Source: Daily Mail

By SARAH VINE FOR THE DAILY MAIL

The mass migration into Europe of people from North Africa and the Middle East is one of the most significant cultural, social and economic challenges of our time.

Its repercussions will be of historic significance. And yet, gripped by impotence, we appear to have no coherent strategy for dealing with these seismic events.

We veer from hysteria at the sight of dead children washed up on Greek beaches to xenophobic fury at the news of migrants molesting Western women in public.

Politicians dither and recite cliches, while pressure groups issue politically correct platitudes. We are paralysed by inaction. And it’s easy to see why.

Hundreds of migrants who arrived by train at Hegyeshalom on the Hungarian and Austrian border walk the four kilometres into Austria in September last year

This influx in particular — these poor souls who risk life and limb to cross icy seas in pursuit of something, anything, that is not the brutality of war — are some of the most traumatised people on the planet.

Back home, many of them were doctors, nurses, teachers, artists. But after being cooped up in a rotting boat on the dangerous seas, they are like desperate animals, wild-eyed and shivering in the glare of the TV news camera lights.

How can we, as a compassionate, generous nation, not be alive to their plight?

Their tragedy makes philanthropists of us all. People organise food parcels, schoolgate mothers co-ordinate lorries full of clothes, celebrities pledge their support, pop stars make fund-raising records.

We invite them in, we offer them hospitality. We bask in the reflected warm glow of our good deeds, foreign aid and fine words.

No wonder we’re so hurt and angry when, instead of falling to their knees in gratitude and embracing our way of life, they too often remain segregated within their own communities, refuse to engage with mainstream Western culture and — in extremis — commit acts of barbarity towards some of the most vulnerable in our societies.

I’m talking, of course, of the gangs of Arab and North African men who rampaged through Cologne on New Year’s Eve, accused of terrorising and raping German women.

Of the asylum-seekers accused of attacking girls at a teenage rock festival in Sweden last summer.

Of the gang of Afghan migrants filmed attacking two German pensioners on a train who intervened to stop them harassing a young woman.

Of the Somalian ‘teenager’ recently charged with stabbing to death a Swedish woman helping to run a young asylum- seekers’ hostel in Gothenburg. (This week, a migration agency ruled that the 6 ft migrant is an adult, not the 15-year-old child he claims to be.)

And it is not just the actions and cultural practices of some of the most newly arrived that gives us cause for concern.

In Britain, we have read about case after case of the wicked grooming rings of predominantly Muslim men who preyed on vulnerable white girls in Rotherham, Oxford, Bristol, Lancashire and Manchester.

Last week, three men from Manchester’s Somalian community were jailed for the gang rape of a white teenage girl (none of them showed a scrap of remorse — quite the opposite, in fact).

And this week a gang of 12 men of Pakistani origin were jailed for gang-raping a 13-year-old white girl in West Yorkshire.

Here and across Europe, too, we’ve seen countless examples of forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honour killings and the many injustices perpetrated by Sharia courts — particularly against women.

How we arrived at this unhappy state of affairs in this country is a tale of cultural imperialism in reverse.

Starting out with the best of intentions, over the past century we have invited many other nationalities to the UK.

It most cases, this has been all to the good. British cultural and economic life is all the richer for it. But there are, sadly, a few exceptions. And I’m afraid the most troubling is Islam.

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