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