Yisrael Medad is an American-born Israeli journalist, author and former director of educational programming at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. A graduate of Yeshiva University, he made aliyah in 1970 and has since held key roles in Israeli politics, media and education. A member of Israel’s Media Watch executive board, he has contributed to publications such as The Los Angeles Times, The Jerusalem Post and International Herald Tribune. He and his wife, who have five children, live in Shilo.
(Oct. 27, 2026 / JNS)
Undoubtedly, the specter of the memory of colonization weighs heavily on the European mind.
Recalling the doings of France in North Africa and Greater Syria, England in Egypt, the Middle East and India, Italy and Germany in Africa, the Netherlands in East Asia, Belgium in Africa and even Sweden has been a political and cultural heritage that has plagued their consciences, or, to borrow an image from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem: as an albatross about their neck hung.
The shame, uneasiness and desire to come to terms with that period and those deeds most probably have served as a rationalization for so many politicians, public servants, intellectuals and cultural artists who have either welcomed or approved of the demographic alteration of major European countries over the past half-century.
Whether it be a subservient attitude on the one hand, and on the other, an almost complete ignoring of the undeniable results of such laxness regarding the open-borders policies these countries have practiced, we are witnessing another stage of the ongoing conquest of Europe by the Third World, and foremost, by Islam.
What is now developing is an awareness of what the future portends. But as it is being espoused by the extreme right, which, unfortunately, due to attitudes rampant among the liberal, progressive and woke elites, it will be temporarily rejected and treated in a derogatory manner. Jews, of course, are in the hard place, between a rock and a hard place.
For example, in Germany, an AfD leader in the Bundestag, Beatrix von Storch, had warned in a 2024 speech that what Europe’s future under Islam will be is “First Synagogues Will Burn, Then Churches, and Everyone Who Does Not Submit.” She linked her condemnation of the West’s immigration policies directly to growing threats to Jewish communities and broader European societies. But how many Jews are sympathetic to the AfD? How many of the left would even read or listen to their opinions?
There are others who seem to think clearly. James Hankins has written of Islam as a “confident missionary religion.” As such, it “makes strong claims about how to order public life to accord with its religious outlook.” With the increase of the Muslim population in Western countries, one professor of humanities at the University of Florida sees “their religious system emerg[ing] as a rival to Christianity’s long and deep influence. With time, it may fatally undermine the Judeo-Christian bedrock of our civilization.”
What should be conveniently forgotten is that, in a certain sense, we have been in this situation before. We should remember the great military invasions of Europe by Islamic armies that occurred in the eighth century. I can assure us all that the Muslims have not forgotten this period in the least.
Islamic marauding forces reached and occupied parts of southern France during the 700s after the Umayyad Caliphate’s conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Arabs and Berbers crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into southern Gaul. Narbonne fell to Muslim forces in 719 or 720 and served as the primary military base for Islamic forces in France for nearly 40 years.
Nîmes and Avignon were also captured. Toulouse was besieged but held. Muslim forces marched more than 400 miles to fight at Tours in 732, though they were defeated on the way by the leader of the Franks, Charles Martel. It was Martel’s son, Pepin, who ended the Muslim presence in France in 759. France had been reconquered.
The better-known Spanish Reconquista, in which Christian kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula gradually reclaimed control of Muslim-ruled lands known as al-Andalus, took centuries—from 718 to 1492. In 1492, the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella captured the Emirate of Granada and expelled and banished the Jews of their realm.
Let it not slip from our minds the Turkish Ottoman attempt to take Vienna in 1463.
Do Europeans not know this history? Do they not care? Do they view it through warped lenses of Marxism or other revolutionary rhetoric?
Adam Gopnik, interviewed in The New Yorker, expressed that view from the left, saying: “What’s happened conforms to a classic pattern of far-left and far-right politics in France and in Europe generally. What it will most likely do—and this is the most frightening part of it—is bring the far right to power.”
Islamic domination, supremacist Islam and the threat of the realization of Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission—that is, an Islamicized France is seemingly not even a secondary threat. Even the import of the phrase, Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres (“In the name of God, it’s the darkness”), is dismissed.
Perhaps they hope a sacrifice of their Jews, their synagogues and stores will save them.
Their choice is becoming more urgent. Will they, the non-Muslims, be—as British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hasan once termed them— “people of no intelligence” and “cattle” who are “incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices?” Or will they set out to reconquer their continent?
On Nov. 11, 2023, Binyamin Netanyahu tweeted, in response to another of French President Emmanuel Macron’s statements on the war then just getting underway, that “the crimes being committed today by Hamas-ISIS in Gaza will be committed tomorrow in Paris, New York and all over the world.”
The threat is real. It has been studied, as in JNS columnist Melanie Phillips in Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within, published two decades ago in 2006. Unfortunately, the warnings did not merit attention. When they were noticed, they didn’t merit the proper response. When alarms were raised, they were viewed as right-wing prejudicial rants.
Time has run out. If France desires to prevent the burning of its buildings, if Spain wants to prevent an invasion from North Africa, if Germany wishes not to become an Ottoman fiefdom, then action is required now.
Moreover, this problem is becoming apparent in the United States as well.
This column began with the baggage carried by Europe as a result of its colonial past. But there is another colonization at present. As Maarten Boudry wrote last week:
“So you were worried about “colonization”? Look around. The only thing being colonized here are our own Western cities. The Palestinian flag has become a victory banner, proudly waved amid the ruins of looted and vandalized historic buildings—a symbol of hatred for our civilization and everything it stands for. It never ends with the Jews.”
Will Europe reconquer itself?