“Nay! We hurl Truth against falsehood, so that it smashes its head, and lo it vanishes; and woe to you for what you describe.” Qur’an 21:18

The genteel rantings of right-wing author Douglas Murray with regard to the presence of immigrants, their descendants and the increasing visibility of the Islamic religion in the West have achieved wide currency and established him as one of the leading international celebrity intellectuals for every shade of western white supremacist and bigot. Of course, the essence of his rantings is far from novel. No informed person living in the West could be so removed to note that Murray’s central thesis is an extrapolation of the proposition, that a specific minority population poses a threat to a given western nation. Therefore, the solution is, said minority needs to be challenged, confronted, presence curtailed in the given nation if the West is to survive!

Murray’s fulminations culminated in his bestselling book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity and Islam.  According to Murray, the principal driving force behind the ‘strange death of Europe’ is the policy of the German state during the leadership of Angela Merkal to allow migrants fleeing war into the European Union. Specifically, Merkal’s announcement in late August 2015 to allow a million refugees from war torn Syria and elsewhere into Europe proved to be the turning point and the bullhorn for all and sundry from the Global South to charge forth towards the European continent. Hence, the one way flow of migrants will, lo and behold, lead to Europe’s ‘strange death’.

Adrift at Sea

Yet even before August 2015, Murray acknowledges that more people were landing on the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean on their way to Europe because in “part this was because of the number of people fleeing changes of government and civil unrest.” He then alludes to another issue and observes the “first year of the Arab Spring was an especially bad time for the island.” The ‘Arab Spring’ in the 2010s witnessed the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. In 2011, NATO at the behest of then British leader David Cameron and French leader Nicolas Sarkozi assisted supposed ‘moderate rebels’ in Libya to overthrow not only the then Ghadhaffi government but literally destroy the Libyan state. It is no surprise then to non-ideological people that according to Murray in 2014, “…the year before the migrant crises ‘began’ – 170,000 people arrived [in Lampedusa, Malta or Sicily]. Officials talk of solving the problem by filling Libya’s recent government vacuum”. As expected Murray doesn’t discuss how “Libya’s recent government vacuum” arose. This is understandable as Murray has written a book endorsing neo-conservate military interventionism, the ideology which underpinned the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. It is simply not in his interest to state the obvious, that a foreign policy he had advocated – regime change – resulted in the beginning of the migration crisis across the Mediterranean Sea and into Europe. As George Orwell would say, the NATO Libyan military intervention is ‘memory-holed’, that is not spoken of anymore and especially the migratory consequences of that specific intervention.

Unsurprisingly Murray isn’t the only one to ignore, conceal the truth or memory hole the British led campaign for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) regime change war on Libya in 2011. Others who have de-emphasised or totally ignored the consequences of the Libya NATO military intervention are ironically on the face of it, those who claim to oppose Murray such as the British Muslim news website, 5Pillars which is a “Muslim community media platform” that “concentrates on British Muslim news but also looks to the wider Islamic world” and the Cage advocacy group which is an “organisation that aspires to a just world”.

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