Local businessmen, politicians, academics, and even journalists form NGO's to plug into avalanche of Western largesse. In process, they award themselves and their relatives with salaries, perks, and preferred access to Western goods and credits. NGO's have evolved into vast networks of patronage in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

NGO's chase disasters with a relish. More than 200 of them opened shop in aftermath of Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999-2000. Another 50 supplanted them during civil unrest in Macedonia a year later. Floods, elections, earthquakes, wars - constitute cornucopia that feed NGO's.

NGO's are proponents of Western values - women's lib, human rights, civil rights, protection of minorities, freedom, equality. Not everyone finds this liberal menu palatable. The arrival of NGO's often provokes social polarization and cultural clashes. Traditionalists in Bangladesh, nationalists in Macedonia, religious zealots in Israel, security forces everywhere, and almost all politicians find NGO's irritating and bothersome.

The British government ploughs well over $30 million a year into "Proshika", a Bangladeshi NGO. It started as a women's education outfit and ended up as a restive and aggressive women empowerment political lobby group with budgets to rival many ministries in this impoverished, Moslem and patriarchal country.

Other NGO's - fuelled by $300 million of annual foreign infusion - evolved from humble origins to become mighty coalitions of full-time activists. NGO's like Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and Association for Social Advancement mushroomed even as their agendas have been fully implemented and their goals exceeded. It now owns and operates 30,000 schools.

This mission creep is not unique to developing countries. As Parkinson discerned, organizations tend to self-perpetuate regardless of their proclaimed charter. Remember NATO? Human rights organizations, like Amnesty, are now attempting to incorporate in their ever-expanding remit "economic and social rights" - such as rights to food, housing, fair wages, potable water, sanitation, and health provision. How insolvent countries are supposed to provide such munificence is conveniently overlooked.

"The Economist" reviewed a few of more egregious cases of NGO imperialism.

Human Rights Watch lately offered this tortured argument in favor of expanding role of human rights NGO's: "The best way to prevent famine today is to secure right to free expression - so that misguided government policies can be brought to public attention and corrected before food shortages become acute." It blatantly ignored fact that respect for human and political rights does not fend off natural disasters and disease. The two countries with highest incidence of AIDS are Africa's only two true democracies - Botswana and South Africa.

Their religion, atavistic and rigid, insists on ritual slaughter and male circumcision. They rarely mingle socially or inter-marry. Most of them - though born in European countries - are not allowed to vote. Brown-skinned and with a marked foreign accent, they are subject to police profiling and harassment and all manner of racial discrimination.

They are new Jews of Europe - its Muslim minorities.

Muslims - especially Arab youths from North Africa - are, indeed, disproportionately represented in crime, including hate crime, mainly against Jews. Exclusively Muslim al-Qaida cells have been discovered in many West European countries. But this can be safely attributed to ubiquitous and trenchant long-term unemployment and to stunted upward mobility, both social and economic due largely to latent or expressed racism.

Moreover, stereotype is wrong. The incidence of higher education and skills is greater among Muslim immigrants than in general population - a phenomenon known as "brain drain". Europe attracts best and brightest - students, scholars, scientists, engineers and intellectuals - away from their destitute, politically dysfunctional and backward homelands.

The Economist surveys landscape of friction and withdrawal:

"Indifference to Islam has turned first to disdain, then to suspicion and more recently to hostility ... (due to images of) petro-powered sheikhs, Palestinian terrorists, Iranian ayatollahs, mass immigration and then attacks of September 11th, executed if not planned by western-based Muslims and succored by an odious regime in Afghanistan ... Muslims tend to come from poor, rural areas; most are ill-educated, many are brown. They often encounter xenophobia and discrimination, sometimes made worse by racist politicians. They speak language of wider society either poorly or not at all, so they find it hard to get jobs. Their children struggle at school. They huddle in poor districts, often in state-supplied housing ... They tend to withdraw into their own world, (forming a) self-sufficient, self-contained community."

This self-imposed segregation has multiple dimensions. Clannish behavior persists for decades. Marriages are still arranged - reluctant brides and grooms are imported from motherland to wed immigrants from same region or village. The "parallel society", in words of a British government report following Oldham riots two years ago, extends to cultural habits, religious practices and social norms.

Assimilation and integration has many enemies.

Remittances from abroad are an important part of gross national product and budgetary revenues of countries such as Bangladesh and Pakistan. Hence their frantic efforts to maintain cohesive national and cultural identity of expats. DITIB is an arm of Turkish government's office for religious affairs. It discourages assimilation or social integration of Turks in Germany. Turkish businesses - newspapers, satellite TV, foods, clothing, travel agents, publishers - thrive on ghettoization.

There is a tacit confluence of interests between national governments, exporters and Islamic organizations. All three want Turks in Germany to remain as Turkish as possible. The more nostalgic and homebound expatriate - larger and more frequent his remittances, higher his consumption of Turkish goods and services and more prone he is to resort to religion as a determinant of his besieged and fracturing identity.

Muslim numbers are not negligible. Two European countries have Muslim majorities - Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania. Others - in both Old Europe and its post-communist east - harbor sizable and growing Islamic minorities. Waves of immigration and birth rates three times as high as indigenous population increase their share of population in virtually every European polity - from Russia to Macedonia and from Bulgaria to Britain. One in seven Russians is Muslim - over 20 million people.

According to March-April issue of Foreign Policy, non-Muslim part of Europe will shrink by 3.5 percent by 2015 while Muslim populace will likely double. There are 3 million Turks in Germany and another 12 million Muslims - Algerians, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Egyptians, Senegalese, Malis, or Tunisians - in rest of European Union.

This is two and one half times number of Muslims in United States. Even assuming - wrongly - that all of them occupy lowest decile of income, their combined annual purchasing power would amount to a whopping $150 billion. Furthermore, recent retroactive changes to German law have naturalized over a million immigrants and automatically granted its much-coveted citizenship to 160,000 Muslims born in Germany every year.

Between 2-3 million Muslims in France - half their number - are eligible to vote. Another million - one out of two - cast ballots in Britain. These numbers count at polls and are not offset by concerted efforts of a potent Jewish lobby - there are barely a million Jews in Western Europe.