Bernard Lewis: Muslims to Take Over Europe

From the NewsMax.com Staff
For the story behind the story... Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007 11:22 a.m. EST

Muslims "seem to be about to take over Europe,” which has "given up” efforts to maintain its culture, said world-renowned Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis.
Lewis, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, told the Jerusalem Post that soon the only important question regarding Europe’s future would be, "Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?"

Lewis, whose many books include the recent "What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East,” said the Islamic takeover of Europe would be assisted by "immigration and democracy." Instead of fighting the threat, he added, Europeans had given up.
"Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence," he said. "They have no respect for their own culture." Europeans had "surrendered" on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of "self-abasement, political correctness and multi-culturalism.”

Turning to the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, Lewis said the Cold War philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction, which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using nuclear weapons, would not apply to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime.

"For him, Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. If [Iran's ruling ayatollahs] kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a quick, free pass to heaven. I find all that very alarming.”

Lewis said Israel and the West should work to strengthen moderate forces within Iran via an aggressive propaganda campaign.

"All the evidence is that the regime is extremely unpopular with their own people," he told the Post. "I am told that the Israeli daily [radio] program in Persian is widely listened to all over Iran with rapt attention."