“It’s time to stand up” 52
Tommy Robinson leads the protest against Muslim terrorism and the Islamization of Britain, Sunday June 11, 2017.
(Hat-tip to our British associate, Chauncey Tinker)
Plain speaking to the traitor class 15
Paul Weston states precisely what needs to be done to put an end to Muslim terrorism in Britain:
(Hat-tip to our indispensable commenter, liz)
The man 44
Like an answer to a maiden’s prayer, the only politically heavyweight alpha male in the British parliamentary Conservative Party, Boris Johnson, has responded to our cri de coeur and is at last taking action to lead the party and the country. (See our post of two days ago, Cometh the hour, cometh the man?, June 9, 2017.)
Or so some say. Apparently he has not yet said so himself. But many are expecting that he will, soon.
Could Johnson be the man to save the Tories in their hour of desperation? Certainly he remains one of the few front-rank politicians who can change the atmosphere just by turning up to the local shopping centre.
From the Mail on Sunday:
Boris Johnson is preparing a new bid to become Prime Minister as Theresa May’s grip on No 10 becomes increasingly fragile. …
Talk of his leadership bid came as Mrs May was rocked by the resignations of the two Downing Street advisers who have been blamed for the Election disaster – and a Mail on Sunday poll which found that half of voters want her to quit. …
Mrs May last night won the backing of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist MPs in order to shore up her precarious position, in a deal that would offer her the prospect of a working majority in the Commons.
The MoS Survation poll found that 49 per cent of all voters want Mrs May to resign, with only 38 per cent wanting her to stay put. And out of the contenders to replace her, Mr Johnson outscores his nearest rival, Chancellor Philip Hammond, by a margin of more than two to one.
A separate survey of Tory supporters by the Conservative Home website found that two-thirds wanted Mrs May to announce her resignation immediately.
Few Tory MPs believe that Mrs May will still be in No 10 by the end of the summer after losing 13 Tory seats – squandering the party’s previous working majority of 12.
Mrs May’s joint chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, stepped down yesterday amid growing criticism of the power which they wielded in Downing Street. …
The aides have also been blamed by MPs and aides for creating a ‘toxic’ Downing Street in which officials and Ministers are subject to bullying. …
A total of 41 per cent of voters think that if she does resign, she should do so immediately.
If she does quit, Mr Johnson is the clear favourite to succeed her. …
Boris Johnson once said: “All politicians are like crazed wasps in a jam jar, each individually convinced that they’re going to make it.”
And no one has been more convinced he is going to make it all the way to No 10 than Johnson himself. He has long considered himself a Prime-Minister-in-waiting, but has been obliged to wait far longer than he hoped.
For 11 years, he watched as the Tory Party was led by David Cameron, whom at Eton and Oxford Boris had viewed as an obscure and junior figure. …
And the parliamentary arithmetic now makes a return to the polls within the next year more or less certain. As today’s poll for this paper shows, a majority of the public want May to go now, and Johnson is their preferred choice to succeed her.
This, then, should be Johnson’s moment. …
Can he pull it off? The days ahead will prove whether his wait is finally at an end.
We have had our differences of opinion with Mr. Johnson, do not like everything he has done and said while he has been Foreign Secretary, but recognize that he is THE MAN to take the lead in Brexit Britain now, in the twilight years of its secular (pre-Islamic) government.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man? 16
Theresa May, Prime Minister of Britain by some facetious quirk of fate, stupidly called a very early general election, and lost the support of millions of voters. Her wild action resuscitated the Labour Party, which was almost defunct under the leadership of the Member for Hamas, Jeremy Corbyn.
She must form a government to keep Britain from prematurely becoming the Islamic land it is destined to be. She can only do so now by entering into a coalition with a smaller party.
Then she needs to be replaced. By a man, we hope. There are far too many women – of both biological sexes – in European governments. (Margaret Thatcher was one of the very rare exceptions among biological women who could think politically like a man. She was often and rightly called “the best man in the Conservative Party”.)
(We also except the two women on the four-member editorial board of The Atheist Conservative.)
Which brings us back to our deliberately provocative statement, made from time to time on these pages, that “the human race consists of adults and women”.
What Britain needs is a true conservative, an adult in the patriarchal tradition. He should also be fiercely anti-Islam. (But would a militantly anti-Islam politician be allowed to live?)
Raheem Kassam writes at Breitbart:
There may be a silver lining for small-c conservative voters following the shock results of the UK General Election. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — whom the Conservatives will seek a coalition government with — is far closer to conservative philosophy than Britain’s Tories have been for decades.
Formed in 1971 by Dr. Rev. Ian Paisley, now deceased, the party grew out of the Protestant Unionist Party.
Built upon the resistance to Irish Republican terrorism and a pro-UK, unionist mindset, the DUP also represents staunchly social conservative values.
Well, on the plus side for small-c conservatives, the DUP may remind the Tories what they are supposed to believe, philosophically.
The DUP forms the largest bloc in the Northern Ireland Assembly and has a far stronger socially conservative record on matters such as same sex marriage and access to abortion.
So to us the DUP is not the ideal modifying force on the British Tories. We ourselves have nothing against same-sex marriage, and though we are against abortion in general we know there are times when it is a necessary recourse.
We also regret that the leader of the DUP is yet another woman. But many of their policies are sound:
Now led by mother of three Arlene Foster, the DUP were staunchly pro-Brexit at the UK referendum on membership of the European Union, with some of their activists and leaders joining UKIP leader Nigel Farage on his Brexit tour ahead of the vote. …
During the referendum, the DUP allied with the Leave.EU and Grassroots Out campaigns, and their manifesto states:
The DUP sees no value in the attempts by some to keep re-running the referendum. Instead, we want to get on with the work to make it a success; to write our own laws; to deliver on the vision of a Global UK with new free trade deals; to control immigration; to deliver policies for farming and fishing shaped to our needs; to lift the burden of unnecessary regulation.
… The party’s MPs hold an array of views on climate change, though many believe the DUP to be “climate change sceptics”.
The former finance minister Sammy Wilson has said: “…we are already paying through the nose for electricity because we go down the route of the dearest electricity possible through renewable energy” and are “putting our agricultural industry in jeopardy because there is no greater producer of greenhouse gases than cows”.
He has referred to climate change legislation as a “con”.
So of course the Left hates them:
Hard leftist groups like OpenDemocracy have already begun sharing articles packed with fake news about the DUP.
The Soros-funded group, which claims to represent “independent” media, claims the DUP had some sort of definitive links to a post-“fascist turn” Enoch Powell, the former Conservative Member of Parliament who warned over mass migration into the United Kingdom.
Such a “fascist turn” is a myth in itself, and Powell’s only link to the DUP was via his campaign manager who was in a different party at the time. …
The Soros site refers to the DUP as “Irish terrorists”, though the campaign of terrorism was waged by the DUP’s opponents, with the Ulster Resistance usually being referred to as a paramilitary group. The IRA, which targeted civilians, infrastructure, the British Army, and British unionists, are commonly regarded as the most influential terrorist outfit, and believed to be linked to DUP opponents Sinn Fein. The IRA killed around 1,700 people during the Troubles.
The Resistance was never implicated in a major incident that took place, with most civilian deaths attributable to the IRA — perhaps the only group alongside its political partners who would refer to the Ulster Resistance as “terrorists”. …
The DUP has said: “The party’s stance is consistent, that anyone involved in illegal activity should be investigated and face the full weight of the law.”
Sources close to the DUP have suggested to Breitbart London that “all they’ll want is cash”, but between Arlene Foster’s need to form a new executive in Northern Ireland, and the socially conservative views of its members, the DUP will likely be thinking carefully about what they can get the Conservative Party to compromise upon from the centre-left manifesto issued by Theresa May.
A “centre-left” conservative party! If the DUP can make it genuinely conservative, and further enrage George Soros the earthly Satan – then this election has not been a disaster after all but the means to better government and more victories over the evil Left.
But under new, male leadership, we hope.
The grim future of Europe 89
The best thing that could happen tomorrow in Britain would be that nobody turns out to vote in the general election, as voters have no real choice between the two pusillanimous parties, both of which are intent on enabling the Islamization of Britain. But such a clear signal to the ruling class that the people won’t stand for the slow destruction of their nation a moment longer, will not be given. The amazingly leftist Conservative Party led by clueless Theresa May will be returned to government. And the slow suicide of Britain will continue.
There is a resistance movement forming, under the courageous leadership of working-class Tommy Robinson. He is organizing a protest demo in Manchester on this coming Sunday June 11, 2017. Can he save Britain?
With or without resistance, because British governments have let Islam in and given it power, there will be blood.
Giulio Meotti writes at Gatestone:
In the four European countries most targeted by terror attacks – Britain, France, Belgium and Germany – the number of official extremists has reached 66,000. That sounds like a real army, on active duty.
That is to say, 66,000 Muslims known to be involved with terrorism.
Throughout this article, wherever “extremist” and “Islamist” occur, “Muslim terrorist” or “jihadist” must be understood.
Intelligence officers have identified 23,000 Islamic extremists living in Britain as potential terrorists. The number reveals the real extent of the jihadist threat in the UK. The scale of the Islamist challenge facing the security services was disclosed after intense criticism that many opportunities to stop the Manchester suicide bomber had been overlooked.
French authorities are monitoring 15,000 Islamists, according a database created in March 2015 and managed by France’s Counter-Terrorism Coordination Unit. Different surveys estimate up to 20,000 French radical Islamists.
The number on Belgium’s anti-terror watch-list surged from 1,875 in 2010 to 18,884 in 2017. In Molenbeek, the well-known jihadist nest in the EU capital, Brussels, intelligence services are monitoring 6,168 Islamists. Think about that: 18,884 Belgian jihadists compared to 30,174 Belgian soldiers on active duty.
The number of potential jihadists in Germany has exploded from 3,800 in 2011 to 10,000, according to Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Germany’s domestic intelligence service).
These Islamists have built a powerful infrastructure of terror inside Europe’s cities. These terror bases are self-segregated, multicultural enclaves in which extremist Muslims promote Islamic fundamentalism and implement Islamic law, Sharia – with the Tower Hamlets Taliban of East London; in the French banlieues [suburbs], and in The Hague’s “sharia triangle”, known as “the mini-caliphate” in the Netherlands. These extremist Muslims can comfortably get their weapons from the Balkans, where, thanks to Europe’s open borders, they can travel with ease. They can also get their money from abroad, thanks to countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. These Islamists can self-finance through the mosques they run, as well as get “human resources,” donated by unvetted mass migration coming through the Mediterranean.
23,000 potential jihadists in the UK, 18,000 in Belgium, 10,000 in Germany, 15,000 in France. What do these numbers tell us? There might be a war in Europe “within a few years”, as the chief of the Swedish army, General Anders Brännström, told the men under his command that they must expect.
Take what happened in Europe with the terror attacks from 1970 to 2015:
4,724 people died from bombings. 2,588 from assassinations. 2,365 from assaults. 548 from hostage situations. 159 from hijackings. 114 from building attacks. Thousands were wounded or missing.
Terrorism across Europe has killed 10,537 people in 18,803 reported attacks. And it is getting worse:
Attacks in 2014 and 2015 have seen the highest number of fatalities, which includes terrorists targeting civilians, government officials, businesses and the media, across Europe since 2004.
A jihadist takeover of Europe is no longer unthinkable. Islamic extremists are already reaping what they sowed: they successfully defeated Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, the only two European candidates who really wanted to fight radical Islam. What if tomorrow these armed Islamists assault the Parliament in Rome, election polls in Paris, army bases in Germany or schools in London, in a Beslan-type attack?
The terrorists’ ransom is already visible: they have destabilized the democratic process in many European countries and are drafting the terms of freedom of expression. They have been able to pressure Europe into moving the battle-front from the Middle East to Europe itself. Of all the French soldiers engaged in military operations, half are deployed inside France; in Italy, more than half of Italian soldiers are used in “Safe Streets,” the operation keeping Italy’s cities safe.
After 9/11, the United States decided to fight the Islamists in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to have to fight them in Manhattan. Europe chose the opposite direction: it as if Europe had accepted to turn its own cities into a new Mosul.
If Europe’s leaders do not act now to destroy the enemy within, the outcome may well come to be an “Afghan scenario”, in which Islamists control part of the territory from where they launch attacks against cities. Europe could be taken over the same way Islamic State took over much of Iraq: with just one-third of Iraqi territory.
In any case Europe will be mainly Muslim soon, because the Muslim immigrants have many children and the indigenous peoples have few.
And because there is no real difference between “Islamism” and “Islam”.
So yes, the jihadist takeover of Europe is not unthinkable. It is Europe’s future.
Against our enemy Islam 81
Caolan Robertson speaks for hundreds of millions of us in the Western world AGAINST OUR ENEMY – ISLAM:
The charitable progeny of a peaceful warlord 269
What’s new about the Islamization of Europe; atrocious acts of terrorism carried out by Muslims in the name of Islam; the importing by European governments of millions of Muslims; and the failure of those government to save their people from rape, sudden death, the sexual enslavement of their young daughters, and gradual political dominance by this alien savage enemy?
Nothing new. The suicide of the European nations goes on. And the lies the governments tell themselves and their people are repeated.
Yesterday, on Fox News, Steve Hilton interviewed British Conservative MP Michael Gove in connection with the recent Muslim attacks in London.
In summary, Mr. Gove said that Islam is a religion of peace; that the billion and a half Muslims spread over the world are dedicated to … charity.
Sure, the giving of alms – zakat – is one of the five pillars of Islam. What Mr. Gove hadn’t bothered to find out is that the alms go only to Muslims, and much of it goes to funding terrorism. He also hadn’t chosen to notice that Muhammad was a warlord and Islam decrees that “holy war” – jihad – is every Muslim’s sacred duty. It must be waged against all who are not Muslim until everyone on earth has either submitted to Islam by converting to it or is paying it a mighty fine for daring to live on unconverted, or is dead. The entire history of Islam is an uninterrupted record of war and conquest, persecution and massacre. Never a peaceful moment in it. Oh, Mr. Gove mentions that there “had been strands of violence” in Islam’s past, but nothing like the violent movement there is now, he avers.
This violent movement, he tell us, is something called “Islamism” which is entirely different from Islam. [To find our numerous posts debunking this nonsense, put “Islam is Islam” into our search slot.] He traces it back to … the twentieth century.
“Islamism”, he says very emphatically and authoritatively, “turns that generosity” – all that charity giving – “into resentment”. And what do “Islamists” resent? That Islam is in decline.
Thus the indiscriminate murder of dozens and the agonizing injury of many more in London in the last few days, by these “Islamists”. You see?
No, we don’t either.
Robert Spencer, who really does know what the history of Islam is, writes at Jihad Watch:
[The British Prime Minister] Theresa May says [there is] “far too much tolerance of extremism in our country,” and that “when it comes to taking on extremism and terrorism things need to change”. Then she repeats the same false and failed analysis, that the jihad “is a perversion of Islam”. Her refusal to identify the motivating ideology behind these jihad attacks means that she will never confront this enemy properly, and never deal with the real source of the incitement to violence.
And the international Left, which has promoted the advance of Islam in the West – and to which all the ruling parties of Europe belong, even those that call themselves “conservative” – is happy to accept that Muslim terrorists will strike at any time in any public place, and advises us simply to accept that this is the new norm. (See here and here and here.) President Macron of France says we “should learn to live with terrorism”. And to die from it.
So there actually is something everyone acknowledges to be new: that it is normal in Western countries to live under the perpetual threat of sudden violent death at the hands of the charitable progeny of the peaceful warlord, Muhammad.
Righteous fury 65
Vox populi? If only it were! This is not demagoguery, it is righteous fury.
Tommy Robinson expresses his anger with lots of cuss-words. But the important thing is he expresses the anger that all the people of Britain ought to be feeling after yet another terrorist attack by Muslims in London yesterday, June 3, 2017.
The great leap backward 12
Western Europe, a large part of the First World, is transforming itself into part of the Third World, a deliberate regression.
What are the rulers of western Europe thinking as they continue to insist on bringing hordes of hostile barbarians into their countries, eventually to rule over them? The demographic transformation costs an enormous chunk of each nation’s economy. The indigenous citizens suffer a huge increase of criminal attacks, rape, robbery, murder and terrorism. Yet the governments continue to invite vast numbers of aliens in; aliens whose culture, customs, morals, values, law, religion, ideology, and standards of everything from hygiene to education, are wholly incompatible with their own?
The indigenous populations are shrinking? They need more workers to maintain the welfare state? And if immigrants are parasites and not workers that’s still okay so there must some other reason? You’re sorry for them, they come from war-torn countries, you want to give them asylum because you want to show brotherly love to fellow-human-beings-in-distress? But aren’t these the very people who have made the wars? Aren’t these the same ones who are torturing and burning to death and drowning in boiling oil their fellow-human-beings-in-distress? Can’t they improve their own countries rather than wrecking yours by making yours quite as nasty as the ones they’ve left behind them?
Millions of Europeans don’t like losing their country, their property, and their lives to the barbarians, and they could stop it by changing their governments, but they don’t. They vote the same destroyers of their heritage back into power over and over again. Why?
You say the answers to all these questions are in the mail? Or are they blowing in the wind?
Heather Mac Donald writes at Front Page:
Liberal ideology conceives of “safe spaces” in the context of alleged white patriarchy, but there was a real need for a “safe space” in Britain’s Manchester Arena on May 22, when 22-year-old terrorist Salman Abedi detonated his nail- and screw-filled suicide bomb after a concert by teen idol Ariana Grande. What was the “progressive” answer to yet another instance of Islamic terrorism in the West? Feckless calls for resisting hate, pledges of renewed diversity, and little else.
A rethinking of immigration policies is off the table. Nothing that an Islamic terrorist can do will ever shake the left-wing commitment to open borders—not mass sexual assaults, not the deliberate slaughter of gays, and not, as in Manchester last week, the killing of young girls. The real threat that radical Islam poses to feminism and gay rights must be disregarded in order to transform the West by Third World immigration. Defenders of the open-borders status quo inevitably claim that if a terrorist is a second-generation immigrant, like Abedi, immigration policy has nothing to do with his attack. (Abedi’s parents emigrated to Britain from Libya; his immediate family in Manchester lived in the world’s largest Libyan enclave outside Africa itself.) Media Matters ridiculed a comment about the Manchester bombing by Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt with the following headline: fox news host suggests ‘open borders’ are to blame for manchester attack carried out by british native.
Earhardt had asked how to prevent “what’s happening in Europe, with all these open borders, they’re not vetting, they’re opening their borders to families like this, and this is how they’re paid back in return”. Pace Media Matters, a second-generation Muslim immigrant with a zeal for suicide bombing is as much of an immigration issue as a first-generation immigrant with a terrorist bent. The fact that second-generation immigrants are not assimilating into Western culture makes immigration policy more, not less, of a pressing matter. It is absurd to suggest that Abedi picked up his terrorist leanings from reading William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, rather than from the ideology of radical Islam that has been imported into Britain by mass immigration.
The Washington Post, too, editorialized that “defenders of vulnerable immigrants and asylum seekers, who in Britain as elsewhere in the West remain the targets of populist demagogues, could take some comfort from the fact that the assault apparently did not originate with those communities.” Well, where did the assault originate from — Buckingham Palace?
Since liberals and progressives will not allow a rethinking of open borders policy, perhaps they would support improved intelligence capacity so as to detect terror attacks in the planning stages? Nope. The Left still decries the modest expansions of surveillance power under the 2001 Patriot Act as the work of totalitarianism. Former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly sought to gather publicly available information about dense Muslim neighborhoods in New York in order to monitor potential radicalization; his discontinued initiative is still denounced as anti-Muslim oppression. Internet companies protect encrypted communications from government access, to the applause of civil libertarians and the mainstream media. The National Security Agency’s mass data analysis, done by unconscious computer algorithms, is still being challenged in court. …
So what does the progressive and liberal bloc offer? Treacly bromides, combined with fatalism about the necessity of adjusting to future attacks.
A day after Manchester, the Washington Post admonished:
As nations across the West have learned, it is not possible to prevent all such terrorist attacks, especially when they are staged by homegrown militants. What is possible is a response that focuses on uniting rather than dividing a diverse society. That’s what was happening in Manchester on Tuesday, as thousands of people of all races and faiths gathered for a vigil in the city’s Albert Square. “I’m not here as a person with brown skin or someone born Muslim,” a man named Amir Shah told a Guardian reporter. “I’m here as a Mancunian.” If that spirit prevails, the terrorists will have failed.
No, the terrorists will have failed if they can no longer slaughter children. They don’t care if a terror attack is met with candlelight vigils; they care if border restrictions and law enforcement make it impossible to destroy lives.
The flip side of the Post’s “terrorists will have failed if we light candles” conceit is the ubiquitous meme that the “terrorists will have won” if we modify our intelligence strategies or immigration policies in any way. The New York Times editorialized after the Manchester bombing: “It is important to recognize this attack for what it is: an attempt to shake Britain — and, by extension, the rest of Europe and the West — to its core, and to provoke a thirst for vengeance and a desire for absolute safety so intense, it will sweep away the most cherished democratic values and the inclusiveness of diverse societies.” This response is narcissistic. The attack was an effort to kill British girls and their parents, period. The terrorists win every time they pull off such massacres. They are not monitoring the legislative process and plotting how to move the needle on Western security protections in a way contrary to their own self-interest. If a society were exclusively Christian, Jewish, or even Muslim, it would be just as much the target of attack by ISIS or al-Qaida as a more “diverse” society.
Besides which, diversity per se is NOT a cherished value of the West. It is a suicidal policy of the Left. Western nations could and did accept newcomers of diverse origins if the immigrants were ready to live under the law of their hosts and were eager to be assimilated. But diversity in itself was not seen as a supremely good thing until the Left became obsessed with race and racism.
Moreover, how would the New York Times distinguish a terror attack that seeks to “sweep away . . . the inclusiveness of diverse societies” from one that was merely intended to kill? Any terror attack carries some chance (albeit an increasingly de minimis one) that it will result in a tightening of immigration or security policies, but that does not mean that such tightening is the goal of the attack.
Perhaps aware that the “candlelight vigil” strategy for fighting terrorism may seem a little wan, progressives make passing reference to actual security measures, but couched in such broad terms as to be almost meaningless. And they are only faking it, because those security measures would violate core tenets of progressive ideology. …
The [New York] Times says .. it is … “critical that immigrants, especially Muslims, are not stigmatized” … “understanding is critical” and [it] inveighs against “whipping up divisive ethnic, racist and religious hatreds”.
Here’s painful irony. The bien pensants of the Left, whose organ is the New York Times, are themselves passionately dedicated, heart-mind-hand-and-voice, to “whipping up divisive ethnic, racist and religious hatreds”.
When it comes to terrorism … a country is apparently not allowed to say: “Enough is enough, the status quo is not working, we need to rethink the policies that have allowed this mayhem to flourish.” …
The writer asks why the emotions triggered by the attack, “horror, anger, sadness, fear, revulsion”, should not be politicized. We agree with her that they should be. Why should we pretend not to be afraid of Muslim terrorism? We are terrorized. Political action needs to be taken against those who are terrorizing us.
Islamic terrorism in the West is an immigration problem. Until we have the law enforcement and intelligence capacity to detect terror plots, immigration policy has to change, both in Europe and in the U.S. …
The immigration of Third World barbarians – in particular Muslim barbarians – needs to be STOPPED.
The United States must not end up in the same situation. We need lower immigration levels and much tighter screening. The Manchester bombing vindicated President Donald Trump’s March 2017 executive order briefly limiting travel to the U.S. from half a dozen ISIS- and al-Qaida-riven countries, including Libya, while the administration reviews security screening in those countries. Yet three days after Manchester, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down that order, claiming that it “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination”. This judicial crusade against Trump’s travel pause cripples the executive’s ability to protect the country from attack, by exporting phantom constitutional rights to the world. Progressives’ passivity in the face of Islamic terrorism is not a consistent philosophy. It is rather the outcome of their commitment to open borders at any cost. That ideology has taken too many lives and must be overcome.
Yes, it must be overcome. But how?
The mailed answers never arrive. Or the wind blows them away.
The West at sunset 24
The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray is soon to be published. This, you will find at Amazon, is what the book is about:
The Strange Death of Europe is a highly personal account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end.
This is not just an analysis of demographic and political realities, it is also an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes accounts based on travels across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who pretend they want them to the places which cannot accept them.
Murray takes a step back at each stage and looks at the bigger and deeper issues which lie behind a continent’s possible demise, from an atmosphere of mass terror attacks to the steady erosion of our freedoms. The book addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel’s U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation, and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, Lampedusa, and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away.
This sharp and incisive book ends up with two visions for a new Europe – one hopeful, one pessimistic – which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. But perhaps Spengler was right: “civilizations like humans are born, briefly flourish, decay, and die.”
Spengler? Oswald Spengler. Author of The Decline of the West (published in 2 volumes, 1918, 1923), more lyrically titled in German, Der Untergang des Abendlandes – literally, The Going Down of the Eveninglands – which might raise an image of a crimson Western sunset.
There is a brightness of crimson fire accompanying the decline of Europe. It is caused by the explosion of bombs as the hordes of Islam surge over the continent and the warriors of Islam’s holy war blow up Europeans and the shrines of their culture.
Spengler’s theory is that successive civilizations rise and fall, and the civilization of the West is falling. One falls, another rises. It will not, however, be another civilization that follows the death of Europe, but the barbarism of Islam.
The Amazon blurb for The Strange Death of Europe includes the “self-distrust and self-hatred” of Europeans among the causes of their civilization’s “eventual end”.
Who dares to say that the culture so many Europeans apparently despise IS the best, the highest, intellectually, morally, governmentally, and physically ever achieved in the history of the human race?
Well, we say it.
It is the best intellectually as a result of the confluence of two streams: the culture of classical Greece and Rome, and the values enshrined by reason in the Enlightenment. (NOT so-called “Judeo-Christian values”; NOT Christianity whose darkness covered Europe for a thousand years before the new dawn of Greco-Roman culture was followed by the bright day of the Enlightenment.)
It is the best morally and governmentally because it recognized that the individual person mattered more than his tribe; it therefore held individual freedom to be the highest value and protected it by law; established equality before the law; taught tolerance and abolished the age-old practice of slavery. Yes, there was slavery before it was abolished. Yes, there was still much injustice. And some Western tribes betrayed their civilization, most notably the Germans with their attempt at eliminating the Jews. But the Constitution of the United States enshrined the values of freedom and equality before the law, making the best hopes of humankind possible to achieve.
It is the best physically because most people live prosperous, safe, healthy, comfortable lives in the West. Anyone who doubts that the standard of living of Europeans and Americans is far higher than that of most Africans and most Asians cannot have travelled in those realms of hardship.
It is the best not only because of its own great cultural achievements, but also because it has recognized and been hospitable to the best ideas, techniques, works, discoveries and inventions from everywhere else.
But Western thinkers see no glory in their inheritance. They blame themselves for having carried their values, their culture, and often their prosperity, to those realms of hardship, the Third World. They see “colonialism” and “imperialism” as national crimes; crimes so terrible as to require the penance of national self-destruction.
Such thought inspired politicians to facilitate the end of their civilization by surrendering to Islam.
They welcome the Muslim “refugees”; they give them houses and education and medical services and money; they let them off when they commit crimes; they suppress all criticism of them; and still the newcomers shoot their European hosts, run them over, stab them, torture them, rape them, and blow them up with nail-bombs.
The political leaders simply cannot understand why. What more could they do for them? Will even giving them the whole of Western Europe be enough?
Mark Steyn writes about the Muslim nail-bombing of a concert audience in Manchester, England, on May 22, 2017:
Angela Merkel pronounced the attack “incomprehensible”. But she can’t be that uncomprehending, can she? Our declared enemies are perfectly straightforward in their stated goals, and their actions are consistent with their words. They select their targets with some care.
For a while, it was Europe’s Jews, at a Brussels museum and a Toulouse school and a Copenhagen synagogue and a Paris kosher supermarket. But Continentals are, except for political photo-ops on Holocaust Memorial Day, relatively heartless about dead Jews, and wrote off such incidents as something to do with “Israeli settlements” and “occupation” and of no broader significance.
So they moved on to slaughter 49 gays in a nightclub in Orlando – the biggest mound of gay corpses ever piled up in American history and the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11. But all the usual noisy LGBTQWERTY activists fell suddenly silent, as if they’d all gone back in the closet and curled up in the fetal position. And those Democrats who felt obliged to weigh in thought it was something to do with the need for gun control …
So they targeted provocative expressions of the infidel’s abominable false religion, decapitating a French priest at Mass and mowing down pedestrians at a Berlin Christmas market. But post-Christian Europe takes Christianity less seriously than its enemies do, and so that too merited little more than a shrug and a pledge to carry on.
So they selected symbols of nationhood, like France’s Bastille Day, Canada’s Cenotaph, and the Mother of Parliaments in London. But taking seriously assaults on your own nation’s symbols would require you to take your nation seriously, and most western citizens are disinclined to do so. As the great universal talismanic anthem of the age has it, “Imagine there’s no countries/It’s easy if you try…”
So the new Caliphate’s believers figured out that what their enemy really likes is consumerism and pop music. Hence the attacks on the Champs-Élysées and the flagship Åhléns department store in Stockholm, and the bloodbath at the Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris and now at Ariana Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” tour. …
“Carrying on exactly as before”, as The Independent advises, will not be possible. A few months ago, I was in Toulouse, where Jewish life has vanished from public visibility and is conducted only behind the prison-like walls of a fortress schoolhouse and a centralized synagogue that requires 24/7 protection by French soldiers; I went to Amsterdam, which is markedly less gay than it used to be; I walked through Molenbeek after dark, where unaccompanied women dare not go. You can carry on, you can stagger on, but life is not exactly as it was before. Inch by inch, it’s smaller and more constrained.
And so it will prove for cafe life, and shopping malls, and pop concerts. Maybe Ariana Grande will be back in the UK – or maybe she will decide that discretion is the better part of a Dangerous Woman’s valor. But there will be fewer young girls in the audience – because no mum or dad wants to live for the rest of their lives with the great gaping hole in your heart opening up for dozens of English parents this grim morning. And one day the jihad will get lucky and the bomb will take with it one of these filthy infidel “shameless” pop whores cavorting on stage in her underwear. You can carry on exactly as before, but in a decade or two, just as there are fewer gay bars in Amsterdam and no more Jewish shops on the Chaussée de Gand, there will be less music in the air in western cities. Even the buskers, like the one in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens today serenading a shattered city with “All You Need Is Love”, will have moved on, having learned that it’s a bit more complicated than that.
I am currently reading Douglas Murray’s fine book, The Strange Death of Europe, which lays out, unsparingly, the central illusion of the last half-century – that you could demographically transform the composition of hitherto more or less homogeneous nation states on a scale no stable society has ever attempted, and that there would be no consequences except a more vibrant range of local restaurants. Mrs May [amazingly the Prime Minister of Britain] declared this morning on the steps of Downing Street that she had held a top-level security meeting … I’ll bet the mood around the table was one of fatalism and resignation, outside a few micro-adjustments to the budget of counter-terrorism agencies and the number of CCTV cameras and the amount of security checks at “sensitive” “high-value” targets like department stores, and theaters, and restaurants and football grounds and pubs and chip shops …
But the arithmetic is not difficult: Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam. France and Germany and Belgium admit more and more Islam, and thus more and more terrorism. Yet the subject of immigration has been all but entirely absent from the current UK election campaign. Thirty years ago, in the interests of stopping IRA terrorism, the British state was not above preventing the internal movement within its borders of unconvicted, uncharged, unarrested Republican sympathizers seeking to take a ferry from Belfast to Liverpool. Today it declares it can do nothing to prevent the movement of large numbers of the Muslim world from thousands of miles away to the heart of the United Kingdom. It’s just a fact of life – like being blown up when you go to a pop concert.
All of us have gotten things wrong since 9/11. But few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither – and, for the sake of the dead of last night’s carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly. Theresa May’s statement in Downing Street is said to be “defiant”, but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it …
What’s the happy ending here? In a decade it will be worse, and in two decades worse still, and then in three decades people will barely recall how it used to be, when all that warmth and vibrancy of urban life … is but a memory, and the music has died away, and Manchester is as dull and listless as today’s Alexandria. If Mrs May or Frau Merkel has a happier ending, I’d be interested to hear it. If not, it is necessary not to carry on, but to change, and soon – before it’s too late.
Is it not already too late for Western Europe? Its sun is sinking fast.