Russell Berman, the Walter A. Haas Professor of Humanities at Stanford, has published a book, Anti-Americanism in Europe, that focuses on European dislike for the United States.  Berman explains that “anti-Americanism has emerged as an ideology available to form a postnational European identity.”

In place of the nationalist, anti-immigration mood of the 1990s, anti-Americanism permits a generalized European hostility toward the paradigmatic nation of immigrants.  Europeans can therefore indulge in xenophobia without nationalism.

Although there is much in these statements that I would dispute, Berman does call attention to a truly bizarre situation.

While France, Germany, Sweden, and the Lowlands are denouncing America as an imperialist threat, these countries are doing everything humanly possible to accommodate a growing and indigestible Muslim presence.  In France alone, over five million residents (nine percent of the population) are Turkish and African Muslims.  If current immigration patterns persist, that figure will soar to 10 million, or about 15 percent of the population, by 2030.  By then, Third World Muslims who have moved to France will account for over 40 percent of the annual birthrate.  An E.U. estimate, perhaps intended to quell anxiety, claims that another 300,000 Muslims have clandestinely arrived in France since 1981.  This particular figure may understate what it reports.  The figure that is available from the same estimates for clandestines in the United Kingdom is over 300,000 but is less than one third of the number that is circulating in Germany.  According to the E.U. Commission, over half a million illegal immigrants, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, enter E.U. territory each year, while attempts to intercept and return them have been minimal.

The Turks in Germany (which now has a Muslim population of almost six million) have pressured the two party blocs to secure Turkish admission to the European Union.  In France, Muslims have done exactly the same thing.  Turkey’s admission, which now seems likely, despite her Islamic government and low standard of living relative to Western Europe, will precipitate a further demographic shift.  It will likely lead to millions of poorly educated Turks, particularly from backward Anatolia, being thrust into the heart of Europe as a mobile workforce.

In just about every European country where they have gone, these immigrants have created social problems, taxed welfare systems, and responded to anti-Christian and anti-Jewish rabble-rousing.  Maurice Allais, the French Nobel laureate in economics in 1988, has determined that the integration of a single immigrant worker requires a European country to spend four times in social services what a native worker receives as an annual salary.  If the immigrant brings along a wife and children, costs may rise to 20 times the annual salary of an indigenous French worker.

By now, the horror stories are tiresome even if true, and one is reminded of the ancient aphorism “Deus vult perdere prius dementat” (The gods drive mad those they intend to destroy).  While European leaders go on about the dangers of American unilateralism, they do nothing to restore a European character to their countries.

Berman observes that the E.U. vision is postnational and based on supranational bureaucratic regulation.  It also leaves no place for the nation-states that the European Union is replacing.  Supranational E.U. directives allow bureaucrats and judges to accommodate accredited victims by stripping majority European populations of their constitutional freedoms.  Instead of addressing their demographic problems and trying to control their borders, Europeans make it a hate crime even to notice the reasons for social disruption.  At this moment, France and Germany have both launched new initiatives against intolerance, and it was possible to read the cover story about xenophobia in Le Monde Hebdomaire in early March without realizing that French antisemitism is a Muslim problem.

On February 1, the French minister of state, who introduced “positive discrimination” in public employment and university admissions for Third World settlers in France, vowed to take new measures to “finish up with anti-Semitism.”  According to his department, however, the “extreme Right” in France, a term designating French Christian opponents of Third World immigration, accounts for less than seven percent of antisemitic acts in the country.  The president of the “extreme right-wing” organization Les Identitaires is correct to observe that the planned campaign against hate speech will likely be directed against politically incorrect nationalists, to help the Chirac government court leftist and Muslim support.

The tendency of French Jewish spokesmen to complain about “anti-Semitism creeping back into France” fosters a certain self-deception.  The anarchist Proudhon may have disliked Jews and shared this prejudice with the Enlightenment figure Voltaire.  The expressed dislike for Jews among long-dead French reformers, however, has nothing to do with the present threat.  European countries, in a fit of multicultural madness, have turned themselves over to embattled Muslims, who form sizable voting blocs in some places.  And these Muslims are generally hostile to the Jews because of Jewish identification with the “Zionist entity.”

One might wonder what exactly the French government can do at this point to neutralize France’s Islamic-xenophile lobby.  Whatever that might be, French president Jacques Chirac is not bothering to think about it.  He is too busy assuring critics, including Ariel Sharon, that “anti-Semitism existed in France before the Muslims came here.”