electing another Kemalist government decrease with each election cycle. ~As for the pasty white blokes, what lessons does Turkey hold for Europe or even Australia and Canada? They too are undergoing remorseless demographic evolution: Look at, say, French natives as Rumelian Turks and French Muslims as Anatolians. In the last presidential election, the Muslim vote for M Hollande was larger than his margin of victory over Sarkozy. How large will it be in 2017? What about Down Under? Australia is one of the least insane western polities, not to damn with faint praise. But the appalling and disgraceful reactions to the junior jihadist with the severed head suggest that for Australias Opposition Leader and his Members of Parliament electoral viability requires tiptoeing around even the most brutal provocations. Miranda Devine runs the numbers: The most populous Muslim electorates in the country are Labor. Blaxland, held by Jason Clare, has a Muslim population approaching 25 per cent, Watson, held by Tony Burke, has 20 per cent. Next comes the Labor seat of Calwell, in northwest Melbourne, with 16 per cent. The fourth most populous Muslim electorate is the Sydney seat of Reid, with 10 per cent, the only significant Muslim electorate held (barely) by a Liberal, Craig Laundy. Its no surprise Laundy has been a vocal opponent of the governments now defunct free speech reforms of the Racial Discrimination Act, which were so strenuously opposed by Muslim organisations. Will that be enough to save his seat? I would doubt it. Relatively few people want to jet off to the Sunni Triangle and decapitate someone. But a far more significant number are remarkably relaxed about decapitation as long as the head being sawn off is a Jews, or a Christians, or a Yazidis. And, when it comes to entertaining even a very narrow criticism of what is done in Islams name, a far larger number of people, invited to choose between criticizing Islam or embracing lunacy, find it easier, like Yasmina Haifi at the Dutch Ministry of Justice, to embrace lunacy. How many like-minded souls will have joined Yasmina in Dutch government service by 2020? And there are no Kemal Atatürks in sight, only culturally craven prostration limbo-dancers like Bill Shorten. Absent any countervailing forces, continued mass Muslim immigration will lead to the death of France and the Netherlands, as those terms have any meaning. Look at it this way: There are three reactions to Isis among western Muslims - active support on the streets from the excitable young lads, deranged conspiracy theories from Yasmina Haifi, and utter deafening silence from everybody else. Suppose one of those youthful jihadists returns from Mosul and decides to decapitate a French Jew. Do you think that trio of reactions would be any different? This is beyond integration or assimilation, and closer to what William Wilberforce, in another context, called the reformation of manners, and on a scale even he might have balked at. Without that, the numbers will, as in Turkey, prove decisive. © 2014 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied, modified or adapted, without the prior written consent of Mark Steyn Enterprises. Got a comment on a column? Drop a line to Marks Mailbox.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 07:10:44 +0000
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