Who Really Killed Europe?

Jul 15, 2017 by Jill

By David Jimenez, The American Conservative:

I recently attended a Brussels event on migration alongside young American and European researchers and activists. The musings of the guardians of human decency there would send average European voters fleeing towards the populist right. The argument was made that generous migration levels should stem not from compassion but be an indefinite manifestation of reparations for the crimes of Western civilization. Integration courses for new male migrants on sexual assault “stereotyped” their cultures, and the voluntary wearing of the Islamic niqab functioned as a form of female empowerment.

The admirable bluntness of the young Brussels idealists would make for political suicide anywhere in Europe. But their worldview is not without a policy legacy. Douglas Murray, a columnist for The Spectator, shows otherwise in The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Islam, Identity. Guilt, naivety, and a refusal to forcefully defend one’s values have defined the response of the postwar European political class to migration and integration for a half-century. Their failure, writes Murray, leaves a continent “committing suicide.” By the end of the century, “Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place we call home.”

Whether one welcomes or fears sharp demographic change, The Strange Death of Europe amply documents its reality. Vienna researchers predict more than half of Austria’s adolescent youth will be Muslim by mid-century. In Sweden, non-European immigrants compose up to 14 percent of the population, with ethnic Swedes projected to become a minority in all major cities within a few decades. Can Europe safely accommodate these changes while remaining faithful to herself? Or will the unprecedented scale of migration, coupled by European cultural malaise, be “the death sentence that the cradle and Parthenon of Western civilization had passed upon itself”?

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