Book Review: “The Strange Death of Europe”

Strange Death of Europe by Douglas MurrayDouglas Murray Bloomsbury: 343 pp., on AmazonEurope’s Epitaph – A Saga of Political Correctness, Denial, Arrogance, and Stupidity 

Book Review by Col. Tom Snodgrass (Ret.)

The Seemingly Inexplicable, Self-Inflicted Demise of Western Europe

The first paragraph of the book’s Introduction sets the stage for the bizarre and appalling historical account that follows:


Willful self-destruction is difficult to comprehend and explain, but the author, Douglas Murray, does as well as such a decidedly weird behavior permits. Mr. Murray is a prize-winning British author, journalist, and associate magazine editor, and as such he is perfectly positioned to deal with this abnormal issue as a firsthand observer chronicling the pathetically tragic civilization-ending events.

The Historical Background

The fateful story begins in Western Europe after the Second World War when the war’s massive male death toll created continent-wide labor shortages. In order to perform the critical reconstruction of the war-devastated societies, the Western Europeans turned to a readily available source of manpower, the teeming Islamic labor markets in North Africa, Turkey, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia. The assumption when the Islamic labor recruitment was initiated in the post-war era was that the imported labor augmentation would be temporary and that the migrant workers would return to their counties-of-origin after some undetermined period of time. The entire concept was poorly thought-through by European governments from the beginning.

But, as should naturally have been anticipated, the imported labor force found that life in Europe, which was being economically rebuilt, was tremendously more attractive than returning to their impoverished third world existences. Soon, the foreign male work force began to bring their families to Western Europe and settle into their new homes. The inflow of new foreign people began slowly and in numbers that were easily accommodated in a Europe depopulated by tens of millions of war-related deaths. Because the incoming foreign population was not a burden or disruptive, it was not noteworthy nor concerning that the foreign newcomers lived in ethnic ghettos and were not integrated in the life and culture of the European nations. Furthermore, it should be observed that this arrangement was just fine with the Europeans who remained ethnocentrically separated from the Muslims with no motivation to accept these culturally different people as fellow countrymen.

Since taking over politically and establishing sharia law was not the overriding, immediate priority of most newly-arrived Muslims, they set about getting jobs and making new lives for themselves, while establishing modest prayer rooms and mosques. This arrangement of culturally very diverse societies living side by side continued without any particularly great difficulties for decades until the 1980s.

The year 1979 marked a sea change in the Middle Eastern heart of Islam, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which reverberated around the globe, especially in the Muslim communities in Europe. The jihadist forces of revolutionary change that rolled out of the Middle East were twofold and Islamic sectarian in nature, Sunni and Shia. There were two separate drastic events that triggered this dual-pronged Islamic jihadist impetus.

In Saudi Arabia, Sunni Wahhabi militant “purists,” dissatisfied with the “westernization” of the Arabian Peninsula permitted by the Saudi Royal Family, physically took over the Grand Mosque (Masjid al-Haram) of Mecca calling for the overthrow of the Saudi Royal Family.  The two-week seizure of Islam’s holiest site resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people, including worshippers, militants, and security forces, shocking the Islamic world. The Saudi king, known as “Guardian of the two most holy Muslim cities—Mecca and Medina,” was humiliated and stymied for a solution because no weapons are permitted to be used in the Grand Mosque. This religious dictum is in accordance with statutes of the Wahhabi clerical establishment, which is the principal sustaining force for the Saudi Royal Family’s power over the country.

In keeping with standard Islamic practice, a legal fiction was devised and legalized by a fatwa issued, in this case, by the Wahhabi establishment authorizing the Royal Family to commission the use of force to clear the mosque of the rebelling Islamic militants. The Royal Family then had to bring in French and Pakistani commandos to assist the Saudi national forces to retake the mosque. And here is where the Muslim conquest of Europe began in earnest for the third time –the first in Western Europe from 711 to 1492 A.D. by the post-Mohammed Arabs and the second by the Ottoman Turks in Eastern Europe from 1423 to 1924 A.D.

In exchange for the Wahhabi clerical fatwa authorizing the use of force in this Islamic sacred area, the Saudi Royal Family agreed to annually allocate around $4 billion in petrodollars to export violent and stealth Wahhabi Islamic jihad by building Wahhabi mosques administered by Wahhabi-indoctrinated clerics to preach Wahhabi Sunni jihad around the globe. (It should be noted that these tremendous jihad-financing expenditures have continued now for three and a half decades.) Wahhabi Sunni jihad is rooted in Islamic Salafism, which is the idea that authentic Islam is found in the example of the earliest generation of Muslims (Salafis) who lived with Mohammad and carried out successful jihad after his death. (According to Islamic sharia law, jihad is specifically “to war against non-Muslims…signifying warfare to establish Islam” and is “obligatory for every Muslim.”)

The second trigger of Islamic jihadism worldwide occurred in Iran when the Shia Khomeinist Twelver sect overthrew the Shah, and the revolutionaries proclaimed that Iran was now the Islamic Republic of Iran with the mission of worldwide Shia jihad. (The term Twelver refers to its adherents’ belief in twelve divinely ordained leaders, known as the Twelve Imams, and their belief that the last Imam, Mohammed al-Mahdi, lives in occultation and will reappear as the promised Islamic redeemer Mahdi.) It was at this point that Islamic terrorism began to plague the world with the introduction of Shia suicide bombing in the 1980s, which was an infrequently used tactic previously. The devastation resulting from the tactic also popularized it in time with Sunni jihadists as well.

During this period the Shiites began to supplant the Sunnis as the Muslim leaders in Islamic jihad in the minds of umma Muslims (world community of believers in Islam), and since jihad is the primary purpose of Islam, the Sunnis were compulsively motivated to regain their position as Islam’s leading jihadists, which they had historically held. The Soviet-Afghan War gave the Sunnis an excellent battlefield in which to found and perfect their premier jihadist organization (Al-Qaeda) and its murderous terror techniques. Since this time, the Sunnis and Shiites have fought for the leadership of the Islamic world umma by attempting to outdo each other with greater and greater jihad terrorism, yielding greater and greater human slaughter. It should be noted that, while Shia jihad terrorism is primarily orchestrated by the Khomeinist Twelver Mullahs in Iran, the Sunni jihad terrorism in Europe and worldwide is managed from multiple sources, including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State with material support from Saudi Arabia and Qatar among others.  

The Excuses the Europeans Told Themselves Debunked

After the slowly increasing jihadist terror and Islamic sharia demands came into play in the 1980s, public support for the mass immigration of Muslims went from unenthusiastic neutrality to outright disapproval. In order to counter public opposition, European governments continued to force vast social change on the European societies by offering a wide variety of excuse justifications that ranged from the moral to the technocratic. One of the more interesting aspects of the book is Douglas Murray’s refutation of each attempt of the ruling elites to deceive the public in an effort to vindicate their governing malfeasance.

The first pro-immigration argument that the European ruling classes made for mass Islamic immigration is that the European societies are aging and the aged are not being replaced by European youth; therefore, it is necessary to bring in more young foreign people to pay into the social welfare system that keeps aging Europeans in the comfortable lifestyle to which they have become addicted. One fact that is utterly ignored while huge numbers of immigrants are flooding into Europe is that immigrants age too. This short-term fix is building an even larger long-term social crisis. Structurally, the cushy European social welfare programs are clearly pyramid schemes constructed on over-spending of borrowed money. More people compound that problem.

The second pro-immigration argument that the European ruling elites made was that, even if the mass deluge of peoples from different cultures doesn’t economically benefit indigenous Europeans, the Europeans are being culturally enriched by different attitudes, different languages, and the endlessly cited “exciting new cuisine.” But does bringing in 100,000 extra Somalis, most of whom who will go on social welfare, increase the enjoyment of Somali food 100,000xfold?

However, the real diversity problem for Europe (and the US) is the clash of cultural values. For instance, it is an Islamic belief in many societies that it is permissible to rape non-Muslim “white girls” because of the religious superiority of Islam. Britain had over 1,400 juvenile girls (some as young as 11) sexually exploited in the town of Rotherdam  between 1997-2014 by Pakistani-origin Muslim men. British law enforcement was well aware of this on-going serial gang rape, but was restrained from taking action to stop it for fear of being labeled “racist.” Then there is “female genital mutilation” (FGM) that is extensively practiced by Muslims as a cultural rite, but once again British officials have been constrained from stopping the barbaric FGM practice by the cowardice born of British officialdom’s dread of the “Islamophobia” characterization. The European ruling classes made the judgment that increased rates of sexual assault are balanced by the much wider range of cuisine choices.

When those two arguments are exposed as specious, the elites fall back on the idea that immigration is unstoppable because of “globalization.” This third justification (i.e., rationalization) goes beyond reason and simple excuses, it maintains that none of this matters because nothing can be done anyway. It is out of everyone’s hands. It is our fate because globalization has made it virtually impossible to stop Muslims from flocking to Europe. But globalization has nothing to do with the immigrant surge; the magnets attracting third world Islamic poor are Europe’s almost nonexistent immigration prohibitions and its generous social welfare system.

European elites have admitted that, when they opened the immigration floodgates, they believed that the migrants would integrate, but they had no policy or plan to facilitate that integration. These government officials were/are foolish beyond belief.


There are 320 pages in this book of this type of penetrating analysis that examines many more foolish fallacies that have precipitated the current culturally explosive situation in Europe. As is illustrated in the excuse discussion above, the underlying reason for this crisis is denial of reality by official policymakers, while ignoring the growing opposition of the European-in-the-street. Americans should read this book because our public officials are following many of the same wrong-headed immigration policies. However, by far the most dangerous similarity is that US officials are in the same mental denial that Western values based on personal liberty and Islamic “submission” (the meaning of the word “Islam”) values are totally incompatible. Muslims will not accept US cultural values and will never stop attempting to Islamize America.

Will Americans be as foolish as Europeans have been, or will we wake up, read this book and repudiate the irrational denial of Islam’s conquest motive?

Col. Thomas Snodgrass, USAF (retired) served over a year in Peshawar, Pakistan, working with Pakistani military intelligence, during his thirty-year career.


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