Kip Watson of Truth+Hope.net sent a long and thoughtful comment on my Fall of Rome post, and it seems to important to just leave in the comment section. So here it is with my interlineal response.

(Sorry for the long-winded comment, but this is an area where I think well-meaning people are making some serious mistakes.)

It would be truly ungracious of me, given the length of my posts, to object to lengthy responses.

I enjoy your site. Your Pallywood and Al-Durah videos in particular are two extremely insightful and intelligent pieces of journalism. However, I must take issue with one or two of the implications of this post.

It’s a widespread ‘meme’ on the Right to regard Muslims as invaders, but 19th Century inequalities in Islamic societies notwithstanding (the Dhimmi concept and such), it’s quite unfair to characterise Muslims as barbarians, even by implication, and the vast majority came here legally, in some cases after having been specifically invited (eg. via targeted advertising – Australia did this).

Thank you for making me clarify. First, I’m not sure what you mean when you use the term barbarian. I am comparing the relationship of Muslim immigrants to Europe vis-a-vis Europe with those of Germanic warrior tribes vis-a-vis Rome. The term barbarian was used by the Romans to describe the considerably more primitive level of social organization of the Germanic warrior tribes. Muslims come from societies in which social hierarchy is a fundamental feature of life — patriarchal dominance, power hierarchies, very limited social mobility, stigmatization of manual labor, elaborate forms of deference to social superiors, self-help justice, vendetta, honor killings and the other elements of a dominant “honor-shame culture” which has a particularly strong hold on Arab culture in our day. By the standards of modern civil societies, these are all precisely the features of a medieval culture that we had to bring under control in order to create socieites that tried to guarantee civil rights. Since these patterns characterize Muslim cultures around the world who provide the immigrants to Europe (Arab and non-Arab), then I think the comparison holds. Granted that, unlike the German tribes of the first millennium CE, Arab culture is literate, in comparison with the extent of European literacy, however, the “literacy gap” is comparable and the social impact of the gap is significant. And given the severe problems that Arab immigrants have with the Western school system, that gap is not easily overcome.

Second, when I speak of a threatened invasion, I’m not referring to the Muslims who came, invited and, by and large grateful for the opportunity to leave the Arab world and come to Europe, even if it was to do the manual labor. They are, often enough, appalled by what’s happening. The invaders, it seems to me, are the militant preachers who are coming into Europe with Salafi, Wahhabi, global Jihadi aspirations, and who are finding an increasingly receptive audience among the second generation of these immigrants. This is what I was thinking of when I read the line in the interview with Heather about how the Germanic groups “continued to unify, producing still larger and yet more powerful entities that the Empire could not hope to dismantle…. new, and more powerful, barbarian groups were able to carve out kingdoms for themselves from the Empire’s living body politic.” This is exactly what the “rioters” of Ramadan 2006 were demanding from the French authorities, and what various Islamist groups in Europe want to do with their demographic majorities in various cities and regions (like Malmo, Sweden). Giving into the demand, in the misconceived sense that this would be an “imaginative experiment” that would help the problem would be a good example of failing to learn from the late antique past.

But your obejction raises precisely the kind of “mutatis mutandis” exercise that I suggested in my original post. One of the differences between the German tribes and the Muslim communities, is that Rome/Europe invited them in for different reasons — the former as a way of using and domesticating their belligerent talents (to do the dirty work of military service); the latter as a way of at once appeasing their guilt over colonialism and importing cheap labor. But they were both, in critical ways, invited by a culture which considered/considers itself so superior that it could/can absorb this “inferior” culture without difficulty. It is to this that I think Walter Goffart refers when he says, “an imaginative experiment that got out of hand.”

There are serious problems in the Arab world with particular (though complex) causes. The drift towards towards regarding Islam as the source of the problem, despite all the evidence to the contrary (the brave people of Iraq for example) is not worthy of clear thinkers.

I’m not sure your parenthetical aside is quite what I would call a firm support for the claim of “all the evidence to the contrary.” The brave people of Iraq are indeed a heartening sight, but they hardly indicate that Islam is not a serious problem. Indeed the worst problems the Iraqis face right now are precisely from Islam at its most assertive and intolerant, i.e., Islamism in its various forms. The job of rebuilding Iraq would have been a very different story were not a (by our standards) insanely destructive (and self-destructive) radical Islam intent on destroying everything that the USA/Britain has a hand in, no matter how beneficial to the Iraqis. In fact one way to distinguish between the two cases is by pointing to the commitment of Europe in 2000 to separation of church and state, to opposing theocracy faced with a monotheistic theocratic foe (Islamism), whereas in 500, the Roman (Christian) empire was deeply committed to a monotheistic theocracy (destruction of pagan shrines ca. 400), faced with polytheistic tribes. As politically incorrect as it may appear, there is a problem with theocratic Islam today, just as there was a problem with theocratic Christianity in the Middle Ages (I teach heresy and inquisition this Spring.)

The problem that Europe has now is that the same streams of Islamism and global Jihadism that we see operating virtually in the open in Iraq, are building strength in Europe. Their goal, as bizarre as it may seem to us, is to take over Europe and turn it into Dar al Islam, the realm of submission to Allah and His law Sharia. I’m not arguing that Europe should expel the Muslims in its midst, or reduce them to some modern version of dhimmi status. I’m saying that unless they take cognizance of these forces in their midst, they will have enormous difficulty not falling victim to the predatory religious currents that have entered into their societies.

My in-laws are Japanese and although it’s not my view, I see nothing racist or immoral about wanting to maintain cultural or racial homogeneity in a country, although like most Australians I support our well regulated immigration system. My wife and some of my dearest friends who are Asians who migrated here, but I find people-smuggling and illegal immigration utterly unacceptable. And, although personally I consider accepting legitimate refugees is worthwhile from a moral perspective, it’s a simple fact that (with a few exceptions) refugees, coming as they do from troubled and brutalised societies, impose a far higher burden on the community than normal migrants. Citizens should have a say in numbers of migrant numbers, refugees and otherwise.

I agree with most of your comments and don’t disagree with any. I think immigrants are one of the great strengths of US culture, and as I point out to my students, the free cities of Europe that grew up in the 11th and 12th centuries were built up from rural immigrants in large numbers (the death rates were so high, that without constant immigration from the countryside, they would have lost population). Immigrants are intrinsically a self-selecting population of high risk initiative takers. But it takes a particularly creative and dynamic culture to make the most of their immigrants, and Europe is not too creative when it comes to absorbing their Muslim populations.

Australia accepted a lot of Vietnamese after the war, which was a worthwhile thing to do, but there was a lot of crime associated with that too. Charity is not without cost. However, just as the crime these people brought with them is not a product of their Vietnamese ethnicity, likewise revolutionary terrorist activity is not a necessary side effect of being Muslim. I explain this in rambling detail here.

Extremely interesting entry, which I comment on at your site. I do think that you are making a mistaken historical analogy in trying to compare the Muslims in Western countries to the Israelites in Egypt, but you do so out of the goodness of your heart, and it would be churlish to reprimand you for it. But I think that the problem is in fact cultural (whether that’s ethnic or not, I don’t know). This means that it is not a matter of genes — someone from any ethnicity, given a different cultural upbringing, is capable of responding positively. But when certain cultural styles get transported to host countries, and those raised in it view their host countries with cultural hostility, then there’s a problem. The expressive macho behavior of, for example, the Lebanese gangs who wreak their damage in Australia (which you note in your essay), or the rioters in France, represent not an individual problem, but a cultural one, a particularly predatory form of honor-shame culture that finds honor in the same principle that animated the Germanic warrior culture according to Georges Duby: “plunder and distribute.” The original Muslim term for what we call terrorism, i.e., targeting civilians in order to sow fear is razzia or “raid.” And to pretend that it’s not, to pretend that that cultural style and global Jihadi tendencies don’t resonate the one with the otheras the French do, strikes me as very dangerous.

Let me be churlish for a moment in a gentle way. Your determination to see the best in people is admirable, and I work on doing the same thing. But adopting it as a faith-act, or a dogma about human nature makes you highly susceptible to becoming a dupe of demopaths.

Finally, however they came to reside in their host societies, an invited guest (which is what a legal migrant is, whether or not you like the law that allowed them to immigrate) should not be criticised for having accepted the invitation. Arabs and Muslims understand the meaning of hospitality – here is one thing we can learn from them. I hate terrorists, gangsters and fascists as much as anyone, but, like George Bush has repeatedly said, it really isn’t caused by their religion.

I’m certainly not criticizing them for that. But I am criticizing some of them for taking the invitation and (now, maybe not at the time of coming), taking advantage of that hospitality to work for the overthrow of the very culture they came into as invited members. To say this has nothing to do with Islam, when it’s a particularly aggressive form of Islam with roots deep in the tradition that is giving them the sense that they can take over and radically change the rules, doesn’t make sense. And by the way, Bush has not been saying this repeatedly. He has exonerated Islam, but fingered Islamism. And it’s not clear that anyone, inside or out, can definitively draw the line between the two.

Fascism, refugee problems, crime, none of these things are exclusive to, or caused by, being Muslim. If we waste our efforts fruitlessly, we impair out ability to deal with the real problems.

I will certainly agree that none are exclusive to Islam. But there’s plenty of evidence that Islamism has very strong fascist tendencies, if it isn’t actually a fascist ideology. If we ignore that out of some misplaced liberal dogma, then we impair our ability to deal with the real problems.