And the number of mosques? It’s well into the four figures.What kind of impact has this rampant growth had on Britain? Other statistics help paint the picture. Terrorism? Two examples: the 2005 London bombings killed 52 and injured 784; the Manchester Arena bombing killed 22 and injured 512. Grooming gangs? In the town of Rotherham alone (pop. 265,000), the rapes of 1400 English girls by Muslim gangs have been systematically covered up for decades by police, politicians, social workers, and the media. There’s no reason to believe that the situation isn’t just as bad in cities and towns all over England.

Politicians are no longer safe. In 2021, a Conservative Party MP, David Amess, was murdered by a jihadist at a meeting with constituents – and his pusillanimous colleagues collaborated with the media to turn the focus away from the dangers of Islam to the supposed perils of “online abuse.” Just the other day, another conservative MP, Mike Freer, who is gay and who represents a largely Jewish constituency, announced that he would be leaving the House of Commons in the wake of numerous threats from Muslims.

Members of other non-Western immigrant groups – notably Hindus – have done a spectacular job of integrating peacefully and prosperously into British society. But the record of Muslims in Britain, who outnumber Hindus in Britain by almost four to one, has been drastically different. Instead of assimilating, they’ve formed sharia enclaves where their imams preach hatred of the West. While their daughters wear hijabs symbolizing subordination and their sons terrorize the schools, the parents demand that those schools purge curricula of material that contradicts their religious teachings.

Meanwhile the ever-growing number of Muslims who live on the dole – and who’ve never so much as contemplated entering the job market – has placed an ever-growing burden on the British welfare state, necessitating ever more severe cutbacks in other public expenses.

In one city after another, everyday barbarism – machete attacks, acid attacks, and rape statistics that have risen 340% nationwide in the last decade – native Britons feel increasingly unsafe, even as adherents of a faith whose holy book calls for their destruction receive preferential treatment in everything from housing to hiring to higher education. Hundreds – if not thousands – of native Brits have dared to state the truth about Islam only to be imprisoned for it.

And in recent months, as the streets of British cities have filled weekend after weekend with rabid Muslims shouting antisemitic slogans, it has been hard not to imagine them doing to their infidel neighbors what Hamas did to Israelis on October 7.

How did all this start? In Britain, as in other countries throughout Western Europe, it began with government officials who decided that they needed to enlarge the workforce. Apparently it never occurred to them that importing people whose core values differed radically from those of their native-born citizens could lead to catastrophe. Nor did it occur to them, needless to say, to ask those citizens for their opinions about this cataclysmic policy decision.

For an example of the kind of thinking that, decades ago, set Britain – and the rest of Western Europe – on the road to disaster, consider these passages from an editorial published in a major U.K. periodical: in the West, the editorial warned, “the threat of population collapse” would cause “the welfare state model” to collapse as well, making one thing urgently important above all else – namely, to welcome immigrants in large numbers.

When did this article appear? In 1960? 1970? No. Believe it or not, it appeared in the February 3, 2024, issue of the Spectator (not to be confused with the American Spectator), the flagship publication of the British conservative establishment. Under the headline “Who’s Afraid of Population Growth?” the Spectator’s editors cited the fast-declining populations of South Korea and Japan as threats to those countries’ economic prospects, and further noted that “in almost every country in Europe the working–age population has already started to decrease.” In Britain, by contrast, “our working-age population is projected to keep rising.”

The Spectator’s editors presented this upward trend as a magnificent accomplishment. Note, however, the failure to distinguish between “working-age population” and working population. Yes, the editors acknowledged that Britain’s years of massive immigration have caused widespread alarm. But they then immediately posed the question: “which is the worse problem to have – too many people or too few?” And they made it clear that for them the answer is undebatable: “too few.”