The Strange Death of Europe

THE STRANGE DEATH OF EUROPE: Immigration, Identity, Islam

DOUGLAS MURRAY

Bloomsbury, 2017, 343 pages

In 2016, the most popular baby boy’s name in England was Mohammed and its sundry variants. In the same year, a quarter of high school students in France were Muslims. In 2011, white Britons were in a minority in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs. Walk around certain parts of Europe’s major cities and you could be in Turkey, Africa or the Middle East because it’s all headscarves and Halal. These are just some of the sentinels, notes Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe, that should sound the alarm about a far-reaching demographic revolution in most of Western Europe that will, thanks to mass Third World immigration and migrants’ very high fertility rates, mean that “Europe will not be Europe” within the lifespan of much of the current generation.

This transformation was unasked for, and unwanted by, the European public. In ten western European countries surveyed in 2016, for example, only 36% of Britons thought that immigration was ‘very or fairly positive’ in Britain, only 24% in liberal Sweden felt the same way, just 18% in Germany agreed, whilst in Italy, France and Belgium barely 10%-11% thought immigration even cleared the ‘fairly positive’ bar. Poll after poll over the last decade or so has found that very large majorities of the European public regard Islamic immigration, in particular, as ‘not belonging’ to, or ‘incompatible’ with, or ‘irreconcilable’ with, European society and values.

It is easy to see why mass Third World immigration is unwelcome, as Murray documents. It largely drives housing shortages and affordability, places pressure on access to schooling, health and other state services, and frays social cohesion from the loss of shared cultural values and a shared language.

Immigration does not meet critical labour shortages, says Murray, but steals jobs from Europeans whilst the temporary ‘guest worker’ programs have a habit of becoming permanent. Migrants also rob the taxpayer because more is taken out in social benefits from Europe’s generous welfare states by migrants than is contributed in taxes. Any economic benefits from immigration accrue solely to migrants, and to the employers of cheap labour, whilst migrants’ wage remittances to their families in their home countries are diverted from the local economy.

Importing the next generation of Europeans from Africa as a solution to the labour and demographic problems of Europe’s ageing societies is bizarre and self-contradictory, says Murray, because working-age migrants import their aged family members under ‘family reunification’ immigration schemes, and, of course, the migrant workers themselves age after a few decades, requiring further immigration intake – it’s like a giant, and disastrous, Ponzi scheme, priming Europe for social and economic collapse when the bill becomes due.

Muslim immigration, in particular, is justly seen with growing hostility by the European public. Import the world’s Muslims and you import their retinue of egregious social problems. Grisly terrorism, of course, tops the list of Islamic social pathologies but below this signature dysfunction lies general bigotry and intolerance. A survey of five hundred Muslims in Britain in 2009 found that precisely 0% thought homosexuality was morally acceptable, whilst Jews are a special target, with resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe coming not from the neo-Nazi Right but from Muslim immigrants - Jews are just 1% of the French population, for example, but they are the victims of half of all racist attacks in France.

Muslims’ mediaeval views on women’s rights and freedoms are intensely un-European and anti-Enlightenment. The headline indicator is Female Genital Mutilation (with 130,000 having experienced this traumatic, fidelity-ensuring barbarism in Britain) but Muslim misogyny encompasses a wide range of beliefs and practices which enforcing Muslim women’s second-class status and self-effacement, including mandatory headcoverings and clothing codes, and an ever-present risk of sexual assault and gang-rape especially against non-Muslim Western women who go out unaccompanied at night in skimpy clothes to party, a feminist freedom which many Muslim men find ‘offensive’.

Creeping Sharia Law, says Murray, threatens to undermine the separation of church and state in Europe, a secular right won over centuries of struggle to guarantee freedom of speech, the demise of blasphemy as a crime and to provide a “public space free from clerical intrusion based on holy texts”. A few years of Muslim immigration has now introduced a faith-based regime of censorship and prosecutorial zeal (in 2006, two out of every three British Muslims thought anyone who ‘insulted Islam should be prosecuted’). “A bit more beheading and sexual assault than there used to be”, says Murray mockingly, is the small price to be paid for “a much wider range of cuisines”.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that only 7% of Germans, for example, associate Islam with “openness, tolerance and respect for human rights”. Those who had thought they had won the battle for these societal values in Europe through the “separation of religion from politics and the law”, have had to think again.

Not that progressives have rushed to campaign against Muslim illiberalism. Liberals, and the multiculturalist state, clutching at the phantom evil of ‘Islamophobia!’, appear “more worried about offending Muslims” than protecting homosexuals from gay-bashing, or enforcing the criminal law against FGM, or investigating mass sexual assaults and sexual grooming. Their default setting is to go quiet on Islamic bigotry “just because it is coming from an immigrant community”. ‘There are times’, says the Somali former Muslim, Ayan Ali Hurst, now in exile in the US for her own safety, ‘when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice’.

The problems associated with Muslim immigration are indeed many and various, yet are quarantined from public discussion because of the ideological hegemony of multiculturalism. Establishment governments, says Murray, are acutely aware of the electoral power of Muslim communities, and, buttressed by left-wing progressives who are didactically wedded to anti-racist ‘identity politics’, they “talk up” the alleged artistic, scientific and other wonders of Islam whilst they “talk down” anything good about the host culture by stressing its past colonial guilt, ongoing racism, etc. “Western guilt”, says Murray, has become a “moral intoxicant” in Europe.

Thus are the taps of immigration kept open, flooding the continent with high-fertility migrants, both legal and illegal, who do not want to become European but who do want to retain their ethnic-faith identity, and the welfare dollars, jobs and official ‘Diversity’ adulation that comes with it, in a Europe that is easy for migrants to get into and to remain in (unlike, say, Japan). There are “hundreds of millions of potential economic migrants” in the Third World who are eyeing the same prize. The demographic and social future, for the host continent, is dark.

As a documentary record on immigration and its discontents in Europe, and as a manifesto for immigration-restriction, Murray’s book is excellent, marred only by a stylistic penchant for the interrogative, asking a barrage of questions before deciding that there are just “no answers”. This is too pessimistic by half. The first double-pronged answer would be to stop the immigration mess from getting worse through a zero immigration policy coupled with repatriations (also popular) of resident migrants starting with deportations of immigrant illegals and criminals. Murray avoids these bold, clear, yet widely popular policies, seemingly because they would be portrayed as ‘racist’ or infringing on civil liberties and thus ‘extremist’ according to multicultural orthodoxy.

The ambivalence between immigration policy need and action by politicians who are routinely “unbothered, incurious or in denial” about immigration highlights the disconnect between popular and elite opinion on immigration. Immigration-restrictionist parties (like France’s Front National, Britain’s UKIP, Gert Wilders in Holland, etc.) that could potentially fill the political void have yet to blossom. Despite being in accord with all the public opinion polls on immigration, such parties are still seen as ‘far-right’, a perception not helped by their origins sometimes being mired in the neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic swamp. Such parties also do not hoover up the votes because they are too new (thus lacking organisational experience and stability), and voters do not know, or want, the other economic, social and environmental policies ( which can be a grab-bag of both leftish and reactionary beliefs), that they might be getting from such parties. Institutional political change in Europe comes at grindingly slow tectonic pace. The Trump revolution, achieved by a hostile takeover of an establishment party, is still an outlier in the West.

Murray’s big blindspot is that, despite briefly noting the cheap labour attraction of immigration, as a conservative he has nothing to say about how immigration , even when the migrants are not exploited, is a thoroughly profit-driven capitalist strategy to sell more stuff to more people from an ever-expanding market by getting the government to import massive numbers of new consumers through immigration.

Murray is from the political Right but the politically destitute ‘identitarian’ Left could learn a thing or three on “immigration, identity, Islam” from his concisely subtitled book. An immigration-restrictionist, alternative (Alt) Left could resurrect the left’s political clout by reconnecting with the working class, and abandoning identity politics and the ‘no borders’ lunacy of neo-liberal capitalist economic globalisation. The immigration crisis demands it.