I've been saying, for at least twenty years, that Europe was doomed, that an invader was already in the moribund nations of the continent, and that in another generation, perhaps two, most of Europe would be under the sandal of a Muslim caliphate.
I stand by that prediction. I can see it happening, right now, and it sure looks like most of the so-called leadership of Europe is welcoming their conquerors in; never in history have nation-states so willingly surrendered their culture, their countries, their lives.
In 2006, author Bruce Bawer was thinking the same thing. He looks back now and sees that he, too, was right. And now, in a column published Tuesday in FrontPage Magazine, Mr. Bawer is here to say "I told you so."
It was twenty years ago this month that Doubleday published While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. It was the fastest seller of all my books: in the hours after it became available, its sales rank on Amazon kept improving for hours until it was in the double digits. The next week it made the New York Times bestseller list. One reason for this instant success was obvious: the book happened to have appeared at the height of the Danish cartoons controversy, at a moment when Muslims all over the planet were rioting, damaging embassies, and committing coldblooded murder in response to some newspaper cartoons of Muhammed. This worldwide mayhem was, thus far, the most vivid example of the civilizational challenge that was the subject of my book.
What's interesting is the response to his book; remember what I said about Europe willingly placing its head on the block?
While Europe Slept won plaudits from Booklist (“a book of the utmost importance”) and from reviewers like Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer (“timely and incisive”) and J. Peder Zane in the Raleigh News and Observer (“indispensable”). But most of the mainstream media came gunning for me. For in the years since 9/11, the Western media and political establishment had chosen to embrace a dishonest view of Islam as a “religion of peace.” Newspapers ran absurdly sympathetic profiles of imams in the West, depicting them as deeply spiritual and hard-working and devoted to their families and flocks, and to “bridge-building” with non-Muslims – all the while delicately avoiding any mention of their ties to terrorist groups, their hatred for Jews, their belief in the death penalty for homosexuality, their systematic treatment of women and girls as veritable slaves, their yearning for sharia law, and their dedication to Islamic conquest.
I've read the Qur'an. All of these things are in there. Now, a caveat: Arabic, the original language of the Islamic text, is a very different language from English. My copy of the Qur'an has both English and Arabic text, and I'm limited to the former. So there's always the chance something is lost in translation.
But the behavior of Europe's Muslims, 20 years ago and today, speaks volumes all by itself. As Mr. Bawer describes:
That was a long time ago. Since then, I’ve followed the rise of Islam in the West very closely. I’ve written another couple of books and hundreds of articles on the topic. Things have moved, alas, in exactly the direction I expected. I honestly wish I had been wrong. But I wasn’t. The Muslim percentage of the European population has climbed steadily. In Vienna, for example, more than 40% of the schoolchildren are Muslim. In London, only 30% of the population are ethnic English. And Islam is not just a phenomenon of the big cities, as it once was. In small towns where, two decades ago, you never saw a hijab, they’re now unavoidable. A new study shows that by 2035, the majority of the inhabitants of Germany will have immigrant backgrounds. As for employment rates, recent figures from the UK – where 78% of Muslim women and 63% of Muslim men are on the dole – are more or less representative.
Two decades after While Europe Slept, the confident predictions that European Muslims, after a generation or so, would assimilate socially and culturally have been proven disastrously wrong. This January, a Norwegian politician noted that “a parents’ meeting at a school in Lillestrøm municipality requires 13 different interpreters, at a cost of 70,000 kroner” (about $7,000). As Muslims have grown increasingly numerous and powerful, moreover, they’ve grown increasingly hostile and aggressive. By 2015, even PBS had to acknowledge that Muslims in Marseilles, a city once seen by some as a model of multicultural harmony, had become radical – and violent.
This is how it's done. This is how a civilization falls. Europe's Islamic population came, en masse, from fundamentally broken nations, and those same Muslims now, in Europe, clamor for the installation of the very institutions, the very practices, the very laws, and the very religion that made them broken nations in the first place.
The barbarians are already inside the city walls, and the people of Europe are paying them to be there. Not only has Europe accepted the conqueror, but they are paying the conqueror to invade them, to subjugate them, to destroy them.
That's the goal. Spoken or unspoken, that's the goal.
Read More: Virginia Democrats Are Cooking Up a Chilling ‘Islamophobia’ Bill That Should Alarm Everyone
Watch: Zohran Mamdani Rips the Islamist Mask Off With Insane, Deranged 'Migration' Speech
As evidence, note that most immigrants assimilate into their new home. Here in the United States, Irish, Italian, Polish, German, all the various immigrants from Western nations have assimilated - have become Americans. But the invaders have no intention of doing so.
As their numbers have risen, in short, Muslims in Europe haven’t assimilated – they’ve complained, more and more boldly, that European values and folkways offend them, and demanded that they be altered or abolished. Yet some countries are still holding the gates wide open. “Experts” still call for higher immigration levels. In January, Spain announced plans to grant amnesty to at least half a million illegals, and Sweden’s migration officials were ordered to obey EU guidance stating that ISIS members from Syria merit asylum, while Syrian Christians deserve asylum only “in exceptional cases.”
And they are here. In Dearborn, Michigan. In Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Chicago, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles. They are calling for more mosques. They are calling for sharia law. They are calling for their own, segregated enclaves. And in some places, even here, they are getting what they demand.
This is the great cultural conflict of our time. It's not a battle of civilizations. It's a battle of civilization against barbarity. And if civilization loses, the world will be plunged into a new Dark Age, and from this one, there may be no Renaissance.
