The view of the article below is that they (ie the differences) are at least staying the same, saying that every generation of German Turks is like a first generation of migrants, especially as many Turks seek marriage partners in Turkey. But the rate of cultural change in Germany is different to that in Turkey and especially in rural Turkey, in Anatolia mentioned below, the conservative Muslim heartland of the country, which, if anything, is following the general trend in the Muslim world towards increased religious conservatism. Such a growing rift can only lead to one thing - an eventual split in the very identity of the host nation.

The extracts below are from a lengthy article, “Where Every Generation Is First-Generation”, in the NT Times, exploring some integration issues Germany is having with its huge Turkish population:

Exact statistics are hard to come by, but it is possible that as many as 50 percent of Turks (a word that in common parlance often includes even those with German citizenship) seek their spouses abroad, according to Schäuble, the interior minister. For most of the past decade, according to the ministry, between 21,000 and 27,000 people a year have successfully applied at German consulates in Turkey to form families in Germany. (Just under two-thirds of the newcomers are women.) That means roughly half a million spouses since the mid-1980s, which in turn means hundreds of thousands of new families in which the children’s first language is as likely to be Turkish as German.

Binational marriage alarms many Germans for two reasons. First, it allows the Turkish community to grow fast at a time when support for immigration is low. The Turkish population in Germany multiplies not once in a life cycle but twice — at childbirth and at marriage. Second, such marriages retard assimilation even for those Turks long established in Germany. You frequently hear stories from schoolteachers about a child of guest workers who was a star pupil three decades ago but whose own children, although born in Germany, struggle to learn German in grade school. After half a century of immigration, every new generation of Turks is still, to a large extent, a first generation.

Turkish marriages are seldom Western-style love matches. They are often arranged by parents. A 2003 study by the Federal Ministry of Family found that a quarter of Turkish women in Germany hadn’t even known their partners before they married. The rural Anatolian practice of marrying relatives, usually first cousins, is frequent. It accounts, according to the Center for Turkey Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, for between a sixth and a quarter of binational pairings. These marriages bring certain Anatolian problems into the heart of Germany. Domestic violence is high. The causes of wife-beating among families of immigrant background can be debated, but not the numbers. Gulgun Teyhani, who works at a battered-women’s shelter in Duisburg, reckoned that of the 86 women her house took in last year, 60 had a migrant background, and 51 of them spoke Turkish. Last year, the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency found that in the preceding five years, 45 “honor killings” were carried out by Turkish or Kurdish families in Germany against women deemed to have “strayed,” generally by dating Europeans or adopting Western fashions.

[..]
The tragedy of imported brides, Necla Kelek writes, is that they “will live in Germany but never arrive there.” Like Ates, Kelek is a Turkish-German woman with intense passions on either side of the hyphen. [..] It is in large part a result of her books that some Germans who once viewed Turkish marriage practices as none of their business now see it as a pressing crisis.

[..]
Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands, Kelek has been accused of “Enlightenment fundamentalism,” a tendency to defend secular values too dogmatically. Last year, a group of 60 “migration researchers” wrote an open letter to the weekly paper Die Zeit attacking Kelek’s writing as “unserious” — an odd criticism to level at a memoirist, even one trained in sociology. Others say she has made Islam too central to her explanation of violence against women.

[..] In 2000, the German Youth Institute reported that 53 percent of Turkish women ages 16 to 29 would not consider marrying a German “under any circumstances.”

[..] In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state and the one where Duisburg is located, 80 percent of Turks ages 25 to 34 are married; their average marriage age is 21 for women and 24 for men. Among non-Turks, only 32 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds are married; the average marriage age is 29 for women and 32 for men. Germans have one of the lowest fertility rates in the history of the world — 1.36 children per woman, according to 2004 figures. While it is hard to find precise figures for Turks in Germany, the rate is widely agreed to be higher.

[..] According to a study done by the Center for Turkey Studies in Essen, young Turkish women and men brought up in Germany view their fellow Turkish-Germans of the opposite sex as “distant from their own culture, or ‘degenerate.’ ”

[..] In the Comenius Garden in Neukolln, a particularly tough part of Berlin, Murat, Ali and Hakan, all in their late teens, were passing a freezing cold afternoon chatting and making up rap verses. Ali, whose family comes from the Black Sea port of Rize, is the son of a local Neukölln imam. He is training to be a plumber but is not employed yet. He is betrothed to a “friend” in Turkey. The person who introduced me to Ali said Ali’s other friends had spoken of the woman as his cousin. So I started by asking him why he had looked for his wife in Turkey. “German girls are Schlampen,” he replied. They’re sluts.

Necla Kelek is great, by the way, have a read of this article on Europe Multiculturalism and integration for a taste.

Fjordman finds the picture is more complicated than may first appear.

See also my previous posts on the demographics decline of the West and Europe in particular, and where it is leading.

Continuing with the theme of the day, The Chronicle Review has an excellent essay by Walter Laqueur today, adopted from his forthcoming book “The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent”, which will be published next week (h/t The Brussels Journal):

This, then, is the picture of Europe in the first decade of the new century. It is a picture of gradual decline. Future historians may well be at a loss to understand why the sorry state of affairs was realized only late in the day, despite the fact that all the major trends — demography, the stalling of the movement toward European unity, and the crisis of the welfare state — had appeared well before the turn of the century.

The decline of the Roman Empire has been discussed for centuries, and it could be that the discussion about the decline of Europe will last as long. Decline often does not proceed as quickly as feared; there are usually retarding circumstances. But it is also true that, for better or worse, the pulse of history is beating quicker in our time than before.

There is also a danger that we will throw up our hands in despair and accept with resignation Europe’s future role as a museum of world history and civilization, preaching the importance of morality in world affairs to a nonexistent audience. Surely decline offers challenges that ought to be taken up, even if there is no certainty of success. No one can say with any confidence what problems the powers that now appear to be in the ascendancy will face in the years to come. And even if Europe’s decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.

There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe’s traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over.

Extracts from a new essay by Fjordman:

[..] I have heard individuals state point blank that even if Muslims become the majority in our countries in the future, this doesn’t matter because all people are equal and all cultures are just a mix of everything else, anyway. And since religions are just fairy-tales, replacing one fairy-tale, Christianity, with another fairy-tale, Islam, won’t make a big difference. All religions basically say that the same things in different ways. However, not one of them would ever dream of saying that all political ideologies “basically mean the same thing.” They simply don’t view religious or cultural ideas as significant, and thus won’t spend time on studying the largely unimportant details of each specific creed. This is Marxist materialism.

The unstated premise behind this is that the age of distinct cultures is over. All peoples around the world will gradually blend into one another. Ethnic, religious and racial tensions will disappear, because mankind will be one and equal. It’s cultural and genetic Communism. Nation states who create their own laws and uphold their own borders constitute “discrimination” and an obstacle to this new Utopia, and will gradually have to be dismantled, starting with Western nations of course, replaced by a world where everybody has the right to move wherever they want to and where international legislation and human rights resolutions define the law, upheld by an elite of — supposedly well-meaning — transnational bureaucrats managing our lives.

What the proponents of this ideology don’t say is that even if it were possible to melt all human beings into one people, which is in my view neither possible nor desirable, this project would take generations or centuries, and in the intervening time there would be numerous wars and enormous suffering caused by the fact that not everybody would quietly allow themselves to be eradicated.

[..]

The extreme Left didn’t succeed in staging a violent revolution in the West, so they decided to go for a permanent, structural revolution instead. They now hope that immigrants can provide raw material for a violent rebellion, especially since many of them are Muslims who have displayed such a wonderful talent for violence and destruction. The Western Left are importing a new proletariat, since the previous one disappointed them.

A poll carried out on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag, although 95 percent knew of Auschwitz. “Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the findings,” Ander Hjemdahl, the founder of UOK, told website The Local. In the nationwide poll, 43 percent believed that Communist regimes had claimed less than one million lives. The actual figure is estimated at 100 million. 40 percent believed that Communism had contributed to increased prosperity in the world. Mr. Hjemdahl states several reasons for this massive ignorance, among them that “a large majority of Swedish journalists are left-wingers, many of them quite far left.”

I have personally read statements by leading media figures not just in Sweden, but all over Western Europe, who openly brag about censoring coverage of issues related to mass immigration and the Multicultural society.

[..]

Ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse. By hiding behind labels such as “anti-racism” and “tolerance,” Leftists have achieved a degree of censorship they could never have achieved had they openly stated that their intention was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its foundations.

According to the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, “the lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: A source of violence.”

[..]

Many Marxist ideas have been allowed to endure and mutate, such as the notion that culture is unimportant or that it is OK to stage massive social experiments on hundreds of millions of people. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has stated that had the Soviet Union managed to create a functioning Socialist society, tens of millions of deaths would have been a worthwhile price to pay. But Marxist ideals of forced equality can only be enforced by a government with totalitarian powers, and will thus inevitably lead to a totalitarian society. There is no “enlightened Marxism,” and the idea that there is has ruined more lives than probably and other ideology in modern history.

Marxism is an organized crime against humanity.

[..]

Ideas matter. Individuals matter. Cultures matter. Truth matters, and truth exists. We used to know that. It’s time we get to know it again, and reject false ideas about the irrelevance of culture. We are not racists for desiring to pass on our heritage to future generations, nor are we evil for resisting to be treated as lab rats in social experiments on a horrific scale. We must nip the ideology of transnational Multiculturalism and unlimited mass migration in the bud by exposing it for what it is: A Communism for the 21st century.

I mentioned Bernard Lewis’ (”the most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East.”) speech at the AIE dinner recently, you can read the full text here.

Here are some editted extracts the AIE also posted for those lacking the patience to read the whole thing, “Islam and Europe”:

The Muslim attack on Christendom . . . has gone through three phases. The first is from the very beginning of Islam, when the new faith spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was born, into the Middle East and beyond. It was then that the Muslims conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa–all at that time part of the Christian world–and went beyond into Europe, conquering a sizable part of southwestern Europe and occupying for a while parts of France.

After a long and bitter struggle, the Christians managed to retake part, but not all, of the territory they had lost. They succeeded in Europe, and in a sense Europe was defined by the limits of that success. They failed to retake North Africa or the Middle East, which were lost to Christendom. Notably, they failed to recapture the Holy Land. . . .

That was not the end of the matter. The Islamic world, having failed the first time, was bracing for the second attack, this time conducted not by Arabs and Moors, but by Turks and Tatars. They conquered Anatolia and Russia and captured the ancient Christian citadel of Constantinople. They conquered a large part of the Balkans. Twice they conquered half of Hungary. Twice they reached as far as Vienna. Barbary corsairs from North Africa–well known to historians of the United States–were raiding Western Europe. They went to Iceland–the uttermost limit.

Again, Europe counterattacked, this time more successfully and more rapidly. They succeeded in recovering Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, and in advancing farther into the Islamic lands, chasing their former rulers from whence they had come. For this phase of European counterattack, a new term was invented: imperialism. When the peoples of Asia and Africa invaded Europe, this was not imperialism. When Europe attacked Asia and Africa, it was.
This European counterattack began a new phase which brought the European attack into the very heart of the Middle East. In our own time, we have seen the end of that domination.

***

Osama bin Laden had this to say about the war in Afghanistan, the war which led to the defeat and retreat of the Red Army and the collapse of the Soviet Union. We tend to see that as a Western victory–more specifically an American victory–in the Cold War against the Soviets. For Osama bin Laden, it was nothing of the kind. It was a Muslim victory in a jihad. . . . As bin Laden put it, “We have met, defeated, and destroyed the more dangerous and the more deadly of the two infidel superpowers. Dealing with the soft, pampered and effeminate Americans will be an easy matter.”

This belief was confirmed in the 1990s when we saw attacks on American bases and installations with virtually no effective response of any kind–only angry words and expensive missiles dispatched to remote and uninhabited places. This was a sequence leading up to 9/11. It was clearly intended to be the completion of the first sequence and the beginning of the new one, taking the war into the heart of the enemy camp.

The third phase has clearly begun. We should not delude ourselves as to what it is and what it means. This time it is taking different forms–two in particular–terror and migration.

***

Where do we stand now? The Muslims have certain advantages. They have fervor and conviction, which in most Western countries are either weak or lacking. They are self-assured of the rightness of their cause, whereas we spend most of our time in self-denigration and self-abasement. They have loyalty and discipline, and perhaps most important, they have demography, the combination of natural increase and migration leading to major population chang