BRANDON J. WEICHERT | AMERICAN GREATNESS
History is replete with examples of the migration of peoples across vast and distant lands. Depending on the numbers and the purpose of the migration, such movements have the capacity fundamentally to alter or even destroy indigenous civilizations and countries. Other times, of course, such movements can empower the native people. It is never a neutral change, no matter how much elites in today’s postmodern society attempt to insist that immigration is always a net benefit, irrespective of the need (or desire) for new peoples in our homelands.
But, at what point does immigration (whether illegal, legal, or refugee movements) become an invasion?
Today, Europe has witnessed decades of destabilizing immigration from the Muslim world—some of which governments have encouraged. But, in fact, the majority of Europeans do not want so many foreigners in their midst. As many immigrants may be entering Europe to escape war, privation, and disease in their homelands, a great many others are coming to Europe (and Canada and even the United States) with ill-intent. Many of them have no desire to assimilate with or become Europeans themselves. The question of assimilation and cultural integration is doubly important when considering that many leaders in the Islamist movement have explicitly encouraged migration into Europe as a means of making Europe a Muslim land.
Old Barbarians and New
Europe has experienced this sort of invasion before. When the so-called “barbarian” tribes crossed over from the East into Europe, they claimed to be fleeing privation and war in their homelands. They waded into what was then the Roman Empire and either forced themselves upon the Romans (or they raped and pillaged their way through until they were opposed). In many instances, the Roman Empire made deals with the foreign invaders, in an attempt to convert those foreigners into Roman citizens.
Very often, however, the “barbarians” failed to comply with the wishes of the Romans. In fact, the large (and growing) presence of new people in the Western Roman Empire during its final days contributed to its ultimate collapse. At some point, the Romans proved unable to resist the martial prowess of the barbarian tribes and were unwilling to enforce policies that would have ensured integration between the barbarians and the Romans.
Throughout Europe, we see a positive correlation between the presence of migrants from the Muslim world and the incidence of reported rapes. In Norway, rape had become so prevalent that the government began offering classes to migrants to learn how they should treat European women. One such lesson: If a Norwegian woman smiled at a Muslim migrant, that was not an invitation for sexual intercourse—whether consensual or non-consensual. According to a 2015 New York Times story, a 33-year-old asylum-seeker from Eritrea explained, “Men have weaknesses and when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control. If someone [in Eritrea] wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished.”
Norway isn’t an outlier. In Germany, the police are reluctant to report increases in rape involving Muslim migrants, because the German political class (as well as most of Europe’s leaders) believe that the sexual assault epidemic is the result of “cultural misunderstanding.” They advise their female citizens to dress more conservatively and defer to their Muslim “guests.”
What History Teaches
Has there ever been an example in history of a host country ordering its people to abandon indigenous habits of dress, food, or any other behavior to comport with the wishes of a newly arrived immigrant population? No.
However, history—specifically European history—is replete with examples of invaders coming in from afar; demanding special treatment; taking territory as their own; engaging in an assortment of criminal behaviors; giddily raping as many local women as they can; and expecting the local populations either to conform with their way of life or leave (or die).
In many cases, European schools do not teach or enforce Western values or norms on Muslim students, for fear of being “culturally insensitive.” Instead, it is the European schools who force native-born students to embrace the cultural values, teachings, and practices of the Muslim migrants among them. They’ve come a long way from the 1950s, when my English grandmother (who is part-Maltese) was called a “half-breed” by the headmistress of her school and had to work twice as hard as her “full-born” English peers to overcome her school’s stifling racism. How sad that instead of substituting one kind of insanity with good judgment, we have skipped all the way down to its polar opposite which is just another kind of madness.
Is it any surprise that over 60 percent of Europe’s Muslim migrants (which constitute a majority of European migrants) are military-aged males? What immigration wave in history has had such a demographic profile?
What Europe is experiencing today is no different than what previous generations experienced when genuinely foreign peoples—carrying alien ideas and beliefs—marched into Europe and attempted to colonize those lands. The Romans experienced it. The Spanish experienced it when the Moors invaded from Africa. So, too, did the Byzantines, when the Ottomans took Constantinople and defeated the Byzantine Empire.
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