One of the great successes of Islamist movements appears to have been to convince much of the third generation of Muslim families to break with assimilation. Many of that generation were beginning to become more integrated than their parents or grandparents.
[B]y launching barbaric jihadist attacks — such as Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Brussels, Berlin, or the July 14 Nice attacks — radical Islamists in fact aim to induce hostility toward Muslims and provoke a clash between Muslims and non-Muslims, to motivate Muslims to separate from their non-Muslim environment and de-assimilate.
This strategy has been most effective. Islamic terrorism produces criticism of Islamism. The Islamists then say that the criticism is proof that they are victims of Islamophobia…. This community then functions as a counter-society against Western society, which is perceived as harmful, decadent, “Islamophobic,” or “racist.”
There are networks that organize Islamization – it seems, mainly of three kinds. The first network consists of Islamist movements themselves…. Some states play an extremely direct role in this process: Turkey, Qatar and Pakistan, among others…. The institutions involved include the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which brings together 57 Muslim states and promotes an international Islamic order. One can also mention ISESCO, the Islamic counterpart of UNESCO. These structures help to spread a narrative that by adapting to Western culture… This narrative not only tries to adapt sharia to Europe, but tries to push Europe to adapt to sharia.
The third network is… the dominant current within Western societies themselves, shaped by “political correctness.” Out of fear of conflict, fear of not getting votes, or Western postcolonial guilt, many Europeans conveniently manage not to see the Muslim colonization of Turkey, Egypt, Albania, Kashmir, Cyprus and Israel. The last is where Jews have lived for nearly 4000 years and are therefore the indigenous population. Muslims did not even exist until the seventh century.
Sometimes, simply out of a desire to buy peace in their neighborhoods, Western elites accommodate Islamist demands. Local elected officials, confronted with “difficult” neighborhoods, come to implicit agreements with a community’s representatives just in order to preserve a form of peace.
We are, in fact, creating “extraterritorial mini-caliphates.”
US President Donald Trump has spoken of “civilizational erasure.” He is absolutely right.
Many Islamists tell Muslims in Europe that their presence in a non-Muslim country can be justified only on two conditions. First, they must re-Islamize in order to protect themselves from the supposedly harmful influence of the unbelieving societies. Second, they must contribute to expanding the Muslim community until it one day becomes dominant. In this mindset, living in Europe becomes acceptable only if one works to transform it gradually into an Islamized space.
A great mistake of the Western elites seems to have been to reduce “national interests” only to material interests. Many in the West appear to have believed that democracy and human rights would seduce all of humanity. They passed over in silence the dimensions of religion and ethnic values of the West — its shared culture, language and history, and its anchoring in Judeo-Christian priorities—in order to present democracy and human rights as a model exportable to the entire world.
Much of the West no longer thinks of itself in cultural, religious, or civilizational terms. It thinks of itself rhapsodically as a space that is open to all ethnicities and religions, reduced to individual rights, democracy, and consumption — and capable of extending over the entire world.
Much of the West also no longer believes in its own civilization; many no longer even believe it is a civilization. Under these circumstances, how could it be capable of pursuing a policy of defense of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian heritage?
This loss of self-awareness might explain some serious strategic errors. If one believes that Europe has neither religion, history, shared values nor civilization, then Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait, or Turkey can appear merely as economic partners. Their investments, buildings, football clubs, and financial power are noticed; their ideological and religious roles are overlooked.
If the West had preserved a vision of itself as a civilization, it could have maintained economic relations with these countries while prohibiting any religious interference. It could have said clearly: “We cooperate, but you do not finance the Islamization of our territories.” The West, having stopped seeing itself as a civilization, allowed Islamist powers to finance mosques, associations, and networks of influence on its own soil.
If you refuse to defend your civilization, you are disarming your nation. The West is a civilization shared by a number of groups, which are mainly the products of Judeo-Christian values. If a nation does not know its identity, how can it defend itself? If a nation renounces its value systems, its traditions, its historical religion, and its heritage, it implicitly accepts changing its population, identity and religion.
Alexandre del Valle is a French author specializing in geopolitics.
Grégoire Canlorbe: What do we know, please, about the Islamization of Europe?
Alexandre del Valle: The Islamization of countries such as Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, or the Netherlands has, in my view, reached a critical threshold, perhaps even a point of no return. The reasons are at once demographic, cultural, and ideological. These recent minorities have not only reached a significant numerical weight; they also have much higher fertility rates. Above all, for the past twenty years or so, there has been not only a failure of assimilation, but a form of de-assimilation among populations that, until then, had seemed assimilated.
One of the great successes of Islamist movements appears to have been to convince much of the third generation of Muslim families to break with assimilation. Many of that generation were beginning to become more integrated than their parents or grandparents. They had begun to adopt some codes of European societies: freedom of individuals, freedom of movement, separation between religion and politics, sometimes even emotional and sexual freedom. You could see young Muslim women dating Christians, atheists, or non-Muslims.
For a number of years, though, you can see a retreat, particularly during conversations on “Islamophobia.” Islamists, often with the support — or complacency — of many on the “left,” have managed to instill in many Muslims a mentality of mistrust, sometimes verging on paranoia, leading them to believe that they are surrounded by enemies — that the non-Muslim society is fundamentally hostile to them, and that they must therefore not join it. In what turned out to be a bestseller in France, The Strategy of Intimidation, I explained that by launching barbaric jihadist attacks — such as Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Brussels, Berlin, or the July 14 Nice attacks — radical Islamists in fact aim to induce hostility toward Muslims and provoke a clash between Muslims and non-Muslims, to motivate Muslims to separate from their non-Muslim environment and de-assimilate.
This strategy has been most effective. Islamic terrorism produces criticism of Islamism. The Islamists then say that the criticism is proof that they are victims of Islamophobia. Young people who were assimilated, or at least interested, are encouraged to withdraw voluntarily into an isolated Islamic community. This community then functions as a counter-society against Western society, which is perceived as harmful, decadent, “Islamophobic,” or “racist.” In this framework, withdrawal—whether it involves a veil, marrying only within one’s religion, Muslim clothing excluded by non-Muslims from everyday life, or abstention from some democratic activities — is then presented as a condition of survival in the face of a small minority community supposedly being oppressed by a large majority.
There is now a discourse in these Muslim communities that suggests it might be best if they separated themselves from the rest of society. The separation is being presented as a demand for protection, a right to difference, or even a right to reparations in the face of the supposedly “racist” attitude of Western society.
The discourse presents Western society as diabolically secular, anti-religious, perverse, Islamophobic, and, of course, Zionist. In this narrative, Christians are often described as the accomplices of Jews or Zionists — a view that further reinforces the hostility toward the host society and the wish to separate from it.
Canlorbe: Is this Islamization spontaneous?
del Valle: Often it is not spontaneous. There are networks that organize Islamization – it seems, mainly of three kinds. The first network consists of Islamist movements themselves. These may be transnational organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistani Tabligh, the Barelvi or Deobandi movements, the Europe-based Turkish movement Milli Görüş, or Salafist currents. Those networks are supported by associations, foundations, mosques, Islamic centers — and also by states.
Some states play an extremely direct role in this process: Turkey, Qatar and Pakistan, among others. They sometimes act openly, sometimes through religious, diplomatic, consular, or associative intermediaries. Often Muslim states, transnational Islamist organizations, and international institutions converge into what appears to be the three major poles of re-Islamization.
The institutions involved include the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which brings together 57 Muslim states and promotes an international Islamic order. One can also mention ISESCO, the Islamic counterpart of UNESCO. These structures help to spread a narrative that by adapting to Western culture, Muslims who have immigrated to Europe are betraying their parents, their religion and their ancestors. Muslims are told that their parents already began this betrayal by integrating, and that their dignity requires a form of redemption: becoming fully Muslim again, re-Islamizing themselves, and claiming a form of sharia adapted to Muslim minorities in Europe. This narrative not only tries to adapt sharia to Europe, but tries to push Europe to adapt to sharia. The process is made clear in two books by Bat Ye’or: Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, or her other major work on dhimmitude, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam.
The second network is not Muslim; it is a new, Marxist “far left.” Out of hatred for the West, Jews and Israel, many seem to see radical Islam as an instrument for destabilizing and eradicating Western societies. Complicity with Islam appears to stem from their hostility to Jews, “Zionists” — meaning Jews — and Judeo-Christian values such as individual merit, opportunity, free-market economies, democratic self-rule as opposed to top-down rule by a government or religious decree, and so on. In this revolutionary logic, Islam is perceived as a force of rupture capable of shaking — and eventually displacing — Western, democratic, Judeo-Christian states. Marxist, Third-Worldist, and pro-Palestinian circles see this political pressure as a lever to confront the established order, with a view to revolution.
The third network is more diffuse but just as important: it is the dominant current within Western societies themselves, shaped by “political correctness.” Out of fear of conflict, fear of not getting votes, or Western postcolonial guilt, many Europeans conveniently manage not to see the Muslim colonization of Turkey, Egypt, Albania, Kashmir, Cyprus and Israel. The last is where Jews have lived for nearly 4000 years and are therefore the indigenous population. Muslims did not even exist until the seventh century.
This capitulation affects both the left and the right. Sometimes, simply out of a desire to buy peace in their neighborhoods, Western elites accommodate Islamist demands. Local elected officials, confronted with “difficult” neighborhoods, come to implicit agreements with a community’s representatives just in order to preserve a form of peace. That appeasement is sometimes known as a “pax islamica”: a momentary peace in the hope of avoiding the cost of escalating demands and even more concessions – which usually come soon enough, anyway.
These three networks — the Islamist, the alliance with the Marxist “far left,” and a misguided, Western political correctness — allow Islam to advance by peaceful means, such as proselytizing, infiltrating, lobbying, revising education, legal pressure, political pressure, and community demands. What the great Islamic invasions failed to accomplish between the 7th and 15th centuries, Islam is achieving today through immigration, demography, ideological influence, and institutional conquest.
The great expert on Islam, Bernard Lewis, spoke of a third great wave of Islamization. We are witnessing it today not only in Europe but also in Africa and, gradually, in Canada, the United States, Venezuela, and Brazil. Across the West as a whole, the interweaving of Islam, the far left, and political correctness is successfully advancing the entrenchment of Islam.
We are, in fact, creating “extraterritorial mini-caliphates.” This does not necessarily mean imagining that all of Europe will be transformed into a caliphate, but rather that many areas may cease to be culturally European. Many of England’s major cities now have Muslim mayors who are working to advance the cause of Islam. New York, in the US, just elected a Muslim mayor who seems deliberately to be accumulating a rather spotty record when it comes to the different religions of his constituents. US President Donald Trump has spoken of “civilizational erasure.” He is absolutely right. In some neighborhoods marked by massive immigration, entire zones become at once Arab-African and Islamic, with their own norms, codes, courts, and informal authorities.
This process is difficult to curb. The more the number of Muslims influenced by Islam increases, the more a pattern of self-reinforcement develops: marriages only within the group, family reunification, meaning the arrival of cousins, spouses, in-laws, or other extended family members. Pierre Brochand, former director of France’s DGSE [Directorate-General for External Security] from 2002 to 2008, noted that Islamic immigration eventually becomes self-sustaining.
Many Islamists tell Muslims in Europe that their presence in a non-Muslim country can be justified only on two conditions. First, they must re-Islamize in order to protect themselves from the supposedly harmful influence of the unbelieving societies. Second, they must contribute to expanding the Muslim community until it one day becomes dominant. In this mindset, living in Europe becomes acceptable only if one works to transform it gradually into an Islamized space.
In Europe, therefore, the more numerous Muslims influenced by Islam become, the more they seek to bring in other Muslims, who are then supervised by imams, associations, and re-Islamization networks. European laws on family reunification, religious freedom, and immigration facilitate this dynamic. Beyond some threshold, the increase ceases to be circumstantial: it becomes structural, cumulative, and self-sustaining.
Canlorbe: What then happens to national interests such as immigration policy or foreign policy?
del Valle: A great mistake of the Western elites seems to have been to reduce “national interests” only to material interests. Many in the West appear to have believed that democracy and human rights would seduce all of humanity. They passed over in silence the dimensions of religion and ethnic values of the West — its shared culture, language and history, and its anchoring in Judeo-Christian priorities—in order to present democracy and human rights as a model exportable to the entire world.
These elites may have believed that they could ensure the economic and political dominion of the Judeo-Christian West through exporting an abstract “West” belonging theoretically to everyone and empty of all ethical or religious content.
The West ended up believing its own lie — through the media, advertising, universities, schools, popular culture, radio, and television — it spread this vision of the West within its own space and among its own population. It forgot that this view might collide with the views of others.
Much of the West no longer thinks of itself in cultural, religious, or civilizational terms. It thinks of itself rhapsodically as a space that is open to all ethnicities and religions, reduced to individual rights, democracy, and consumption — and capable of extending over the entire world.
Much of the West also no longer believes in its own civilization; many no longer even believe it is a civilization. Under these circumstances, how could it be capable of pursuing a policy of defense of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian heritage?
This loss of self-awareness might explain some serious strategic errors. If one believes that Europe has neither religion, history, shared values nor civilization, then Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait, or Turkey can appear merely as economic partners. Their investments, buildings, football clubs, and financial power are noticed; their ideological and religious roles are overlooked.
If the West had preserved a vision of itself as a civilization, it could have maintained economic relations with these countries while prohibiting any religious interference. It could have said clearly: “We cooperate, but you do not finance the Islamization of our territories.” The West, having stopped seeing itself as a civilization, allowed Islamist powers to finance mosques, associations, and networks of influence on its own soil.
The intelligence services were often immensely disconcerted by this indifference: they saw political authorities tolerate, for decades, the action of Islamist networks in suburbs and sensitive neighborhoods in the name of economic or diplomatic partnership.
If you refuse to defend your civilization, you are disarming your nation. The West is a civilization shared by a number of groups, which are mainly the products of Judeo-Christian values. If a nation does not know its identity, how can it defend itself? If a nation renounces its value systems, its traditions, its historical religion, and its heritage, it implicitly accepts changing its population, identity and religion.
National interests cannot be defended without being aware of who we are and what we stand for. Without knowing that, there can be no defense.
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