The Italian navy rescued 3,000 “migrants” aboard more than a dozen boats in the Mediterranean on Saturday. Like hundreds of thousands of others before them, they were taken to Europe for de facto permanent settlement. At the same time, any semblance of border control along the southeastern land route has collapsed. Thousands of migrants stormed across Macedonia’s border also on Saturday, overwhelming security forces who threw stun grenades and used batons in a futile bid to stem their flow. So much for Macedonia declaring a state of emergency on August 20 and announcing that it was sealing its borders.

In July over 50,000 persons from the Middle East and Afghanistan are estimated to have reached Greece’s extended coastline by boat from Turkey. The Turks have done nothing to impede their initial entry from Syria and Iraq, followed by a long transit across Anatolia and departure by sea. The Greeks have been chartering ships to take them from the inundated Aegean islands to Salonika, and facilitated their transit further north.

“Tell Brussels we are coming, no matter what,” 32-year-old Saeed from Syria said. This is not an idle boast. For weeks illegal aliens had been pouring across the border into Macedonia at a rate of some 2,000 per day en route to Serbia, where up to 8,000 reached the southern border town of Preševo this past weekend. Their next target is Hungary, and from there the promised land of Europe’s welfare havens further west.

Hungary is the only country in the region with the political will to act decisively. For the past six weeks it has been constructing a 13 ft tall steel and barbed wire fence along its 110-mile-long border with Serbia. This has prompted a barrage of criticism from Brussels and from various bleeding-heart NGOs, but the decision is very popular among most ordinary Hungarians. When the fence is finished at the end of August it is possible that some of the influx will shift west, to Croatia. Luckily for the government in Zagreb, most of the border with Serbia is formed by the Danube (85 miles) which is hard to cross. The land section (70 miles) is in flat, partly marshy land. Another possibility is that the refugee wave will shift east, to Bulgaria and Romania, but that route is unattractive to the migrants because it takes them physically away from the intended destination in Germany, Benelux and Scandinavia.

It is noteworthy that the overland migrants, mostly Arabs, do not seek refuge in the Arab world, including the mega-rich Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar, and are not welcomed there. For the Syrian Christians this is understandable, but they constitute only a minority of the current human deluge (and getting rid of them is what the Muslim majority wants anyway). Those taking the sea route are overwhelmongly Muslim. It is a possibility worth further scrutiny that the enormous, apparently well-financed onslaught has a geopolitical dimension which is not immediately obvious to the unsuspecting. A multi-million Muslim diaspora is already 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, or Berlin’s suburbs. That suits those same oil-rich kingdoms and emirates just fine. The involvement of their jihad-friendly, quasi-private “charities” should be investigated.

The process has been assisted by Europe’s political elite. It invokes “compassion” in the face of the third Muslim invasion of Europe. The difference from the previous two onslaughts (Arabs to Spain, Turks to the Balkans) is threefold: the invaders are not armed warriors but “asylum seekers”; they have a massive infrastructure of Islamic centers and coreligionists to welcome them; and there is no political will to resist them. Last year 220,000 African and Asian illegal immigrants landed on northern Mediterranean shores. That number has been doubled so far this year. None have been sent back. The conquest proceeds unchecked because the elite class does not want it checked. Italian prime minister 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.” Quite apart from the tricky issue of whose policies exactly had caused such conditions in Libya, it can be predicted with certainty that such policies will only prompt further hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, to make the crossing.

The post-Christian liberal West, which has lost its sense of purpose and history, is unable to protect itself from those who want to conquer it. It is in need of salvation which Christian charity alone is powerless to effect. A stronger medicine is needed, with possibly unpleasant side-effects for the invading aliens and their offspring. The alternative is death.