Europe should give these people a choice. Leave or conform. It is a blessing that they don’t have the same overly liberal views of the UK and their immigrants. I hope that all Continental Nations come to their senses and deport the Muslims that will not assimilate. If they want to live in Muslim countries with Sharia law — they can go back where they came from. The sooner the better.

As to the problem of “integration”, yes, I agree there’s no clear sense of the concept, and what exists at the popular level, as in the United States, tends to be an ethnocentric model.* At an institutional level, however, we see some ideas, although much of its wisdom is debatable (I, for one, am against implementing shariah as a separate civil code).

Agree or disagree with the specifics, the point is not all Europeans are Pim Fortuyn (and even he wasn’t Pim Fortuyn). People here are actively confronting the issue after a long time of ignoring it.

As to the issue of European women and emancipation, well, that’s a whole other bag of worms. I see Islam and the West as having contending ideas about the definition of emancipation. The question is whether the two ideas can be bridged or reconciled.

*Digression: to be fair, a neo-conservative response would be to say that of course the model is ethnocentric; these were, after all, “our homes first”. That’s arguable historically, but even if we take it as face-value true, in an increasingly globalized world it’s a backward-looking view.

Is thàt ‘the example’?! On top of that, there is no clear sense of what ‘integration’ means. What is often meant is, that Muslims are supposed to become a ‘clone native’, in sort a caricature of the savage who learned ‘good manners’. In this mindset, people of Muslim and other ‘exotic’ background do are tolerated, as long as they remain entertainment or stay in a position of submission.

As for ‘hating women’: many so-called emancipated European women hate themselves and each other and are first of all their own problem. And this sudden interest and fetish cause among some to ‘save Muslim women from Islamic tyranny’ is awash with hypocrisy and old colonial sm fantasms.

Moreover, regarding the European ethnic nation-state, I’m presenting a certain point of view. Perhaps saying that it should be “abandoned” is too strong. I am not advocating the downfall or overthrow of current European governments. Rather, I’m saying that contemporary European societies are ideologically ill-suited to handle large-scale Islamic immigration: their long-term stability necessitates that they reform their core self-conceptions.

Is the American model therefore the “best”? Definitely not. For example, although European societies have difficulty coping with difference within their borders, they are so far much better at adapting to globalization than the United States. Their almost pathological ignorance of Islamic culture at home does not stop Europeans from becoming masters of Islamic culture abroad. Conversely, America often feels like an ape groping blindly in the dark.

Moreover, the American model, like the European model, is based around an increasingly antiquated and static conception of statehood. Ironically, the best model for a globalized world may not be that of either America or Europe, but of the classical Islamic umma. ;-)