Out of the Mouths of Buffoons?

In 2006, in a speech aired on Arab satellite TV station Al Jazeera, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi declared: "There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe – without swords, without guns, without conquests. The 50 million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades." He noted that if Turkey joins the European Union – a cause dear to the heart of British Prime Minister David Cameron, of course – there will be a further 50 million Muslims in the heart of Europe’s counsels. "Europe is in a predicament, and so is America," he continued. "They should agree to become Islamic in the course of time .... All people must be Muslims."

In November last year, when the flamboyant colonel visited the equally flamboyant Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, his country’s former coloniser and now its best trading partner, 200 “escort girls” hired through an agency were whisked off to a Rome villa where they were lectured on Islam by Gaddafi, and each received, along with 50 euros and a volume of his bons-mots, a copy of the Koran. Last Sunday, again in Rome with Berlusconi for economic talks, Gaddafi lectured on Islam to 500 young women paid to attend his talk, urged them to marry Libyan men, and declared that Islam should “become the religion of all Europe”.

The man who hoodwinked the Scottish government over the state of health of the Lockerbie bomber – who’s just celebrated the first anniversary of his freedom despite having at his release been diagnosed with just weeks to live – also attempted some rather sophisticated blackmail, demanding that the European Union pays Libya £4.1 billion a year to stop the illegal immigration of Africans who use Libya as their gathering point for the Mediterranean crossing. “Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration, it could turn into Africa,” he said pointedly. “At the moment there is a dangerous level of immigration from Africa into Europe .... What will be the reaction of the white Christian Europeans to this mass of hungry, uneducated Africans? We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and cohesive continent or if it will be destroyed by this barbarian invasion.”

It’s ironic that back in the 1960s and 1970s the “First World” was being told by latter-day Malthusians and the vanguard of the environmental movement to restrict their families to just two children per couple – “Zero Population Growth” – and that nowadays we’re being told by some “experts” that large-scale immigration is necessary for economic growth. It might not be politically correct to say so, but mass migration from the Third World does present a real social and cultural problem for developed countries – and the colonel has tapped into that fact, using some very blunt language indeed.

There are, as we all know, many Cassandras who warn that Europe is being deliberately colonised by Muslims intent on imposing Islam on everyone  – and that in view of their relative youth and fertility patterns theirs is the demographic weapon, the weapon that Gaddafi spoke of in 2006. (In traditional Muslim societies polygamy tends to be restricted to affluent men, who can afford to have up to four wives – but, as far as I’m aware, in dear old deluded Britain welfare payments are available to surplus wives and their children, so long as the polygamous Islamic marriages have taken place overseas, in countries where polygamy is lawful.)

"What would happen if a European head of state went to Libya or another Islamic country and invited everyone to convert to Christianity?" asked one Italian daily following Sunday’s event. "We believe it would provoke very strong reactions across the Islamic world." A Vatican spokesman dismissed as “lacking seriousness” Gaddafi’s latest call for Europe to embrace Islam – although the spokesman did add that Europeans’ widespread indifference to their own faith and to matters sacred “could create a fertile ground for the eventual future penetration of Islam in all of Europe”.

Colonel Gaddafi is popularly portrayed as a preposterous figure. But then so were Mussolini and Goering. Could we be faced with a case of “out of the mouths of buffoons”?