Islam versus Europe

It is difficult to be rational about Muslim immigration, but let us try. There is a wide range of opinions about its potential long-term consequences, but let us try and define the outer limits of the spectrum of possibilities.

On the one hand, there is the multicult crowd, including the writers for the Guardian (I won't say Guardian readers because you only need to look at the comments to Guardian articles about Muslims or immigration to see that the readers no longer agree with the newspaper's editorial line). Although they prefer not to mention it, these people would no doubt, if pressed, if the hard evidence was waved in front of their face, acknowledge that Muslims in Britain are characterised by the following: disproportionate unemployment, benefits dependency, disproportionate involvement in crime with particular distinction in the fields of crime involving fraud, violence, terrorism and sexual predation; disproportionately low educational attainment. In other words, by every objective metric, Muslim immigration has been damaging to Britain.

These high-minded utopian thinkers would ungraciously acknowledge these unpleasant truths but retort that primitive patriarchal (although they would no doubt call it 'traditional') cultures are stunting the human potential of the Muslims who are here. In addition, they would say, vile racism and islamophobia are encouraging Muslims to retreat into psychological, and often physical, ghettoes, with further damaging consequences. In time, the Utopians would say, once the evils of racism and islamophobia are successfully combated, and the strength of regressive traditionalism erodes, Muslims will be able to realise their full human potential. The problems currently associated with Muslims will become mere historical curios and, apart from their skin colour and a minor cultural differentiation of no great consequence, Muslims will be virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the population.

On the other hand there are people like me who think that Muslim immigration is ushering in a veritable apocalypse, that its long-term consequences will spell doom to our way of life, resulting in civil war, the extinction of European civilisation and the end of our democracy. We look at history and at the world today. We see that there is literally not a single place on earth today where Muslims, in significant numbers, live in peace, harmony and equality with non-Muslims. At all points where Muslims and non-Muslims meet, the Muslims engage in systematic aggression against the non-Muslims; or, if they have already achieved a position of dominance, subject them to second-class status.

We look at places like Egypt and Turkey, formerly Christian countries that experienced Muslim colonisation. We see that the indigenous inhabitants of those countries have not fared well there. In the case of Egypt, Copts are now 10% of the population, an embattled, persecuted minority. Turkey is now 99.8% Muslim, so almost nothing of the original population remains. Moreover, this persecution is not some historical artefact. It has continued even into modern times and the present day. Turkey had 2 million orthodox Christians at the start of the 20th century. It now has 4000. Almost every week in Egypt, Coptic girls are kidnapped, forced to marry Muslims under duress and de facto raped.

We look at these countries and we fear that the fate of Europeans will be no different once Muslims have colonised our countries sufficiently. And the speed of Muslim demographic expansion is astounding. In Britain, for more than four decades, their numbers have been doubling every 11-12 years, growing literally 10 times faster than the rest of the British population. This is a matter of simple arithmetic. The data is provided from objective sources. It is not a theory. It is not controversial. It is not open to dispute.

So let us now consider the two ends of this spectrum of possibilities, the optimistic scenario and the pessimistic scenario. The optimistic scenario is that Muslims will be just like the rest of the British population. They will have crime rates, economic activity rates and educational attainment levels on a par with those of the rest of the British people. This is the upside, the maximum potential benefit from the set of policies that is allowing these people to come and settle in our country: they will be just like us.

Under the pessimistic scenario, on the other hand, our way of life comes to an end. British culture and European civilisation live on only in the history books alongside Nineveh and Tyre.

Let us attempt to be rational about it, therefore. We are implementing a policy the best possible result of which produces no tangible benefits for the British population. Even if the Muslims become just like us, there is no actual improvement in the lot of the British people. We simply have more of what we already have. The worst possible result of the policy, however, means that our way of life is extinguished forever.

Is it rational to implement a policy whose maximum potential upside produces no benefit whatsoever and whose maximum potential downside results in the end of our way of life? Is this rational behaviour?