Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
For the last several weeks, when the entire world is busy in combating challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, hundreds and thousands of illegal migrants, mostly Muslims, are arriving in Britain through boats, by crossing the English Channel. Experts are considering such a massive influx of migrants in the United Kingdom as the invasion of Britain. Unfortunately, authorities are mostly unaware of this massive influx of illegal migrants.
Every day, the number of illegal migrants reaching British shores is hitting a new daily record despite the national lockdown imposed on British citizens. Meanwhile, the United Nations has also started putting pressure on states to give special status for migrants during the coronavirus pandemic, which is encouraging the ultimate invasion of the West.
The UN also is asking for the swift release of migrants from detention and the requirement to provide access to healthcare, housing, and other services regardless of migration status.
The United Kingdom signed the UN Migration Pact at the end of 2018.
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage said that increasing waves of illegal crossings in the English Channel is the “beginning of an invasion”, with the number of migrants reaching British shores hitting a new daily record despite the national lockdown imposed on British citizens.
Speaking on his LBC radio program, Nigel Farage urged that “at some point in time we have to get a grip on this”, adding that “there is nothing good about what is going on in the English Channel”.
According to media reports, these migrants will likely be afforded the opportunity to apply for asylum, as entering the country illegally from a safe country is not grounds for deportation under European Union regulations which Britain is still bound by.
A report from the anti-mass migration think tank Migration Watch UK found that some 3,200 illegal boat migrants have reached British shores since the beginning of 2018. During that same time period, the British government has deported just 155 bogus asylum seekers.
Islamic conquest of the West
Muslims are gradually increasing the size of migrants in the European nations thus paving the path of the Islamic conquest of the West. According to statistics, over 25 million Muslims live in the 28 member states of the European Union (now Britain is out of the EU). The vast majority of these Muslims entered with the hope of getting betters pays while they mostly occupy the sectors usually referred to as “Difficult, Dirty and Dangerous”.
In the ’80s, these Muslim migrants were perceived to be from Morocco, Pakistan, or Turkey, but as “Muslims” thus eventually threatening the social fabric of the European societies. The jihadist attacks by several groups of radical Muslims and spreading the poisonous seeds of radicalization, anti-Semitism and jihad amongst the native Muslim Europeans though had surged anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe, the trend of increase in the size of Muslim migrants have been gradually expanding, mostly taking the undue advantage of liberating immigration policies. Unless there are any immediate measures in checking the rise in the number of Muslim migrants in the Western societies, it may ultimately emerge as the most serious threat to the peace and security of the Western societies.
A vast majority of the European Muslims (both migrants and native) have a wrong perception thinking Europeans caricaturize their religion. Such perception is dangerous and only would fuel the tendencies of jihadism within the Muslims in the West. Efforts of the Western leaders of emphasizing the interfaith harmony are being greatly dampened as the Muslims not only reject interfaith harmony, they reject people of every other religious belief as “enemies of Allah” and consider waging jihad against them as divine responsibility.
Although the European and Western leaders are talking about integrating Muslims – especially those Muslim migrants into their societies, it is rather impossible in implementing such policies within the secularist societies in the West.
Some experts ask – are radicalization and extremism linked to the economic disadvantageous situation of the Muslims. In my opinion, economic disadvantage has nothing to do with the minds of the Muslims, as they do not compete with the non-Muslims in the Western societies intellectually or economically. Poisonous Muslim minds always see the “enemies of Allah” in each of the Westerners and only believe – eliminating the non-Muslims or getting them converted into Islam is the only solution towards the notorious agenda of Muslims of Islamic conquest.
Some experts say, “tiny minority of Muslims” are engaged in radial or jihadist activities, while others are against such acts. In my opinion, this perception is totally wrong. If we can look into Muslim societies in today’s Western world, we can easily understand, majority of the Muslims in those nations are increasingly becoming radicalized and most of them are in favor of Islamic terrorism and elimination of non-Muslims from the societies. In Britain, the situation is even worse as the majority of the Muslims are not only radicalized, but they are silently imposing Sharia rule within the secular British societies. These Muslims have an extreme love for the Palestinian terrorists, including Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and also Hezbollah. In their eyes, every Palestinian terrorist is a hero.
The Islamic conquest
The presence of Muslims in Europe is not a new phenomenon. Starting in 711, Muslims conquered large swathes of Northern Mediterranean shores and set up Caliphates and Emirates mainly in the Iberian Peninsula for more than seven centuries. The fall of the last Emirate of Granada, in 1492, marked the end of Muslim political rule in Spain.
Almost concomitantly, in the Eastern Mediterranean, Islamized Ottomans defeated the Greeks, ejected them from Anatolia, took Constantinople (1453), which later became Istanbul, and conquered the Balkan region. Balkan States achieved its independence in the 19th century, before the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War. Muslim Bosnians, Albanians and Kosovars have not been expelled, and nowadays, they constitute Europe’s indigenous Muslim population.
The second wave of Muslim influx began immediately after the Second World War and they represent the bulk of the European Union’s Muslim populace.
Indeed, as European states started their reconstruction at the end of the war, they resorted to their ex-colonies to offset labor shortages. Hundreds of thousands of North Africans, most of them Berbers from traditionally rural areas of the Rif Mountains, immigrated to France. Indonesians and the Surinamese went to Holland, and Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis entered the United Kingdom. The case of Germany is more specific since it has been the main destination of Turkish and Kurdish labor immigrants, although Turkey was not a German colony, but simply an ally in the First World War.
On the whole, these Muslim migrants contributed to the economic boom of many European states as they built roads and railroads, worked in the coal mines, cleaned streets and offices, and, on the whole, did the jobs that Europeans were reluctant to do.
Until 1970, there was neither a migration “problem” nor, a fortiori, a Muslim problem in Western Europe. Migrants were largely invisible in public places.
But, in the early 1970s, the European economic boom came to a halt and the oil crisis of 1973 was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as the Arabs say. From that year on, European states enacted laws restricting regular migration but, at the same time, relaxing restrictions of family reunification. Immigrants hurried to bring over their families. These measures produced significant quantitative and qualitative effects. Statistically, the sheer size of the Muslim migrant population increased considerably in the 1970s and the 1980s. Economically, the number of workers among the migrants dwindled drastically. Sociologically, there has been a process of feminization of the migration stocks while the presence of children inaugurated the second-generation phase.
All of these transformations produced unforeseen effects. First, the arrival of families from rural areas changed the immigrants’ attitudes towards religious and cultural values. While temporary workers accepted “basement mosques” as a temporary solution to their prayer needs, the sedentarized immigrants asked for mosques and minarets. Secondly, the visibility of migrants in public space increased (veiled women, children going to school, etc.) Thirdly, immigrant families congregated in certain areas where they could find informal support structures and social networks. Families could thus keep in constant contact with their home countries by phone, internet or travel.
Finally, in the last three decades, marriage immigration peaked as the first and second-generation youth entered the marriage market. To take just two examples from Holland, between 1995 and 2003, Turkish marriage immigration peaked at 4.000 per year while Moroccan marriage immigration hit a record of 3.000 per year. Marriage immigration ensured continued, high fertility among the immigrant population as many second-generation immigrants prefer to marry spouses from their parents’ home countries, who are young, traditional and virgin, rather than marrying a fellow second-generation immigrant like themselves. Obviously, marriage immigration has maintained the migration dynamic intact.
This significantly differentiates Muslim immigration to Europe with the Muslim expatriation in the USA on two grounds. First, Muslim migrants in Europe are, at most, a two to four-hour flight from their home countries, while the distance between the USA and their home countries gives little choice but to integrate into the American “melting pot”. Secondly, as Robert Leiken argues, “unlike the American Muslims who are geographically diffuse, ethnically fragmented and generally well-off, Europe’s Muslims gather in bleak enclaves with their compatriots”. Finally, the rate of mixed marriages in the USA is higher than in Europe.
This differentiation explains, to a certain extent, why Islam and Muslims in the United States are not a major concern while in Europe, at least since the 1980s, migration has become an issue, mainly because two-thirds of the migrants are Muslims. Indeed, everything related to Islam in Europe became a cause of anxiety: the mushrooming of mosques, women’s veils, and new religious fervor. It is in this context that far-right parties emerged and started to garner support in presenting migration as a threat. In reaction, Western European states began erecting new defenses against the much-meditized threat of mass immigration by strengthening direct immigration control through severe visa regimes, internal surveillance, and outsourcing border control on the external borders of the EU.
But all cordons sanitaires put in place could not stop or even slow the flow of irregular migration from southern countries. The long land border and coastlines of many European states hindered the effective policing of frontiers. In many cases, land and maritime controls only served to displace the routes of migration, making the travel longer and riskier and making traffickers richer as they showed their ability to adapt to the new regulations. Southern European countries were particularly exposed to irregular migration. In the beginning, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Malta were transit countries and “stepping stones” for other destinations. But later, in the 1990s, they became countries of final destination for waves of irregular migrants.
It is, therefore, not surprising that today, there are more than one million Muslims in Spain and a similar figure in Italy.
The problem has become more acute recently with the substantial increase of asylum seekers from impoverished or devastated countries in the South, like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and even the Gaza Strip. While the Mediterranean is being transformed into a cemetery of drowned dreams, European countries are bickering about the cost-sharing of land borders and coastline policing and about distributing asylum seekers among European states.
There is no doubt that the situation is difficult to manage.
These numbers are not threatening. And yet there is a widespread sentiment that Europe is being invaded by a growing Muslim population that cannot or will not be assimilated and that dreams, as blogger Agnon de Albatros argues, of “implementing Shariah law in Europe and making this infidel continent part of the domain of Islam”.
In conclusion we can say –the Western nations are being gradually invaded by Muslims and the most disturbing fact is – the majority of them are radicalized while Tablighi Jamaat is playing a key role in spreading the venom of jihadism within the Muslim societies thus posing serious threat to national security.
Muslims not only aspire to re-establish Islamic dominance in Spain, but they also want to see the entire West coming under the flag of Islam – more precisely, Sharia rule or Caliphate.
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is an internationally acclaimed multi-award-winning anti-jihadist journalist, counter-terrorism specialist and editor of Blitz
