For a number of years I have made automatic monthly contributions to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). To be honest, this wasn’t because of pure altruism. I was fed up having to listen to the agents for various worthy charities and now, when I’m accosted on the street or in shopping centres, I dismiss their appeals by telling them I am already paying to an established charity.

In response to my contribution MSF sends me a glossy magazine, the Pulse, four times a year to tell me about all the good work they are doing and there is no denying that their volunteers across the globe do achieve much. But recently the humanitarian work of MSF has taken on an increasingly militant political aspect.

In the May edition of the Pulse the main story is about the great work that their Mediterranean rescue ship, the Geo Barents, is doing to save the lives of desperate people trying to enter Europe from Libya. Eloise Liddy, a ‘communications Manager’ for MSF noted that the current practice in the Mediterranean is ‘not unlike the decade-long commitment to holding asylum seekers offshore in Nauru and Papua New Guinea’. She also observed that, ‘In 2022, countries have rightly opened their homes for Ukrainians. So why is it that, on the other side of Europe, people seeking safety from other wars and human rights abuses are condemned to drown?’

While you may find the answer to that question obvious, to the good people on board the Geo Barents, the young North African Islamic males have just as much right to enter Europe as the Ukrainians fleeing Putin’s invasion. But the Europeans, in the main, have had enough of the Third World Islamic migrants who in ever-increasing numbers are trying to get into the promised lands of milk and honey and welfare payments.

Around one thousand years ago the English paid marauding Scandinavians ‘Danegeld’ to go away. More recently the Lithuanian government announced a plan to purchase plane tickets and offer cash payments of €300 for people claiming refugee status who agree to return to their country of origin. While there are clear differences between the two payments, there is one undeniable similarity. Like England in the Middle Ages, Lithuania recently has had great difficulty controlling its borders. And of course England today, and almost all Western European nations, are equally incapable of controlling the ever-increasing number of ‘refugees’ who are arriving in trucks, rubber dinghies, fishing boats and on foot.

There is a nice reversal in history in Sweden from where fierce Vikings once sailed to terrorise England and France. Today it is Islamic migrant gangs terrorising the local population of Sweden. What goes around comes around. Even if it takes one thousand years.

Are we at the early stages of the Islamisation of Europe? Recently Hakim El Karoui, President Emmanuel Macron’s advisor on Islam, claimed that Islam is now the most practised religion in France and said, ‘There are more practising Muslims, between 2.5 and 3 million than practising Catholics, 1.65 million’. The Vatican recently noted that 65 per cent of practicing Catholics are over 50 years old. By contrast, 73 per cent of practicing Muslims are under the age of 50. Bernard Lewis, who was one of the world’s most influential Islamic Scholars, claimed that Muslims would outnumber non-Muslims in Europe by the end of this century.

In 2008, in a paper about the prospects for integration of Muslims into European communities, Steven Staninger, an American academic, claimed, ‘The cultural and economic chasms between native Europeans and Muslim Europeans… are too great to be overcome in the near future’. (‘Muslims in Europe: Challenges of Cultural Integration’). There is nothing in the following fourteen years to suggest that Staninger’s pessimistic assessment was incorrect. In general throughout Europe the rapid rise in Muslim migration has led to an increase in crime rates and a concentration of migrants in the drug trade.

But, as far as MSF is concerned, the failure of Muslims to integrate into European society is no reason why they should in the future be refused entry to Europe. Once the refugee charities claimed to be helping people who claimed protection under the UN refugee convention. Now, according to MSF ‘There are many reasons for flight: persecution, poverty, war, natural disasters, and repression’. There is nothing in the UN refugee convention about giving refugee status to victims of natural disasters or people trying to escape poverty.

MSF has become a self-affirming charity irresponsibly undermining European efforts to maintain some semblance of order in the influx of third world migrants trying to enter Europe. The current EU policy of intercepting boats and forcing them back to Libya is described by MSF as ‘illegal’ and, in an editorial in the May edition of the MSF magazine we are told, ‘…we have the ability and tools to afford everyone assistance and protection. A humane response is possible’.

This is nonsense. MSF knows as well as any international relief organisation the size of the problems confronting them. The rising population and political instability in most parts of the Islamic world are major causes of the growth of refugees and displaced persons globally. The UN announced in May that, for the first time ever, the number of displaced persons around the world exceeded 100 million. What MSF isn’t saying is how many of those 100 million should be allowed to take up residence in Europe. MSF is also not addressing the inescapable fact that those trying to enter Europe illegally have sufficient funds to pay people smugglers to get them on to a boat, and that facilitating this industry by rescuing people in boats then taking them to European ports may be saving lives but it is also helping the people smugglers.

The traffickers who make their living from truly desperate people can tell them to ‘Look out for the Geo Barents. The people on that ship will rescue you and take you to Europe’. But the inescapable fact is that the more people who survive the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, the more other people will drown attempting to do the same. There are better ways for MSF to use the millions of donated dollars than to spend it on Mediterranean cruises.