I've been saying for some time now that, in another generation or two, most of Western Europe will be an Islamic caliphate. Years of unchecked immigration into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East have seen to that; there are places in some major European cities where Sharia law rules and the local police avoid.
This is what the European quest for "diversity" hath wrought.
Still, there is one nation that has decades of experience dealing with Islam, and it may come as a surprise to some: France. A recent piece by scribe Conrad Black in the Brussels Signal lends some interesting insights.
As the militant Islamic threat to many Western societies steadily gained strength from increasing immigration, a high birth rate among migrants, and sustained collective fervour, I have always predicted that the country that would guide us through this challenge was France.
It has two distinct advantages. First, despite the posturings of a few British Arabist-romantics such as T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, France is by far the Western state most experienced in dealing with Arabs.
France gained much of that experience through their colonies in North Africa, most significantly in Algiers, where France maintained the headquarters of the Légion étrangère - the French Foreign Legion - in the Algerian town of Sidi Bel Abbès. But with Algeria's independence from France came a return of French nationals to France, along with a healthy influx of Muslim Arabs known to be loyal to the French colonial regime--and didn't care to answer to the incoming Arab government for it.
Since then, however, like so many European nations, France has been beset by floods of immigrants and asylum seekers, and their response to it has been, well, less tepid than most of Europe. Black's piece continues:
President Emmanuelle Macron is responding to these escalated tensions and has requested a thorough analysis from the National Defence Council on the threat to civic order presented by the Muslim Brotherhood and kindred organizations.
His hard-line interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, and a former ambassador to Algeria, François Gouyette, have been tasked with producing a comprehensive report on the threat posed by Islamist extremists in the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, and a counteroffensive strategy.
Darmanin seems to have hit the ground running, especially in response to the October 7th atrocities in Israel. Will it be enough?
Darmanin has promised an effective response to contain and, if necessary, suppress aggressive Islamism, which he said will require “a shock” for the country. The first such shock was provided by the French courts with a recent decision that any public comment that attempts to condone the invasion of Israel and massacre of Israelis on October 7, or to represent Hamas as a legitimate resistance movement, amounts to the public approval of terrorism and is an offense that could bring imprisonment for seven years.
France has taken actions that probably wouldn't pass constitutional muster in the United States, such as banning the use of Islamic face coverings in public even during the masking requirements put in place during the COVID scare. And yet, France is still having problems with its Muslim minority:
French society is a powder keg of tensions, with regular eruptions of violence in disaffected, predominantly Muslim suburbs, rising antisemitism and terrorist attacks in the past decade that have increased a sense of insecurity and fueled anti-Muslim sentiment. Over the past years, France has pushed for more laws and rules safeguarding secularism against Islamic radicalism, which have also alienated many French Muslims.
All their efforts don't seem to be yielding much fruit.
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In Eastern Europe, nations like Poland and Hungary have taken a harder line. Poland has accepted Christian refugees from Ukraine but has thus far avoided mass immigration from majority-Muslim nations. The Polish parliament's ruling party plans to hold a referendum to allow Polish citizens their say as to whether the country should allow in masses of immigrants, while Hungary has taken an even harder line, implementing limits on family reunification and mandating that any non-citizens who lose their employment in Hungary must leave the country within six days.
There is, as yet, no completely proven model for dealing with this issue. There is a huge problem in Europe - and in many other developed parts of the world - that nothing the French, Hungarian, Polish, or American governments are doing will deal with, and that is demographics. The future belongs to those who show up for it, and birthrates in Europe from Dublin to Volgograd are cratering. Most of the majority-Muslim world is a little better, but only just; the only parts of the world where birth rates are well above replacement are in sub-Saharan Africa.
In Europe, though, Muslim minorities are having children at a higher rate than ethnic Europeans, and that's a matter of concern if you live in Europe. It doesn't take many generations of this to result in a Muslim majority.
Fifty years from now, most of Western Europe may well be a Muslim caliphate. Might France escape this fate? It seems unlikely. The French government talks a good game, but in the end, they are skirting around the edges of the problem. If the French really want to forestall Sharia law in the streets of Paris, they need to do one thing above all - start having babies.
