MANCHESTER
The Canadian writer and broadcaster Mark Steyn asks a simple but
fundamentally searching question about the problem of Islamic terrorism
in Western society today, a question that few mainstream liberal
politicians want even to acknowledge, let alone attempt to answer.
The simple question Steyn asks is:
What’s the happy ending here?
In other words, Steyn is asking if Islamic terror in the West, and
Europe in particular, is ever going to end and allow us to get back to
normal living, to get back to those days when Islam didn’t dominate our
news screens, back to those days when we weren’t threatened on our
living-room TV screens with beheading if we did not show “respect”, or
has Islamic terrorism now become a major and integral part of our
Western way of life, just as it is in the Middle East and much of the
Muslim world?
Throughout the Western world today,
largely because of the post
Second World War liberal consensus on Muslim immigration and growing
Islamic terrorism on our streets, the West’s ruling liberal clerisy is
under unprecedented pressure from an enraged public.
Witness the growing electoral strength of the anti Muslim-immigration AfD party in Germany; the growing strength of the
Front National
in France which, although losing to Mr Macron in the recent general
election, has established Muslim immigration as an issue of serious
voter concern, with the
FN now a major force in French
politics. Witness the growing strength of Geert Wilders in the
Netherlands, whose electoral support for a ban on Muslim immigration
frightened the pro-immigration prime minister Mark Rutte into telling
Muslims who don’t like “our values” to leave Holland. And, of course,
the election of Donald Trump, whose victory over the
bien pensant
clerisy of America’s East and West coasts had much to do with ordinary
voter concerns about security and Muslim immigration. And of Brexit,
where the British people were deeply concerned about Angela Merkel’s
almost unilateral open invitation to the world’s Muslims to come and
settle in Europe.
The Western, but particularly the European political landscape is
changing. It’s no longer simply the traditional Left/Right questions of
economics that divide people, but something much more fundamental: the
question of a Muslim threat to Europe’s historical identity as a
Christian/secular culture. Islamic immigration is now a major defining
feature of European politics.
Everyone can now see the literally bloody disastrous results of
jihadist terrorism on their streets, results that far outstrip even the
dire predictions of the clichéd British bogyman Enoch Powell (Powell
predicted irrational inter-racial violence on Britain’s streets, not
targeted and deliberate civilizational destruction).
European, American, Canadian and Australian peoples now see their
towns, their cities, their airports, even their Christian churches and
private homes turned into slaughtering dens by jihadi killers, many of
them second and third generation “Westernised” Muslims who, according to
that same Western liberal consensus, should today be fully-functioning
secular Muslims enjoying the benefits of mini-skirted Muslim women and
same-sex Muslim marriage.
Of course, that great liberal dream of a secularised “Western Islam”
hasn’t worked out as the liberals hoped, and anyone who understood Islam
always knew it never would.
Although much of the European Union political class simply will not
admit it, a real inconvenient truth today is that Muslim immigration and
Islamic terrorism are showing clear signs of fracturing Europe’s
cultural identity.
Conservative anti-immigration movements throughout
Western Europe today blame not simply Muslim immigration, but Western
liberalism itself for what they see as Western Europe’s political and
cultural decay. Liberalism, many believe, has given Europe in particular
a catastrophic and perhaps in the long term an unsolvable security
problem, with jihadism now deeply embedded in Western European society.
France, for example, is still in security lockdown since the Paris
2015 gunning down of innocent teenagers and the Nice 2016 jihadi truck
slaughter. Germany is in a similar state after the Munich jihadi truck
attack. And now Stockholm, perhaps the most generous country to
immigrants, has experienced its own truck jihad slaughter. As I write,
the Louvre in Paris is under siege from an Islamic jihad attack, with
much of the city’s transport closed down.
All of these jihadist outrages have in common a cowardly assault on
innocent men, women and children in public areas going about their
normal business. These innocents were targeted precisely because
they were innocent, freedom-loving Western people, many of them so
innocent in fact that they had supported the right of Muslim immigrants,
including their killers, to come and live among them.
The truth is that we in the West today, but again particularly in
Europe, have imported an existential threat to every basic value we hold
dear.
The extraordinary truth is that today much of Continental Europe’s
famed public culture of easy-going street life is now done only under
armed police protection. Because of militant Islam, many people in
Europe are now fearful of doing things that were once considered
perfectly safe and normal, such as strolling carefree in their towns and
cities, or women walking or travelling alone. In one report, a German
train company, Mitteldeutsche Regiobahn, has introduced women-only
carriages, apparently in response to the widely-reported Cologne
sex-attacks by Muslim gangs.
These are enormous changes to our way of life in Europe today,
brought about in many cases by jihadi killers in the Muslim immigrant
community. In many parts of Europe, public street life is now so tense
and threatening that it is dangerous to go out at night, as I personally
experienced in the northern French towns of Amiens and Verdun on a
First World War commemoration tour in 2015.
This, of course, is not what Muslim immigration was supposed to have
been about. This was not how immigration was sold to us all those years
ago, back in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, to a sceptical public
that never wanted and never voted for large-scale immigration in the
first place.
Europe’s public were always told, and still are told, in spite of
evidence to the contrary, that Muslim immigration would enrich and
enhance our Western way of life. Muslims, we were told, came to Europe
because they valued our secular pluralist society. Be tolerant, said our
European liberal class, and you will see that we are all one big happy
multicultural family.
As is now patently obvious, that’s not how things have worked out,
not by a long shot. Much of Western Europe’s public life today is
effectively under armed guard, and all because of mass immigration and
jihadist terror.
But it’s not simply, or even mainly, the past or present that is of
most concern to Europeans now. It’s Europe’s future with continuing
Muslim immigration and a growing Muslim population that is of most
serious concern. What is Europe’s Muslim immigrant future to be like?
Will there ever be an end to this Islamic violence in our European
homeland?
This brings up Steyn’s simple question again: what’s the happy ending here?
When is this terror threat going to end? The truck jihads, the
machine-gunning of innocents, the knife attacks on police in their own
homes and clergy saying Mass, the security lockdowns, the women only
carriages and street police protection for what was once spontaneous
free behaviour, is all this a temporary nightmare, or is this what
Muslim immigration intrinsically means for Europe, a permanent terror
threat that will intensify long into Europe’s future?
These are perfectly reasonable and important questions for any
European to ask, and nobody should feel intimidated for asking them. Nor
should anyone feel intimidated by truthful answers.
But that’s not what is happening. Western liberal political culture
has effectively erected a language barrier that can criminalise honest
criticism of Islam in the West today. The liberal class have
appropriated the language of social justice, and any criticism of the
West’s pro-Muslim immigration policies, any expressed concern about
Muslim immigration and the future of Western culture is labelled
“racist”, and has to break through the language barrier of liberal
prejudice before even beginning to make a case.
For example, it is de rigueur for most mainstream
politicians today to preface all debates about Islamic terrorism in
Europe with the mantra “it has nothing to do with Islam”. Someone who
may want to question that claim, or question its universality has first
to prove he is not Islamophobic, something that is almost impossible to
do in our liberal culture because, by definition, anyone who disagrees
with the liberal claim is Islamophobic.
The fact is that the intellectually dishonest liberal/Left language
barrier, where “Islamophobia” is plastered all over any reasonable
criticism of Islam and Muslim immigration, makes it impossible to get an
honest debate on the most urgent issues of our day: Muslim immigration,
Muslim demographics and the future of Europe.
How has this intellectual dishonesty in debate come about?
The problem was always Western liberalism. Since the end of the
Second World War, liberal Europe has experienced, largely because
liberal Europe greatly encouraged, an immigration programme from the
Muslim world the scale of which no other society in history has ever
even contemplated.
Not coincidently, such an immigration programme fitted very well the
new consensus among left-wing intellectuals that it was the non-white
Third World native, not the now affluent and embourgeoised white
industrial working class, that needed liberation from exploitative
Western capitalists. Third World immigration to the welfare West was,
and still is, seen as a moral crusade to “expropriate” the ill-gotten
gains of the affluent West, a form of punishment and payback for years
of supposed colonial exploitation.
Western Enlightenment teleological liberalism (a secular outgrowth of
Christianity) has always had at its heart the assumption that the
world’s civilizations are moving towards one goal: a universal Western
secular culture. Third World Muslim immigration to the West was seen as
part of the process that would bring about this universal goal.
Liberals simply assumed that Muslim immigrants to Europe would grasp
at the chance to become freedom-loving secular liberals. They assumed
that the sheer power of Europe’s traditional homogeneous secular culture
would unify Muslim, Christian and secularist and eventually create a
religion-free modus vivendi, turning Europe into a secular heaven on Earth, with eventually the whole world becoming an Enlightenment secular civilisation.
Alas, this liberal globalist dream, as Europe very much to its cost
now knows, is over. Many of Europe’s Muslims, perhaps the vast majority
of them, reject most, if not all of the West’s secular liberal
programme. And who can blame them?
So too do many Westerners. The election of Donald Trump and the
Brexit result are, to some degree, a rejection of what many see as a
long-running Western liberal drift into anarchic, nihilistic secularism.
In America and Britain, the blue-collar proletariat and much of the
middle class have revolted, not just out of economic self-interest, but
out of perfectly reasonable concerns about Islamic terror and the threat
to Western values from relentless mass immigration.
But liberal Europe’s problems go way beyond the election of Donald
Trump and Brexit. Europe now has a legacy of over fifty years of heavy
Muslim immigration, and whether or not it is culturally or politically
acceptable to say it, Europe now has a problem, not just with individual
acts of Islamic terror, but, many would argue, with Islam itself, as
even the former socialist President Hollande of France finally, after
many years of denying it, admitted.
The fact is that the supposed unifying power of Europe’s traditional
homogeneous culture has failed in its liberal-inspired historic task of
creating a homogenised, secular modus vivendi out of
Europe’s fractured mass-migrant culture. Europe today is dividing, not
so much racially, but along cultural, or rather civilizational fault
lines, and to any reasonable person the policy of unquestioned,
never-ending large-scale Muslim immigration must now, surely, be
questioned.
Yet amazingly, Europe’s liberal political class, and much of the
media, are effectively in denial about the impact that Muslim
immigration has had, and continues to have, on Europe’s culture and
political stability.
Political correctness, misplaced sensitivity, but particularly fear,
fear that speaking the truth might offend or could cause social unrest,
have all combined to create throughout Europe an almost schizophrenic
public mentality on anything to do with Islam. Many simply do not feel
free to speak their mind on the dangers they see ahead for their
continent.
The politicians say one thing, yet the ordinary people know it’s not
true.
There are two worlds in Europe today when it comes to Islam: one a
fabrication of the liberal politicians and media, and one actually
inhabited by ordinary people.
The people want the truth, they want an
honest debate about Islam and immigration, but suspect that the
political class and the media are running scared of that debate.
In Britain, everyone knows that
the press buckled under the threat of
Islamic violence by refusing to publish the Muhammad cartoons. Whatever
the security concerns may have been, the public can see that the press
surrendered to threats, and now have little respect, particularly for
the mainstream media.
Currently, many in the British media are furious at the British
Government’s proposed press legislation, particularly section 40 of the
Crime and Courts Act 2013. The Act will curtail the freedom of the
press, they say. But of what use is this much-vaunted press freedom if
the media do not have the courage to use and defend that freedom?
The fact is that much of the political class and the mainstream media
simply do not speak freely and honestly about Islam, particularly about
the religious and ideological source of jihadist terror and its threat
to Europe’s future. As the political philosopher, John Gray — very much a
traditional liberal — put it:
- Britain is a country “where a minority of
fundamentalist Muslims that is estranged from whatever remains of a
common culture, and which rejects the tacit norms of toleration that
allow a civil society to reproduce itself peacefully, has effectively
curbed freedom of expression about Islam in Britain today”. (Post–liberalism: studies in political thought)
Even after 9/11, when one might have expected a change of tack on
Muslim immigration, liberals reiterated their absolutely unquestionable
mantra: “Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam” (therefore we
can continue with relentless Muslim immigration).
Incredibly, instead of
perhaps even a moratorium on further immigration after 9/11, many
Western countries actually increased Muslim immigration.
Such a denial of common-sense public concerns about Islam and
immigration — many would say a denial of reality — is surely perverse.
“Islam is not the problem”, insists the West’s ruling liberal political
class. “We will defeat the terrorists”, says Merkel and the other EU
leaders.
Jihadi terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, they insist,
without even considering the possibility that they might be wrong, or
that they may not understand the theology of Islam, and that the
concerns of the ordinary man on the street might just have a point.
“It’s just a few bad men”, liberals insist after every jihadi act of
terror, and we will “take them out”, they say. And when the bad men are
“taken out”, we can all go back to peaceful living, go back to
secularised Muslims and secularised Christians living together in a
secular pluralist state where we can all walk the streets again without
fear of a lorry being driven at us, without our children being knifed
because they are wearing swimwear, or being blown to bits while
innocently standing in an airport queue.
Such hopes about Europe’s multicultural, multi ethnic future are
surely nothing more than that — hope. It’s a refusal even to consider
the historical and contemporary facts about at least certain
interpretations of Islam.
While the majority of Muslims are peaceable and law-abiding, what
liberals refuse to acknowledge is what more and more ordinary people in
the West now understand and see as militant Islam’s historical
propensity to violent cultural assertiveness, Islam’s difficulty sharing
space with non-Muslims, and the fact that Islam has bloody borders
right around the world, even in countries that have nothing to do with
the Middle East. Peaceable, law-abiding Muslims seem to have made little
difference.
Of course, Islam is not the only religion to have a bloody history. However, as Samuel Huntington wrote in his prescient book
The Clash of Civilizations:
- “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have
problems living peaceably with their neighbours. The question naturally
rises as to whether this pattern of late-twentieth-century conflict
between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations
between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims
make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they
have been far more involved in inter-group violence than the people of
any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming.” (The Clash of Civilizations page 256)
The evidence is indeed overwhelming, and there is no reason
whatsoever to believe that Europe, with its large and growing Muslim
population, will escape this bloody clash of civilizations. At the very
least, on any rational assessment of Europe’s immigrant-based future,
Huntington’s findings would surely be a consideration in all honest and
serious political debate.
The London Underground bombings, the Madrid train bombings, the
Brussels airport bombing, the Paris and Nice jihad slaughter, the Berlin
truck rampage, the Stockholm truck rampage, German, Swedish and Danish
knife and gun attacks, all pose a disturbing question, particularly for
Europeans: is Europe, after over half a century of heavy Muslim
immigration, now a new Islamic jihadi front?
Is Europe now a permanent
part of Islam’s violent perimeter?
These are disturbing but absolutely essential questions that people
in a free society must feel free to ask. That Europe might now be facing
a long-term terrorist future seems to have been confirmed by the former
socialist French Prime Minister Manuel Valls who, ominously, told the
French people after the Nice jihadi truck outrage to
“learn to live with
terrorism”.
Equally, London’s socialist Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan has said terrorist acts are
“part and parcel” of city life today.
What Mr Valls and Mayor Khan failed to point out is that such
despicable acts of terror did not happen before large-scale Muslim
immigration.
Given the level of public concern about immigration, and given the
possibility that the French Prime Minister was right and that Islamic
terrorism will continue to be an integral part of European life, surely
all debate about Europe’s future must now address the question of
whether continued Muslim immigration is compatible with the survival of
European culture and Europe’s long-term security. On any reasonable
assessment of Europe’s predicament, Europe must now debate whether
Western European states are now, in Samuel Huntington’s phrase, an
integral part of Islam’s bloody borders.
Not everyone, of course, will be so pessimistic. For those of a more
positive outlook, it could be argued that Europe’s security forces will
manage to contain Islamic violence
within certain “acceptable levels”,
in Reginald Maudling’s phrase about IRA violence.
To that end,
“learning to live with terrorism” might well be the only
rational, long-term strategy our liberal political elite have to offer
us. Under the protection of what might be some form of martial law,
“normal” life could continue and Europe’s cultural values maintained.
But such a prospect, even if one were prepared to accept it, is
surely wishful thinking. It is a common belief that sharia law, for
example, is a product of Islamic fundamentalism. Defeat the
fundamentalists, Western liberal governments say, and you nullify or
defeat sharia. If you nullify sharia in Europe, then multicultural
secular Europe will be at peace. A non-sharia Islam, or an Islam that
dissolves on contact with Europe’s hedonistic and consumerist culture,
seems to be the Western liberal’s idea of an ideal Westernised Islam.
The idea of a non-sharia Islam was, and still is, a common hope in
Western liberal thought; but it is almost certainly a mistake. Sharia
law is not a product of fundamentalism, but in fact is a product of
ordinary mainstream Islam. The Irish writer, Conor Cruise O’Brien
(another traditional liberal) has this to say on the attempt to
distinguish fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Islam:
- “Fundamentalist Islam is a misnomer which dulls our perceptions in a
dangerous way. It does so by implying that there is some other kind of
Islam, which is well disposed to those who reject the Koran. There
isn’t. Islam is a universalist, triumphalist and political religion. It
claims de jure dominion over all humanity.” (Independent, Jan 5, 1995)
This was written in 1995, before large-scale Islamic terrorism in the West.
The fact is that Western consumerist materialist culture has not, as
hoped, weaved its magic on Europe’s successive generations of Muslims.
Today’s younger generation of European Muslims is even more committed to
sharia than were earlier generations, an intriguing example of Islamic
indigenization taking root, not in a Muslim country but right in the
heart of secular/Christian Europe.
So, on any reasonable assessment, there will be no sharia-free Islam
in Europe. Several opinion polls of Europe’s Muslims have shown large
numbers to be strongly supportive of sharia law, and not just for
Muslims, but for everyone. Many Muslims believe sharia should be the
main legal source in their new European homeland.
A German government-funded study (WZB Berlin Social Science Centre)
of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants in Europe found that 65 percent
believed that sharia law is more important to them than the laws of the
country in which they live.
In the Irish Republic, where Islam is now the fastest growing
religion, 57% of Muslims, according to one poll, want the country ruled
by sharia law. In Britain, according to some polls, 40% of Muslims
support sharia law for the whole of the UK.
On that basis, it is perfectly reasonable to claim that, with an
ever-growing Muslim population in Europe,
by sheer demographic weight
sharia law will gradually begin to elbow-out and replace traditional
Western values over large areas of the Continent.
It’s already happening. Today in many European countries, the
deliberate self-segregation of Muslims is gradually creating
semi-Balkanised communities in many of Europe’s cities, where secular
pluralist values are explicitly rejected and where deeply conservative,
even illegal Muslim traditions are reinforced.
There are now in Britain’s heavily Muslim areas well-established
sharia courts or “councils”, dispensing “justice” according to Islamic
law, mainly in matters of marriage, inheritance and divorce. According
to lawyer Aina Khan as reported in the
Daily Telegraph of 2015,
there are up to 100,000 sharia “marriages” in Britain, many of them polygamous.
These marriages are not recognised under UK law but, either out of
indifference or liberal accommodation, or even out of a craven deference
to Muslim demands, the authorities condone and encourage these
polygamous relationships
by tailoring welfare entitlements to the many
vulnerable wives and children. The British taxpayer is effectively
reinforcing the consolidation and spread of fundamentalist Muslim
culture in Britain.
Germany has similar concerns, with the German courts regularly
incorporating sharia principles into mainstream law, where polygamous
marriages are recognised for all welfare entitlements, provided the
“marriages” were legally performed in a Muslim country.
In France, Muslim demographics and violence are creating hardened separate cultural identities. Almost routine Muslim
banlieue
riots have turned large tracts of French cities into no-go areas,
except for the riot police and fire-fighters to douse the torched cars.
And such rioting has little to do with the by now boring liberal
excuse of social injustice or “Islamophobia”. As the writer, Andrew
Hussey put it in his disturbing book
The French Intifada, the Muslim banlieue gangs who rioted and torched cars in 2007 were shouting
Na’al abouk La France —
Fuck France: “the rioters, the wreckers, even the killers of the
banlieues are not looking for reform — They are looking for revenge.”
Clearly, many French Muslims do not want to live in French secular
culture; they want to live as Muslims under sharia law, but in welfare
France.
And of course, such hardened separate identities are reinforced
by continuing large-scale Muslim immigration from poor and traditional
Muslim societies, with
welfarism locking them into a state of permanent
dependence and permanent grievance, with rioting as a way of extracting
more money out of the state.
The ruling liberal establishment in the EU are in denial about the
true significance of what is happening in many of Europe’s cities.
They
acknowledge there’s a problem, but with the usual platitudes deny it has
anything to do with Muslim immigration and the self-segregation and
cultural separateness favoured by many Muslims.
Again and again it’s the
same old “social injustice” and “Islamophobia” story.
Invest more
taxpayers’ money in Muslim communities and end Islamophobia, they say.
Europeans must change their ways and pay more tax, then we will have an
integrated, happy pluralist society.
For most ordinary people in Europe today this liberal explanatory
model is little more than an insult to their intelligence. It simply
does not account for what people see and experience in their own towns
and cities across the European Continent.
It is now an observable fact that the appearance and atmosphere of
many of Europe’s public spaces and city landscapes are becoming more and
more Islamic, as anyone who has travelled round Western Europe in
recent years will confirm, as will those who remember Paris and Lyon,
and many German towns and cities from the 1960s. These enormous
demographic and cultural changes to Europe’s cities have, for many
Europeans, resulted in a strong sense of alienation from their own
traditional European roots, an alienation they never wanted and never
voted for. Hence the rise of anti-immigration right-wing and far-right
parties.
And with growing Muslim immigration to Europe, such cultural changes
are set to continue and deepen. Very likely, at some point in the future
the adhan, or call to prayer, will almost certainly become a prominent
feature of many European cities, and sharia dress code enforced (or
advisable) in autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim areas.
In time, more
and more areas of many of Europe’s cities will look and sound Islamic.
Europe’s central and local governments will also, very likely, begin
to reflect the changing demographics.
Separate Muslim education (there
will almost certainly, eventually, be a separate Muslim educational
system, no matter what Europe’s governments say today) would very likely
have a school curriculum catering exclusively for Muslim beliefs and
values. How would such a Muslim curriculum teach World War Two and the
Holocaust, for example? Or evolutionary science? With a growing Muslim
demographic, Europe may well find it impossible to maintain the common
assumptions that for centuries have underpinned the norms of Western
education.
The Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha would also very
likely become official holidays, street names may even change (as was
actually recommended for France in a report commissioned by former Prime
Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault), and foreign policy, particularly on
Israel, would almost certainly begin to reflect the new European Muslim
dispensation.
Whether one welcomes these changes as part of an unstoppable
evolution towards some ideal happy multicultural world of the future, or
sees them as an extremely ominous development for Western culture and
values, the fact surely needs to be publicly acknowledged, certainly as
part of mainstream public debate, that Muslim immigration is radically
changing Europe.
It has to be acknowledged that large-scale Muslim
immigration does not add to what Europe already has, it changes
what Europe has always been. More Muslim immigration means less Europe.
That’s an empirical fact, and it’s a fact that the political class and
the media need to be frank and honest about.
With continuing Muslim immigration, higher than average Muslim birth
rates and below-replacement native European birth rates, by the sheer
weight of demographic numbers a determined, hyper-identity political
Islam is surely on course to turn many European cities semi-Islamic.
Why
would this not happen, if the demographics are there to support it? The burden of proof is surely now on those who would disagree.
To point all of this out is not necessarily to criticise Islam, and
certainly not to pass judgment on all Muslims. But it is to say that
Europe is experiencing by far the greatest change in its history, and
that if Europe is democratic, then the European peoples should be
consulted on these historic changes, and their views respected.
Yet amazingly, one of the most extraordinary facts about post-Second
World War Western European democracies is that this democratic
consultation on Muslim immigration did not happen. The European peoples
have been systematically ignored and denied a democratic say on who, and
how many, should be allowed to settle in Europe.
This extraordinary lack of democracy in the EU, including Britain, is
captured by the American journalist Christopher Caldwell in his book:
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,
where he quotes a European cabinet minister on the subject of
immigration to the EU:
- “We live in a borderless world in which our new
mission is defending the border not of our countries but (of) civility
and human rights” (page 270).
New mission? Who sanctioned this “new mission”? Does this anonymous
EU cabinet minister have a mandate to create a borderless Europe? Have
the European peoples given him and his EU colleagues a mandate to
globalise European culture?
Very unlikely, when you consider that, as Caldwell points out: “Only
19 percent of Europeans think immigration has been good for their
countries” and “73 percent of French people think their country has too
many immigrants, as do 69 percent of the British.”
Those statistics represent opinion in 2009. Today, with Europe
experiencing perhaps the heaviest Muslim immigration in its history, a
wide-ranging Chatham House survey of European opinion shows that eight
out of ten European countries want an end specifically to Muslim
immigration.
And yet European countries and the European Union continue to ignore
public opinion on the issue. The EU’s ruling liberal class, from both
Left and centre Right of the party-political spectrum, appear to believe
that Third World immigration to the EU must happen,
irrespective of the democratic will of the voters. It’s as if there were
some historically determined imperative for Islam to come and settle in
Europe. And to ensure that this moral imperative is carried through, to
ensure that Islam comes to Europe, Muslim immigration is to be decided,
not by the European voters, but only by the high priests of the bien pensant liberal class.
It was this high priest
bien pensant class in the
US and throughout much of the West that exploded in rage when Donald
Trump, during his election campaign, first suggested that the American
people — meaning the voters — should have a say in Muslim immigration to
the United States. It wasn’t that liberal opinion simply disagreed with
what Trump had said; it was that there should be no place,
democratic or otherwise, for such an opinion.
To question Muslim
immigration to the West was to question the very direction of history
itself.
The late Robert Bork, an American judge and conservative jurist,
captured well the contempt that modern liberals have for popular
democratic opinion:
- “Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic
government because it demands results that ordinary people would not
freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions
that are largely insulated from the popular will. The most important
institutions for liberals’ purposes are the judiciary and the
bureaucracies. The judiciary and the bureaucracies are staffed with
(liberal) intellectuals—–and thus tend to share the views and accept the
agendas of modern liberalism.” (Robert H, Bork Slouching Towards Gomorrah 1996 page 318)
Many in the European Union power structure believe they should be
insulated from public opinion on a large range of issues, particularly
on globalisation and Third World Muslim immigration.
The West’s liberal
class today believe that a normative liberal agenda of open borders and
unlimited Third World immigration to the West should be the default,
unquestionable position of the whole of Western society.
We saw this
default position in operation when Angela Merkel, unilaterally, welcomed
to Germany unlimited numbers of unassessed, mainly male Muslim
migrants, and then sought to spread them around EU countries whose
peoples had had no say in the matter.
By contrast, the American primaries and caucuses offer a much
stronger sense of democratic accountability. At the recent US elections,
the people of the United States were finally offered a voice on Muslim
and Third World immigration, and they gave Donald Trump a democratic
mandate to act. The vote for Trump was a vote to change direction and to
at least begin to preserve what remains of America’s traditional
Judeo-Christian core identity.
Because of Donald Trump, debating Muslim immigration is no longer a
taboo subject in the US. Thanks to Donald Trump, Muslim immigration is
now a central part of the national political debate.
No such debate has yet taken place among the ruling liberal class in
Europe. Muslim immigration, in spite of widespread public concern and
the rise of anti-immigration movements throughout the continent, is
still a taboo subject among the mainstream political class and media.
The majority of Europeans want an end to large-scale Third World
immigration, yet the European Union continues to ignore this democratic
voice.
The truth is that in Europe today, Third World and Muslim immigration
are not subjects to be decided by democracy, therefore immigration
policy continues as if 9/11 never happened, as if the London Underground
bombings never happened, as if the Paris slaughter of well over 100
people never happened. The Nice truck attack that killed 87, the Madrid
train bombings that killed almost 200 and injured 2,000, relentless
Muslim immigration continues as if they had never happened.
Europe today desperately needs its Donald Trump.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/05/muslim-immigration-and-the-future-of-europe-wheres-the-democracy
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