Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission[1] contained a genius insight: that the “Islamization” of France would take place not as a hostile takeover but as a piecemeal and voluntary process, one in which the nation slides into becoming an Islamist-led state. Meotti, an Italian journalist, builds on this literary insight, assembling an impressive trove of hard evidence under the memorable title of The Sweet Conquest.
Meotti has long reported on Middle Eastern affairs and on the decline of Western liberal culture for the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. Here, he brings together statistics, direct observations, and interviews with scholars and opinion makers across a wide political spectrum, ranging from Alexandre del Valle to Michel Onfray. The phenomenon Meotti sketches contains an inherent ambiguity; he argues that a continuum exists from apparently harmless concessions to a profound mutation of European culture.
The book’s common thread comes down to an understanding, to quote Meotti’s interview with French philosopher Onfray, that “Islam’s strength is a consequence of Christianity’s weakness.” European elites emerge as essentially self-hating, and much of that hatred is directed toward their historic faith. This phenomenon is hardly new. British economist Peter T. Bauer, decades ago, argued that guilt informs the Western
approach to its development policies vis-à-vis the so-called Third World; never mind that trade with wealthy Western countries provided “the principal agent of material progress” for poorer ones. Pushed by the likes of Edward Said, Westerners went on to blame their own way of life for nearly all evils on planet Earth.
Meotti suggests that Islamists benefit from this trend, which has become more exaggerated thanks to the growth of political correctness, extreme environmentalism, feminism, and the woke movement. These intellectual postures not only radically reject traditional institutions and mores but aim to obliterate them. Given that humans hunger for values around which to live their lives, this means that Europeans are effectively canceling the accomplishments of their forerunners and opening the way for Islam.
[1] New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
