Some theorize that  Islam is strengthening in Europe because Europe is abandoning Christianity. The reasoning goes like this: a religion-vacuum is created, so another religion is “sucked in” to fill the empty space.

Another theory is that the Left actually wants to discard the civilized achievements of the West and return to a primitive way of life, the life of the savage.

Thomas Hobbes described such a life – accurately, we think – as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Daniel Greenfield argues that the Left is pining for a return to the primitive; and he sees that the longing of the Left to be disburdened of Western civilization makes it all too easy for Islam to destroy it.

We don’t agree with everything he says in his essay, but we think he’s right about the Left’s perverse wish, and that it coincides with Islam’s ardor to restore the age of its prophet. There does seem to be a suicidal self-hatred among the most privileged class that exists in the world and that ever has existed in all history, which harmonizes with Islam’s hatred of human achievement; an insane nostalgia for the simplicity of poverty which sympathizes with a terrible nostalgia for the dust of the desert soaked with the blood of infidels.

He writes at Sultan Knish:

The clash of civilizations is also a clash of histories. The Western view of history is progressive. A march upward from barbarism to greater phases of enlightenment. … In progressive history, human techniques from the technological to the social can be used to improve life and make the world a better place.

The Islamic view of history is regressive. A lost golden age followed by unbelief and heresy, culminating in a struggle by the believers to restore Islamic dominance. Everything that humans do independently of Islam makes the world a worse place. The perfect touchstone of history was Mohammed. And the only way that history can be set right is by restoring the lost and corrupted caliphates. …

The intellectual elites of the West have begun to make the switch to a regressive model of history. The environmental movement and the postmodern left have become the champions of a regressive history which demands that we turn back the clock and learn to imitate the slums of the Third World in order to become a better society.

That the people doing this are some of the best and the brightest [we’d take issue with that – JB], the graduates of elite institutions and the thinkers and philosophers of the West, who have followed the dark road of social revolution into oblivion and have come away with no reason for their cultures and nations to go on living— testifies to the peril that the West finds itself in.

The progressive model of history is on life support. In its pure form, it hardly exists outside of scientific circles, rationalist atheists and patriotic Americans. And the former two often incorporate it into a global admixture that depends on a … world-state through the United Nations. …

Not real scientists, as opposed to global warmists. And not us rational atheists.

Imagine what Europe would be like if some 90 percent of the population wanted to restore feudalism, theocracy … There’s no need to imagine it. It’s called the Muslim world. And a rising percentage of the European population consists of Muslims who are implementing Sharia, Burqas and Jihad in its major cities.

But the Muslim Jihad is not irrational, it’s arational. Muslims don’t believe in reason as a solution to human problems. They believe in no human solution at all, only the abnegation of humanity to Allah through a clerical guardianship. This is their means of creating a perfect society.

Progressive history accepts human imperfection and builds on it. Regressive history rejects it as a force of evil. Instead it holds up a beacon of a golden past… The daily submission of Muslims arises out of a contempt for the individual as a moral actor, and replaces him with the collective Ummah, the receptacle for their transcendence under the guidance of the clerics. The Jihad abandons individual morality for collective bloodshed in the name of creating a perfect society through world domination. …

Islam … may use modern tools, but it never values them, let alone the gifts and sciences that brought them into being. Its gaze is hopelessly dingy, rimmed with disgust for anything that is less than [their idea of] perfect. The tools are inferior copies of what the Koran makes possible. The societies are corrupted and decadent. …

Everyone is practiced at manipulating everyone else and accordingly there is no real trust outside the family. And little trust even inside it. And all of this only goes to reinforce the essential Islamic message of human worthlessness. …

European expectations of Muslim integration were flawed from the start… Their pessimistic worldview was never compatible with Western democracy. …

Rather than identifying with their new countries, Muslim immigrants instead decided to replace them. To remake them into the same Caliphate mirage under the guardianship of quarreling clerics and greedy uniformed thugs. And no amount of visits to mosques and Ramadan dinners thrown by Western leaders will change that. It only accelerates the process. …

Islam’s aim is unity. The absolute collectivism of the Ummah standing over the diminishing number of Dhimmis who have not yet been convinced to take the plunge into the Sharia pool. It views a society that is based on division as corrupt and confused. Multiculturalism is alien to its ideological DNA. It cannot accept the equality of those who are different. The very idea of it is blasphemous. …

If the West still believed in progress as a moral imperative, it would have no trouble holding the gates. And understanding why the gates need to be held. But the worldview that made that possible is in decline.

The left rejected commercial progress as capitalist, but continued to embrace technological progress and cultural development. Then it rejected technological progress as destructive, culture as perspective and stated that the highest moral principle was for the West to save the world by destroying itself. And under their leadership that is the way it has been ever since…

The left’s regressive history is not national, cultural, religion or even specific. Instead it is primitivism itself that it seeks out. The backward and the barbaric, the poor and the lacking, that is their new compass. …

The sizable number of Muslim immigrants and the Islamic world is more than happy to step into this vacuum created by the willing abandonment of Western civilization. To take another shot at restoring their glory days in gory ways.

Barbarism … undoes civilization, but only once the civilization has undone itself.

We are not so pessimistic. Our civilization is under threat, but it can survive if America comes to its senses and rids itself of its disastrous Left leadership.

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Post Script: Of course the lefty academics, politicians, writers, trade-union leaders, community organizers, and others of that kidney do not want poverty for themselves. They want the rest of us to live in dim cold rooms, grow our own food, give up our cars, never fly, and gratefully accept whatever cheap medical treatment some bureaucrat allows us to have if any at all. But for themselves they want tenure, guaranteed high pensions, lavish research grants, fast cars, frequent free flights with all possible perks, unstinted health care, and restaurants that never skimp on the salt, all at our expense, because they believe that is their due. (Don’t Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore spring immediately to mind?)