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Thursday, October 22, 2015 | by Guy Millière

Originally published by Gatestone Institute. Republished with permission.

Out with the old, in with the new… European officials estimate that 1.5 million migrants, mostly Muslims, will arrive in the European Union this year. Jews are fleeing Europe in increasing numbers. “Native” Europeans are starting to flee as well.

The flow of illegal migrants does not stop. They land on the Greek islands along the Turkish coast. They still try to get into Hungary, despite a razor wire fence and mobilized army. Their destination is Germany or Scandinavia, sometimes France or the UK. Some of them still arrive from Libya. Since the beginning of January, more than 620,000 have arrived by sea alone. There will undoubtedly be many more: a leaked secret document estimates that by the end of December, there might be 1.5 million.

Journalists in Western Europe continue to depict them as “refugees” fleeing war in Syria. The description is false. According to statistics released by the European Union, only twenty-five percent of them come from Syria; the true number is probably lower. The Syrian government sells passports and birth certificates at affordable prices. The vast majority of migrants come from other countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Nigeria.

Many do not seem to have left in a hurry. Many bring new high-end smartphones and large sums of cash, ten or twenty thousand euros, sometimes more. Many have no passports, no ID, and refuse to give fingerprints.

Whenever people flee to survive, the men come with whole families: women, children, elders. Here, instead, more than 75% of those who arrive are men under 50; few are women, children or elders.

As Christians are now the main targets of Islamists (the Jews fled or were forced out decades ago), the people escaping the war in Syria should be largely composed of Christians. But Christians are a small minority among those who arrive, and they often hide that they are Christians.

Those who enter Europe are almost all Muslims, and behave as some Muslims often do in the Muslim world: they harass Christians and attack women. In reception centers, harassing Christians and attacking women are workaday incidents. European women and girls who live near reception centers are advised to take care and cover up. Rapes, assaults, stabbings and other crimes are on the rise.

Western European political leaders could tell the truth and act accordingly. They do not. They talk of “solidarity,” “humanitarian duty,” “compassion.” From the beginning, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that illegal migrants were welcome: she seemed to change her mind for a moment, but quickly slid back. In France, President François Hollande says the same things as Angela Merkel.

After the heartbreaking image of a dead child being carried on a Turkish beach was published, thousands of Germans and French initially spoke the same way as their leaders. Their enthusiasm seems to have faded fast.

The people of Central Europe were not enthusiastic from the beginning. Their leaders seem to share the feelings of their populations. None spoke as explicitly as Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary. He said out loud what many of his countrymen seemed to think. He spoke of “invasion” and asked if there were another word to describe the massive and often brutal entry into a country of people who have not been invited to do so. He added that a country has the right to decide who is allowed to enter its territory and to guard its borders. He stressed that those who enter Europe are from a “different culture,” and suggested that Islam might not be compatible with European Judeo-Christian values.

Western European political leaders harshly condemned his remarks and the attitude of Central Europe in general. They decided to take a hard line approach, including: forcing recalcitrant countries to welcome immigrants, setting up mandatory quotas that define how many immigrants each EU country must receive, and threatening those countries that declined to obey. Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, said that Europe was built in a spirit of “burden sharing,” and that EU breakup was a risk that could not be excluded.

An acute division, in fact, is emerging between the leaders of Western Europe and the leaders of Central Europe. Another division is growing between the populations of Western Europe and their leaders.

Those who rebuilt Europe after World War II thought that an enlightened elite (themselves) could make a clean sweep of the past and build a dream society where peace and perpetual harmony would reign.

Because they thought democracy had brought Hitler to power, they decided to restrict democracy.^[1] Because they thought nationalism was the cause of the war, they decreed that nationalism was harmful and that the cultural identities in Europe had to disappear and be replaced by a new “European identity” that they would shape.^[2]

Because Europe had a colonialist past and Europeans had believed in the superiority of their cultures, they claimed that Europe should redeem its guilt and affirm that all cultures were equal. And because Islam was at the heart of the culture of people formerly colonized, the Europeans rejected all criticism of Islam, and said that it would blend smoothly into a multicultural Europe. They did not demand the assimilation of Muslims who came to live in Europe in increasing number.

Because the Europeans thought poverty had led to the rise of Nazism, they built welfare states that were supposed to eliminate poverty forever.

Because two world wars had started in Europe, the Europeans decreed that from now on, Europe would renounce the use of force, and solve all conflicts through diplomacy and appeasement.^[3]

We now see the results.

European people still have the right to vote, but are deprived of most of their power: all important political decisions in Europe are made behind closed doors, by technocrats and professional politicians, in Brussels or Strasbourg.

Cultural identities in Europe have been eroded to such a point that saying that Europe is based on Judeo-Christian values has become controversial.

Any criticism of Islam in Europe is treated as a form of racism, and “Islamophobia” is considered a crime or a sign of mental illness.

Islam has not melted into a smooth multiculturalism; it is creating increasingly distressing problems that are almost never brought to light.

Muslim criminality across Europe is high. Consequently, the percentage of Muslims in prisons in Europe is high. In France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, the prison population is 70% Muslim. Many European prisons have become recruitment centers for future jihadis.

Muslim riots may occur for any reason: police upholding the law, a Soccer League celebration or in support of a cause.

Welfare states have created a government-dependent class in Europe of many people who live permanently on social benefits. These people are often Muslim. Much of the time, they are not assimilated — and often show signs of not wanting to assimilate. Many reside in virtually autonomous, so-called no-go zones (e.g. France, the UK, and Germany).

Europe has renounced force; to many, it therefore appears weak, vulnerable and easily able to be overpowered.

Populations of Western Europe increasingly think that the dream society that had been promised has turned into a nightmare. The sudden and often brutal arrival of hundreds of thousands more Muslims most likely prompts Europeans to think the nightmare will get worse. They see, powerlessly, that their leaders speak and act as if they have no awareness of what is happening.

Central European leaders and their people, who have directly experienced authoritarian rule, seem to be thinking that entering the European Union was a huge mistake. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they became members of the EU to join what was called then the “free world.” They do not seem willing to be subjected again to coercive decisions made by outsiders.

After living under the Soviet yoke, they preserved their desire for freedom and self-government, and evidently will not now agree to give them up. They know what submission to Islam could mean. Bulgaria and Romania were occupied by the Ottoman Empire until 1878. Hungary was under the boot of Ottoman rule for more than a hundred and fifty years (1541-1699).

Polls show that a majority of Muslims living in Europe want the application of sharia law and clearly reject any idea of assimilation.

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in Europe have joined fundamentalist Islamic organizations. Thousands have joined jihadist movements and are now fighting in Syria or Yemen. Many have returned and are ready to act against Europe.

Illegal Muslim migrants are likely to join the Muslims already living in Europe; and they will remain Muslim. They will live on social benefits until the bankruptcy of welfare states. They will reside in the “no-go zones,” and the “no-go zones” will continue to grow. Their occupants come from countries where Christians and women are mistreated; in Europe, they are already mistreating Christians and women.

They come from countries where Western civilization is despised and where hatred of Jews is inescapable — and this remains so among Muslims already living in Europe. For more than two decades, almost all assaults against Jews in Europe were committed by Muslims.

Many of those who arrive, according to European intelligence sources, are already radicalized.

A project to overwhelm Europe by a huge wave of migration was already described by the Islamic State in documents discovered this February. It is hard to rule out that the Islamic State plays a role in what is happening. Turkish authorities are ignoring the massive departures taking place from their coast. If they really wanted the current process to stop, they could stop it. That is clearly not what they do. The Islamic State could not survive without Turkish help. Daily flights on Turkish Airlines bring illegal migrants to Istanbul; they continue unhindered to Europe. The Russians, in their military intervention in Syria, similarly does not seem interested in stopping what is occurring.

Angela Merkel said in Strasbourg, on October 7, that migrants entering Europe today are attracted to Europe, for the reasons Europeans migrants who arrived in America a century ago were attracted to America: to “realize a dream,” presumably of opportunity.

In all 28 countries of the European Union, birth rates are low and the population is aging. People under thirty account for only 16% of the population, or 80 million people. In the 22 Arab countries, plus Turkey and Iran, people under thirty account for 70% of the population, or 350 million people.

Jews are fleeing Europe in increasing numbers. “Native” Europeans are starting to flee as well.

In 1972, in his book “The Camp of the Saints,” French writer Jean Raspail described flooding Europe with Muslim migrants crossing the Mediterranean. At the time, the book was a work of fiction. Today, it is reality.

Guy Millière, born in 1950 in Marseille, is a French writer and Professor at the University of Paris.

Notes:

[1] Christopher Booker, Richard North, The Great Deception, The Secret History of the European Union, Bloomsbury Academic, 2005.

[2] Neil Fligstein, Euroclash: The EU, European Identity, and the Future of Europe, Oxford University Press, 2009.

[3] Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union, Cambridge University Press, 2007.