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Originally Posted by Gizzmoe
You said it again. "Host society"! Sorry, but I slowly get the feeling that you have a problem to accept that Muslims can be an integral part of Holland or Germany or any other "western" country! They don´t have to be 100% like "us", they can do whatever they want as long as it isn´t against the law. It has not much to do with "disdain" and "indifference"..
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You illustrate what exactly the West's problem in realizing Islam is: "they can do as they want as long as it is not against the law". That way you reduce Europe to a bureaucratical meaning only. But I understand Europe as a cultural sphere in the first, and it's history was heavily influenced - sometimes for the good, sometimes for the worse - by the religion that has become typical for Europe since the empire of Rome: and that is not Islam that started to constantly attack europe since the 8th century until the 16th century and brought it two times to the brink of brakedown, but Christianity. Even after the Turk's attack on Vienna the relation between Europe and the weakening Muslim Ottoman empire were fragile and focussed on the possebilites of more wars to come. The theory that Islam and Europe peacefully coexisted in past times in history is a complete myth. Their relation has been dominated by war and violance from the defeat of Roderich in 711 (just 80 years after Muhammad's death - the whole African coast lies beyond both events!) until today's heavily damaged relations between both spheres. Islam never has had a historical tradition in Europe, and where it is present in minor regions (Balkans, Hungary), it has been enforced there by violance (Ottoma empire), and has conserved enthnical tensions that every couple of decades light up, since centuries.
I expose myself to critizism of beeing politically uncorrect, but I put it clearly:
Europe ends where European Christianity in the tradition of Western Rome's history ends, and it is here where I want to see Islam's drive into the West beeing brought to a halt - period. The orthodox Christian tradition reaching far into the russian and Middle East direction already is critical, but some of it's territories that do not reach too far to the East I do accept and think of as Europe., nevertheless, becasue of shared history. The line is somehwere in the Eastern half of the Baltic states, Belarus, wstern Ukraine, western Romania, the Northern part of the Balkans, the Eastern part of Greece.
This is not about my personal confessions. I am no Christian. It is about realizing the importance of religion as a deciding factor for one's own culture - and identity. And the ideology of Islam does not work well with that typical identity of Western culture and the values that emerged from that.
Empires of the past did not have solid borders, just peripheral territories near their defined borders where their cultural and administrative influence started to phase out and became the weaker the farther away these territories were from the empire's coreland and center. In this understanding Europe is is desperate need to think of it self in an imperial understanding. The idea of solid borders where it ends is idiotic - it has never been like that. There needs to be a belt of Europe phasing out, and non-Europe phasing in. Current policies of the EU do not reflect thios need, thus their headless rushing to the East.