The Islamic Threat to the West

Lars Møller recently published a piece on three farsighted people — the late Oriana Fallaci, Mark Steyn, and Douglas Murray — who understood and have written about the mortal threat to Western civilization from “the sons of Allah,” tens of millions of whom are now living in our midst. More. on his tribute to the three (and he might have added the names of Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Ibn Warraq to his list) and the alarm he now feels, because so few in the West have heeded them, can be found here:

The moral decline of the West is no longer a matter of speculation but a demographic, cultural, and spiritual fact, visible in collapsing birth rates, the erosion of civilizational confidence, and the supine accommodation of an ideology fundamentally hostile to the Enlightenment inheritance. Where once the West confronted Nazism and Bolshevism—two totalitarian waves that sought to remake humanity through terror and ideology—it now faces a third: Islamist totalitarianism, advancing not primarily through tanks or gulags, but through demographic momentum, elite cowardice, and the patient erosion of liberal norms.

In this darkening landscape, the voices of Oriana Fallaci, Mark Steyn, and Douglas Murray rate as lonely sentinels. Far from unreflective “Islamophobes,” as their detractors sneer, these thinkers form an intellectual continuum defending Western liberty against civilizational surrender. Their warnings, typically dismissed as “alarmist” in the complacent halls of Brussels or academia, grow more prescient with each passing year. To ignore them is to invite a future in which Europe—and by extension the West—becomes unrecognizable, its freedoms subordinated to a theocratic vision incompatible with individual rights.

Oriana Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride (2001), written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, remains a visceral cri de coeur. An accomplished journalist who had interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini, she possessed intimate knowledge of radical Islam’s face. She beheld in post-9/11 Europe not multicultural enrichment but a “reverse crusade”—a Muslim invasion facilitated by mass immigration, differential birth rates, and the craven multiculturalism of European elites. She adopted and popularized the term “Eurabia” from the writings of Bat Ye’or to describe the continent’s trajectory towards becoming an Islamic colony. For Fallaci, the threat was civilizational: Islam, in its political and expansionist form, sows “hatred in place of love,” subjugates women, stifles inquiry, and rejects the separation of mosque and state….

Mark Steyn, in America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (2006), provided the demographic and strategic depth to Fallaci’s passion. His thesis is stark: Europe is dying of self-inflicted wounds—sub-replacement fertility, cultural self-loathing, and a welfare state that imports dependents rather than nurturing its own children. Muslim populations, with higher birth rates and assertive religious identities, fill the vacuum. Steyn distinguishes, as do his peers, between individual Muslims and the political ideology of Islamism, yet he refuses the comforting delusion that the two can be neatly separated when scriptural sources and historical patterns urge otherwise. His prediction of “Islamization” warned of a “fearless Muslim advance” met by “weak-kneed European elites.” The endgame, he foresaw, would be either submission or civil war, perhaps yielding neo-nationalist strongmen as desperate backlash….

Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe (2017) synthesizes and updates these analyses with empirical rigor and moral clarity. He documents how mass migration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries, combined with elite refusal to insist on assimilation, has produced parallel societies, grooming scandals, no-go zones in practice if not in euphemistic language, and rising extremism. An atheist himself, he examined Islamic texts and found them incompatible with the secular, pluralistic order that Europe claims to cherish.

Murray’s controversial statements—that conditions for Muslims in Europe should be made “harder across the board” to discourage further settlement and failed integration — stem not from gratuitous cruelty but from observed reality: tolerance extended unilaterally becomes suicide. Jihadism, he insists, “comes from Islam,” drawing on theology, history, and contemporary events from Bataclan to Cologne. Like Fallaci and Steyn, he deplores the West’s loss of identity. Europe, he argues, no longer believes that its own story is worth defending. This spiritual exhaustion invites conquest by those who believe fervently in theirs.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? In the spirit of “Sursum Corda,” let’s consider the reasons for hope so as to dispel the gloom. In Europe, almost everywhere the anti-immigrant — or more exactly, anti-Muslim immigrant parties, are ahead in the polls. In Germany, Alice Weidel of the Alternative für Deutschland, in France, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the National Rally, and Bruno Retailleau of Les Républicains, in Italy, Giorgia Meloni of Fratelli d’Italia, while in the UK, Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain Party, not even a year old, is rapidly gaining support from those who have found Nigel Farage’s Reform Party not sufficiently adamant on the subject of ending Muslim migration.

It is the next decade or two that will determine Europe’s fate. Will it continue to welcome Muslim migrants or call a halt to increasing their presence? Will European states limit welfare benefits so that, as Bruno Retailleau has suggested, for the first five years of their presence, immigrants will not be eligible for any benefits? Will the peoples of Europe inform themselves sufficiently about the texts and teachings of Islam to rouse themselves, as if after a long sleep? How many will educate themselves in time about this menace, which turns out to be more dangerous than even Nazism and Bolshevism, for it has already burrowed into our societies, affecting our political life, our media, our impressionable young?