From Robert W. Merry's review of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Douglas Murray, Bloomsbury Continuum, 352 pages:
You should carefully study the whole piece. Here are some excerpts. Emphases added.
[. . .]
No, the defining issue of our day is mass immigration into the nations of Western heritage. This growing inflow threatens to remake those nations and overwhelm their cultural identity. This is the issue that played the largest role in getting Donald Trump elected. It drove Britain’s Brexit vote. It is roiling the European continent, mounting tensions inside the EU and driving a wedge between the elites of those nations and their general populations.
Indeed, the central battlefront in the immigration wars is Europe, which accepted a trickle of immigrants in the immediate postwar era due to labor shortages. But over the years the trickle became a stream, then a growing river, and finally a torrent—to the extent that ethnic Britons are now a minority in their own capital city, refugee flows into Germany went from 48,589 in 2010 to 1.5 million in 2015, and Italy, a key entry point, received at one point an average of 6,500 new arrivals a day.
[. . .]
A key point of the book, reinforced through anecdote and abundant documentation, is that Muslim immigrants have not assimilated into their European host countries to any meaningful extent. Indeed, there is a growing feeling among many of the new arrivals that these aren’t host countries at all but merely lands ripe for Islam’s inexorable expansion. An 18-year-old Syrian refugee to Germany, Aras Bacho, writing in Der Freitag and the Huffington Post Deutschland, reflected this attitude when he said German migrants were “fed up” with “angry” Germans—described as “unemployed racists”—who “insult and agitate.” He added, “We refugees…do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. Germany does not fit you, why do you live here?….Look for a new home.”
Consider also the significance of this fact: By 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for ISIS than for the British armed forces. There was nothing hidden about the resolve of many European Muslims to retain their own culture while overwhelming the European one. At a rally in Cologne in 2008, then-Turkish prime minister (later president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a crowd of 20,000 Turks living in Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands that assimilation in Europe would constitute “a crime against humanity.” He added, “I understand very well that you are against assimilation. One cannot expect you to assimilate.” Yet he admonished the five million Turks living in Europe to pursue political influence through democratic means in order to wield a “constitutional element” in transforming the continent.
Reading Murray’s book, one gets an understanding of why he characterizes Europe’s demise as “strange.” The continent’s embrace of its own cultural death is indeed historically aberrational. Civilizations normally fight for the preservation of their cultures, unite to expel invaders, revere their identities and the fundamental elements of their heritage. But the West today is engaged in an extensive and progressive extravagance of civilizational self-abnegation. Murray calls this the “tyranny of guilt” and identifies it as a “pathology.” The concept of historical guilt, he writes, means that hereditary stains of guilt can be passed down through generations—much as Europeans themselves for generations held Jews responsible for the killing of Christ. Eventually this was seen as repugnant, and the Pope himself in 1965 formally lifted the historical burden.
[. . .]
America lags behind Europe in the magnitude of its immigration problem. But, with an estimated 11 million illegals in country and the same prevailing elite sensibility dominating our discourse, the United States eventually will hit a similar crisis point unless current trends are altered or reversed. It’s worth noting that the percentage of Americans born outside the country has approached a historical high of 14 percent—similar to what it was in the 1920s, the last time the country curtailed both the numbers of immigrants and the nations from which they were allowed to come. That may be what’s brewing here today with the election of Trump.
Exactly right. Stupid 'liberals' are still in shock over Trump's election and still cannot understand how he could have won. The main factor responsible for his election is easy to understand. We decent Americans who love our country and stand for the rule of law are sick of illegal immigration and are very reasonably opposed to the legal immigration of those who do not accept our values.
Those who oppose Trump's immigration proposals are either destructive leftist scum or else pollyannish bleeding-hearts who do not understand the issues. The lines are clearly drawn and the battle is on for the soul of America. 2018 should prove to be very interesting indeed.
We are lucky in that we are not Europe or the U. K. We can learn from their experiment in self-destruction. We have a little time, and with Trump in the saddle, a fighting chance.
But will learn? And will we fight? Some of you have children and grandchildren. Do you care at all what country they will inherit?