From The Brookings Institute Six Years Ago

Excerpt from this link:

Europe's Muslim Street

March/April 2003 —

Islam may still be a faraway religion for millions of Americans. But for Europeans it is local politics. The 15 million Muslims of the European Union (EU)—up to three times as many as live in the United States—are becoming a more powerful political force than the fabled Arab street. Europe's Muslims hail from different countries and display diverse religious tendencies, but the common denominator that links them to the Muslim world is their sympathy for Palestine and Palestinians. And unlike most of their Arab brethren, growing numbers of Europe's Muslims can vote in elections that count.

This political ascendance threatens to exacerbate existing strains within the trans-Atlantic relationship. The presence of nearly 10 million Muslims versus only 700,000 Jews in France and Germany alone helps explain why continental Europe might look at the Middle East from a different angle than does the United States. Indeed, French and German concerns about a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq or Washington's blind support for Israel are at least partly related to nervousness about the Muslim street at home.

Whether Brussels, Berlin, Paris, or Washington like it or not, Europe's Muslim constituencies are likely to become an even more vocal foreign policy lobby. Two trends are empowering Europe's Muslim street: demographics and opportunities for full citizenship....

Fellow infidels here are just going to love the final paragraph. NOT!:

On the positive side, demographic growth and enfranchisement are already integrating European Muslims into the political mainstream and have the potential to produce a moderate type of Euro-Islam. Yet the implications of a more vocal Muslim lobby in Europe's Middle East policy offer no good news for the United States. Home to a minuscule Jewish minority and growing Muslim masses, Europe will only get better at confronting the United States at the game of ethnic-lobby influence—a small price to pay, perhaps, for the emergence of a truly multicultural Europe.

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Wiki on the Brookings Institute. Excerpt, but you may want to read the whole thing:

Brookings claims to have contributed to the creation of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and the Congressional Budget Office, as well as influenced policies of deregulation, broad-based tax reform, welfare reform, and foreign aid.

Of the 200 most prominent think tanks in the U.S., the Brookings Institution's research is the most widely cited by the media,and the third most-cited of all public policy institutes by Members of Congress, behind only the Heritage Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.