Establishment Waking Up

It looks like the Establishment are waking up.

Lets hope its not too late eh !


Here's an inconvenient truth: the Islamisation of Europe

Posted By: Ed West at May 6, 2009 at 23:48:00 [General]


For years the world ignored climate change. As the evidence for man-made environmental disaster built up, the majority of people took part in a passive conspiracy of silence, like there was a nutter in the carriage and no one wanted to acknowledge the fact.

Many did so out of ignorance, others out of bigotry against environmentalists who, they thought, wanted us all to live in huts, or worshipped the earth, or at the very least didn't use deodorant. Still others purposefully ignored it because they had a vested economic interest in doing so. Some simply couldn't believe something so awful could happen, some believed it but were fearful of the terrible consequences of acting – economic unrest, war, perhaps mass murder. Still others believed it but thought it was inevitable and so pointless worrying about.

I interviewed a storm chaser back in 2004 for Nuts magazine. I just wanted tales of derring-do, but his tone was so downbeat I wanted to chop my own head off. He was in despair at humanity's refusal to face this disaster that engulfed us all.

"I hate to say it, I really do, but it will take a catastrophe on American soil, and many dead, before something happens". I think they took that bit out of the interview – people buy Nuts to think about sex, not death.

But the following summer Hurricane Katrina did happen, and, very quickly, man-made climate change become almost universally accepted. In fact no one talks about anything else.

Climate change denial was, and still is, an overwhelmingly conservative vice, and it's a historical black mark against the Right (and, ahem, we have a few). But there is a corresponding liberal conspiracy over an issue that is as important to our society, if not to our planet.

Ten or even five years ago few people were prepared to say in public that, whatever the media consensus, mass immigration didn't in fact benefit our economy, but placed a strain on services, damaged the social fabric of society, and made England more violent and unequal and unhappy, and even threatened our very democracy. Anyone who dared to say so was presented as the sort of man who ran an army surplus shop and collected old SS daggers and empty cans of Zyklon B.

But while sociology is not a hard science, the evidence has been mounting up - and ignored. Some chose to ignore it because of their bigotry against "Colonel Blimps", "Daily Mail readers" and "racist Little Englanders". Some - such as the many employees in the enormous race relations industry - had a vested interest in denial. Many others thought it true but that to admit it would unleash man's worst trait - racial hatred - and result in murder and violence against black and Asian Britons, and their friends and loved ones – British people born here – being shipped off somewhere. Better just to leave London and choose the quiet life or sing the benefits of immigration from your Dorset country home.

No particular event changed broke the taboo - not 7/7, which I think had the opposite effect of showing just how amazing London is as an experiment and how tolerant Londoners are at getting along. The Danish cartoon protests certainly opened a lot of eyes and had unlikely people talking about "Islamicisation". Most likely there was not any particular event; it was simply that the increasing popularity of blogs broke the mainstream media's silence on the issue.

But all over Europe people have had their Katrina moment. As the respected American journalist Bruce Bawer writes in this devastating piece, in Norway, Denmark and Holland voters are turning to parties that openly oppose mass immigration. These are ordinary people who work regular jobs and travel abroad and have friends of every race and creed, but who do not want to be a minority in their own country or capital, just as no Indian or Ugandan or Moroccan would want to be a minority in his.

The media tried to paint these parties as racist and fascist. Never mind that Pim Fortuyn's party was led by an openly gay man and an openly, er, black woman.

What has prompted this rightward shift? Bawer points to several factors. One is the prosaic one of numbers:

One source estimates that Britain’s Muslim population rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to 2 million in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of Western Europe as a whole during that period. According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth ten times that of the rest of that country’s population.

Secondly, there is the financial impact of a immigration, a taboo within a taboo in Left-wing circles, a sub-taboo.

For while some immigrant groups in Europe, such as Hindus and East Asians, enjoy relatively low unemployment rates and healthy incomes, the largest immigrant group, Muslims, has become such a burden that governments have made extensive cutbacks in public services in order to keep up with welfare payments—closing clinics and emergency rooms, reducing staff in hospitals, cutting police and military spending, eliminating course offerings at public universities, and so on. According to a report issued last year by the think tank Contribuables Associés, immigration reduces France’s economic growth by two-thirds. In 2002, economist Lars Jansson estimated that immigration cost Swedish taxpayers about $27 billion annually and that fully 74 percent of immigrant-group members in Sweden lived off the taxpayers. And in 2006, the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise warned that Norway’s petroleum fund—which contains the massive profits from North Sea oil that have made the nation rich—could wind up drained to cover outlays to immigrants. (This in a country whose roads, as a report last year indicated, are in worse shape than Albania’s.)

But perhaps most importantly is the growing realisation among some European liberals that continued immigration, predominantly from the reactionary Muslim world, is destroying liberalism. One of the most striking signs of this is the collapse of the Rainbow Alliance, so that Bawer (who is himself gay) writes:

Owing to the rise in gay-bashings by Muslim youths, Dutch gays—who ten years ago constituted a reliable left-wing voting bloc—now support conservative parties by a nearly two-to-one margin.

The same could also be said about European Jews, who have traditionally voted for Left-wing parties because of the Right's bigotry. Last year the Conservatives won the Jewish vote in the London elections, the first time in history that the capital's Jews had voted for a Right-wing party (it didn't help that Ken had a fondness for barking mad Islamists and making concentration camp gags to Jewish journalists).

And, as David Goodhart first pointed out in Prospect magazine four years ago, the welfare state and mass immigration are mutually exclusive, or at the very least the welfare state works best in small, homogenous societies. Yet the same people who would want us to be more like Sweden in our social model are pushing our demographics in the direction of vibrant and exciting but also violent and brutally unequal multi-racial countries like the United States, Brazil or South Africa.

First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive, and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. Add to all this the growing power of an unelected European Union bureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps to punish criticism of it—criminalizing “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” in 2007, for example—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prize their freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of their see-no-evil elites.

Don't expect Polly Toynbee et al to admit this any time soon – the Left is paralysed by its fear of racism, which is why Europe will continue rightwards.

However, while Holland and the Nordic countries have built up a decent, anti-Islamist right, in other countries the void left by mainstream conservatism's cowardice has been filled with neo-fascists – Austria's Freedom Party, the Flemish Vlaams Blok and our very own British National Party. If the Conservative Party fails to take up its position as Fortuyn's heirs, then the vacuum will only get bigger. The space is open for either dissident Conservatives, UKIP or some other non-fascist party to take up that mantle.

I hope they will, for as Bawer warns: "Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to sharia as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs?"