For Europe, yes, the end is nigh 347

As we and other conservatives have often said, both in sorrow and in anger, Europe is killing itself.

Since the beginning of this century, writers who watch population numbers – notably Mark Steyn – have been stating plainly that the indigenous European populations are dying out. At the same time – partly because of this shrinkage and the resulting “need” for workers enough to maintain their socialist welfare states – European political leaders have been importing multitudes of Asians and Africans.

Obviously a demographic change does not save Europe, it hastens its destruction. Alien  – and inferior, yes, far inferior – cultures replace its own. Yet Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and most other European leaders, keep bringing the aliens in. They will not not consider stopping it. Some long for Europe to cease being a “white” continent.

At last a few are becoming aware that it is a tragedy they are inflicting on their own nations. They may even admit they don’t like it. But only a very few will try to do anything to stop it.

Interestingly, one of the European nations whose government does not yet acknowledge that catastrophe is fast approaching, is Britain. Britain! That used to be the Land of Common Sense.  The land of realists. Now the land of self-deluders?

Voices are announcing from the high towers of the continent (soon to be totally replaced by actual muezzins calling the faithful of Islam to prayer) that the end is nigh. But they  are not cries of repentance or despair. Not the cries of the reluctantly doomed.

It seems they just want it to be over. This civilization thing.

Giulio Meotti writes at Gatestone:

The days of European strength are over. Because of low birth rates, Europe is dramatically shrinking. …

Even President Macron of France, who continues to call for more immigration from the Third World, knows that it hurts Europe, hastens the end of Europe. And, what is more, he deplores the fact that it does. Hear him, hear the cry of dying Europe as it goes on deliberately killing itself.

In 2017, Macron called Africa’s problems “civilizational” and lamented that they “have seven or eight children per woman”. In a second speech at the Gates Foundation last week, Macron said: “Present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight or nine children.” The question Macron implicitly raised is: How can Europe manage its own educated people with their low birth rates while confronting massive African and Middle Eastern fertility and immigration? It seems that Europe is in a demographic struggle with the rest of the world, and can only lose.

It seems that Europe has also lost all confidence in its hard-won Enlightenment values, such as personal freedoms, reason and science replacing superstition, and the separation of church and state.

These are critical, if Europe truly wishes to survive. The distinguished historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote:

Judged by the great historical determinants of civilizational power — fuel, energy, education, demography, political stability, and military power — Europe is waning. It is spending a mere 1.4% of its collective GDP on defense … And with a fertility rate of less than 1.6%, Europe is slowly shrinking and aging — hence the short-sighted immigration policy of Angela Merkel who apparently sees immigration also as a solution to the demography crisis and a shortcut to low-cost labor.

However, as Walter Laqueur wrote, “even if Europe’s decline is irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse”.

How does one avoid that collapse?

At a recent European meeting, Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, who heads the anti-immigration League party, said:

I’ve heard colleagues say that we need immigration because the population of Europe is getting older, but I have a completely different viewpoint … I believe that I’m in government in order to see that our young people have the number of children that they used to a few years ago and not to transplant the best of Africa’s youth to Europe. Maybe in Luxembourg they need to do this, but in Italy we need to help people have more children, rather than bring in modern-day slaves (from Africa) to replace the children we’re not having.

Then, directly addressing an interruption from Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, Salvini added:

I calmly answer your point of view which is different from mine … If in Luxembourg you need a new immigration, I prefer to keep Italy for the Italians and start to make children again.

Salvini evidently sees what to expect from Italy’s future. Under unchanged conditions, Italy’s population could collapse, reaching just over 16 million inhabitants compared to 59 million today. …

Europe’s establishment is … divided between the so-called “Europeists,” who believe that new migrants are necessary to stop the EU’s demographic collapse, and the “Euroskeptics” who want to overcome it on their own. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for instance, has called on Europeans to stop the “demographic decline” by investing more in traditional families.

Meanwhile, Italian Catholic Archbishop Gian Carlo Perego has said:

The challenge for Italy is to reconcile a country that is dying with young people who come from elsewhere, in order to begin a new history. If we close our door to migrants, we will disappear.

Point is, as Italians they will disappear anyway.

Salvini proposed another idea …

A country which does not create children is destined to die … We have created a ministry of the family to work on fertility, nurseries, on a fiscal system which takes large families into account. At the end of this mandate, the government will be measured on the number of newborns more than on its public debt.

At stake, Salvini said, is Italy’s “tradition, our story, our identity” – the left is using the fertility crisis as an “excuse” to “import immigrants”.

Another Catholic bishop, Andrew Nkea Fuanya of Mamfe, Cameroon, recently said about low birth rates in Europe:

It’s a very big thing. And I will dare to say that, especially with the backdrop of the Islamic invasion, if you look through history, where the Church slept, got diverted away from the Gospel, Islam took the advantage and came in. This is what we are seeing in Europe, that the Church is sleeping, and Islam is creeping in … Europe is being Islamized, and it will affect Africa.

But Christianity cannot argue Islam down. One irrational creed cannot prove itself truer than another.

Nor was it Christianity that made Europe great, however often and insistently “Judeo-Christian values” are given the credit.

Pre-Christian Greece and Rome began Europe’s greatness, western Christianity suppressed it, the Enlightenment revived it and brought our civilization to its glory. 

Europe’s decline and transformation can also be seen in France. According to new statistics released by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, Mohammed and several other traditional Muslim names now top the list of most popular baby names in the French department of Seine-Saint-Denis (1.5 million residents). It is noteworthy that two journalists with the mainstream newspaper Le Monde, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, have just published a book entitled Inch’allah : l’islamisation à visage découvert (If Allah Wills: The Exposed Face of Islamization), an investigation of the “Islamization” of the Seine-Saint-Denis area.

Meanwhile, an investigation published in July by the weekly L’Express showed that in France, “between 2000 and 2016, the number of children with at least one foreign parent increased from 15 to 24 percent.”

Germany too notices the population change:

Die Welt reported that, according to the Federal Statistical Office, in Western Germany, 42% of children under the age of six now come from a migrant background. …

Walter Laqueur wrote:

…uncontrolled immigration was not the only reason for the decline of Europe. But taken together with the continent’s other misfortunes, it led to a profound crisis; a miracle might be needed to extract Europe from these predicaments.

Both Matteo Salvini and [the French writer] Michel Houellebecq have pointed out that the drama of an aging and tired Europe is not a partisan or electoral issue; it is a civilizational one. This issue will also decide the future of the European Union, which the open-borders policy might wipe out.

Time is running out. As Houellebecq said …:

The advance of Islam is just beginning, because demography is on its side and because Europe, which has stopped having children, has entered a process of suicide. And it is not really a slow suicide. Once you have arrived at a birth rate of 1.3 or 1.4, then in reality things go very fast.

(Italy’s rate, 1.35 in 2016. Spain’s, 1.33 in the same year.)

Salvini is one of the few trying to save his nation. It is hard to see how he can succeed. The collapse that Walter Laqueur thought was avoidable, proceeds apace.

Our civilization may only survive in America. The Left came close to destroying it here too, but President Trump was elected in time to save it. At least for a while. If the Left regains power, the fatal self-inflicted European disease, brought on by socialism and worsened by Islam and Third World immigration, will all too probably destroy America too.

Good night France, good night Europe 810

732 C.E. A Frankish army saves Europe from Islamization, winning the Battle of Tours under the command of Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer).

2017 C.E. France capitulates to Islam and ensures the Islamization of the greater part of Europe?

From Gatestone by Giulio Meotti:

 After two years and 238 deaths at the hands of Islamic terrorism, what did France do to defeat radical Islam? Almost nothing.

It is this legacy of indifference that is at stake in the looming French presidential elections.

If Marine Le Pen or François Fillon win, it means that France has rejected this autocratic legacy and wants to try a different, braver way.

Whatever her faults (we suspect she is an anti-Semite like her father, though she has tried to put distance between her opinions and his on this as on other issues), we hope she wins because she would not only try to stop the Islamization of France, she would also try to take France out of the corrupt undemocratic European Union. François Fillon – to his credit an admirer of Margaret Thatcher – is also against Islamization, but not against the EU. 

If Emmanuel Macron wins, France as we have known it can be considered pretty much over. Macron is, for example, against taking away French nationality from jihadists. Terrorism, Islam and security are almost absent from Macron’s vocabulary and platform, and he is in favor of lowering France’s state of emergency. By blaming “colonialism” for French troubles in the Arab world, and calling it “a crime against humanity”, he has effectively legitimized Muslim extremist violence against the French Republic. …

France’s fake war began in Paris with a massacre at the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Twelve cartoonists and policemen were massacred by two brothers who shouted, “We avenged Muhammad, we killed Charlie Hebdo”. After a few days of marches, vigils, candles and collective statements such as “Je Suis Charlie”, half of the French intelligentsia was ready to go and hide underground, protected by the police. These are academics, intellectuals, novelists, journalists. The most famous is Michel Houellebecq, the author of the book Submission.

In which the protagonist, an academic, decides to convert to Islam because he can then have more than one wife.

Then there is Éric Zemmour, the author of the book, Suicide Française (“The French Suicide”); then the team of Charlie Hebdo, along with its director, Riss (Laurent Sourisseau); Mohammed Sifaoui, a French-Algerian journalist who wrote Combattre le terrorisme islamiste (“Combating Islamist Terrorism”); Frédéric Haziza, radio journalist and author at the journal, Canard Enchaîné; and Philippe Val, the former director of Charlie Hebdo. The latest to run was the Franco-Algerian journalist Zineb Rhazaoui; surrounded by six policemen, she left Charlie Hebdo after saying that her newspaper had capitulated to terror and refused to run more cartoons of Muhammad.

“Charb? Where is Charb?” were the words that echoed in the offices of Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the day he and his colleagues were murdered. “Charb” was Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of the magazine that had published cartoons of Muhammad. Charb was working on a short book, On Blasphemy, Islamophobia and the true enemies of free expression, posthumously published. Charb’s book attacked self-righteous intellectuals, who for years had been claiming that Charlie Hebdo was responsible for its own troubles, a childlike view, popular throughout Europe. It is based on the notion that if everyone would just keep quiet, these problems would not exist. Presumably, therefore, if no one had pointed out the threats of Nazism or Communism, Nazism and Communism would have quietly vanished of their own accord. Unfortunately, that approach was tried; it did not work. The book also criticized “sectarian activists”, whom he said have been trying “to impose on the judicial authorities the political concept of ‘Islamophobia’.”

As for “the Left“, he wrote: “It is time to end this disgusting paternalism of the intellectual left” — meaning its moral sanctimony. Charb delivered these pages to his publisher on January 5. Two days later he was murdered.

Now, some of these people he was calling out are trying to hide their cowardice by attacking him. In recent weeks, a number of cultural events in France have tried to “deprogram” the public from paying attention this extremely important book. A theatrical adaptation of it, attended by one of the journalists of Charlie Hebdo, Marika Bret, was scheduled to take place at the University of Lille. However, the president of the University, Xavier Vandendriessche, said he feared “excesses” and the “atmosphere”, so he eliminated Charb from the program. Twice. The play’s director, Gérald Dumont, sent a letter to the Minister of Culture, Audrey Azoulay, mentioning “censorship”.

At the same time, Charb’s book also disappeared from two events at a cultural festival in Avignon. “How to reduce the dead to silence”, tweeted Raphaël Glucksmann. “Killed in 2015, banned in 2017”, Bernard-Henri Lévy summed up.

During the past two years, the publishing industry itself has played a central role in censoring and supporting censorship, by censoring itself. The philosopher Michel Onfray refused to release his book, Thinking Islam, in French and it first came out in Italian. The German writer, Hamed Abdel Samad saw his book Der islamische Faschismus: Eine Analyse (“Islamic Fascism: An Analysis”), a bestseller in Germany, censored in French by the publishing house Piranha.

The French courts, meanwhile, revived le délit d’opinion – a penal offense for expressing political opinions, now an “intellectual crime”. It was explained by Véronique Grousset in Le Figaro:

“Insidiously, the law blurred the distinction between the discussion of ideas and the personal attack. Many organizations are struggling to bring their opponents to justice”.

It means that the legal system is hauling writers and journalists to court for expressing specific ideas, in particular criticism of Islam.

In just two years in France, Muslim organizations have dragged to trial great writers such as Georges Bensoussan, Pascal Bruckner, and Renaud Camus. It is the Islamists’ dream coming true: seeing “Islamophobes” on trial to punish their freedom of expression.

Charlie Hebdo’s physical massacre was therefore followed by an intellectual one: today, Charb’s important book cannot find a room in France for a public reading; it should, instead, be protected as a legacy of courage and truth.

Even in French theaters, free speech is being crushed. Films about Islam have been cancelled: “The Apostle” by Carron Director, on Muslim converts to Christianity; “Timbuktu” on the Islamist takeover of Mali, and Nicolas Boukhrief’s “Made in France”, about a jihadist cell. A poster for “Made in France” – a Kalashnikov over the Eiffel Tower – was already in the Paris metro when ISIS went into action on the night of November 13, 2016. Immediately, the film’s release was suspended, with the promise that the film would be back in theaters. “Made in France” is now only available “on-demand”. Another film, “Les Salafistes”, was screened with a notice banning minors. The Interior Ministry called for a total ban.

After the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, the country seemed for a short time to return to normalcy. Meanwhile, thousands of Jews were packing up to leave France. At the request of local Jewish community leaders, the Jewish skullcap disappeared from the streets of Marseille, and in Toulouse, after an Islamic terrorist murdered a Jewish teacher and three children in 2012, 300 Jewish families pack up and left.

France’s never-begun war on terror …  collapsed around the three most important measures: removing French citizenship from jihadists, “de-radicalizing” them and closing their salafist mosques. …

 The Territorial Information Center (SCRT) recommended that there are 124 salafist mosques in France that should close.

Only Marine Le Pen has demanded that.

Three days after the November 13 Paris massacres, President Hollande announced a constitutional reform that would strip French citizenship from Islamic terrorists. Faced with the impossibility of finding a shared text by both Houses, as well as with the resignation of his Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, Hollande was forced to cancel the move. It means that hundreds of French citizens who went to Syria for jihad can now return to their country of origin and murder more innocent people there.

The Bataclan Theater – the scene of a massacre in which 90 people were murdered and many others wounded on November 13, 2015 – recently reopened with a concert by the performer Sting. His last song was “Inshallah” (Arabic for “If Allah Wills”). That is the state of France’s last two years: starting with “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”), chanted by the jihadists who slaughtered 80 people, and ending with a phony invocation to Allah by a British singer. “Inshallah,” said Sting from the stage, “that wonderful word”. “Rebirth at the Bataclan,” the newspaper Libération wrote as its headline.

The director of the Bataclan told Jesse Hughes, the head of American band Eagles of Death Metal: “There are things you cannot forgive.” True. Except that France has forgiven everything. The drawing on the cover of Charlie Hebdo after the massacre – a weeping Muhammad saying, “All is forgiven” – was the start of France’s psychological surrender.

The first round of the 2017 French presidential election will be  held on April 23, 2017. If no candidate wins a majority, a run-off election between the top two candidates will be held on May 7, 2017.

Victory for Marine le Pen would also be a victory for Donald Trump’s populist revolutionary movement agains the globalist ruling establishments of the West which have invited the hordes of Islam into their countries.  

The last days of Europe 219

We are living through the self-extinction of the European civilization that shaped the age we live in.

So writes Giulio Meotti at Front Page. He goes on:

The inquisition against Europe’s “racist” and “Islamophobic” writers and journalists sheds a unique light on this demographic and religious revolution. Cartoonists, novelists, intellectuals, reporters, these are … the new reactionaries … Western intellectuals “guilty” of fighting the stereotypes of the Western elites: multiculturalism, the “droits de l’hommisme”(the human rights turned into a spoiled child), Islam and anti-Semitism. These new witches are demonized in the name of anti-racism, which the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut called “the communism of XXI century.”

The latest victim of the leftist bien-pensants allied with the Islamic fanatics is Eric Zemmour, Jewish journalist and author of the bestseller “Mélancolie Française.” A few days ago, Zemmour has been dismissed from his radio show for having criticized the new French Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira, “gentle and compassionate as a mother with her children, the poor children of the suburbs who steal, peddle, torture, rape, and sometimes kill.”

The late Italian writer Oriana Fallaci went to trial …  in France and Italy … The Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature, Wole Soyinka, known as the “Nigerian Joyce,” has been demonized as a “racist” for having called the UK “a cesspit” [of] Islamists. Finkielkraut … has been tried, after he dared to comment on the French suburbs that “if the thugs were white everyone would have evoked fascism, when a school is burned down by an Arab then it’s ‘rebellion’”. …

The writer Michel Houellebecq was on trial for his best-selling novel “Platform” and interviews where he called Islam “the most stupid of all religions”, [and] V S Naipaul, another Nobel Prize Laureate, has been demonized as “racist” and “reactionary” by the liberal press.

In many cases, the journalists became refugees in their own countries. “My house is protected as a bunker with cameras,” Kurt Westergaard [told me], the Danish artist who created the cartoon of the Prophet wearing a bomb in his turban for the Jyllands Posten newspaper. Visiting his paper’s office is like entering a US embassy in an Arab country. The journal had erected a 2.5-metre high, one-kilometer long barbed-wire barrier, complete with electronic surveillance, around its headquarters in Visby. Mail is scanned and newspaper staff members need ID cards to enter the buildings. When Flemming Rose, the cultural editor who took the initiative of publishing the cartoons, attended a conference in Oxford, the British police had to set up “the same protection as for Michael Jackson.”

In the Netherlands, where filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed by a Muslim for his criticism of Islam and the biggest mosques of Europe frame the luxuriant, wooded, watery countryside, cartoonist Gregorious Nekshot uses… a pseudonym to protect his own identity. At the University of Leiden, Rembrandt’s city, the office of Law Professor Afshin Ellian, who escaped the Iranian religious dictatorship, is protected by bulletproof walls and policemen. …

I recently spoke with Robert Redeker, the philosopher and columnist condemned to death for an article in Le Figaro newspaper. His piece, a response to the controversy over remarks about Islam made a week earlier by Pope Benedict XVI, was titled “What should the free world do in the face of Islamist intimidation?” Redeker was sentenced to death in a posting that, in order to facilitate a potential assassin’s task, provided his address, telephone and a photograph of his home. “I went to Austria for a conference and even there the bodyguards were always with me,” Redeker said. The police did not even allow him to announce his father’s death, because someone could have noted the surname. “I had to bury my father like a criminal,” he said. The marriage of his daughter was also attended by the police. Redeker had to sell his house and buy another one in a secret location. “I cannot go out to buy bread or newspapers or for a glass of wine. I cannot walk in the streets. I cannot take the train, bus or subway. I cannot answer the question of what I can expect from the future. … ”

A few days ago I received another email of threat, saying: “Dear feces eating insect, continue to scratch around the Zionist dung as it’s natural for you, the Israelis will give you thirty coins.” To quote from Walter Laqueur’s masterpiece, these really look like the last days of Europe.

Other honorable names that must be added to the list of Europeans who have spoken out against the advancing conquest of Europe  by Islam are: Geert Wilders, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, and Lars Hedegaard. See our posts: The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11, 2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010); The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26, 2011); Darkness imminent (January 8, 2012); The most important struggle of our time (April16, 2012); Marked for death (May 10, 2012).

What will Islamic Europe be called by its conquerors? Al-Andalus, perhaps?

Will European civilization live on in America?

 

Note added June 11, 2012:

Gatestone reports:

Finland’s Supreme Court has found a prominent politician guilty of defaming Islam for “Islamophobic” comments he made on his personal blog. The ruling represents a major setback for free speech in a Europe that is becoming increasingly stifled by politically correct restricions on free speech, particularly on issues related to Islam and Muslim immigration.