Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-02-20-Speech-3-408"
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"en.20080220.17.3-408"2
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"Mr President, the word ‘integration’ has been used 24 times in this report. The proposed integration of immigrants out of the national taxpayers’ pocket has not taken into consideration one important aspect, namely religion and civilisation. Militant secularists of socialist origin avoid this subject, although the Muslim population is shooting up.
By 2025, one in three people living in Western Europe may, or will, be Muslim. The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently suggested that Europe should adopt Sharia law, which the President and the establishment of this Parliament would probably call ‘multiculturalism’. This brings a confused debate to the fore that has been developing over the ways and possibility of integrating and assimilating the new immigrants flooding into the continent.
Does assimilation mean that immigrants should absorb and be absorbed into European civilisation, or does it mean that they should join the descendants of old European nations to create some sort of new European man? Or is the creation of a common civilisation either undesirable or impossible?
Although Europe has always had its full share of varying cultures, it has also had a mainstream Christian culture or civilisation, so to speak, in which most of its people, whatever their identities, have shared. For almost 20 centuries, this civilisation has been the central and the lasting component of the European legacy. One has to ask: would Europe would be the Europe it is today if, in the seventh and eighth centuries, the ashes of ancient Rome had been conquered and settled not by Christian societies but by Muslim and any other? The simple answer is no. It would not be Europe. It would be Egypt or Libya.
Fortunately, there are people who will not accept cultural rights as a cover for Sharia. Religion should be protected from the State – the European State, in particular. It is only Christianity that can integrate other religions into a shared European project, by acknowledging what secular ideologies cannot. I believe that Europe can do that and Europeans should recommit themselves to Christian culture and the traditions and values of liberty, equality, law and individual rights that, for over 20 centuries, have been embraced by Europeans of all nations and that have been the source of prosperity and moral leadership in the world.
This report can integrate nobody and nothing. It is a symbol of dead men walking. It might create a continent of zombies, unaware of their national identities."@en1
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