Racial Clashes Hit Windsor

Extra police are being drafted into the Windsor area today after three nights of violent clashes between white and Asian youths.

Gangs have fought battles in the streets using baseball bats and pitchforks. A Muslim-run dairy which wants to build a mosque was petrol bombed.

Pitchforks? Howling mobs torching buildings? Where have we seen this before?

The trouble apparently started when the dairy in question applied to convert one of its offices into a mosque for its workers. The office was already being used informally for that purpose. That didn't sit well with local white youths.

Nearby, one hooded youth claimed the problems had started after the previous owners, Express Dairies, left.

The 17-year-old said: "I've been here all my life and there were no problems with the old owners, they used to give us milk and stuff.

"We have had a couple of fights with this lot before, but now they're taking it seriously. We want them out of Dedworth."

Dedworth is the neighborhood in Windsor where the dairy is located.

The British press frequently refers to Muslims as "Asians." That's arguably correct when the Muslims in question hail from Pakistan, although it's not clear this is the case in Windsor. In any event, this terminology allows the Brit press to portray anyone who criticizes Muslim activities in Britain as a racist. Framing the issue this way effectively makes any discussion of Muslim immigration and its related problems taboo. It also allows the press to portray conflicts like the one in Windsor as "race riots" when in fact there's a lot more going on.

Thomas P.M. Barnett, a military strategist and author of The Pentagon's New Map, recently gained notice by dividing the world into a functioning "Core" comprised mainly of liberal, capitalist countries and the "Non-Integrating Gap" where violence, disease, war and poverty are the norm. He proposes that Europe and the rest of the Core create a well armed intervention force to transform the "Gap" countries and bring them into the "Core." It's an idea that simply won't work, says Mark Steyn.

Whatever the defects of the Continent's elites, the real problem isn't the lack of leaders but the lack of followers. The demographic reality is that Europe is running out of Europeans -- the deathbed fertility rates of the French, Italians, Germans, Spaniards, etc. is a continent-wide suicide bomb, a kind of auto-genocide in which one population is gradually yielding to a successor population unlikely to share American foreign policy goals in any parts of the world likely to catch Washington's eye in the next decade or three. Rather than the Continent's leadership class helping move countries from the Non-Integrating Gap to the Core, it's more likely that parts of Europe will be doing a Bosnia and moving from the Core to the Non-Integrating Gap.

Steyn could be wrong, but I doubt it. Events like the Windsor riots do not augur a happy future for Europe.