I hope your title was a joke.

No comment.

I hope you're going to write about how Bernard Lewis, learned though he may be, is shockingly deranged and paranoid about a "Muslim Europe" by 2100, or whatever it is he's talking about. There's simply no way the math works.

I find the whole use of the "Eurabia threat" as an excuse to clamp down on immigration and perpetuate the ghettoization of European Muslim communities pretty disgusting, so it's probably going to be the major theme of the paper.

I can translate the thing but why do you want it. It's not particularly good, boilerplate rightwing hackwork mixed with insubstantial fluff on a whole bunch of issues and the whole Islamicization of Europe tm is absolutely ridiculous (has Prof. Lewis actually looked at birth rates for Muslims born in Europe, or at current immigration rates - both are quite low)

Well, I can't say the guy's an idiot until I know what he's actually saying, hence the request for translation — I can't find any English-language reproduction of his comments, although I've found plenty of conservative mags picking up on his comments elsewhere.

I'm not sure how you define "quite low" - most all the sources I'm looking at have indicated the opposite, so perhaps you could point me to something that says otherwise?

Did you see this?

And it features Samuel Huntington too. Wow, does the whole culturalism shtick ever grate on my nerves. Perfect.

Well to take a typical year Germany in 2003 Germany had a net immigration from Turkey of some 13,000 people In 2003 total net immigration from all of Africa - North and sub-Saharan was about 12,000 people. This is typical for the past decade. For the stats (auf deutsch) see
http://www.integrationsbeauftragte.de/download/Modul_1_Migrationsgeschehen.pdf
Tablel 5 on page 25 is immigration
Table 6 on page 27 is emigration

For France net immigration from the Maghreb from 1994-1999 varied from about 18,000 to about 36,000. Again not exactly massive.

http://www.ined.fr/population-en-chiffres/france/index.html
click on immigres et etrangers and then on flux d'immigration.

Don't have figures at the moment on birth rates and in France it is rather difficult to get any figures based on race or religion or nationality of origin (illegal to keep stats on things like that) but from what I've read as far as anyone can tell children of immigrants have fertility rates not much above 'natives' - that doesn't apply to actual immigrants but as you can see from the figures not too many are coming in. Not to mention that fertility rates in Turkey and the Maghreb (main place of origin for muslim immigrants in continental Europe) are dropping dramatically. In Turkey and Tunisia they're already at or below replacement level. Going there fast in Algeria and Morocco.

See my reply at Tacitus (well, that blog is opens before this one on my firefox bookmarks).

And btw, it's "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

Tsk, tsk - Otmar. My feelings are crushed that you would prefer Tacitus to our humble abode.

I think the Chef may have taken a bit too enthusiastically the addage that German is easy for English speakers because of the similar sounds. I've certainly never found that to be the case -- more faux amis than anything.

Take to offense, Nadezhda. I use Firefox's "Open in Tabs" to get my dose of blogs each morning. As Tac is older than this site, his site opens to the left of newer entries to my bookmark folders.

Sometimes I read the tabs left-to-right (closing them once read), sometimes it's right-to-left. Well. Today it was tac before chez.

I can't really comment on the difficulty of German as a second language, it being my mother tongue. But going the other way round (learning English), I found that there are indeed a lot of similar words. The false friends are quite the exception, usually you're fine relying on similarities.

(famous exceptions are: become vs. bekommen, hardly vs. hart, sensible vs. sensibel)

The tricky part of German are the declinations and conjugations, which you don't really need when you just want to read some text.

But more to the core of the topic here: I live in one of the parts of Vienna with a rather high percentage (must be around 30 to 40%) of turkish immigrants. The picture one gets this close up is certainly quite different than what the US media (especially the right-wing cruisading x-tian one) writes.

In any case, I think MC was kidding about the title. At least, I hope so.

Kind of a "Speechen You Deutsch?"

That's what I meant by an "overly enthusiastic" quasi-transliteration from "speak the Deutsch?"

the thing we don't have is the ess-tset.

"Parlez usted ingles?"

I just really, really don't know any German. I thought it was something along those lines, but yeah, evidently not quite.

I did visit there for an afternoon once and had some very nice bratwurst and saw a zeppelin museum, but that's about all I got.

argh. that should have been "take No offense".

If so, reply and I'll do it for you tonight or tomorrow
Marek

Actually, Praktike's IHT link gave me some pretty good quotes to hang my introduction around, so I think I may be set, thanks; I'm using the article mainly as a set-up for the rest of my argument, so I don't think I'll need the full thing. If I do, I will post another request... thanks very much though!