Home > Work > The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
61 " The cliché of the ‘average immigrant’ being an economic boon for the country only works when such exceptions are made to appear as though they are the rule. "
― Douglas Murray , The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
62 " It is a point of minor interest that as third-world migration to Europe has swelled, the Green movements have ceased to argue for population caps or to campaign for restrictions on reproduction. While happy to tell white Europeans to stop breeding, they became somewhat more reticent about making the same request of darker-skinned migrants. "
63 " But it is also a result of young people being educated to a level at which they look down on apparently mundane or unglamorous labour.Aside from the racial insinuation that we are above such roles whereas others are eminently suited to them, we should ask ourselves why our young people are (if they are) ‘above’ such tasks. "
64 " In the wake of Cologne and other similar attacks one could hear the language deteriorate around the fringes. Street movements began to talk of all arrivals into Europe as ‘rapefugees’. In Paris I met an elected official who referred to all migrants as ‘refu-jihadists’. These were unamusing as well as insulting terms for anybody who knew first hand that some at least of the people who had come were fleeing rape or escaping jihad. But such deterioration in the language seems inevitable after a period of dishonesty from the other direction. If you pretend for long enough, in the face of clear evidence, that all the arrivals in to the continent are asylum seekers, you eventually spawn a movement who believe that none of them are. "
65 " Gallup survey conducted in 2009 in Britain found that precisely zero per cent of British Muslims interviewed (out of a pool of 500) thought that homosexuality was morally acceptable.In 2009 police in Norway revealed that immigrants from non-Western backgrounds were responsible for ‘all reported grab-rapes’ – those in which the assailant grabbed the woman off a street or public place – in Oslo.One thing this demonstrates is that whereas the benefits of mass immigration undoubtedly exist and everybody is made very aware of them, the disadvantages of importing huge numbers of people from another culture take a great deal of time to admit to. "
66 " What they were claiming to criticise was ‘multiculturalism’ as a state-sponsored policy: the idea of the state encouraging people to live parallel lives in the same country and particularly in living under customs and laws that stood in opposition to those of the country they were living in.Rather than leading to a unified identity it led to a fracturing of identities, where instead of making society colour- or identity-blind, it suddenly made identity into everything. "
67 " We do not live our lives and experience our existence as solved beings. "
68 " The new Labour Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, said that it would be wrong to describe such attacks as ‘Islamic terrorism’ because these terrorists were in fact behaving contrary to their faith. Henceforth, she said, it would be more appropriate to describe such events as ‘anti-Islamic activity’. "
69 " the six Gulf Cooperation countries comprising Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman had granted asylum to a grand total of zero Syrian refugees by 2016. "
70 " If Australia is forever opening up and apologising for its own past while China remains silent, the impression may eventually be instilled, in children in Australia as much as anywhere else, that Australia is the country with more to apologise for. "
71 " America, as in Australia, such a constant drumbeat of guilt changes a people’s natural feelings about their own past. It transforms feelings of patriotism into shame or at the very least into deeply mixed emotions, and troubling effects result from this. A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. "
72 " Guilt, as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has diagnosed it in his book La Tyrannie de la pénitence, has become a moral intoxicant in Western Europe. "
73 " People imbibe it because they like it: they get high on it. It lifts them up and exalts them. Rather than being people responsible for themselves and answerable to those they know, they become the self-appointed representatives of the living and dead, the bearers of a terrible history as well as the potential redeemers of mankind. "
74 " Wondering whether he had stumbled upon a scoop the journalist asked the Chairman who the Americans in the next room were. ‘They are an American delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologise for the crusades,’ said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage. "
75 " Only the nations of Europe and their descendants allow themselves to be judged by their lowest moments. "
76 " Stephen Spender spent part of the 1930s living in Berlin and reflected on that time in his diary in 1939. Before the ultimate catastrophe had begun he mulled on the Germans he had met while living there. As he wrote, ‘The trouble with all the nice people I knew in Germany is that they were either tired or weak.’ Why were the nice people so tired? Existential tiredness is not a problem only because it produces a listless type of life. It is a problem because it can allow almost anything to follow in its wake. "
77 " In a country like Britain it has taken decades for opposition to female genital mutilation to be mainstream. Despite being illegal for three decades, and despite more than 130,000 women in Britain having suffered this barbaric treatment, there have still been no successful prosecutions for the crime. If Western Europe finds it so difficult even to confront something as straightforward as FGM, it seems unlikely it will ever be able to defend some of its subtler values in the years ahead. "
78 " Throughout the stages of its collapse, communism had not only revealed its own horrors, it also revealed the foolishness of several generations of people meant to be among the cleverest and most informed people in the continent. From the era of Marx right through to 1989 many of the cleverest people of the age contaminated themselves by their approval of the communist system. From George Bernard Shaw to Jean-Paul Sartre almost all the secular prophets turned out to have been apologists for the worst systems of their time. "
79 " Reason’ and ‘rationalism’ had led men to do the most unreasonable and irrational things. It had been just another system used by men to control other men. Belief in the autonomy of man had been destroyed by men. "
80 " translated into English as Icarus Fallen, she suggested that the condition of modern European man was the condition that Icarus would have been in had he survived the fall. "