OPINION:
In early May, a smattering of local elections in England produced Muslim winners.
Maheen Kamran, 18, won a county council seat for the town of Burnley. She says she opposes Muslim men and women “free mixing” in public.
She will be joined on Lancashire County Council by Azar Ali. The Labor Party kicked him out for anti-Jewish statements, the Daily Mail reported.
So goes Britain, and Christian Europe, these days. Western customs, such as the sexes socializing in a park or restaurant or street, and respect for Jews, are being challenged by an increasingly belligerent Muslim population bolstered by yearslong mass immigration.
“The Europeans have learned the hard way that mass migration of Muslims without assimilation leads to submission of their own cultures,” Jim Hanson, chief editor for Middle East Forum, told me.
In 2022, a popular Muslim influencer on YouTube said on social media that non-Muslim women enjoy being taken as sex slaves. Another Islamic opinion maker recently wondered why a guy can marry a 100-year-old in Britain but not a strong 9-year-old girl.
There are news stories on Muslim “grooming” gangs who kidnap non-Muslim girls and rape them. Muslims have staged aggressive street protests and taken over public spaces such as bridges and town squares to pray. Women complain of harassment by street migrants. Burqas covering women from head to foot are commonly worn. Britain is considered the Western capital of Shariah courts, which hand down rulings based on Islamic, not national, laws.
In Germany, waves of Islamists invaded Christmas markets to disrupt the sacred holiday.
There is pushback.
In Dublin in late April, more than 10,000 marched, demanding an end to the mass immigration of thousands of so-called asylum-seekers, some homeless and living in tent cities.
Southport, England, was the site of a horrendous killing spree on July 29. An ethnic African teenager entered a dance school and stabbed three girls to death. He is not Muslim. Right before he got into a studio-bound taxicab, armed with a chef’s knife, he searched for information on the April 15, 2024, stabbing of a Christian bishop and a priest inside Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Sydney, Australia, the Daily Mail reported. He pleaded guilty to murder. Authorities also charged him with owning a manual from the murderous Islamic group al Qaeda.
In September, Sweden offered $34,000 to migrants to return home. Polish security forces unleash water cannons to keep migrants on the other side of the country’s fenced border.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni campaigned in 2022 on stopping the mass influx of foreigners at Italy’s southern sea border. In 2018, she said, “I believe that Islam certainly presents incompatibilities with our values and our civilization, and what happens in Islamic centers demonstrates this. This does not mean generalizing, but there is an incompatibility with our culture.”
Ms. Meloni is virtually alone among European chiefs of state in condemning any aspect of Islamic culture.
President Trump’s senior aides are not so shy. On Feb. 14, Vice President J.D. Vance spoke to European Union dignitaries at the Munich Security Conference. A day earlier, an Afghan asylum-seeker in the city deliberately drove his car into a crowd, injuring 30. Later, a prosecutor said there was an “Islamist motivation for the crime.”
Mr. Vance scolded European leaders for allowing a foreign invasion.” How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?” Mr. Vance said to an uppity European audience not accustomed to being lectured. “No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. … More and more all over Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration.”
On May 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X a denunciation of the German government for authorizing its spy agency to surveil the anti-mass-immigration and popular Alternative for Germany party.
“What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD — which took second in the recent election — but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes,” Mr. Rubio said in a post viewed by 14 million. “Germany should reverse course.”
Pew Research estimates that Europe’s Muslims will grow from 5% (31 million) to 14% of the population by 2050 if high immigration numbers continue.
Immigration to the West is supposed to welcome people who want to pitch in to make a better democratic society. Activists against mass immigration believe Islamists have infiltrated Europe to methodically destroy Western values, particularly those that honor equal rights to women.
Their evidence is often the words of imams and other Islamists.
The Middle East Media Research Institute provides an online historical record by tracking and posting sermons and speeches.
In 2014, British Islamist Anjem Choudary appeared at a panel discussion with two associates. He displayed an image of Buckingham Palace.
“We will remove your regime and implement the Shariah in Europe,” he said, according to MEMRI. “Definitely, before the Day of Judgment, even America, Britain, China and Russia will be under the authority of the Muslims. This is a promise of the Messenger Muhammad. Indeed, there are many good tidings, much good news, to come.”
In July, Choudary was sentenced to life in prison for running a terrorist organization.
In Copenhagen in 2017, Imam Mundhir Abdallah said in a live Facebook stream: “[Jews] are hastening their own annihilation by their rampaging, their filth and their vileness, which reflect the immutable nature of the Jews.”
He added: “Their nature has nothing to do with genes, of course. It has to do with the Jewish character and psyche, with that sick Jewish mentality.”
In Britain in February, British-Palestinian academic Ghada Karim defended Hamas, which slaughtered more than 1,200 Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, as unfairly “demonized.” At a broadcast forum, she called for a plan to “dismantle” Israel.
“I want at this point to pay tribute to Hamas,” she said.
In Birmingham, England’s second-largest city and 30% Muslim, Imam Mustafa Abu Rayyan said women have an “obligation” to have sex with their husbands, the Daily Mail reported.
In 2023, a video of another Birmingham imam was circulated widely on social media. He gave instructions on how to stone an adulterous wife to death.
The British government has arrested Britons for their anti-Muslim social media memes. It often warns against “Islamophobia.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
