Robert Spencer: Italian Mayor Celebrates Italy’s Demise

As it is inundated with Muslim migrants, will Europe go gentle into that good night, or will it rage, rage against the dying of the light? If the Mayor of Palermo, Italy, Leoluca Orlando, is any indication, Europe has already happily turned off the light switch and celebrated the impending darkness.

Orlando recently said in a pro-migrant article published by the French newspaper Libération: “If you ask me how many immigrants there are in Palermo, I do not answer 60, 70, or 80,000. Anyone who arrives in Palermo is a Palermo.”

Really? Is everyone who stands in a garage an automobile? But Orlando wasn’t finished. He continued: “The future has two names: Google and Ali the immigrant. Google expresses the virtual connection and Palermo is today the best wired and computerised city in the entire Mediterranean. Ali the migrant represents the human connection. We want to be a welcoming and modern city.”

How wonderful – because, you see, Mayor Orlando thinks the Muslim migrants will fight against the Mafia: “Until I was 30, I did not see a single immigrant in Palermo. Because the mafia was pushing them away. They are afraid of diversity. Since I became mayor and the mafia no longer governs the city, something extremely beautiful has happened: we have been invaded by immigrants.”

How extremely beautiful indeed.

Yet what neither Leoluca Orlando nor anyone else will acknowledge is that Islam is a political and social system as well as a religion. All too many of the Muslim migrants are coming to Italy those who do have a ready-made model of society and governance that they consider superior to the Italian model, and are determined to replace the one with the other.

And there are other considerations as well: many of the “refugees” are jihad terrorists. All of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees. Iin February 2015, the Islamic State boasted it would soon flood Europe with as many as 500,000 refugees. The Muslim migrant influx into Europe started soon after that. The Lebanese Education Minister said in September 2015 that there were 20,000 jihadis among the refugees in camps in his country.

Meanwhile, 80% of migrants who have come to Europe claiming to be fleeing the war in Syria aren’t really from Syria at all. So why are they claiming to be Syrian and streaming into Europe, and now the U.S. as well? An Islamic State operative gave the answer when he boasted in September 2015, shortly after the migrant influx began, that among the flood of refugees, 4,000 Islamic State jihadis had already entered Europe. He explained their purpose: “It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.” These Muslims were going to Europe in the service of that caliphate: “They are going like refugees,” he said, but they were going with the plan of sowing blood and mayhem on European streets. As he told this to journalists, he smiled and said, “Just wait.”

On May 10, 2016, Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s DGSI internal intelligence agency, said that the Islamic State was using migrant routes through the Balkans to get jihadis into Europe.

But none of that is of any concern to Leoluca Orlando. As far as he is concerned, life is beautiful, Palermo is beautiful, and it is only being made more beautiful by the entrance of all these beautiful new Palermans. What could possibly go wrong? Only racist, bigoted Islamophobes would think that any of the newcomers have any malevolent intentions, right? They will all be grateful to their Italian hosts, and together they will link arm in arm and marching happily together into the glorious multicultural future, right?

This will not end well. But as the jihadi machete begins to slice through Leoluca Orlando’s throat, he can muse happily in his final moments on how very, very beautiful it all has been.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is Confessions of an Islamophobe. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.