Analyzing the forecasts of an emerging ‘Eurabia,’ hostile to America and western values.

To listen to Europe’s far right, it would be easy to conclude that the continent is poised for another round of bitter conflict with a centuries-old adversary. “The first Islamic invasion of Europe was stopped at [the battle of] Poitiers in 732. The second was halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Now we have to stop the current stealth invasion,” argues Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, which claims that Islamic doctrine encourages terrorism.

It’s rabble-rousing stuff. But underlying Wilders’s polemic is an argument shared by many more mainstream right-leaning thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe, its will sapped by secularism and anything-goes tolerance, has allowed decades of mass immigration without serious challenge. Too feeble to defend their own values, governments have been ready to appease Muslim opinion and must expect the worst. The argument has been gaining ground for some time—fed by alarmist and highly speculative projections from writers like the Canadian Mark Steyn, author of the bestselling America Alone—that immigration and high birthrates could mean that Muslims will make up 40 percent of Europe’s population by 2025. Similar and very public warnings have come from American diplomat Timothy Savage, who claimed that forecasts of a Muslim majority in Western Europe by midcentury “may not be far off the mark” if present trends continue, which would heighten the risk of conflict. The British historian Niall Ferguson has written that “a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize—the term is not too strong—a sene-scent Europe.” And the American journalist Christopher Caldwell forecasts that an “anchored” and “confident” Islam looks likely to impose its will on an “insecure” and “relativistic” European culture. The gloomiest commentators, including Steyn and the conservative Ameri-can writer Tony Blankley, talk of an emerging “Eurabia” hostile to American interests and in thrall to Islam.

These warnings chime with public fears that Europe has already become an incubator for worldwide terrorism. After all, the September 11 hijackers plotted in Germany, and homegrown terrorists were involved in the Madrid and London attacks. Concern is growing that a swelling immigrant population resistant to assimilation or integration will steal jobs and strain public services. Last year a Pew poll found that about half of respondents in Spain and Germany held negative views of Muslims. In Spain the figure had climbed 15 points, to 52 percent, since 2004. In the June elections to the European Parliament, Wilders’s party won 17 percent of the national vote in the Netherlands. The anti-immigrant British National Party, which warned of the “creeping Islamification” of British society, won its first two seats. In Austria the right-wing Freedom Party almost doubled its share of the vote, at 13 percent.

Alert to the public mood, European governments, which are now almost entirely center-right, have been slamming doors to further immigration from Muslim countries and elsewhere, and have reinforced the message that Muslim Turkey is not welcome in the European Union. Italy is now in the process of approving a bill that will jail landlords for leasing properties to undocumented immigrants. Last month French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared the burqa to be “a sign of subservience” that “would not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”

But all this obscures a simple fact: the rise of a Eurabia is predicated on limited and dubious evidence. A much-cited 2004 study from the U.S. National Intelligence Council outlines a number of possible scenarios. Its most aggressive is that the number of Muslims in Europe could increase from roughly 20 million today—about 5 percent of the population—to 38 million by 2025. But that projection turns out to be attributed to “diplomatic and media reporting as well as government, academic, and other sources.” In other words, it’s all speculation based on speculation—and even if it’s accurate, it would still mean the number of Muslims will represent just 8 percent of the European population, estimated by the EU to be 470 million in 2025. Indeed, if there is a surge ahead, its scale looks overstated. “There is a quite deliberate exaggeration, as has often been pointed out—but the figures are still being cited,” says Jytte Klausen, an authority on Islam in Europe at Boston’s Brandeis University.

Coming up with a reasonable estimate for the percentage of Muslims now living in Europe, let alone making projections for the future, is a virtually impossible task. The number of illegal immigrants is unknown and, in a sign of the sensitivity of the issue, many countries including France and Germany do not even tally census data on the religion of legal residents. It is true that the Muslim minority is destined to grow steadily in Europe, especially given the youthful profile of today’s immigrants. Fertility rates remain higher among Muslim immigrants than among other Europeans, and Muslims may continue to arrive in Europe in large numbers. But the alarmists assume that past patterns are sure to hold. “The worst of the scaremongering is based on the assumption that current behavior will continue,” says Grace Davie, an expert on Europe and Islam at the University of Exeter in Britain.

For the number of Muslims to outnumber non-Muslims by midcentury, it would require either breeding on a scale rarely seen in history or for immigration to continue at a pace that’s now politically unacceptable. More likely, new controls will slow Muslim immigration. The birthrate for Muslim immigrants is also likely to continue to decline, as it has tended to do, with greater affluence and better health care. There is no Europewide data available, but one study says fertility rates among Turkish-born women in the Netherlands fell from 3.2 in 1990 to 1.9 in 2005, barely above the figure for native-born Dutch. Over the same period, the equivalent figure for Moroccan-born women in the Netherlands dropped from 4.9 to 2.9. Also, fertility rates are edging upward in some Northern European countries, which would offset some of the Muslim growth. Bottom line: given the number of variables, demographers are loath to make predictions about the number of Muslims in Europe in the years to come. “You would almost have to make it up,” says Carl Haub, the senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. And the idea of a Muslim majority any time soon? “Absolutely absurd.”

Moreover, the myth of Eurabia implies the existence of a united Islam, a bloc capable of collective and potentially dangerous action. The truth is that there are no powerful Muslim political movements in Europe, either continentwide or at the national level, and the divisions that separate Muslims worldwide, most obviously between Sunnis and Shiites, are apparent in Europe as well. Each major nation in Europe has drawn Muslim immigrants from distinct regions of the Islamic world, often former colonies, with different traditions and outlooks. A British Muslim from Pakistan would struggle to communicate with a French Muslim from Algeria. A second-generation Muslim from Turkey living in Germany will have little in common with a newly arrived Moroccan across the border in Belgium. Sharp differences exist even within national frontiers. In Germany, more than one in 10 Muslims are Alawites, who aren’t even recognized as coreligionists by the more orthodox.

In areas of personal morality, attitudes vary markedly, too. One recent Gallup poll found that more than 30 percent of French Muslims were ready to accept homosexuality, compared with zero in Britain. Almost half of French Muslims believed sex between unmarried people was morally acceptable, compared with 27 percent of German Muslims. And violent zealotry is for the tiny minority: polls repeatedly reaffirm that Muslims overwhelmingly disapprove of terrorism. In some countries, the mood is broadly secular. “The majority of Muslims in France are, in fact, decoupled from their religion. They just blend into an amorphous mass of brown or black people,” says Ali Allawi, the former Iraqi defense minister and author of the The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. Jochen Hippler, a German political scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, says he has had young Turks come up to him to ask what Islam is all about. “They have lost any connection with the religion of their parents and grandparents,” he says. A recent government survey showed that 40 percent of Iranians living in Germany identified themselves as having no religion, as did 23 percent of North Africans. In the Netherlands, the proportion of Muslims who regularly attend the mosque—27 percent—is lower than the proportion of Protestants who go to church.

For that matter, there’s little evidence that Muslims themselves see any contradiction between allegiance to the state and their religious faith. An overwhelming majority of Muslims in France and Germany told Gallup’s pollsters that they believed Muslims were loyal to their country. British and German Muslims were more likely than their countrymen to say they were confident of the judicial system and financial institutions and the honesty of elections. It seems that if Europe is in the throes of revolution, many of the supposed combatants appear strangely content with the established order.

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The violence brings into question China’s hard-line policy against Uighur ethnic minority.

from the July 6, 2009 edition

Beijing – Simmering ethnic tensions in the mainly Muslim west of China erupted Sunday night into the country’s deadliest rioting in decades, as demonstrators and police clashed violently.

State media put the death toll at more than 140, and portrayed the mayhem in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang autonomous region, as a rampage by Muslim Uighurs against Han Chinese bystanders. Uighur representatives abroad denied that account, and blamed the security forces for most of the deaths.

Muslim Uighurs have long chafed under what they feel is repressive rule by the nation’s Han Chinese majority. They resent Beijing’s drive to populate Xinjiang with Han settlers from the east of the country, its clampdown on religious practice, and Uighurs’ relegation to mostly menial jobs.

“There have been widespread discontents, and things have boiled over,” says Dru Gladney, an expert on Xinjiang at Pomona College.

The Chinese authorities, meanwhile, say they fear that Uighur radicals are seeking to break away from China, and last month launched a new “strike hard campaign” of arrests in Xinjiang, local residents say.

Sunday’s violence apparently broke out after a peaceful demonstration got out of control. A provincial government spokesman said Monday that more than 260 vehicles had been attacked or burned, and that 203 houses had been damaged. He put the number of injured at 828.

Pressure for investigation of killings

The demonstrators had been demanding that the government investigate the deaths of two Uighur migrant workers who were killed last month in the southern province of Guangdong in a mob attack on their dormitory by Han Chinese co-workers. The Uighurs had been accused of raping a Han woman – falsely, according to local Guangdong authorities. Nobody has yet been charged with the two murders.

Nur Bekri, chairman of the Xinjiang regional government, charged Monday that exile Uighurs had used the Guangdong incident to instigate Sunday’s violence.

Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur exile leader living in the United States, “had phone conversations with people in China on July 5 in order to incite, and websites…were used to orchestrate the incitement and spread propaganda,” Mr. Bekri said.

Dolkun Isa, secretary-general of the World Uighur Congress, denied in a telephone interview that exiles had sparked the violence. Although his Munich-based group had called on Uighurs to demonstrate in front of Chinese embassies in Europe Friday, he said, “we never called for protests inside China.

“We knew that would provoke a crackdown, and we did not want to take the responsibility for that,” Mr. Isa said.

He claimed that an informant in Urumqi had told him that the death toll had reached 600, and that “95 percent of the victims are Uighurs” who died at the hands of the police and paramilitary forces sent to break up the demonstration.

The authorities in Beijing have given no details of the 140 victims they acknowledge, but video footage shown on television portrayed bloodied Han Chinese civilians being kicked and beaten.

The official portrayal of the rioting echoed government accounts of the violence that struck the Tibetan capital of Lhasa in March 2008, when a mob burned shops and killed 19 non-Tibetans. Mr. Bekri’s allegation of exile Uighurs’ role in Sunday’s riot also recalled Beijing’s charges that the Dalai Lama was behind the incident in Lhasa.

Unprecedented scale of clash

Ethnic tensions have been bubbling beneath a generally calm surface in Xinjiang for many years, sparking the occasional outbreak of violence and feeding sympathy for militants who have been waging a sporadic separatist campaign. Sunday’s riot was unprecedented, however, in its scale and death toll.

The violence underlined the fact that “the hardline approach” to Uighur grievances “clearly has not worked,” says Professor Gladney.

“There is discussion among officials and scholars in Beijing about the need for new thinking,” he adds. “In the long run, though publicly the government would not want to acquiesce in the face of violence, this could broaden awareness of the severity of the problem and the need to find new approaches to it.”

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.

The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Mr. Panetta rejected.

The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees “are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.” But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”

In addition, for covert action programs, a particularly secret category in which the role of the United States is hidden, the law says that briefings can be limited to the so-called Gang of Eight, consisting of the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees.

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

An intelligence agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, declined on Saturday to comment on the report of Mr. Cheney’s role.

“It’s not agency practice to discuss what may or may not have been said in a classified briefing,” Mr. Gimigliano said. “When a C.I.A. unit brought this matter to Director Panetta’s attention, it was with the recommendation that it be shared appropriately with Congress. That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect.”

Members of Congress have differed on the significance of the program, whose details remained secret and which even some Democrats have said was properly classified. Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that should have been disclosed to the intelligence committees.

Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.

In the tense months after 9/11, when Bush administration officials believed new Qaeda attacks could occur at any moment, intelligence officials brainstormed about radical countermeasures. It was in that atmosphere that the unidentified program was devised and deliberately concealed from Congress, officials said.

Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had begun to cool.

One intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity, said there was no resistance inside the C.I.A. to Mr. Panetta’s decision to end the program last month.

“Because this program never went fully operational and hadn’t been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial,” the official said. “That’s worth remembering amid all the drama.”

Bill Harlow, a spokesman for George J. Tenet, who was the C.I.A. director when the unidentified program began, declined to comment on Saturday, noting that the program remained classified.

In the eight years of his vice presidency, Mr. Cheney was the Bush administration’s most vehement defender of the secrecy of government activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy, and won.

A report released on Friday by the inspectors general of five agencies about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program makes clear that Mr. Cheney’s legal adviser, David S. Addington, had to approve personally every government official who was told about the program. The report said “the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program” frustrated F.B.I. agents who were assigned to follow up on tips it had turned up.

High-level N.S.A. officials who were responsible for ensuring that the surveillance program was legal, including the agency’s inspector general and general counsel, were not permitted by Mr. Cheney’s office to read the Justice Department opinion that found the eavesdropping legal, several officials said.

Mr. Addington could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

Questions over the adequacy and the truthfulness of the C.I.A.’s briefings for Congress date to the creation of the intelligence oversight committees in the 1970s after disclosures of agency assassination and mind-control programs and other abuses. But complaints increased in the Bush years, when the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies took the major role in pursuing Al Qaeda.

The use of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, for instance, was first described to a handful of lawmakers for the first time in September 2002. Ms. Pelosi and the C.I.A. have disagreed about what she was told, but in any case, the briefing occurred only after a terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times.

Democrats in Congress, who contend that the Bush administration improperly limited Congressional briefings on intelligence, are seeking to change the National Security Act to permit the full intelligence committees to be briefed on more matters. President Obama, however, has threatened to veto the intelligence authorization bill if the changes go too far, and the proposal is now being negotiated by the White House and the intelligence committees.

Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat of Illinois on the House committee, wrote on Friday to the chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat of Texas, to demand an investigation of the unidentified program and why Congress was not told of it. Aides said Mr. Reyes was reviewing the matter.

“There’s been a history of difficulty in getting the C.I.A. to tell us what they should,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Democrat of Washington. “We will absolutely be held accountable for anything the agency does.”

Mr. Hoekstra, the intelligence committee’s ranking Republican, said he would not judge the agency harshly in the case of the unidentified program, because it was not fully operational. But he said that in general, the agency had not been as forthcoming as the law required.

“We have to pull the information out of them to get what we need,” Mr. Hoekstra said.