They came in the early eighth century across the Straits of Gibraltar, unleashing terror and carnage across Iberia “like a desolating storm.”  They were stopped deep inside today’s France, at Tours, by Charles Martel in 732.  They kept attacking Europe throughout the Middle Ages, but their next sustained assault was at her vulnerable southeastern flank, taking advantage of Byzantium’s weakened state after the infamous Fourth Crusade.  They conquered Constantinople and destroyed the Christian nations of Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary.  They were finally stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

Europe seemed safe over the ensuing 250 years of unprecedented demographic, scientific, technological, and geopolitical advance.  The “sick man on the Bosphorus” was reduced to a mere object of European imperial ambitions, while “Arabia,” irrelevant to the civilized world, remained stuck in its primitive ways.

Then Europe attempted suicide with the Great War, sealed with its sequel in 1939-45.  Her subsequent material recovery was a mirage.  Dechristianized and focused on the need for cheap labor regardless of its source, she imported millions of Muslim immigrants in the 1960’s and 70’s—Turks to Germany, Pakistanis to Britain, Algerians to France, and a mix of them all to Benelux, Scandinavia, Austria.  A generation later a multimillion Muslim diaspora was well established throughout the old continent.  Steeped in the Islamic ethos regardless of ethnic origin, it refused integration and created its own infidel-free zones in the French banlieus, Yorkshire’s industrial cities, and Berlin’s suburbs.

The process has been assisted by Europe’s political elite.  In recent years, for example, a Dutch justice minister announced that the Muslim demand for no-go zones and sharia in Holland was perfectly legitimate, while a Swedish government minister declared that “we must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.”  Similar examples are too numerous to mention.  By last January, Europe was more than ready to follow the Charlie Hebdo massacre with a wave of morbid self-examination and shrill warnings against “Islamophobia.”

The Third Muslim Invasion of Europe is entering its mature stage by sea, just like the previous two onslaughts.  The difference is threefold.  The invaders are not armed warriors but “asylum seekers.”  They can count on a massive infrastructure of Islamic centers and coreligionists to welcome them.  And there is no political will to resist them.

Europe’s southern maritime frontier is as porous as America’s on the Rio Grande.  Last year 220,000 African and Asian illegal immigrants landed on northern Mediterranean shores.  None have been sent back.  E.U. border-agency chief Fabrice Leggeri says that up to a million are currently poised to leave Libya alone.  It is an eminently Muslim invasion: African Christians making the crossing, a minority, are routinely thrown overboard by their jihadist-minded fellow passengers.

The conquest proceeds unchecked because the elite class does not want it checked.  “How can it be that we are daily witnessing a tragedy?” Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi wondered after a boat crammed with hundreds of people overturned off Libya’s coast last April.  “Europe can do more, and Europe must do more” to improve rescue missions, declared Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament.  Europe must mobilize more ships, more aircraft, French President François Hollande said.  “Words won’t do anymore,” Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told a rally.  Pope Francis, addressing a crowd in Saint Peter’s Square, called on political leaders to “act decisively and promptly to prevent similar tragedies.”

None of these luminaries is suggesting that those rescued should be sent back to Tripoli or Benghazi, or that Europe should do more to prevent the smugglers’ boats from reaching her shores.  Sr. Renzi explicitly rejected calls from the right for a naval blockade and announced that the rescuers would not be returning anyone “to chaos and violence in Libya.”  It can be predicted with mathematical certainty that such policies will only prompt further hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, to make the crossing.

 

Forty-two years after The Camp of the Saints came out, Jean Raspail has been proved right.  The invaders are not Indians but far more hostile Muslims, yet the result is the same: Our civilization is on the road to disappearance.  This applies to all of traditionally Catholic and Protestant Europe.  Her current collapse comes from the “old Christian virtues gone mad,” as Chesterton put it—the depraved ideology of universal human rights.

The post-Christian liberal West, which has lost its sense of purpose and history, is unable to protect itself from those who want to destroy and conquer it.