First, the good news. Speaking to French Christians, Pope Francis has described the influx of migrants into Europe as an ‘Arab invasion’.
That’s exactly what it is, and one can only applaud his disdain for PC equivocation. Just to think that there I was, tactfully trying to avoid such forthright terms.
Then comes the bad news, and the palms about to come together with a thunderous clap stop in mid-air. For His Holiness happens to think the invasion is a good thing.
But don’t let my feeble paraphrasing take anything away from the actual words. Here they are: “Today we can talk about an Arab invasion. It is a social fact.” Thereby Europe “will go forward and find itself enhanced by the exchange among cultures” which will “bring about a certain unity to the world.”
One doesn’t immediately see the mechanisms by which such desirable effects can be achieved, unless the Pope means that we’ll all be united in a mass grave.
I wonder how the families of those murdered in Paris last year responded to the papal address. Did they agree to take the rough with the smooth? Did they feel that the benefits of multiculturalism outweighed the grief of their loss? Had His Holiness given their feelings the slightest thought before orating?
His Holiness seems to think that what’s currently under way is some kind of a cultural exchange programme, a reading of the situation that doesn’t naturally tally with the concept of invasion. We teach them how to use modern indoor facilities, they teach us… what exactly? How to embark on a short-lived career of a suicide bomber?
But then Pope Francis is like the heart, which, according to Pascal, “has its own reasons that reason knows not of” (Le pape a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point, to paraphrase ever so slightly). For it’s much easier to see how the arrival of millions of cultural aliens or rather hostiles, with several thousand trained terrorists among them, will have an effect diametrically opposite to the idyll the Pope sees in his mind’s eye.
Just about every European country already has vast and growing enclaves where Sharia law takes precedence over the law of the land, where Christians and especially Jews fear to tread and where the denizens venture outside only to ‘enhance’ the country’s crime rate. For example, Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, and one blessed with a heavy Muslim presence, has more murders than the rest of Scandinavia combined.
Such an ‘enhancing’ effect is being achieved with only about 50 million Muslims present in Europe. What if that number were in short order doubled, as seems eminently possible? Or tripled, if Turkey were admitted to the EU?
The only effect one can foresee is that Christianity will be relegated not so much to the background as to the skip. Or does His Holiness seek to emulate Prince Charles and present himself as defender of all faiths, rather than merely the one he’s institutionally obligated to defend?
Both the royal multiculturalist and his clerical doppelgänger clearly misunderstand their brief. The pontiff also displays a rather shaky knowledge of history.
For his church gratefully venerates such early opponents of multiculturalism as Charles Martel who in 732 stopped an Arab invasion at Tours (or Poitiers, if you’d rather), Don John of Austria who in 1571 did so at Lepanto, Jan Sobiesky who did it in 1683 at the gates of Vienna – not to mention Pope Urban II who in 1096 blessed the first of several crusades aimed at checking Arab aggression.
None of those gentlemen overemphasised the culturally enhancing aspects of Arab invasions. This at a time when the Arabs actually did have some culture, though not one as lofty as proponents of multi-culti rectitude like to claim.
So what has changed since then, other than Arabs now favouring explosive belts over sabres and Christianity losing much of its cultural and social dynamism? What makes the Pope believe that an Arab invasion would be more beneficial today than it was way back then?
Modern Islamic ideologues see the current demographic shift in Europe in different, and more realistic, terms. “Our victory,” the president of Algeria once said, “will come from the womb of every Muslim woman.”
And the guiding lights of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt clarified what is meant by victory. Thus Mohamed Akram: the Muslims’ task “is a kind of grand Jihad eliminating and destroying the Western civilisation from within… so that God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” And thus Kamal El-Helbawi: “Our ideal is a global Islamic state”.
Such tirades can’t be dismissed as extremist rants: they are wholly consistent with Islamic scriptural sources, including the Koran (9:33, among many other verses). So what kind of response would be consistent with our own history, along with our cultural and social tradition?
As the founder, president and so far only member of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity, I’d suggest that Martel comes much closer to it than Pope Francis. Why oh why did Benedict XVI have to leave? I for one am sorry he couldn’t stay.