A Warning to Europe

In each and every case [of rape with violent assault in Oslo], not only in 2008 and 2009 but also in 2007, the offender was a non-Western immigrant. At the same time, in 9 out of 10 cases, the victim was Norwegian, not just by nationality, but also by ethnicity.

—Hanne Kristine Rohde, Oslo Police¹

The confrontations were very, very violent. For months I’ve been asking for the means to alleviate the neighborhood’s problems because tension has been mounting here. You’ve got gangs of youths playing at being gangsters who have turned the area into a no-go zone. You can no longer order a pizza or get a doctor to come to the house.

—Gilles Demailly, Mayor of Amiens, France²

I don’t feel your pain. I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a non-believer.

—Mohammed Bouyeri, murderer³

Women are not entitled to respect when they walk around without a Hijab. They are to blame for it when they are attacked … All the crimes that occur against women is because they are not covered. When they are not covered, you have no respect for them … She disobeys her master, there are two places in the Qur’an has ordered her to cover themselves … Women make a clean society dirty when they walk around without a Hijab. They are not entitled to respect and are not valuable as those who wear a Hijab.

—Copenhagen Imam Shahid Mehdi⁴

In May 2014, the voters of Europe sent a warning to their political elites. The event was national elections for members of the European Union (EU) parliament. Almost everywhere across Europe the results were stunning—anti-mainstream parties skeptical of mass immigration and loss of national sovereignty to unelected EU bureaucrats surged to victory. In France, it was the National Front, whose leader Marine Le Pen has been outspoken in defense of her country’s traditional separation of church and state. In the United Kingdom, it was the UK Independence Party outstripping both Labour and the Conservatives with its message of retaining Britain’s identity and independence.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the media responded with shock and disgust—yet neither response was warranted. To many observers, the rising tide of revolt against top- down political consensus in Europe has been building steadily for many years. This revolt is based not in racism or ignorance but on the re-assertion of democratic will and cultural dignity. Certainly, the anti-EU and anti-immigration movement which has spread across the continent attracts its share of unpleasant groups. But the fundamental core, the basic principles of this movement lie in love of liberty, love of democracy, and love of nation. It is worthy to rally behind, not to oppose.

The people of Europe have good reason to be angry with their political elites. For decades, the main parties of both Left and Right have presented European integration and multiculturalism as a fait accompli. Abstract ideologies and massive social experiments have been systematically imposed upon the European people as if they were self-evident goods that only bigots or idiots could oppose. Voters have had few genuine opportunities either to give or to withdraw consent for these policies. Taken together, European integration and multiculturalism present an assault against both the democratic will and the cultural heritage of the nations of Europe. As the EU elections of May 2014 showed, however, time is running out on the political elite. The failures of their policies are obvious, and new political parties have emerged to force the mainstream to recognize the will, the history, and the needs of their peoples.

NO MORE—THE REVOLT BEGINS

To find the tipping point which brought Europe to its pass in May 2014 one must look back at the Netherlands a dozen years before. No country better represented the new ideals of cultural relativism and European integration than the Netherlands at that time. Its political parties together formed an echo-chamber of elite opinion in which all dissenting views to its headlong rush into immigration and integration were silenced. Merely to question the course the country had taken was tantamount to racism, idiocy, and madness. But while political correctness could restrain political dialogue, it had no power to suppress reality. The reality was that relativism and multiculturalism were already a disaster.

Across the Netherlands, the famed tolerance and hospitality of the Dutch people was being abused as peaceful neighborhoods fell into crime and disorder. Native men and women became harassed and abused minorities in the streets of their own cities. Ian Buruma, who wrote a well-researched examination of Islam and the limits of European tolerance, has documented the serious increase in crime in the Netherlands. Along with the increase, the doctrine of multiculturalism made it indecent to disclose the ethnicity of the criminals, who were often Arab Muslims. With the increase in criminality came a stunning increase in intolerance and violence, particularly among the Islamic Moroccan population which had come to live in the Netherlands. As Buruma puts it, there was no response from government or media, who watched and even applauded as Dutch cities became “hotbeds of religious bigotry.”5 “The most dramatic sociological change of our lifetime was unfolding before our eyes,” Dutch politician Geert Wilders explains, “but neither the Dutch media nor the political class wanted to acknowledge it.”6

Then an academic sociologist and political columnist named Pim Fortuyn appeared on the scene. Through the force of his arguments, Fortuyn gave eloquent voice to the opinions of millions of ignored Dutch citizens. Before, it had been common to describe those who opposed mass immigration and multiculturalism as racists and fascists; when those same slurs were heaped upon Fortuyn and his followers, voters saw right through the ad hominem attacks. Fortuyn made the case that Islamic culture and mass Islamic immigration was contrary to the very same liberal democratic values and Dutch tolerance which was inviting them in.

Fortuyn was a political success, but it came at a great personal cost. His local political party made a breakthrough in his home city of Rotterdam in 2002, and this success led to increased support and enthusiasm ahead of national elections in May of that year. Just days before the national election, Fortuyn was shot to death by a left-wing extremist. A country which had not seen a political assassination in 400 years was shocked. But the murderer was unsuccessful at containing the movement: Fortuyn’s party went on to win 17% of the vote and a firm place in the ruling coalition government. It was not an end, but a beginning. After Fortuyn, the terms of the debate over immigration and multiculturalism began to change.

THE PROBLEM

For some readers, it will be necessary to lay out some of the realities behind multiculturalism and Islamic immigration in Europe. Most Europeans know these all too well, and though some deny the extent or the severity of the problem, it is usually acknowledged that there is indeed a problem. The demographic invasion of Europe by Islam has torn apart native communities, eroded ancient liberties, and provoked a spike in violent crime across the continent. While the bonds of political correctness have been slightly loosened, they are still in place and all too readily join together with jihadist intimidation to silence and censor the protesting voices of the majority.

The problem begins with the nature of Islamic immigration. Unlike most other immigrant groups in Europe, Muslims immigrants insist on maintaining a rigid and supremacist separateness from their host cultures. The doctrine of multiculturalism, which holds that all cultures are equal and no cultural values should trump another’s has protected a group that completely rejects it.

Some media outlets prefer to spin Muslim violence in Europe as resulting from imposed isolation, but this argument does not hold water. The national governments of Europe have bent over backwards for decades to accommodate their immigrant groups. Other media figures have honestly acknowledged, as Swedish newspaper editor Ingrid Carlqvist did recently, that:

For the last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden [that] really don’t like Sweden … They don’t want to integrate, they don’t want to live in this society.7

The leader of Sweden’s National Democrats Party Marc Abramsson observed that Sweden, Tried harder than any other European country to integrate, spending billions on a welfare system that is designed to help jobless immigrants and guarantee them a good quality of life.8

Despite these efforts, Sweden now has large areas in its major cities where immigrants regard the police and even the fire department as enemies and attack them.

Muslim separatism in Europe is not the case of a group which just wants to live their lives in quiet and dignity. As author Bruce Bawer has observed in the Netherlands, “many Dutch Muslims kept that society at arm’s length, despising its freedoms and clinging to a range of undemocratic traditions and prejudices.”9 Crime statistics bear out Bawer’s observation. In Oslo, Norway, a police report found that in every single violent rape assault in a three-year period where the rapist could be identified, the rapist was a man of foreign origin (in almost every case, the victim was a native Norwegian woman).10 This was an extreme case, but it is by no means unique. In Britain, where the Muslim proportion is similar:

The majority of convictions obtained against the child sex grooming gangs have been against men of Pakistani origin that have exploited, repeatedly gang-raped and sexually tortured vulnerable young girls over long periods.11

These statistics are not the result of discrimination by police but quite the opposite: Pakistani gangs were in some cases allowed to continue their crimes by police who hesitated to press charges for fear of accusations of racism.12 Geert Wilders has told of being driven out of his own neighborhood in the city of Utrecht after being personally assaulted and robbed by Moroccan youths. In 2012, “Dutch authorities revealed that 65 percent of youths of Moroccan origin between twelve and twenty-three years old have been detained at least once by the police.”13

In her chilling and revealing book Londonistan, author Melanie Phillips describes the response in 1989 of British Muslims to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Her description is a microcosm of the systematic threat the community presents to British values:

There was the murderous incitement; the flagrant defiance of both the rule of law and the cardinal value of free speech; the religious fanaticism; the emergence of British Muslims as a distinct and hostile political entity; and the supine response of the British establishment. What was also on conspicuous display was the mind- twisting, back-to-front reasoning that is routinely used by many Muslims to turn their own violent aggression into victimhood.14

As she goes on to recall, British Muslims burned books and raged against Rushdie on the streets long before Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa. Rather than confront this murderous rage, British culture backed away apologetically—a pattern it has continued to follow ever since.

Knowing that the liberal culture of the West places greater moral dignity on victims and minorities, Muslims were quick to spin this episode not as an example of their own intransigence and hostility to the West but as an example of a thoughtless and intolerant attack on Islam. Unfortunately, the British media mostly bought this lie.15 Meanwhile, Rushdie (a British citizen) was forced into hiding, a Japanese translator of his book was murdered, and an Italian translator and Norwegian publisher of the book narrowly survived attempts on their lives.16 This hardly sounds like the case of a religion suffering serious oppression.

Muslims have since expanded this technique throughout Europe. Everywhere they have succeeded in intimidating governments and media outlets into self-censorship and even collaboration in the canard that Muslims are hapless victims. The value of free expression has been buried beneath Islamic intimidation. The intimidation does not come from idle threats, either. Two years after the murder of Pim Fortuyn, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Moroccan Muslim on the streets of Amsterdam. His supposed crime was making a film with Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali about the mistreatment of women in Islam. After the murderer had shot van Gogh and slit his throat, he added a note to the dead victim’s chest threatening Hirsi Ali with death. The note claimed that this woman, who had suffered rape, abuse, and genital mutilation during her Islamic upbringing only to escape and protest against such treatment, was somehow capable of “terroriz[ing] Islam.”17 It is the height of chutzpah to murder and threaten one’s critics and then complain about victimization and terror.

This is just a sample of the reality that European politicians have been trying their best to ignore. Separatist Muslims benefit from naïve multiculturalist policies and throw it back in Europe’s face. They demand not equality but Islamic monoculture. They back this demand by calling it their “religious freedom.” The aggression and intimidation on display not only erodes free expression and censors critics, it also creates Islamic colonies in the urban areas they have come to dominate. As Bawer describes:

In Britain, imams have pressed the government to designate parts of Bradford as being under Muslim law. In Belgium, Muslims in the Brussels neighborhood of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek consider it to be under Islamic jurisdiction. In Denmark, Muslim leaders have sought similar control over parts of Copenhagen. In France, an official met with an imam at the edge of Roubaix’s Muslims district out of respect for his declaration that it was Islamic territory.18

Recently in Birmingham an elaborate plot to Islamize the city’s public schools was uncovered. Birmingham is England’s second city, with a 20% Muslim population. What was found is that, with the complicity and acquiescence of the city council, “schools in Birmingham are illegally segregating pupils, discriminating against non-Muslim students and restricting the [national] syllabus to ‘comply with conservative Islamic teaching.’”19 Reporters found that one school had subsidized trips to Mecca and allowed a teacher to lead the students in anti-Christian chants at assembly. Girls were made to sit at the back of classroom. Christian students were made to study on their own while Muslims were given close attention. Teachers who did not comply with such treatment were hounded out or threatened. A former teacher at one of the Islamized schools testified that “the Islamic ethos is overpowering and it’s dominating everything.”20 This is happening on a large scale at British public schools funded by British taxpayers.

The degree to which Islam is distorting European society and constricting the rights of the people can be clearly shown in the increasing effects of Muslim anti-Semitism. While American media outlets naturally prefer to focus on “far-right” groups when talking about European anti-Semitism, the fact is that the threat against Jews in Europe today is primarily and almost exclusively driven by Muslims. In France a Muslim went to a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 and murdered three children and a rabbi.21 In May 2014 in Belgium, a jihadist entered the Jewish Museum in Brussels and murdered four people in cold blood, including two Israeli tourists.

This is the legacy of the demographic invasion of Islam in Europe. Aided by European cultural relativism and multiculturalism, European societies today are more divided, less safe, and less free. Native inhabitants are denied their own cultural heritage even as a violent and alien heritage is aggressively enforced with impunity on the streets and in the schools. Voices opposing this transformation are silenced in the name of political correctness. As a result, native populations feel disenfranchised and disempowered in their own countries. A 2008 British government report found:

White people are less likely to feel they can influence decisions at the local level than people from minority ethnic groups (37 percent compared to 45 percent). White people are also less likely to feel they can influence decisions affecting Great Britain (19 percent compared to 31 percent).22

These numbers are chilling for anyone who believes in democracy as representing the voice of the people.

THE RESPONSE

At first, there may appear to be no connection between anti-immigration positions and opposition to the EU. But on closer examination it can be seen that the two positions are directly related. To begin with, both multiculturalism and European integration are top- down political policies that have been largely imposed upon the European people against their will and interests. Both policies undermine culture and sovereignty of nations while expanding the authority of undemocratic foreign powers. More importantly, immigration and border control policies established by EU bureaucrats are binding upon all of the EU’s member states. This has created an enormous problem for member states with large illegal migrant populations.

One of the main goals of European integration was permitting the free flow of people among the countries of the EU. This goal has been fulfilled quite admirably for native European populations, who are now free to move about and find work across the continent. But the policies in place to permit this free flow of people work against the EU nations when it comes to illegal immigrants. Once immigrants reach any EU nation it becomes incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to prevent them from moving around. Furthermore, because all EU nations are signatory to strict human rights protections, it is not permitted simply to deport even an illegal immigrant back to his or her country of origin.

In practice, this means that illegal immigrants find it extremely easy to game the system. This explains the phenomenon of hundreds of African migrants piling onto boats in the Mediterranean Sea then setting it ablaze in the hope of being rescued by a European nation. Once on shore, migrants will claim asylum and qualify for generous welfare benefits in the country of their choice. As Caldwell puts it, immigration for Europe is effectively set “by whichever member state happen[s] to be the most soft-hearted, lax, corrupt, or sanctimonious.”23 Even in extreme cases, it is almost impossible to remove immigrants who have become established in Europe: the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly blocked attempts by the UK government to deport or extradite terrorists to other countries.

It is important to recognize that anti-immigration and anti-EU parties in Europe are not motivated merely by racism or bigotry. There are genuine and reasonable concerns involved which have been ignored or waved aside by the mainstream parties for decades. Rather than deceptively tar groups such as UKIP as neo-fascist, the political and media elite would do well to take their concerns seriously. Unless and until the European cry against Islamization is taken seriously, the problems and frustrations will only get worse.

National sovereignty, border control, and the defense of national culture are not extremist causes. While parties such as France’s Front Nationale (FN) may have origins in unpleasant views (founder Jean Marie Le Pen was often accused of being an anti-Semite), their current leadership is addressing the very real concerns of millions of European citizens. Today’s FN leader Marine Le Pen described her party’s success in the 2014 EU elections with entirely reasonable aplomb:

The French want to regain control of their own country. They want to determine the course of their own economy and their immigration policies. They want their own laws to take precedence over those of the European Union. The French have understood that the EU does not live up to the utopia they were sold. It has distanced itself significantly from a democratic mode of operation.24

In Greece the nationalist Golden Dawn (GD) party emerged to prominence in the wake of harsh austerity measures imposed by their fellow Eurozone countries. When asked to explain their support, 30% of supporters identified it as a protest against the direction of the country while a similar proportion found GD’s anti-immigration policies to be decisive.25 GD and its supporters have been guilty of inciting violence and racism, and as such it does not deserve our support, but the lesson of its success is clear. If mainstream, reasonable parties do not address the seriousness of immigration and integration, voters will turn to truly extremist parties instead.

The immigration issue is particularly bitter in Greece, which is a first port-of-entry into the EU for most illegal immigrants. In 2010, for example, 90% of all detentions for illegal entry into the EU took place in Greece. In that same year more than 132,000 people were arrested for entering or staying in Greece illegally.26 Meanwhile, EU rules about asylum state that asylum-seekers must be accommodated in their country of entry while their application is processed. For a country of ten million where more than half of its young people are unemployed, such requirements are particularly onerous. It is easy to see how a determinedly anti-immigration party such as GD could become successful.

THE WARNING

If European leaders continue to ignore the threats and warning signs, instead demonizing and marginalizing the growing chorus of dissent in their countries, their civilization quite simply will not survive. Multiculturalism and cultural relativism have subjected Europe to the steady degrading of its societies and their cultures. Islam, intrinsically hostile and opposed to European culture, has been allowed to undermine and attack its host cultures with impunity.

To rise from this disaster the European establishment must first stop killing the messengers. The messengers are their own people who see the reality behind the rhetoric. They are the people who know that mass immigration has not worked. Across Europe, people are sick and tired of being told when Muslims riot and murder and rape that it is their fault. Enough is enough.

Second, the laws must be changed so that immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, can be tightly restricted. Those who wish to spread sharia law and jihad must be swiftly and easily deported. If Europe is to endure, it can no longer afford to be tolerant of Islamic intolerance. As we have seen, for these changes to take place there must be change on the level of both the EU and individual nation-states.

Legal and illegal immigration together have filled Europe with violent men intent on destroying its nations from within. These men must be identified as the mortal enemies they are and ruthlessly opposed. Otherwise, the fate of countless noble and fallen civilizations around the world will become the fate of Europe. The Persians, the Copts, the Syrians, the Byzantines, all were established for far longer than Europe, and all succumbed to the onslaught of Islam. Large parts of India today suffer from a similar tragedy. The same tragedy will come to Europe if nothing is done.