The AfD electoral victory in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt is sending shockwaves throughout Europe. This outcome would have been hard to predict before 9/11, an event that set the stage for anti-Islamic rhetoric. Since then, Israel has deliberately worked to ramp up the intensity and tone of this rhetoric, and the far right has followed its lead—and its money—to collect electoral dividends. But it is all based on a false premise.
The Harvard Kennedy School journal International Security published an article in its Spring 2024 issue titled “Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe” by Şener Aktürk, a professor of International Relations at Koç University in Türkiye. The core argument of the article is simple: the emergence of a Western European identity was based on the systematic destruction and removal of its Muslim and Jewish populations between the 11th and 16th centuries, following the Gregorian Reforms.
According to the author, the Gregorian Reforms of the 11th century gave the papacy a supranational religious authority with expanding powers. The papacy then conducted a forced homogenization campaign to secure its power by dehumanizing non-Catholic Christians. It commanded various kings—who were eager to compete with one another to become the Church’s champion and thereby gain more power—to eradicate religious minorities.
There were significant indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations throughout Europe, especially in the South, though not exclusively there. These populations lived in relative coexistence under local kings and rulers in polities corresponding to present-day England, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. This was also true in the Balkan countries, though that is a slightly different story. The Gregorian Reforms pushed for a singular Catholic identity that overrode these local arrangements.
By leveraging its supranational power to threaten, excommunicate, or reward competing European monarchs, the Church forced rival kingdoms to adopt an exclusionary, universal standard of what it meant to be European. A unified “West” was forged by prioritizing a shared, clerical anti-Other doctrine over local political realities. There were, of course, other components to the emergence of this Western concept, such as legal frameworks and state-building processes. But the population eradication—which in some cases, such as on the Iberian Peninsula, fits the modern definition of a genocide—is often overlooked.
This has a direct correlation to the current situation, in which far-right and populist political parties throughout Europe and the U.S. are openly calling to expel Muslims, curb “Islamization,” and stop the “Islamic invasion.” These parties are associated with nationalist movements, such as the AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, Reform in the U.K., or Vox in Spain.
These political movements are deploying this rhetoric in order to define an enemy, blame it for most domestic problems, polarize public opinion, and win support. There is undoubtedly a storm looming over the Western welfare system and middle class. The rain has started pouring, and you can hear the thunder. But the causes of the crisis cannot be attributed to the Muslim presence alone, or even largely to it.
Western countries are undergoing a significant change in the fabric of their societies. The financial system is shifting toward digital programmable money, and the political system is drifting toward openly authoritarian structures. These two fundamental shifts in the social order, which will reverberate throughout the entire social structure, are accompanied by renewed ideological tendencies that will erode the middle class, increase inequality, and destroy the welfare state. There are many reasons for this—some stemming from the financial system, others from changing geopolitical realities and resource control, and others from the sheer stupidity of the political class. But none of them can be attributed to the Muslim presence in Europe alone.
What can be attributed to the Muslim presence in Europe is a relative change in the cultural milieu. From the 1960s up to approximately 2020, Western countries maintained a somewhat open immigration policy. This was not out of humanitarian concern in most cases, but out of economic need due to, among other things, dramatically declining birth rates. Many of the migrants who came to Europe—though not all—came from Muslim-majority countries. Two primary reasons stand out for this.
First, these migrants were invited—like Germany did with Türkiye—by the countries that had previously colonized them and disrupted or destroyed their social matrix, as France did in Algeria. They were invited because they were often educated to standards roughly comparable to Europe’s, which was harder to find in other “developing countries.” That was especially true of the early waves of migration; later, the pattern changed.
Second, one out of every four people in the world is classified as Muslim. In Europe, the Muslim population today is around 6 percent. That is roughly 19 percentage points lower than the global average. In the E.U., the number is even lower, with the Muslim population at about 3.8 percent. Before the 1960s, the Muslim population in Western Europe was almost negligible. While looking at it this way relies on a somewhat biased interpretation—since it presupposes an equal global distribution that is not naturally occurring—it does show that in a society promoted as globalized, these averages would naturally shift slightly closer to the world average.
To claim that this 3.8 percent of the population constitutes an “invasion,” that they are “Islamizing” Europe, or that they pose a threat to Western values—whatever those may be—is almost laughable from any sociological or political perspective. Furthermore, those who went to the West were seeking material betterment—a perfectly valid reason to emigrate—not necessarily spiritual illumination. They went to the West because they were invited and wanted to participate in the material life it offered, not to change it or proselytize.
It is also important to note that this population does not have a unified agenda to promote a turn toward Islamic values in Western societies, for the not very simple reason that Muslims are not a monolithic entity. No one in the Muslim world can claim a monopoly over Islam or exercise centralized control. What the Muslim population in these countries generally asks for—with rare exceptions—is to be treated by the same standards as any other citizen.
Where does the idea of an ‘Islamic Invasion’ come from, then? The main driver behind this narrative is the Zionist Israeli establishment. There is an interesting topic here, worthy of a doctoral dissertation, on how the Western right has shifted from being anti-Semitic to being anti-Muslim.
As an example, we can look at the term Judeo-Christian civilization or values. This phrase emerged in the late 19th century but was popularized in the 1930s when President Roosevelt tried to mobilize American Christians against Nazi anti-Semitism. In fact, to a Christian or a Jew of earlier times, blending those terms would have sent shivers down their spine. That is because historically, Jewish communities rejected Jesus and Christian theology—as is evident in current hostilities toward many Christians in the occupied West Bank—while Western Christians maintained deep animosity toward Jewish populations for most of their history. Indeed, historically and theologically, Jews often found greater security within Muslim-majority lands.
However, we have seen a revival of this term in recent times to signify an alliance between Jews (specifically Zionists) and Evangelical Christians against Muslims. This term has been widely used by the Zionist Israeli establishment to justify its integration into the Western security architecture and to support its genocidal policies against Arabs in Palestine as a “bastion of defense” for the West. This has culminated in an alliance between Washington, Tel Aviv, and Silicon Valley.
This alliance, as documented in the article linked above, includes the governments of the U.S. and Israel, alongside major Silicon Valley tech companies. It has expanded the military-industrial complex—now more aptly named the ‘military-digital complex’—by blurring lines between the public and private sectors, with corporations playing a crucial and often unaccountable role in geopolitical affairs and military operations.
This new digital-military complex is using nationalist and conservative discourse to establish a grip on society, not only in the U.S., but in Western Europe as well. Yoram Hazony, a staunch Zionist, is a trustee of the Heritage Foundation and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organizes the NatCon conference—a premier neoconservative platform that has featured prominent figures such as J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, and Hermann Tertsch, a member of the European Parliament representing the Spanish far-right party Vox.
Vox is a particularly striking example of this merging of Zionism and far-right politics. Reports indicate that its initial funding came from the Iranian opposition and a Hungarian bank. In 2025, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar established formal relations with the party. Likud also became an observer member of the European Parliament coalition Patriots for Europe, which was founded by Orbán and is presided over by Jordan Bardella, during a conference that Vox organized in Madrid. Furthermore, Disenso, Vox’s ideological foundation, has extensive links—including financial ones—to ACOM, the Israeli lobby in Spain.
A few months before the recent flood of Moroccan and sub-Saharan people in Ceuta, Spain, Santiago Abascal made a sharp turn by publicly stating that Morocco not the enemy, ostensibly to comply with Israeli demands regarding its North African ally. Of the ten original founders of Vox, only one remains: Santiago Abascal. Many were sidelined because of their critical comments about Israel. A former Vox politician and vice president of an autonomous region called Abascal “the Israeli candidate to the presidency of the Spanish government.” Amichai Chikli, the Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister, confirmed this by calling him “the most Zionist voice there is in Spain.”
Vox is a particularly strident example of anti-Islam rhetoric. Its members often speak of an “Islamic invasion,” revive the language of the Crusades and the Reconquista, and blame Muslim migrants for a loss of Western values and for draining resources. Ironically, they do not offer the same niceties to migrants of other nationalities. There are 4.2 million migrants from Latin American countries in Spain, representing 60% of all foreign nationals in the country. By contrast, there are about 2.5 million Muslims in Spain, making up about 5% of the population. Around 250,000 are indigenous Muslims—not migrants or their descendants—and about 500,000 more were born in Spain. Almost 70% of the regularization applications connected to the recent government program were from Latin America.
However, the Spanish—and European—right remains fixated on singling out and blaming Muslim migrants and Muslims in general for much of what is wrong with Europe. In this, there is definitely an Israeli push behind the scenes. In September 2025, Drop Site published the results of a study commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and conducted by the U.S. polling firm Stagwell Global to help change worsening public opinion in the West regarding Israel and its genocidial policies. The firm suggested stoking fear of Islam and Muslim. This study is but one example showing that this strategy has been leveraged by Israel for a long time—as seen, for instance, with its messaging around Iran.
The recent flood of people from Morocco to Ceuta has much to do with the outcomes of this study and the alliance among Morocco, the U.S., and Israel. It was the perfect proof that far-right parties needed to justify their claims of an ‘Islamic invasion.’ For Israel and the U.S., it served the purpose of sustaining anti-Islamic rhetoric, solidifying alliances with European far-right parties, and striking back at the Spanish government for its stance on Gaza and Iran. For Morocco, it served to punish Spain for its closer relations with Algeria and to test the waters of how Madrid would react to a real border breach. The Spanish and European right played exactly the role expected of them.
There is no ‘Islamic invasion’ and there is no ‘Islamization’ of the West. There is, without a doubt, a looming crisis weighing down Western countries and a change in the cultural landscape in which Muslims remain a minority. It is therefore questionable whether nationalist parties in Europe are acting in the best interests of their nations when escalating tensions against Muslims—many of whom are citizens—since this distracts attention from the real issues. Once again, just as happened between the 11th and 16th centuries, national parties seem to be following the script of a supranational entity.
