This is our Facebook abstract of Mark Steyn’s review of the film Darkest Hour, about how Winston Churchill saved Britain and the world from Nazi Germany:

We are at the great hinge moment of the twentieth century. That year in which the moth-eaten British lion and its distant cubs stood alone is, more than any other single factor, the reason why the world as ordered these last seventy years exists at all. Joe Wright’s film is very good on the sense of one small island on the periphery of Europe having the noose tightened almost hour by hour. Britain and its lion cubs fought on, playing for time until first the Soviets and then the Americans joined the war against Germany, Italy and Japan. At its heart, the story of one long-serving politician in the spring of 1940 is the definitive example of the Great Man theory of history. It was his very particular qualities – ones that did not necessarily serve him well in peacetime or in other wars – that changed the course of human events. As with Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, one’s admiration for the film is tempered by a terrible profound sadness – for a people who “won the war, and lost their country anyway”: the “long island story” is ending, and without anyone feeling the need to lie choking on the ground over it. To anyone old enough to remember an England where one could “walk into any pub in the country and ask with perfect confidence if the major had been in”, that sense of loss can bring tears to the eye. This is the film of an actual, real-life superhero. You leave the theater with the cheers of the House ringing in your ears …and return to a world where quoting Churchill in his own land can get you arrested.

Read the original in its entirety at Mark Steyn’s site here. It is well worth reading. We introduce it with our abstract in order to use it as a springboard for observations of our own.

Among all that stirs emotion there, above all, for us, is this:

… a terrible profound sadness – for a people who “won the war, and lost their country anyway”: the “long island story” is ending, and without anyone feeling the need to lie choking on the ground over it.  

It is astonishingly true that hardly a murmur of regret is heard from the educated classes of Great Britain, the classes of hereditary leadership, the political talking heads, the opinion formers, the professoriate, the historians, the think tanks, the men and women at present in power or firmly seated in the establishment, for the loss of their country.

They do not want to talk about it. And they do not want you to raise the issue.

Many are pretending that it isn’t happening; or that, if it is, it’s a bother that will  just go away.

But yes, there are those who are choking on the giving away of their country. They are the “horny handed sons of toil”. From the scorned and bullied working-class. The class for which the rulers claimed socialism needed to be established, but for whose opinion the rulers never give a toss.

The “Football Lads” march silently in their tens of thousands to the sites where Muslim immigrants have carried out acts of terrorism. They stand there in sorrow.

Tommy Robinson, who was once a “football hooligan” is now a leader of such resistance as there is in England. He is heavily and persistently harassed by police and frequently locked up for months on end by complicit judges on false charges. He is a brave man who has been abominably treated.

Anne Marie Waters almost certainly won a  recent election held for a new leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), but was summarily informed she had lost it. UKIP might still stand for British independence from Europe under its usurping leader, but it will cast a very disapproving eye on any of its members who might “lie down on the ground and choke” over the end of the “long island story”. So Anne Marie Waters formed a new party called the ForBritain Party. The establishment and the media are calling it a “far right” party to discredit it.

Unspoken, but fully implied by real events is this declaration by the government and the media;

We want the end of the island story. The end of England. The end of Britain. We want it to become a tyrannical Islamic state.

One of the EU Commissioners says that Europe is “too white”. He wants to see it go black and brown. He wants it to be flooded by migrants from the Third World.

A former prime minister of Sweden says that the country he led belongs not to the Swedes but to the Muslim immigrants.

Some say this is happening to Europe because it feels guilty for its past imperialism and colonialism. A Leftist notion now almost universally accepted.

But Sweden had no colonies.

And among those European countries that did, Britain brought enormous benefits to its conquered territories: notably a fair judiciary, freedom of speech, a free press, and in many cases literacy. For Britain to be ashamed of its vast and splendid empire is absurd and even disgraceful. Yet its shame was manifest when England hosted the Olympic Games and told the world how proud it was of its (rotten) National Health Service, and made not a mention of its empire.

France took good cooking to its foreign conquests.

True, some European countries brought mostly dread. Germany did. And Spain and Portugal with their Inquisitions. To know what horror Belgium brought, one has only to read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Almost all these empires have shriveled away. There are only bits and pieces left of the old British Empire.

But the most important good that Europe – chiefly Britain – gave to the human race, to be taken and kept by any who will for its immeasurable benefit, was the Enlightenment.

The values on which the United States of America was founded were Enlightenment values (not “Judeo-Christian” values as we have argued fully elsewhere).

They are the values – reason, individual liberty, property, rule of law, equal justice under the law for each individual – that need to be defended. But they are not being defended in western Europe, all of which, including Britain, is bending to primitive, cruel, unjust Islamic laws and traditions. 

The United States of America – saved from Europe’s fate by President Trump – remains, at least for the present, the last best hope of mankind.

For the millions who live in the great capital cities of Europe, this is what public life has become since the Muslim invasion: at any moment, terror and mass panic.

The report is in many newspapers, all in more or less the same words. We quote The Independent:

Armed police have evacuated part of central London [today] amid unconfirmed reports of gunshots in Oxford Street and Oxford Circus Tube station.

The very heart of London.

Police say they had responded “as if the incident is terrorist related” but have not yet located any casualties or evidence of shots, with searches continuing.

“To date police have not located any trace of any suspects, evidence of shots fired or causalities,” a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said.

“Armed and unarmed officers are on scene and dealing along with colleagues from British Transport Police (BTP).

“If you are in building stay in a building, if you are on the street in Oxford Street leave the area.”

Reports of gunshots originated on the westbound Central Line platform at Oxford Circus station, prompting passengers to flee up exits towards Oxford Circus and Regent Street.

“This caused a significant level of panic which resulted in numerous calls from members of the public reporting gunfire,” a BTP spokesperson said.

“Officers responded in line with our procedures of a terrorist incident, this included armed officers from BTP and the Metropolitan Police.  “A full and methodical search of the station and Oxford Street was conducted by our specially trained firearms officers.”

Ryan Butcher, an Independent reporter who was inside the station at the time, said passengers were told to evacuate the station in a tannoy announcement saying there had been a “reported emergency”.

He had reached street level when panic broke out and people started running.

“I just heard screams, someone shouted ‘run’,” he added. “I saw smoke…people started falling over in the streets.

“I saw everyone running into buildings so I went into the nearest one.”

Mr Butcher was sheltering in a nearby restaurant, where he said other people were “shaking and crying”, adding: “It’s just terrifying.”

He has since been allowed to leave by police officers, who are directing members of the public away from the area. Police were first called at 4.38pm, with the incident coming as shoppers flocked to central London seeking reductions on Black Friday.

“At this stage, we have received one report of a woman sustaining a minor injury when leaving Oxford Circus station,” a spokesperson for BTP said. “There are no other reported casualties.”

The London Fire Brigade said it had sent three fire engines and 15 firefighters to the scene.

Both Oxford Circus and Bond Street station were closed during the alert but have since been reopened.

Prime Minister Theresa May can urge people to just carry on as usual; can boast that terrorists will not make Britons change the way they live; can go on talking such dangerous rubbish as if this was the blitz again, about which nothing could be done but blitz the blitzers right back.

But this is not the blitz. It is a condition of constant fear induced as a matter of policy by successive stupid governments. (Has it ever happened before, that the leaders of a nation have invited in a self-declared enemy?  We can find no historical precedent.)

This incident at Oxford Circus – the hub of the busiest shopping area in the world, probably, on one of the busiest shopping days of the year – is all the more indicative of what that immeasurably wrong policy has done to the country in that it was a false alarm. Nothing could better reveal the underlying nervous anxiety that needs nothing more than a whiff of smoke, the rumor of a shot, a scream to send thousands of people rushing for shelter in the capital of what used to be a law-and-order country. The fear does not show as people continue – of course – to go about their daily business, but it is there. Repeated acts of murderous terrorism by Muslims have planted it there.

The truth is, the quality of life has changed severely for the worse, and the rulers of Britain and the EU countries go on pretending it doesn’t matter, and will not do the only thing that will restore safety and peace of mind to their citizens: get rid, while they still can, of the Muslim invaders.

The European Union is led by unelected leftist globalists.

Their hives of bureaucrats decide such things as the correct shape of a cucumber and what words journalists may use.

 

 

Bruce Bawer writes – perceptively as always – at Gatestone:

“Respect Words: Ethical Journalism Against Hate Speech” is a collaborative project that has been undertaken by media organizations in eight European countries – Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain. Supported by the Rights and Citizenship Programme of the European Union, it seeks, according to its website, to help journalists, in this era of growing “Islamophobia,” to “rethink” the way they address “issues related to migratory processes, ethnic and religious minorities”.  It sounds benign enough: “rethink”. But do not kid yourself: when these EU-funded activists call for “rethinking”, what they are really doing is endorsing self-censorship.

In September, “Respect Words” issued a 39-page document entitled Reporting on Migration & Minorities: Approach and Guidelines. Media outlets, it instructs, “should not give time or space to extremist views simply for the sake of ‘showing the other side’. ” But which views count as “extremist”? The report does not say – not explicitly, anyway. “Sensationalist or overly simplistic reporting on migration,” we read, “can enflame existing societal prejudices” and thus “endanger migrants’ safety”.

The “migrants” are severely threatening the safety of the hosts. To the point of murdering them. The “migrants” are an invading force.

These bureaucrats, who disrespect a lot of words, who would shrink languages and – therefore –  restrict thought, would call that statement of ours “sensationalist” or “overly simplistic”.

Again, what counts as “sensationalist” or “overly simplistic”? That is not spelled out, either. Nor, we are told, should we associate “terms such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islam’… with particular acts”, because to do that is to “stigmatize”.  What exactly does this mean? That when a man shouts “Allahu Akbar” after having gunned down, run over with a truck, or blown to bits dozens of innocent pedestrians or concertgoers, we are supposed to ignore that little detail?

Or perhaps we should entirely avoid covering such actions? After all, the document exhorts us not to write too much about “sensationalist incidents involving migrants”,  as “violent individuals are found within every large group of people”. If, however, we do feel compelled to cover such incidents, we must never cease to recall that the “root causes” of these incidents “often have nothing to do with a person’s ethnicity or religious affiliation”. What, then, are those root causes? The report advises us that they include “colonialism, racism, [and] general social inequality”. Do not forget, as well, that there is “no structural connection between migration and terrorism”.

Obviously, that depends on who is migrating. If terrorists are migrating, then there is indeed a “structural connection between migration and terrorism”. And tere is no doubt that Muslim terrorists are migrating to Western Europe, North America, and Australia.

At least the report’s authors do not have the audacity to maintain that there is no connection between Islam and terrorism. But they do urge us to remember that Islam is “diverse”.  The notion that it is inherently violent is – what else? – a “stereotype”.  So is depicting Islam as “grounded in a different reality and lacking common values with other cultures” or portraying Muslim immigrants as being “fundamentally different from the citizens of the host country”.

Believing Muslims (we acknowledge that there are non-believing “Muslims”) are fundamentally different from Western non-Muslims.  They do lack common values with Western culture.

And it is just plain wrong, needless to say, to encourage “the widespread perception that there is a ‘cultural clash’ between Islam and the West with religion at the heart of the ‘problem'”.  (On the contrary: Islam is, the report tells us, “a belief system that can exist alongside others.”) And do not dare to suggest that Islamic culture is in any way “inferior to Western culture”.  Or that Muslim men are “highly patriarchal”.  (Repeat after me: “Many societies around the world remain highly patriarchal, independent of religion.”) And do not pay too much attention to Muslim women’s “clothing styles”. Why? Because doing so tends to “homogenize” them. (Banish from your mind the thought that it is the clothing itself that homogenizes them.)

During the last couple of years, many countries in Europe have experienced a veritable tsunami of Islamic migration. But responsible journalists, according to “Respect Word”,  must never, ever put it that way: “When describing migration, don’t use phrases such as ‘tide’,  ‘wave’ and ‘flood'” (or, the authors later add, “horde” or “influx”) because such language can “evoke the sense of a ‘mass invasion’.” It “dehumanizes migrants”, you see, and “constructs a false sense among the audience of being ‘under siege’ by an ‘enemy’ that must be repelled”.

Tides of Muslims are pouring into Europe. It is a human flood. It is a mass invasion. To pretend that  it isn’t is to close your eyes to the deluge and wait for it to drown you. The demographics are incontrovertible. They cannot be sweet-talked away.

Of course, much of Europe is “under siege”; this fact is becoming clearer by the day; to use milder terms when discussing this topic is to do nothing less than misrepresent reality. But that is what this document is all about: advising reporters just how to misrepresent reality in EU-approved fashion.

“Inform your audience,” the report urges journalists, “about the reasons why people feel compelled to leave their homelands, and investigate what connections there may be to policies and practices of European states.” Possibly, however, a massive percentage of the Muslims pouring into certain European states are doing so because of those states’ “policies and practices” – namely, their readiness to start handing immigrant families large sums of cash the minute they arrive, to set them up with free housing, furnishings, etc., and to allow them to stay on the dole for the rest of their lives. Many of those countries are more generous to Muslim newcomers than they are to their own citizens who have fallen on hard times; immigrants often go to the front of the line, while elderly citizens of some of these countries – people who have worked hard and paid into the welfare system since the world was young – have been turned out of their homes in order to accommodate newly-arrived Muslim families.

But these obviously are not the “policies and practices” to which the “Respect Words” document is referring. Quite the opposite. The transparent implication here is that Muslim refugees and asylum seekers are fleeing conditions for which they and others in their countries of origin hold no responsibility whatsoever and that can, in fact, ultimately be traced back to Western wrongdoing, whether in the last generation or centuries ago. Never mind that Muslims took over Persia, the Byzantine Empire, all of North Africa and the Middle East, Greece, Northern Cyprus, much of Eastern Europe, and Southern Spain. Ultimately, everything that is wrong with the Muslim world is seemingly the fault of the West, so Europeans owe all incomers a new life – and perhaps even a new country – peaceably handed over to them so that they can import sharia law?

No, the report does not quite go so far as to make this argument. But the report does caution that even to touch on the question of “whether asylum seekers’ claims are genuine” or “whether migrants have a right to be in the country” is thoroughly inappropriate: it places the focus on “law and order” rather than on such things as “the fundamental right of asylum”.  Yes, you read that correctly: “the fundamental right of asylum”. Never mind that under international law not everyone is entitled to asylum – and that a huge proportion of self-styled asylum seekers in Europe today have no legitimate grounds for such a claim but are, like many of us, seeking better economic opportunities.

But such facts are inimical to the authors of the “Respect Words” document. In their view, no human being can be “illegal”; therefore, the word “illegal”, they admonish, should be used to describe actions, not people. …

The report is one long taxpayer-funded catalog of politically correct protocols which – if adhered to by everyone in Europe who is professionally involved in reporting on events concerning Islam and immigration – would guarantee a full-scale whitewash of the alarming developments currently underway on this unfortunate continent.

It is interesting to note that while many people fulminate over President Trump’s complaints about “fake news,” they are silent when an instrument of the EU superstate presumes to tell the media exactly what kind of language should and should not be used when reporting on the most important issue of the day.

A document titled The Paris Statement: A Europe We Can Believe In has recently been published that calls for the preservation, or restoration, of Europe. Its authors recognize that Europeans are losing their European home.

We agree that is the case. And we agree with some of the analysis of what is killing it.

But there is much in the Statement that we do not agree with.

The signatories are three French authors (a preponderance which, with the title, suggests that the initiative came from one of them), and seven others, respectively Czech, Hungarian, Polish, British, German, Dutch, and Belgian.

The Statement as a whole has a sentimental, romantic quality which expresses the continental spirit rather than a rational Anglo-Saxon one, despite the co-authorship of one Englishman.

The whole thing may be read here.

THE PARIS STATEMENT

Europe belongs to us, and we belong to Europe.These lands are our home; we have no other. The reasons we hold Europe dear exceed our ability to explain or justify our loyalty. It is a matter of shared histories, hopes and loves. It is a matter of accustomed ways, of moments of pathos and pain. It is a matter of inspiring experiences of reconciliation and the promise of a shared future. Ordinary landscapes and events are charged with special meaning — for us, but not for others. Home is a place where things are familiar, and where we are recognized, however far we have wandered. This is the real Europe, our precious and irreplaceable civilization.

Europe is our home. Europe, in all its richness and greatness, is threatened by a false understanding of itself. This false Europe imagines itself as a fulfilment of our civilization, but in truth it will confiscate our home. It appeals to exaggerations and distortions of Europe’s authentic virtues while remaining blind to its own vices. Complacently trading in one-sided caricatures of our history, this false Europe is invincibly prejudiced against the past. Its proponents are orphans by choice, and they presume that to be an orphan — to be homeless — is a noble achievement. In this way, the false Europe praises itself as the forerunner of a universal community that is neither universal nor a community.

One fact lies in all that fluff, in part of the last sentence. It could be worded for clearer communication, as: the globalist rulers of Europe see the EU as a model for a world union under world government. 

Those flesh-and-blood traitors are turned into an abstraction as “the false Europe”.

The Statement goes on to elaborate on the “false Europe” – the Europe led by those globalist rulers who are letting millions of Muslims into their countries; not demanding that they assimilate, or adapt to the customs of the host countries, or obey their laws, or even learn the indigenous languages. In its high-flown style, it does not plainly state that the Islamic invasion is killing Europe, but continues to complain about the wrong attitude of the “false Europe” to the invaders.

And they believe that “the true sources of the humane decencies” that they think characterized pre-Islamic  (or “post-national. post cultural”) Europe comes from its “Christian roots”. We have argued, in many articles on this site, against that thesis, but will not make more of our disagreement here than merely to note it.

The patrons of the false Europe are bewitched by superstitions of inevitable progress. They believe that History is on their side, and this faith makes them haughty and disdainful, unable to acknowledge the defects in the post-national, post-cultural world they are constructing. Moreover, they are ignorant of the true sources of the humane decencies they themselves hold dear — as do we. They ignore, even repudiate the Christian roots of Europe. At the same time they take great care not to offend Muslims, who they imagine will cheerfully adopt their secular, multicultural outlook. Sunk in prejudice, superstition and ignorance, and blinded by vain, self-congratulating visions of a utopian future, the false Europe reflexively stifles dissent. This is done, of course, in the name of freedom and tolerance.

The words in bold say something with which we emphatically concur. The stifling of dissent is a plain and horrid fact.

Then comes a flat denial that “the  greatest threat” to Europe is the Muslim invasion. It continues shadow-boxing the “false Europe”, as if, were those globalists who believe (with Karl Marx) that “History is on their side” to be defeated in argument, the facts on the ground – the Islamification of Europe – would disappear.

We are reaching a dead-end. The greatest threat to the future of Europe is neither Russian adventurism nor Muslim immigration. The true Europe is at risk because of the suffocating grip that the false Europe has over our imaginations. Our nations and shared culture are being hollowed out by illusions and self-deceptions about what Europe is and should be. We pledge to resist this threat to our future. We will defend, sustain and champion the real Europe, the Europe to which we all in truth belong.

Next it describes the Europe that has been lost, the Europe the authors take pride in. It is a rosy picture of “open political systems” born out of “love for the homelands”. It misses the main point, that because the Enlightenment broke the near-totalitarian power of the Christian churches, European greatness grew with rational thought, the doubt which drives science, and the freedom that allowed European man to innovate and explore. 

The next two paragraphs continue the description of the virtues of theEuropean system as the authors perceive them. So does part the following one, which, however,  ends with the assertion of an important fact:

[The] nation-state …  became the hallmark of European civilization.

But that is followed with a passage that includes this:

… In the aftermath of the terrible bloodshed of the world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, we emerged with an even greater resolve to honor our shared heritage.

Which is simply not true. It was in the aftermath of the Second World War that many – even most? –  Europeans began to lose confidence in their cultural heritage. Birth rates began to fall and have fallen drastically. Fear that the welfare states would not have enough people to maintain them contributed to the disastrous acceptance of the hordes of Muslims who are changing the character of Europe. The Muslim newcomers have many children. That is the process of Europe’s Islamization, which is insufficiently dealt with in this document.    

The next few paragraphs praise Christianity as a “spiritual empire” that was better than “political empire”, in that it brought “cultural unity” to the continent. (Yes, but it was a cultural unity of illiteracy and terror.) It also ascribes the growth of secular order to Christianity’s separation of the divine and mundane powers. It lists the “gentle virtues” of Christianity: “fairness, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, peace-making, charity”, those ideals more honored in the breach than the observance throughout the history of Europe in our common era.

It goes on to praise marriage and the raising of children, and on that we can again agree.

We also like its acknowledgment of the “inspiration” modern Europe drew “from the Classical tradition”; and its declaration that “men and women of Europe” crafted “musical and artistic works of unsurpassed beauty” and achieved “extraordinary breakthroughs in science and technology”.

“We are losing our home”, the authors cry. 

The false Europe … sells itself as liberation from all restraints: sexual freedom, freedom of self-expression …

But not of speech,

The Generation of ’68 regards these freedoms as precious victories over a once almighty and oppressive cultural regime. They see themselves as great liberators, and their transgressions are acclaimed as noble moral achievements, for which the whole world should be grateful. … [In fact] the Generation of ’68 destroyed but did not build. They created a vacuum now filled by social media, cheap tourism and pornography.

There’s truth in that.

But most wrongly, the authors condemn the ’68 generation – which is to say, the New Left – for promoting individualism!

Our societies seem to be falling into individualism …

Good grief! They were Marxists, Maoists, collectivists through and through. Individualism was the very thing they most abominated.

Then again comes truth:

European life is more and more comprehensively regulated. Rules — often confected by faceless technocrats in league with powerful interests — govern our work relationships, our business decisions, our educational qualifications, our news and entertainment media. And Europe now seeks to tighten existing regulations on freedom of speech, an aboriginal European freedom — freedom of conscience made manifest. … Europe’s governing classes wish to restrict manifestly political speech. Political leaders who give voice to inconvenient truths about Islam and immigration are hauled before judges. Political correctness enforces strong taboos that deem challenges to the status quo beyond the pale.

Right.

And they come to a direct denunciation of multiculturalism, and at last touch on the damage done by “Muslim newcomers”:

The false Europe also boasts of an unprecedented commitment to equality. It claims to promote non-discrimination and the inclusion of all races, religions and identities. Here, genuine progress has been made, but a utopian detachment from reality has taken hold. Over the past generation, Europe has pursued a grand project of multiculturalism. To demand or even promote the assimilation of Muslim newcomers to our manners and mores, much less to our religion, has been thought a gross injustice. A commitment to equality, we have been told, demands that we abjure any hint that we believe our culture superior. … Europe’s multicultural enterprise … trades on the Christian ideal of universal charity in an exaggerated and unsustainable form. It requires from the European peoples a saintly degree of self-abnegation. We are to affirm the very colonization of our homelands and the demise of our culture as Europe’s great twenty-first century glory — a collective act of self-sacrifice for the sake of some new global community of peace and prosperity that is being born.

But they have not apparently noticed the mind-set of those European “multiculturalists” who long for total capitulation; the self-contempt; the positive preference for the primitive, woman-enslaving, enlightenment-suppressing ideology of Islam, the longing for it to replace the culture of Europe – expressed most explicitly by a former prime Minister of Sweden that his country does not belong to native-born Swedes but to the [Muslim] immigrants.

Most in our governing classes doubtless presume the superiority of European culture — which must not be affirmed in public in ways that might offend immigrants. Given that superiority, they think that assimilation will happen naturally, and quickly … that, somehow, by the laws of nature or of history, ‘they’ will necessarily become like ‘us’ — and it is inconceivable that the reverse might be true.

No, no.  Those “governing classes” do not “presume the superiority of European culture”. They urge their citizens to adapt to the ways of the immigrants.

Next the authors speak of  “globalization”:

There is more bad faith at work, of a darker kind. Over the last generation, a larger and larger segment of our governing class has decided that its own self-interest lies in accelerated globalization. They wish to build supranational institutions that they are able to control without the inconveniences of popular sovereignty. It is increasingly clear that the “democratic deficit” in the European Union is not a mere technical problem to be remedied by technical means. Rather, this deficit is a fundamental commitment, and it is zealously defended. Whether legitimated by supposed economic necessities or autonomously developing international human rights law, the supra-national mandarins of the EU institutions confiscate the political life of Europe … This is the soft but increasingly real tyranny we face.

Right again.

And this is right too:

European societies are fraying badly. If we but open our eyes, we see an ever-greater use of government power, social management and educational indoctrination. It is not just Islamic terror that brings heavily armed soldiers into our streets. Riot police are now necessary to quell violent anti-establishment protests …

They then throw in a complaint about “drunken crowds of football fans”, and try to make it relevant by adding: “The fanaticism of our football loyalties is a desperate sign of the deeply human need for solidarity, a need that otherwise goes unfulfilled in the false Europe.”

How does the violence of rival football fans become a sign of a need for solidarity? That’s plain nonsense.

Deploring what has become of the universities is on the mark:

Europe’s intellectual classes are, alas, among the chief ideological partisans of the conceits of the false Europe. Without doubt, our universities are one of the glories of European civilization. But where once they sought to transmit to each new generation the wisdom of past ages, today most within the universities equate critical thinking with a simpleminded repudiation of the past. A lodestar of the European spirit has been the rigorous discipline of intellectual honesty and objectivity. But over the past two generations, this noble ideal has been transformed. The asceticism that once sought to free the mind of the tyranny of dominant opinion has become an often complacent and unreflective animus against everything that is our own. This stance of cultural repudiation functions as a cheap and easy way of being “critical”. Over the last generation, it has been rehearsed in the lecture halls, becoming a doctrine, a dogma. … As a consequence, our universities are now active agents of ongoing cultural destruction.

Our governing classes are advancing human rights. They are at work fighting climate change. They are engineering a more globally integrated market economy and harmonizing tax policies. They are monitoring progress toward gender equality. They are doing so much for us! What does it matter by what mechanisms they inhabit their offices? What does it matter if the European peoples grow more skeptical of their ministrations?

They imply scorn for a market economy, and again misrepresent the globalists, who want global trade, yes; but they are children of the New Left and favor socialism – ideally world socialist government.

We hope they are right that “the European people are growing skeptical of  their [the globalists’] ministrations”.

That growing scepticism is fully justified. Today, Europe is dominated by an aimless materialism that seems unable to motivate men and women to have children and form families. A culture of repudiation deprives the next generation of a sense of identity. Some of our countries have regions in which Muslims live with an informal autonomy from local laws, as if they were colonialists rather than fellow members of our nations. … Globalization transforms the life prospects of millions. When challenged, our governing classes say that they are merely working to accommodate the inevitable, adjusting to implacable necessities. No other course is possible, and it is irrational to resist. Things cannot be otherwise. Those who object are said to suffer nostalgia — for which they deserve moral condemnation as racists or fascists. As social divisions and civic distrust become more apparent, European public life grows angrier, more rancorous, and no one can say where it will end. We must not continue down this path. We need to throw off the tyranny of the false Europe.

How might that be done?

They propose that European public life be “re-secularized”. Which means they rightly see the globalist Leftist movement which despairs of Europe and promotes the Third World as a new religion – which it is.

Some well thought-out paragraphs follow which we suspect are of Anglo-Saxon authorship:

The work of renewal begins with theological self-knowledge. The universalist and universalizing pretensions of the false Europe reveal it to be an ersatz religious enterprise, complete with strong creedal commitments — and anathemas. This is the potent opiate that paralyzes Europe as a political body. We must insist that religious aspirations are properly the province of religion, not politics, much less bureaucratic administration. In order to recover our political and historical agency, it is imperative that we re-secularize European public life.

This will require us to renounce the mendacious language that evades responsibility and fosters ideological manipulation. Talk of diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism is empty. Often, such language is deployed as a way to characterize our failures as accomplishments: The unravelling of social solidarity is “actually” a sign of welcome, tolerance, and inclusion. This is marketing language, a language meant to obscure reality rather than illuminate. We must recover an abiding respect for reality. Language is a delicate instrument, and it is debased when used as a bludgeon. We should be patrons of linguistic decency. Recourse to denunciation is a sign of the decadence of our present moment. We must not tolerate verbal intimidation, much less mortal threats. We need to protect those who speak reasonably, even if we think their views mistaken. The future of Europe must be liberal in the best sense, which means committed to robust public debate free from all threats of violence and coercion.

Breaking the spell of the false Europe and its utopian, pseudo-religious crusade for a borderless world means fostering a new kind of statesmanship and a new kind of statesman. A good political leader stewards the commonweal of a particular people. A good statesman views our shared European inheritance and our particular national traditions as magnificent and life-giving, but also fragile gifts. He does not reject that inheritance, nor does he chance losing it all for utopian dreams. Such leaders covet the honors bestowed upon them by their people; they do not lust for the approbation of the “international community”, which is in fact the public relations apparatus of an oligarchy.

Recognizing the particular character of the European nations … we need not be perplexed before the spurious claims of the multiculturalists. Immigration without assimilation is colonization, and this must be rejected. We rightly expect that those who migrate to our lands will incorporate themselves into our nations and adopt our ways. This expectation needs to be supported by sound policy.

Yes. But then the Statement goes off the rails again:

The language of multiculturalism has been imported from America.

It has not. The United States have encouraged and proved the value of multi-ethnicity, not multiculturalism; many ethnicities, one culture – and that an open, hospitable one that integrates anything from any other culture that is useful to it. (An enriching eclecticism now condemned by the Left as “cultural appropriation”.)

At least one of the authors then got it right:

But America’s great age of immigration came at the turn of the twentieth century, a period of remarkably rapid economic growth, in a country with virtually no welfare state, and with a very strong sense of national identity to which immigrants were expected to assimilate. … That experience tells us that …  a generous welfare system can impede assimilation … We must not allow a multicultural ideology to deform our political judgments about how best to serve the common good, which requires national communities with sufficient unity and solidarity to see their good as common.

“Demographic change” is called by its name at last:

After World War II, Western Europe cultivated vital democracies. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Central European nations restored their civic vitality. These are among Europe’s most precious achievements. But they will be lost if we do not address immigration and demographic change in our nations. Only empires can be multicultural, which is what the European Union will become if we fail to make renewed solidarity and civic unity the criteria by which to assess immigration policies and strategies for assimilation.

The Statement then drifts off again into high-falutin sentiment about “spiritual greatness” needing to be restored to “counter the growing power of mere wealth”, and the need for “the populace” to be “guided toward a virtuous life”. And this:

While we recognize the positive aspects of free-market economics, we must resist ideologies that seek to totalize the logic of the market. …  Economic growth, while beneficial, is not the highest good. Markets need to be oriented toward social ends.

No, they do not. They need to be left alone.

After going on a bit about the arts needing to be about “the sublime and the beautiful”, and stressing that “marriage and family are essential”, they come to weigh the merits of “populism” – the movement begun in America by Donald Trump (and spreading rapidly and effectively, we hope, in Europe). They see it as a source of “anxiety”, but acknowledge that it may be a salutary correction to the “globalist” trend.

There is great anxiety in Europe today because of the rise of what is called “populism” — though the meaning of the term seems never to be defined, and it is used mostly as invective. We have our reservations. Europe needs to draw upon the deep wisdom of her traditions rather than relying on simplistic slogans and divisive emotional appeals. Still, we acknowledge that much in this new political phenomenon can represent a healthy rebellion against the tyranny of the false Europe, which labels as “anti-democratic’” any threat to its monopoly on moral legitimacy. The so-called “populism” challenges the dictatorship of the status quo … and rightly so. It is a sign that even in the midst of our degraded and impoverished political culture, the historical agency of the European peoples can be reborn. …

In this moment, we ask all Europeans to join us in rejecting the utopian fantasy of a multicultural world without borders. We rightly love our homelands, and we seek to hand on to our children every noble thing that we have ourselves received as our patrimony. As Europeans, we also share a common heritage, and this heritage asks us to live together in peace as a Europe of nations. Let us renew national sovereignty, and recover the dignity of a shared political responsibility for Europe’s future.

We must take responsibility.

Phillipe Bénéton (France)

Rémi Brague (France)

Chantal Delsol (France)

Roman Joch (Česko)

Lánczi András (Magyarország)

Ryszard Legutko (Polska)

Roger Scruton (United Kingdom)

Robert Spaemann (Deutschland)

Bart Jan Spruyt (Nederland)

Matthias Storme (België)

The most interesting thing Ann Corcoran says in this video is that Muslim “refugees” are being sent to America (as they were sent to Europe) by the Organization of the Islamic Conference*,  in collusion (or a better word may be conspiracy) with Leftist bureaucrats. And – in America’s case – with sentimental religious groups.

The video was published in 2015. The influx of Muslims was encouraged under the disastrous Obama presidency.

Now President Trump has significantly reduced the number of Muslims admitted into the United States by banning all entry from certain Muslim countries.

 

*Now calling itself the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

This is about the drowning of the West.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), since its establishment in 1950, has resettled some 50 million refugees – an extraordinary achievement by any standards.

So Denis MacEoin writes at Gatestone.

An achievement? We would call it a vast disaster, a colossal calamity. (The United Nations must be destroyed.)  And the rest of his article proves our contention.

So we quote his article with appreciation, in strong agreement with most of his opinions.

Refugees are back in the news. This summer, the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa is likely to rise significantly.

According to the Daily Telegraph:

Europe could face a new wave of migrant arrivals this summer, a leaked German government report has warned. Up to 6.6m people are waiting in countries around the Mediterranean to cross into Europe, according to details of the classified report leaked to Bild newspaper.

Six million six hundred thousand people are about to cross the Mediterranean and enter Europe.

With the closing of the route through the Balkans and entry via Greece, most refugees, economic migrants and asylum seekers are crossing the Mediterranean into Spain or Italy, putting those countries under enormous strain. Since 2016, Austria has strengthened border police to prevent thousands more entering from Italy, and increased the number of troops and armored vehicles on the border in 2017.

On World Refugee Day 2016, the United Nation’s High Commission for Refugees announced that there are now more displaced persons than there were after World War Two: “The total at the end of 2015 reached 65.3 million – or one out of every 113 people on Earth… The number represents a 5.8 million increase on the year before.”

There are over sixty-five million displaced people in the world right now. 

…  The rise in criminality in general, rape, Islamic radicalization, and even terror attacks as a result of a barely controlled influx of migrants from mainly Muslim countries has created alarm in [European] country after country.

This alarm has led to serious divisions. It has divided people politically, with the left and centrists welcoming increasing numbers and the right  …  calling for more rigid controls and even the expulsion of many incomers. Even this division conceals two important issues.

First, it is easy to forget that many countries are legally bound to accept refugees from wherever they originate. These are the 142 countries who are signatories to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol extending it. They include European countries into which refugees have been coming, such as Germany, Spain, Italy, France and the UK. (The United States is signatory only to the 1967 Protocol.) The Convention guarantees that refugees shall not be sent back into harm’s way, and that, according to the UNHCR, “refugees deserve, as a minimum, the same standards of treatment enjoyed by other foreign nationals in a given country and, in many cases, the same treatment as nationals”. Among the few non-signatories are the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Second, there is a moral dimension that transcends simple party politics. Many religious people, such as Christians, may give greater priority to compassion for their fellow man than national concerns about the ability to cope with overwhelming numbers of new arrivals or ways of integrating them into their own societies. Many Jewish people, conscious of the world’s failure to take in hundreds of thousands of Jews in the years leading up to, and even during, the Holocaust, also feel a moral obligation to show a level of concern for today’s refugees far above what was shown to their grandparents. This view also extended to the way a barely-established state, Israel, took in around a million Jews expelled from Arab states after 1948.

Generosity and moral actions, however, may unintentionally make matters worse. In a recent Gatestone article on migrants, Douglas Murray quotes a statement by Bill Gates, a philanthropist who has started to rethink the results of such generosity:

On the one hand you want to demonstrate generosity and take in refugees. But the more generous you are, the more word gets around about this – which in turn motivates more people to leave Africa. Germany cannot possibly take in the huge number of people who are wanting to make their way to Europe.

Balancing legal requirements, stemming from the 1951 Convention, with the needs of national security, finance, and social cohesion, still proves a major dilemma for signatory states. Non-signatories such as the Gulf States, vastly wealthier than European countries such as Greece or Italy, have no such a dilemma, even though many Syrian and North African refugees speak much the same language, have the same religion, and practice similar customs in daily life. …

There are likely to be further waves of refugees in the next few years, then more from Syria now that Islamic State is all but finished in Raqqa. The civil war in Syria, with the ISIS threat to a large extent removed, is certain to intensify; then more will flee Iraq with the recapture of a battered Mosul and further clashes between Sunni and Shi’i militias; then more from Libya, where ISIS-affiliated groups clash with a multitude of other Islamist fighters; then more from other failed and failing states in North Africa, the Middle East, the rest of Africa and Afghanistan, where the Taliban are again resurgent – more, in fact, from everywhere as social structures break down further, now that so many qualified people such as doctors, teachers, scientists have vanished to Europe. …

The collapse around the world of so many countries that never became democracies – countries lacking in abundant natural resources and whose dictators, taking international aid for their own pockets, sucked them dry – has led to an exodus that threatens to displace some of the world’s leading democracies. Many are now under a barely manageable strain and growing impoverishment, actually enabled by our democratic values, our concern for international conventions, our compassion and, at times, our naïvete. … Our decline will leave future refugees without sanctuaries in which they may thrive and give their children the opportunities for which they came.

In other words, Western democracies that accept hordes of refugees from the world’s hellholes will be turned into hellholes themselves, and there will be no refuge anywhere on earth. 

Tyranny scatters the miserable, who can only turn the world into one big hellhole of misery. 

Something, however, is missing. The left, who so often lead the campaigns to welcome to our shores an almost unfettered number of newcomers …  have in recent years justified their actions through the concept of intersectionality.

In itself, intersectionality could a useful way of looking at the world by seeing links between people who suffer different forms of oppression, such as racism, misogyny, homophobia and so on. It argues, for example, that a poor black woman has more issues to solve than, say, a middle-class white woman, even though both may be victims of male oppression. In theory, it is a useful tool; in practice, not so much.

How does intersectionality apply to refugees? Well, in general the “Left” have made the open reception of refugees a major cause, using intersectionality to justify this while condemning any other approach as fascist.

Articles often drip with standard far-left language: “emancipate ourselves from all forms of oppression”, “if we want to fight capitalism with all its forms of oppression”, and “white supremacist behavior harms our political self-organization” and other displays of racism framed in victimhood.

Referring to Linda Sarsour, a prominent Palestinian-American “anti-Zionist”, Benjamin Gladstone argues in Tablet Magazine that

No matter what the Sarsours of the world say, Jewish issues do belong in the intersectional justice movement. … Despite its enormous value and importance, however, the idea of intersectionality can also be manipulated to exclude Jewish issues from pro-justice movements.

Why “Jewish issues”? And what does this have to do with refugees? The answer is that the “Left” … [has] turned intersectionality into two seemingly unlinked matters: as an argument to call for unlimited entry for refugees and other migrants; and as a weapon to advance their hostility for Israel in demonstrations, in conferences, and in their written work.

The clearest expression of this refusal to include Jewish concerns in any intersectional discussion is the way “Left-wing” and anti-racist demonstrators, and speakers, starting in Ferguson in 2014, have consciously linked the Black Lives Matter movement to the Palestinian cause, blaming the “oppression” of the Palestinians on Jews, Zionists, and Israel, and then appealing to intersectionality as the basis for that link. This pairing of two causes rapidly became a core part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Already by 2015, in a deeply anti-Semitic and anti-Israel document, the 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine, one reads:

Our support extends to those living under occupation and siege, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the 7 million Palestinian refugees exiled in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. The refugees’ right to return to their homeland in present-day Israel is the most important aspect of justice for Palestinians.

There is, of course, no mention of Palestinian repression of free speech, of corrupt Palestinian governance, of Palestinian terrorism, or other abuses that follow in the wake of rotten governance. This overdone concern for generations of the descendants of Palestinian refugees – people forced to live in camps, not by Israel but by the Arab states referred to – is then artificially made to meld with the intersectional concern for refugees who are fleeing into Europe from wars in Muslim countries.

It is precisely here that the pretence of intersectionality on the left is most fully exposed. It is not just that supporters of intersectionality refuse to accept Jews as recipients of their outpourings of love and generosity, or that they focus in a racist and fascist manner on the supposed evils of the only Jewish state. They show themselves to be hypocrites in two ways.

To begin with, there actually are no Palestinian people, as used in the current sense of the term. The Oslo Accords accurately refer to Arabs, which is what they are – Arabs who left Israel in the war of 1947-8 in order not to be involved in a conflict in which other Arabs fought with Jews and Christians and who currently make up more than a million of the Arabs now living in Israel as citizens with equal rights. These Arabs who abandoned Israel while it was fighting for its life and who afterwards wanted to return. Israel refused on the grounds that these countrymen had not been loyal. It is those displaced persons, largely in Jordan and Lebanon, who then found themselves on the wrong end of a war that their brother Arabs had started and, to everyone’s astonishment, had lost. It is these Arabs (and their descendants), who fled Israel during the War of 1947-8, and who are therefore considered by Israel a fifth-column, who are what we now call the Palestinians.

And the UN has never attempted to resettle them. On the contrary, that nefarious institution has deliberately kept them, generation after generation, as  refugees.

Jews have remained in place in the area continuously for more than three thousand years – with Arabs, Christians, Turks, Helenes, Philistines, and whoever else came along – even when, at times, many were forced out.

One might have assumed that this history of abuse of the Jews would excite intersectionalists into reaching out to Jewish people everywhere and working with them to quell anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish terrorism. Instead, they have chosen to align with a people whose leaders have refused multiple times to accept a Palestinian state each time it was offered to them.

Instead, they apparently prefer to hate Jews and the Jewish state of Israel.

This is important. Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms and Russia in World War I, long before the Holocaust, and from Arab and Muslim states were among the earliest to head for Palestine, then Israel, in order to build a new Jewish homeland, where Jews would be guaranteed a refuge from violence and hatred. Do not those refugees deserve the same intersectional support as those flowing into Europe today? Do not the many thousands of black Jews who went from Ethiopia and Sudan to Israel deserve backing from Black Lives Matter? Do not the thousands of Indian Jews now in Israel deserve friendship from people of color?

We are sure that Denis MacEoin knows that as Black Live Matter and all anti-Israel movements are battalions of the international Left, they class the Israelis as “colonialists”, and – however absurdly – as “white supremacists”. What BLM is really all about is promoting communism. That is what they are paid for, by George Soros and other haters of America and Western civilization. They should not be allowed for one moment to think that we are taken in by their claims to victimhood or believe they have any sympathy for actual victims. They are transparently hypocritical, as is the whole of the Left.

Instead, left-wing intersectionalists work towards an increasingly unachievable Palestinian “right of return”. …

There is no room here for a discussion of the spurious nature of “Palestinian Refugees” or the fact that they are kept in refugee camps – not by Israel but by Arab states. But such a discussion within groups who use intersectionality as a tool for hatred against Jews and Israelis is long overdue.

If intersectionality means anything as a system for bringing diverse peoples together, for helping refugees settle, for expressing solidarity with people who have suffered, it is meaningless if certain people are excluded. The “mistake” the Israelis made seems to have been that, although driven out as refugees, they exercised their right to self-determination, returned to their homeland, and turned it into one of the most successful countries in the world. The Palestinians, who had an equal opportunity to attain the same success, remain in poverty and disarray, with terrorism for 80 years as their only notable achievement. If they had agreed to work with the Jews instead of fighting them, who knows where they might be today? That would have been positive intersectionality, bringing two suffering people together for the common good. But to some, being “politically correct” evidently matters more than making the world a better place.

When most European countries have become Muslim countries – which will be quite soon now – Israel will be an island of freedom and democracy in a vast ocean of  Islam. That is a sea that really is rising. How can Israel survive? Islam will flow over it, as it will over every democracy eventually. Unless it is stopped now. And there is no sign of it being stopped (except perhaps in America, by President Trump).

Admitting millions of Muslims into Western democratic countries is not a way to save the drowning, but to be drowned.

In our recent post A new idea that could save Europe? (October 3, 2017), we quote an article by Soeren Kern about the Austrian Foreign  Minister Sebastian Kurz, expected to be the next Chancellor, taking measures to preserve Austrian national identity and culture by forcing the hordes of Muslims that have poured into his country to become Austrian. No more multiculturalism. Immigrants must speak German and obey Austrian law. He is the first European leader to make such a demand on Muslim immigrants.

An even better solution to the threat and likelihood of European countries being swamped by Muslims and before much longer dominated by them, is not to let them in at all. It is the preferred solution of  the Hungarian and Polish governments, and now also of a leader of the Czech Republic.

Here again is Soeren Kern, writing at Gatestone:

A “politically incorrect” billionaire businessman opposed to further EU integration is on track to become the next prime minister of the Czech Republic.

Andrej Babis, a Slovak-born former finance minister who has been sharply critical of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy, is leading the polls ahead of general elections, set for October 20.

Babis, one of the country’s wealthiest people, presents himself as a non-ideological results-oriented reformer. He has pledged to run the Czech Republic like a business after years of what he calls corrupt and inept management. He is demanding a return of sovereignty from the European Union and rejects the euro; he argues that it would “be another issue that Brussels would be meddling with”. He has also said he plans to cut government spending, stop people from “being parasites” in the social welfare system, and fight for Czech interests abroad. Babis is often referred to as “the Czech Donald Trump”. 

Babis’s anti-establishment party ANO (which stands for “Action of Dissatisfied Citizens” and is also the Czech word for “yes”) is centrist, technocratic and pro-business. ANO, which rejects political labels, has attracted voters from both left and right, pulling support away from the established parties. Babis has said that ANO aims to replace left and right with “common sense.”

A recent poll shows that support for ANO has grown to 30.9%, while the support for the Czech Social Democrats has dropped to 13.1%. The pro-Russian Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia has 11.1%; the nationalist Civic Democratic Party 9.1%. TOP 09, the only openly pro-EU party, will not pass the 5% barrier of entry into Parliament; it is supported by only 4.4% of Czech voters.

Babis’s approach to the EU is pragmatic: “They give us money, so our membership is advantageous for us.” He does not want the Czech Republic to leave the EU, but he is opposed to the country joining the eurozone:

No euro. I don’t want the euro. We don’t want the euro here. Everybody knows it’s bankrupt. It’s about our sovereignty. I want the Czech koruna, and an independent central bank. I don’t want another issue that Brussels would be meddling with.

Babis has expressed opposition to mass migration: “I have stopped believing in successful integration and multiculturalism.” He has called on Merkel “to give up her political correctness and to begin to act” on securing European borders:

In return for billions of euros, she should make sure that Greece and Turkey completely stop the arrival of refugees in Europe. Otherwise, it will be her fault what happens to the European population. Unfortunately, Mrs. Merkel refuses to see how serious the situation is in Germany and in other EU nations. Her attitude is really tragic.

Babis blamed Merkel for the December 2016 jihadist attack on a Berlin Christmas market:

Unfortunately, the migration policy is responsible for this dreadful act. It was she who let migrants enter Germany and the whole of Europe in uncontrolled waves, without papers, therefore without knowing who they really are. Germany is paying a high price for this policy. The solution is peace in Syria and the return of migrants to their homes. There is no place for them in Europe.

Babis has rejected pressure from the European Commission, which has launched infringement procedures against the Czechs, Hungarians and Poles for refusing to comply with an EU plan to redistribute migrants. In August 2016, he tweeted:

I will not accept refugee quotas for the Czech Republic. The situation has changed. We see how migrants react in Europe. There is a dictator in Turkey. We must react to the needs and fears of the citizens of our country. We must guarantee the security of Czech citizens. Even if we are punished by sanctions.

In June 2017, Babis reiterated that the Czech Republic would not be taking orders from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels:

We have to fight for what our ancestors built here. If there will be more Muslims than Belgians in Brussels, that’s their problem. I don’t want that here. They won’t be telling us who should live here.

Babis has called on the EU to establish a system to sort economic migrants from legitimate asylum seekers:

The EU must say: You cannot come to us to be unemployed and immediately take social benefits.

In an interview with the Czech daily Pravo, Babis said:

We are not duty-bound to accept anyone and we are not even now able to do so. Our primary responsibility is to make sure that our own citizens are safe. The Czech Republic has enough of its own problems, people living on the breadline, single mothers. The West European politicians keep repeating that it is our duty to comply with what the immigrants want because of their human rights. But what about the human rights of the Germans or the Hungarians? Why should the British accept that the wealth which has been created by many generations of their ancestors, should be consumed by people without any relationship to that country and its culture? People who are a security risk and whose desire it is not to integrate but to destroy European culture?

The public service media in some countries have been brainwashing people. They have been avoiding problems with the immigrants. Politicians have also been lying to their citizens. This has only increased tension between the indigenous population and the immigrants. It is not acceptable that Europeans should have fewer rights than immigrants.

It is unthinkable that the indigenous European population should adapt themselves to the refugees. We must do away with such nonsensical political correctness. The refugees should behave like guests, that is they should be polite, and they certainly do not have the right to choose what they want to eat.

Europe and Germany in particular are undergoing an identity crisis. There is a deep chasm between what people think and what the media tell them. …

Many of the Middle Eastern refugees are unusable in industry. Many of them are also basically illiterate …

With the rise of AfD in Germany which is frankly an anti-Islamization party*; a growing grassroots movement of protest against the Islamization of Britain; the refusal of Eastern European countries to accept Muslim immigrants at all; and a world leader, US President Donald Trump, who has set an example by taking the common sense step of banning immigrants from certain Islamic countries, is there reason at last to hope that Western civilization will survive?

The demographic facts are against it. Most of the countries of the European Union, and Britain, will have Muslim majorities in this century. If most of the Muslims became Europeanized on the Austrian model, the demographic statistics would not be a determining factor. But will the Austrian solution succeed? Will other EU member countries follow it?

Will Islam itself change to conform to Western values, law, customs, secularism?

In other words, will the looming darkness be dispelled?

 

*Also see here.

The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), formerly led by Nigel Farage, recently held an election for a new leader. The candidate who should have been elected is Anne Marie Waters, who is against the EU, and against the Islamization of Britain. Instead, a lack-luster candidate, Henry Bolton, with little known support, was somehow finagled into winning.

Amazingly, Nigel Farage opposed Anne Marie Waters and continues to support Henry Bolton!

In this video, Tommy Robinson, patriot and spokesman for millions of Britons ignored by successive governments (not “far-right”, not a neo-Nazi, not a racist) protests the election and what has happened to UKIP; predicts its demise; stresses the importance of combating the Islamic jihad; and challenges Nigel Farage, whom he had much admired, with highly justified indignation:

https://youtu.be/fSlYrebwACE 

The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that progress was “always a knight’s move forward” – alluding of course to the move a knight makes in a game of chess: one straight and one diagonal.

It seems he may be right. And though I hate to admit it, a knight’s move forward is quite similar to the Hegelian/Marxist dialectic: thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis.

What has this to do with our concern with what’s happening in our world, our time?

Well, one politician, in one country in Europe, has come up with an idea that neither accepts the status quo – his country being flooded with Muslims who will increasingly change the culture and politics of his country for the worse – nor the extreme remedy prescribed by angry protestors, to expel them all. He takes the way things stand (call it the thesis), observes the growing protest (the antithesis), and comes up with a series of practical steps that could possibly turn the Muslim invaders into acceptable Europeans (the synthesis).

Soeren Kern writes about this politician and his idea at Gatestone:

A groundbreaking new law regulating the integration of immigrants has gone into effect in Austria. The so-called Integration Law — which bans full-face Muslim veils in public spaces and prohibits Islamic radicals from distributing the Koran — establishes clear rules and responsibilities for recognized asylum seekers and refugees who are granted legal residence in the country.

Austrian officials say the main goal of the law is to promote respect for Austrian values, customs and culture; Muslims claim that the measure unfairly targets them and will promote “Islamophobia”. 

As of October 1, anyone covering his or her face in public with a burka, niqab or mask is subject to a fine of €150 ($175).

By itself, that law is not new. Other European countries have it too.

The law, which follows similar bans in Belgium, France and the Netherlands, requires the face to be completely visible in all public spaces, including bus, rail, air and sea transport. Those who refuse to comply are subject to arrest.

But Austria is doing more than that:

The new law also requires immigrants from non-EU countries to sign an “integration contract” which obligates them to learn written and spoken German and to enroll in courses about the “basic values of Austria’s legal and social order”. Immigrants are also required to “acquire knowledge of the democratic order and the basic principles derived from it”. 

Immigrants are subsequently required to take an “immigration exam” to prove that they have “in-depth knowledge of the German language for independent use” and “in-depth knowledge of the fundamental values ​​of the legal and social order of the Republic of Austria”. 

Immigrants have a period of two years to prove their compliance with the integration agreement. Those who fail to comply are subject to fines of up to €500 ($585), imprisonment of two weeks and the loss of social welfare benefits — but not deportation.

The new integration law is the brainchild of Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, the leader of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). Kurz, who has taken an increasingly hard line on immigration, is leading the opinion polls in the run-up to parliamentary elections on October 15 and is on track to becoming Austria’s next chancellor.

He explained the rationale behind the new law:

The new integration law regulates the central framework conditions for the integration of people who want to settle in Austria: We need clear rules and regulations in order to achieve social solidarity and social peace. The principle on which this law is based is “integration through performance”. People are not judged by their country of origin but by their will to contribute to Austria. The main goal of this law is to promote integration. … We will not tolerate any symbols that aim to build a counter-society with us.”

Previously, Kurz was instrumental in reforming Austria’s century-old Islam Law (Islamgesetz), governing the status of Muslims in the country. Kurz’s other new law, which was passed in February 2015, is aimed at integrating Muslims and fighting Islamic radicalism by promoting an “Islam with an Austrian character”.

It also stresses that Austrian law must take precedence over Islamic Sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

Austria’s Muslim population now exceeds 700,000 (or roughly 8% of the total population), up from an estimated 340,000 (or 4.25%) in 2001 and 150,000 (or 2%) in 1990, according to data compiled by the University of Vienna.

The massive demographic and religious shift underway in Austria, traditionally a Roman Catholic country, appears irreversible. In Vienna, where the Muslim population now exceeds 12.5%, Muslim students already outnumber Catholic students at middle and secondary schools. Muslim students are also on the verge of overtaking Catholics in Viennese elementary schools.

At the same time, Austria has emerged as a major base for radical Islam. Austria’s Agency for State Protection and Counterterrorism (BVT) has warned of the “exploding radicalization of the Salafist scene in Austria”. Salafism is an anti-Western ideology that seeks to impose Islamic Sharia law.

Sebastian Kurz

“The immigration seen in recent years is changing our country not in a positive but in a negative way,” said Kurz, who is campaigning on a “law and order” platform: “Uncontrolled immigration destroys the order in a country.”

His plan might work.

Yet … the knight’s movement will not stop. Impossible to predict what antithesis will arise from an integrated Austrian Islam, to give rise to what synthesis.

What is certain is that Europe has been changed forever by mass Muslim immigration.

Whether it can in any way be made into an asset rather than the ominous threat it is now, remains to be seen.

Muslims are forming political parties in Europe, and are succeeding in getting candidates elected to parliamentary seats.

Long before they have enough seats to form governments, they will have turned West European states into full-blown tyrannies. The process has begun with the suppression of free speech (criticizing Islam) in Germany, Austria, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy.

Judith Bergman writes about some of the Islamic parties at Gatestone:

Sweden’s brand new first Islamic party, Jasin, is aiming to run for the 2018 parliamentary elections. According to the website of the party, Jasin is a “multicultural, democratic, peaceful party” that is “secular” and aims to “unite everyone from the East … regardless of ethnicity, language, race, skin color or religion”. Jasin apparently knows what the Swedes like to hear.

In an interview, the founder and spokesperson of the party, Mehdi Hosseini, who came from Iran to Sweden 30 years ago, revealed that the leader of the new political party, Sheikh Zoheir Eslami Gheraati, does not actually live in Sweden. He is an Iranian imam, who lives in Teheran, but Jasin wants to bring him to Sweden: “I thought he was such a peaceful person who would be able to manifest the peaceful side of Islam. I think that is needed in Sweden,” said Hosseini.

The party does not, however, fit the description Hosseini gives it. He uses the vocabulary of tolerance to deceive Swedish voters. It is deliberate deception – taqiyya – which is not just permitted but prescribed by Islam.

But the lies he tells for the ears of Swedes won’t do for Muslim voters who don’t want democracy and tolerance of other religions. They want a party that will do what the Koran and the hadith say  it must do. So for those who don’t like that description of his party, Hosseini has another:

The purpose of the Jasin party, however, does not appear to be either secular or multicultural. In its application to the Swedish Election Authority, the party writes – with refreshing honesty – that it will “firstly follow exactly what the Koran says, secondly what Shiite imams say”. The Jasin party also states that it is a “non-jihadi and missionary organization, which will spread Islam’s real side, which has been forgotten and has been transformed from a beautiful to a warlike religion …”

In mid-September, the Swedish Election Authority informed Jasin that it failed to deliver the needed signatures, but that it is welcome to try again. Anna Nyqvist, from the Swedish Election Authority, said that a political party with an anti-democratic or Islamic agenda is eligible to run for parliament if the party’s application fulfills all formalities.

And what does it matter if the leader of a party which might in time form a government in Sweden lives in another country? (Government of one country by another used to be called “colonialism”.)

Nyqvist considers it unproblematic that the leader of the party lives in Iran. “This is the essence of democracy, that all views should be allowed. And it is up to them to choose their party leader,”  Nyqvist said.

Can any literate person raised in the West be as stupid as that? Oh, yes. Many.

Islamist parties have begun to emerge in many European countries, such as the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, and France.

In the Netherlands, two Dutch Turks, former members of the Socialist party, founded a new party, Denk, only six months before the Dutch parliamentary elections. Despite the short timeframe, they managed to get one-third of the Muslim vote and three seats in parliament. The party does not hide its affinity for Turkey: Criticism of Turkey is taboo just as is their refusal to name the Turkish mass-slaughter of the Armenians during the First World War a genocide. The party ran on a platform against the integration of immigrants into Dutch society (instead advocating “mutual acceptance”, a euphemism for creating parallel Muslim societies); and for establishment of a “racism police” that would register “offenders” and exclude them from holding public office.

In Austria, Turkish Muslims also formed a new party, the New Movement for the Future (NBZ), established in January 2017. According to its founder, Adnan Dincer, the NBZ is not an Islamic party or a Turkish party, despite being composed mainly of Turkish Muslims. [Yet] several of the party’s Facebook posts are written only in Turkish. [And] Dincer has made no secret of the fact that his party strongly backs Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan … 

Who is taking Turkey back from the secular democracy it has been for nearly a century, to Islam-flavored autocracy.

In Belgium, several Islamic parties are preparing to run in the next elections. Dyab Abu Jahjah, apparently behind one of them, while not having presented a formal platform yet, has said he wants to “be part of an egalitarian radical renaissance that will conquer Brussels, Belgium, Europe and the whole world, with new politics of radical equality… defeat the forces of supremacy … of sustained privileges … of the status-quo … in every possible arena”.

Jahjah is a Lebanese immigrant, who emerged on the European scene, when he founded the now defunct Brussels-based Arab-European League in 2001. It was a pan-European political group aiming to create a Europe-wide “sharocracy” – a supposedly sharia-based “democracy”. In 2001, after the September 11 terror attacks, Jahjah said that he and many Muslims had felt a “sweet revenge feeling”. In 2004, Jahjah said that he supported the killing of foreign troops in Iraq. “I consider every death of an American, British or Dutch soldier as a victory.” He has also been opposed to the assimilation of Muslims, which he has described as “cultural rape”.

Jahjah used to be considered a Hezbollah-supporting extremist, and, although he describes himself as a “political friend” of Jeremy Corbyn, he was banned from entering Britain. In Belgium, however, he is seen as a respectable activist, leader of a group called Movement X, and formerly with his own weekly column in the Belgian daily De Standaard. The Belgian political magazine Knack named Jahjah the country’s fourth most influential person, just behind Manchester City footballer Vincent Kompany. In January 2017, however, De Standaard fired Jahjah after he praised a terror attack in Jerusalem. “By any means necessary, #freepalestine,” Jahjah had tweeted after a Muslim ISIS-affiliated terrorist plowed a truck through a crowd of young Israeli soldiers visiting Jerusalem, killing four and injuring countless others.

Jahjah will likely experience fierce competition from the “I.S.L.A.M.” party, founded in 2012, and working to implement Islamic law, sharia, in Belgium. The party already has branches in the Brussels districts of Anderlecht, Molenbeek and Liege. The party wants to “translate religion into practice”. …

The party has put forth a mayoral candidate for the Brussels municipal elections in 2018: Michel Dardenne, who converted to Islam in 2002. In his program, Dardenne speaks mainly of how much the party respects Belgian democracy and its constitution, while simply wanting to help an undefined populace against “the elites”. He may have found it easier to appeal to “progressive” non-Muslims that way. Brussels, 25% Muslim, has enormous potential for Islamic parties.

In France, several Islamic parties are also preparing to run in elections. One party is the PEJ, established in 2015 by French-Turkish Muslims and reportedly connected to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP. … The PEJ has already approved 68 candidates and wants to abolish the separation of church and state, make veils mandatory for schoolgirls in public schools, introduce halal food in all schools and fight “Islamophobia”.

Do Europeans want Islam to replace their own political systems and cultures? Are they aware that that is what is happening? Hard to tell.

Judith Bergman can’t tell. She asks –

How many Europeans are even paying attention to their [the Islamic parties’] agendas?

And who opened their paths to power?

The short answer is, the Left. Governments that are socialist in fact even when the parties in power are “conservative” in name. Bureaucrats who saw their populations shrinking to a point where it would become difficult to maintain their socialist welfare states, so in order to have people, lots and lots of people to pay into the welfare system, they imported millions of Muslims from the Third World, without a moment’s consideration of what values, what laws, what customs, what antagonisms the masses of newcomers brought with them. And, ironically, the majority of them are takers from the state rather than contributors to it. (For instance, 90% of immigrants to Austria are wholly dependent on state welfare.)

There’s nothing in the Koran about social security, free education, or national health services. Or democracy. Or the equality of women. Or same-sex marriage. Or against slavery.

But that will be just fine with West European leaders as long as the application of the Islamic party in power “has fulfilled all formalities”.

 

Note: Germany has allowed a terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), to register as a political party and – on a joint list with the Marxist-Leninist Party – nominate candidates for the federal parliament. See our post A strange, ironic, and tragic historical moment, September 9, 2027.