WEBINAR: Mass Migration in Europe: A Model for the U.S.?

The author of a new book warns of the disastrous results of European-style permissive policies towards mass migration, causing Europe to face increased terrorism and criminal violence, increased civil unrest, and an unprecedented restraint against free speech rights.

Robert Spencer, author of the new Center for Security Policy monograph, Mass Migration in Europe: A model for the U.S.? spoke with Kyle Shideler, the Center’s Director of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the launch of the Center’s newest Web series examining key national security issues likely to impact the 2020 election.

Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a Center for Security Senior Fellow, and a Shillman Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is the author of 22 books.

Spencer noted that Europe’s involvement in promoting mass migration from Arab and Muslim countries during the Arab Oil Crisis of the 1970s led to a series of agreements between European institutions and Arab countries permitting unrestricted migration to Europe in exchange for manageable oil prices.

“They, in general, proscribe mass immigration of Arab Muslims into Europe, and an agreement by the European Union that there will be no assimilation of those Muslims,” Spencer noted, “This is another of paradox of these agreements.”

The refusal to appropriately assimilate migrants in turn led to the development of so-called “No-go zones” where European governments shrink from imposing their own secular law, allowing Islamic law to flourish. Spencer noted that much of the confusion came from those, particularly in the mainstream media, that inaccurately described the nature of No-Go Zones.

“it is important to emphasize we’re talking about a de facto situation. It’s not as if there’s an Islamic republic in the middle of some European city that has a constitution based on Sharia, it’s just the way the area works” Spencer clarified, “ It’s not written down or codified, ostensibly they are under the law of the land, they just ignore them- and the authorities allow them to ignore them.”

This led to a discussion on how jihadist terrorists utilized mass migrant flows to cross European borders undetected, and hide in unassimilated enclaves such as the notorious Molenbeek, a neighborhood in Brussels, Belgium known as a hotbed for terror groups.

Spencer also discussed how Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the increasingly authoritarian president of Turkey, has exploited mass migration flows to extract concessions from Europe and bolster his own revanchist Neo-Ottoman ambitions.

The discussion concluded with a sobering look at the damaging impact that European policies have had on free speech, as they have increasingly repressed critics of mass migration, and how such tactics have increasingly reached the United States. Spencer noted that he first encountered the group Antifa during a presentation in Germany, where they threatened him.

“He said, if it weren’t for all these police around right now, you would already be dead,” Spencer recalled. Spencer noted that in some cases the elites have ignored, or even condoned silencing tactics by radicals.

“There has been a sharp degeneration in the interest in defending the freedom of speech in the United States,” Spencer said comparing how people rallied in defense of freedom of speech during the Salman Rushdie affair in the 1980s to an incident in 2015, where two Islamic State jihadists were killed by law enforcement while attempting to murder the attendees of a free speech event in Garland, Texas. Many media outlets aggressively blamed Spencer, and his co-organizer Pamela Gellar, instead of their attackers.

Spencer warns, “We are being conditioned by constant repetition of this nonsense, to think that the victim of the violence is the perpetrator of the violence, if he has done something that has offends the liberal norms, the norms of the leftist political class and their jihadi allies.”