The migration shock that is endangering Europe is felt most keenly in Belgium where 1 million people migrated to a country of 10 million, resulting in cultural separatism, the rise of Salafism and terror. What is Europe doing about it?
“Europe’s migration crisis is leading to fission”, Stanford historian Niall Ferguson wrote. “I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU”.
Mr. Ferguson’s prediction seems to be turning into a reality. In Germany, where the party of Angela Merkel has just been roiled after the parliamentary group leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, Ralph Brinkhaus, said a Muslim could become German Chancellor.
In Belgium, immigration recently teared down a government. Belgium’s prime minister Charles Michel resigned over a coalition crisis on immigration and a minority government replaced it. Michel decided he was not giving in to the demands of the Flemish nationalists, who refused to back the United Nations’ migration pact. “There is huge concern and even anger and frustration among a big part of the population about the chaotic organization of asylum and chaotic migration flows into Europe … The illegal chaos has to end”, the Flemish nationalist leader Theo Francken said. Bart De Wever, another leader of Belgium’s right-wing New Flemish Alliance, also declared that Belgium has to choose between social cohesion and open borders.
According to French scholar Laurent Fidés, the U.N. migration pact is a form of “mass indoctrination” about immigration.
Looking at what is happening to Belgium’s second largest city, one realizes that the New Flemish Alliance might have a point. The city of Antwerp just passed a historic tipping point in Europe: the population of the capital of the Flanders passed the threshold of 50% of residents being of “migrant” background, which means that more people in the city are migrants or the descendants or migrants than not.
Belgium is “the future”, Belgium is where all the nations refusing to stop immigration are leading to.
Belgium has been dubbed “a country of permanent migration”. “Judge for yourself: compared to its population, Belgium has experienced since 2000 a migration shock more severe than France, Germany or the Netherlands, Belgian senator Alain Destexhe revealed. “In twenty years, Belgium has naturalized between 600,000 to 700,000 people, that is to say 5 or 6 percent of the population, not to mention illegal immigrants and asylum seekers …”. Destexhe just published a book on the subject titled “Immigration et intégration: avant qu’il ne soit trop tard…”. Immigration and integration: before it is too late. As Mr. Ferguson understood, it is the single most important topic Europe is facing.
Destexhe’s appeal is even more urgent since it is not coming from a right-wing politician, but from the former secretary general of the humanitarian organization Doctors without borders. The now Belgian parliamentarian Destexhe is proposing several significant measures to limit immigration in his country, including the reduction of family reunifications, the revision of the Geneva Convention defining the modalities under which a state must grant refugee status, a ban on the financing of Islam by foreign countries and the scrapping of subsidies for pro-Islamic lobbies. In sixteen years, the Naturalization Commission of the Belgian Parliament has examined 226,417 files and accepted 60 percent of the requests.
“Belgium, like France, is an endangered country”, the French journalist Eric Zemmour said. “When we walk around certain parts of Brussels, it’s no longer Belgium, it’s another country”. What happened to Belgium? “The beginning of the wave can be dated to the year 2000”, Destexhe continued. “Belgium simultaneously adopted three policies. First, the expansion of family reunification that became extremely easy. Then, the massive regularization of the illegals. Finally, the legislator facilitated the naturalization procedure. The combined effect of these measures created an influx of one million people in ten years in a country of 10 million inhabitants! It is a huge demographic shock that leads to a change in the composition of the country, especially in Brussels, and greatly aggravates the problems of communitarianism, the spread of Salafism and more generally cultural separatism”.
In one year, Belgium experienced an increase of 75 percent in the number of applications for family reunification as a consequence of the influx of refugees during the summer of 2015. Most of them from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, the asylum seekers have introduced – once their status is recognized – a request for bringing their family to Belgium. Thanks to immigration, Belgium’s population is costantly growing.
“Imagine that 5 or 6 million people acquire French nationality without being asked for an economic or cultural integration into French society: this would provoke an uproar; however it is, proportionally, what happened in Belgium”, Destexhe explained. “Like France, Belgium has changed dramatically in a relatively short time, and was transformed into a mass immigration nation without any public debate”, Destexhe also wrote in Le Figaro, noting that its population rose from 10.2 million to 11.3 million in a relatively short period as a result of mass migration. Between 2000 and 2010, Belgium’s net migration figures ran “nine times higher than in the Netherlands, four times higher than in France and Germany, and even greater than in the U.S.” in proportion to the nation’s size”.
The Jewish British scholar Eric Kaufmann labelled this historic demographic transformation “whiteshift”. Take the Belgian city of Mechelen: one quarter of his 90,000 people are now Muslims and the Catholic cathedral in the Belgian city recently broadcast the Islamic call to prayer. It looks like a confirmation of what Belgian cardinal and archbishop of Brussels, Jozef De Kesel, said: “It would be imprudent to create a religious vacuum. Islam will not accept relegating religion to the private sphere. Will it follow the same path as the Catholic Church or will it invade our culture? I do not know. I am not a prophet. Have you read the book ‘Soumission’ by Michel Houellebecq?”.
“Such demographic shocks almost inevitably bring cultural conflicts”, Christopher Caldwell recently wrote about the impact of immigration on Europe. There is a link between mass immigration, multiculturalism and Islamist growth.
The Algerian writer Boualem Sansal just declared that in 50 years Belgium could be totally Islamized. “These are not shocking words, that’s what I observe”,Sansal said. “To say that Islamism will dominate does not mean that all French or Belgians will become Muslims. There is an active minority, with those who submit, who accompany it for tactical reasons, because we trade with the Arab countries and we do not want to shock his majesty the Sultan of Saudi Arabia. It’s a process that is happening at different speeds. We have not seen the decline in the last thirty years, it only increases”. The Islamists in Belgium could not agree more with Sansal.
The deputy head of Bruxelles’ Grand Mosque, Nordine Taouil, accuses the Westerners of dressing “like dogs” and he encourages Muslims to make children so that Europe becomes Muslim: “In 50 years, all Europe – inshallah – will have become Muslim. So have kids! Get married and have kids”. In the last years, Brussels’ neighborhoods became “breeding ground for terror”. That is why 71 percent of Belgians see Islam as incompatible with Western values. According with another survey, only 18 percent of native Flemish Belgians consider Muslim values to be compatible with their way of life.
To see how the size of Europe’s Muslim population may change in the coming decades, the US think tank Pew Research Center recently modeled three scenarios that vary depending on levels of migration. In a “medium migration scenario”, Belgium will have 15,1 percent of Islamic population. In a high migration scenario, the country will be 18,2 percent Muslims. In thirty years, one fifth of the Belgian population might be Muslim. And in the cities even more.
Half of the pupils in the elementary schools of Antwerp are already Muslim. The figures come from the city’s official for education, Claude Marinower. The figures vary in the city’s districts. In Kiel, for example, 83 per cent of the children are Muslim, in Antwerp North it is 64 per cent and in Borgerhout 63 per cent. It is one of the most visible consequences of Europe’s “parallel societies”, as the historian Andrew Michta called them. Jeff Jacoby called them “Belgium’s Muslim ghettos”. In one Brussels school, the Koninklijk Atheneum Anderlecht, 80 per cent of the pupils are Muslim.
Alain Destexhe’s question is urgent: What are Belgium and Europe are doing before it becomes too late?
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter and of “J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel” published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.
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