Paris is burning, but is this a surprise? It isn’t to me, because all of Europe has been smouldering under the weight of Islamist ideologies for longer than we wish to accept.

While government officials are hesitant to say that Islamists have anything to do with the current crisis in France, the writing is on the wall. Macron admits that the extreme left is responsible, but the dangerous Red-Green alliance, the unholy partnership between the ultra-left and the Islamists, is at play here. Those of us who have studied and warned about the smouldering flames engulfing Europe for the past decade know that the problem existed long before the fire was lit.

How do I know? I personally witnessed the Islamization of Europe when I travelled with a delegation hosted by Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum on a fact-finding mission to Europe in 2016. Imagine: it has taken 10 years for Western governments to do absolutely nothing, even though we sounded the alarm right after the trip.

We spent two days each in Paris, Berlin and Stockholm. In each city we had a local guide and met government officials, organizations and civil society.

Let’s look at France. We were told that roughly 40 per cent of French Muslims support sharia law. The Muslims we met bemoaned the fact that the media paints them in a negative light, but when pressed about radicalization among youth, they confessed there are huge problems, both in society and especially in prisons. Imams are being sent from Turkey, Morocco and Algeria, and the sermons are in their own languages.

As we travelled across Paris, some parts were like being in the Middle East. Behind one of the oldest churches in France is the office of the Muslim Brotherhood, running under the innocuous name of the Association of Cultural Muslims. The fallacy that these areas are ghettos was dispelled as we saw good housing, roads and infrastructure, telling us that the problem is not only socio-economic but essentially a clash of ideologies and cultures. These areas are called “the lost territories of France,” with high levels of crime and drugs, where police are hesitant to intervene. The best known is the “93” area, Seine-Saint-Denis, and all the major Muslim organizations in France, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Tablighi Jamaat, have their headquarters there.

There was an intellectual debate going on in France about Islam and Muslims. Olivier Roy said, “It’s not Islam that’s being radicalized; it’s radicalization that’s being Islamized.” Other intellectuals and politicians warned of an impending civil war unless things changed drastically.

The French identified the problems as:

• France has no Muslim past
• Efforts towards integration are failing
• Cultures are widely different and there is a clash
• In schools, parents impose their culture upon the majority
• Gender disparity, e.g. women who won’t see male doctors
• Muslims don’t accept French history
• They are antisemitic
• They have attacked women and butchers selling pork
• Messages from some mosques and Islamist organizations are based on hate
• Many French Muslims want sharia law

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Sweden was the biggest shock. In Sweden, political Islam came on the scene 30 years ago. We met with government officials, academics working on the issue of migrants and radicalization, and an ex-Muslim Brotherhood operative. We were told: “Islamists work trans-nationally and Europe is their arena.”

The Swedes generally say that they don’t have a culture and that they have too much of a good thing, so they must share. And share they do.

Sweden has taken in the largest number of immigrants per capita, and the consequences are more than $50 billion in costs plus 55 no-go zones. According to one report, in 2015 Sweden took in 162,887 asylum seekers, mostly from the Middle East and North Africa, including 35,369 unaccompanied minors. The largest numbers were from Syria and Afghanistan. At that time, anyone coming from Syria would get immediate refugee status and benefits.

The government did not help the situation by placing, for example, 500 migrants in a small town of 150 Swedes. This was happening across Sweden, where heritage buildings, hotels and old people’s homes were turned into migrant centres, with no move to educate and inform the host community or the migrants.

In Germany, the conversation in Berlin was about the future of Europe against a backdrop of Islam, and many studies were being done on the issue, including on antisemitism. Berlin was once a major city for Jews, but the numbers are dwindling due to the pull to go to Israel as well as fear for the future. A problem specific to Berlin was the animosity and tension between Turks and Arabs, with the Turks considered the more moderate community. There is also a problem with clans, where a family of 100 will live together as a tribe and gang up against law enforcement if officers come to investigate a crime. This is how partial no-go zones are created, as police are hesitant to enter these areas.

The problems of extremism are not restricted to the European continent. The UK has also succumbed to the lure of the Islamists.

In 2018, I was invited to the UK to give testimony in the House of Lords about the sharia debate in Ontario. At the time, there was a rising number of sharia councils operating in the UK that were performing fake marriages and depriving many Muslim women of their rights.

This is when I discovered the scandal of the grooming gangs.

These so-called grooming gangs sexually exploited hundreds of vulnerable young women and girls across the UK for many years before their activities came to public attention in the early 2010s. In essence, because the perpetrators were largely groups of British-Pakistani men, the media, law enforcement and officials failed in their duty to address or publicize the scandal for fear of being accused of racism. This is a truly tragic result of identity politics on a massive scale.

I worked with Baroness Caroline Cox of the House of Lords, attended rallies to expose this abuse, spoke to the victims and thought that something would be done about it. But political correctness, fear of being called racist and woke culture sidelined the issue.

It’s not that they weren’t warned. UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, speaking at a conference, warned that Europe would face growing numbers of radical extremists and terrorists due to political correctness and a lack of decisive action.

The UK’s solution to the problems it faces is to ban good journalists like our own Ezra Levant! And the joke is on them: when they tried to deport the ringleader of a grooming gang, a Pakistani, Pakistan refused to take him. Well done, UK!

How long does it take for an ideology to travel across the Atlantic? Back home in Canada, I wrote a piece for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute asking the question: could these gangs operate in Canada?

So, Canada, brace yourself. This is not fearmongering; it’s reality, and a reality check is needed urgently. It might be too late, but we must continue to speak out and expose the problems that are compromising our values of liberty, equality and freedom.

Ironically, while things have come to a head in Europe and the UK, in Muslim countries the same organizations that fuel radicalization and extremism, like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, are banned.

It’s time to think and strategize about how we can save Canada.