August 8, 2020
From the Editor’s Desk, Michael Matt takes a look at some good news regarding the Covid recovery rate before exploring what’s really going on with the global pandemic.
PARIS — Despite some establishment efforts to put a smiley face on the growing chaos, the “refugee crisis” swamping Europe is deadly serious. In fact, even top government officials and establishment voices now acknowledge the growing problems, which range from widespread mass sexual assaults perpetrated by Middle Eastern refugees, to a heightened risk of jihadist terrorism, to the expansion and multiplication of Islamic-dominated enclaves where authorities fear to tread, sometimes dubbed “no-go zones.” For Europeans, especially those in countries facing the brunt of the crisis, such as Germany and Sweden, the situation is quickly going from bad to worse.
The refugee crisis, with millions of poor, non-Western immigrants from an alien culture flooding into Europe, often with the intent of settling there permanently but not assimilating, represents a fundamental transformation of Europe. And at this point, it appears that there is no going back. It could get worse, too, as estimates suggest that around one in every 120 or so people on the planet is now considered a refugee or internally displaced by the United Nations. Millions of those are hoping to settle in the West.
For many Westerners, the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, which resulted in the slaughter of about 130 victims and the wounding of almost 400, served as a major wake-up call. Paris, though, like other major European cities, had long faced difficulties with its rapidly growing foreign population. Indeed, a decade before the Paris attacks shocked the world, massive riots across Islamic immigrant-dominated areas of the French capital and beyond resulted in a number of civilians killed, more than 125 police and firefighters injured, and almost 3,000 arrests.
The wave of terrorist attacks were still a shock, of course, but they should not have been — the warning signs were everywhere. Paris had just come under a similar jihadist attack earlier in 2015, when Islamist gunmen massacred employees at a vulgar magazine infamous for ridiculing religion, God, and Muslims. Before that, Islamist militants had slaughtered a rabbi and some Jewish children in southern France. And authorities had long realized that they had a major problem that spanned across borders.
Some of the terrorists were operating out of Belgium. After the most recent Paris attacks, the New York Times quoted Belgian Home Affairs Minister Jan Jambon acknowledging that authorities there did not “have control of the situation in Molenbeek,” a neighborhood linked to numerous other terror attacks. Prime Minister Charles Michel acknowledged that the town — often described as a “no-go area,” one of many such areas proliferating across Europe — had developed quite a reputation for jihadism. “I notice that each time there is a link with Molenbeek,” he said after the Paris attack.
Similar enclaves can be found in France, Germany, Sweden, and other nations. This writer has visited several such areas, in the company of non-Western immigrants, and observed the situation firsthand. Despite occasional claims to the contrary, the no-go zones are neither a myth nor an isolated phenomenon. Police, when they do come, arrive in caravans of squad cars, often wearing bullet-proof vests. Drug dealing takes place in the open, in broad daylight, right in the town square. Women, who have two to four times the fertility rate of native Europeans, are almost all wearing hijabs or niqabs. Natives are rarely seen. The signs are often in Arabic, and shopkeepers regularly do not speak the native language beyond some basic terms. In some cases as much as 90 percent of the population is non-Western. And asking around, residents are more than happy to tell you about how their host nation should be governed by sharia law. There are numerous videos online of “sharia patrols” on European streets where Islamists, operating outside the law, try to intimidate natives into submitting to Islamic law. While some admit to participating in what Islamists refer to as a hijra — Islamic migration to spread Islam — many express concern about the massive, uncontrolled waves of refugees and migrants pouring across the borders. The areas feel more like the Middle East than Europe.
