Watching European attempts to come to terms with the problem of migrants from the Third World is to watch a slow-motion train crash. All manner of liberal nostrums about the duty to accept refugees, the right to free movement within the EU and even the notion of a secular indifference to religious distinctions are all being tested to destruction.
There seems only one possible conclusion: a Fortress Europe with distinct echoes from its past as Christendom. This may not be what Europe’s elites would choose but popular pressure seems unlikely to allow anything else.
.... At the end of the book all that Wolfreys has established is that there are frictions between Muslims and non-Muslims at every level of French society. Wolfreys has merely taken one side in that conflict.
As so often happens, anti-Islamic feeling is then denounced as racism but that is only true in the same sense that, say, English anti-popery was often conflated with hostility to the Irish or Spanish. The more important point is that a clash of civilisations really is happening and, as we surely all sense, the present rather silly debates about hijabs, niqabs and burkas are merely the opening skirmishes. [
