“This could be Europe’s death knell,” writes Robert Spencer in his new book, Mass Migration in Europe: A Model for the U.S.? In it he analyzes how mass Muslim migration to Europe has fulfilled the “Eurabia” societal nightmares of the Egyptian-born Jewish scholar Bat Ye’or, a fate that the United States, among other countries, would do well to avoid.
Spencer quotes the late eminent historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, who already in 2004 predicted to Germany’s Die Welt newspaper that “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.” This would complete the transformation that Bat Ye’or foresaw following the 1973 creation of the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) by the Arab League and the then European Community, now European Union (EU). In various agreements, European leaders encouraged Muslim immigration and Islam-friendly domestic and foreign policies in exchange for access to Arab markets.
Reflecting these agreements, Europe’s Muslim population doubled between 1989 and 1998, and if trends continue, Holland could become Muslim-majority by 2040 or earlier. In turn, European authorities have often accommodated this influx without objection, as when Spain’s Supreme Court in 2020 awarded pensions to two widows of a polygamous Moroccan Muslim migrant. Validating Bat Ye’or’s concerns, the judgment based itself upon a 1979 Morocco-Spain Social Security Agreement.
Such official acts mirror a “wholesale cultural capitulation of many areas of Britain and continental Europe” to Islam that has often “bordered on the risible,” Spencer notes. Some British banks, for example, have banned piggy banks to avoid offending Muslims, who consider pigs religiously unclean. Meanwhile British think tanks have examined how British sharia arbitration councils have subverted legal rights for Muslim women in matters such as domestic violence, divorce, inheritance rights, and polygamy.
Muslim migrants have not always reciprocated with respect for European standards, as Spencer notes in his analysis of Muslim-dominated “European no-go zones.” He specifies that here the “laws of the land often take a back seat to the laws and mores of the immigrant group” and authorities such as the police “can enter, but they are not often treated with respect.” The alienation of these areas became apparent in 2018 when the French government responded to a Paris crime wave by Moroccan migrants by bringing in Moroccan police officers to aid patrols.
Rising sexual assaults across Europe show how “Muslims were taking seriously material from the Qur’an and Sunnah” that brands non-Muslim women as inferior, Spencer documents. New Year’s Eve 2015 remains notorious for Muslim migrants who committed perhaps 2,000 mass rapes and sexual assaults in European cities such as Cologne. Muslim-majority migrants and refugees also commit 92 percent of Sweden’s violent rapes, according to 2017 statistics.
Similarly, “[i]n all too many Islamic teachings and traditions, Jews are the villains,” Spencer observes. Correspondingly, Islamic immigration means that “Jews are threatened in Europe to an extent they have not been since the days of Hitler. And it’s getting worse by the day.”
Despite these Islamic doctrinal dangers, “Islamophobia” accusations and hate speech prosecutions have often faced Islam’s critics, Spencer notes. “While one can say anything one desires about Christianity without facing criminal charges, Islam is regarded as a protected minority religion—and perhaps, covertly, as being too volatile to criticize without risk of violence.” Likewise, “if one didn’t accept the brave new world that was sure to bring more jihad and more Sharia to the continent the charges of being a Nazi and a racist came quickly.” Such intimidations “restrict Western officials and media analysts from discussing the Islamic supremacist threat precisely at the moment when they were directly confronted by it.”
Openly gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who had Marx and Lenin kitchen portraits, experienced these lessons brutally firsthand in the early 2000s, Spencer observes. Fortuyn “earned one of the establishment media’s favorite terms of opprobrium: ‘far right,’” merely because “he maintained the incompatibility of traditional Islamic values with the liberal, secular societies of the West.” In 2002, the non-Muslim Dutchman Volkert van der Graaf compared Adolf Hitler to Fortuyn and murdered him. His fellow Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, has received so many Muslim death threats that he has a 24-hour guard, frequently changes residence, and never appears publicly alone.
Wilders, Fortuyn, and others are Islam-critical iconoclasts against Europe’s Zeitgeist. Modern Europeans “are the products of a relativistic, materialistic, hedonistic culture that has relentlessly indoctrinated them with the ideas that all belief systems and cultures are of equal value,” Spencer writes. Despite this celebration of diversity, one culture is clearly less equal than others, for “Judeo-Christian Western civilization is itself uniquely ‘racist’ and responsible for the great majority of the evil in the world.”
Western self-abasement leaves Europeans ignorant of Islam’s not-so-tolerant aspects and incapable of integrating Muslim migrants. Europeans “have never been taught, and will not be taught, that their new Muslim overlords are in fact the exponents of a culture that has been far more imperialist and more deeply involved in slavery than the West ever was,” Spencer notes. Meanwhile multiculturalism has entailed abandonment of the “old model of requiring that immigrants assimilate and adopt the customs and mores of their new country.”
In fact, Muslim leaders such as Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have often denounced assimilation for Europe’s Turkish and other Muslim diaspora, as Islam traditionally commands. Islamic doctrine lauds “Hijrah, or emigration for the purpose of Islamization,” Spencer observes, based upon the hijrah of Islam’s prophet Muhammad with his followers in the Arabian Peninsula from Mecca to Medina in 622. “Significantly, the Islamic calendar counts the Hijrah, not Muhammad’s birth or the occasion of his first ‘revelation,’ as the beginning of Islam,” and, by implication, “Islam is not fully itself without a political and military component.”
In this gloomy ideological context, Spencer briefly alludes to one glimmer of hope. American and European Muslims face a “question of individual identity. Is a European or American Muslim primarily a European or an American, or a Muslim?” Although he presents a detailed, dark future for Europe and the wider West, significant evidence reveals that Muslims can reflect upon, liberalize, or even abandon their faith when freedom in places such as Europe allows.
Nonetheless, Americans and others should heed Spencer’s warnings. Europe’s large Muslim minorities foretell significant challenges if the United States’ currently small Muslim community should develop in a similarly uncontrolled manner. Confronted by sharia supremacism, free societies must carefully consider how to defend and strategically utilize their liberty.
