Although the French society is based on laïcité, a full separation of state and church, Islamic attacks in France and the radicalization of the highly unemployable Islamic youth have prompted President François Hollande to call for an “Islam of France”, which aims at appealing to its believers to incorporate the revolutionary values on which the French society is based of liberté, égalité, fraternité into their religious faith.

The secular faith that all men are created equal is the bedrock of the thinking of the Western establishment and one of the postulates all Western sociology is founded on. This conviction is not only upheld by the so-called “left”, but it has become the cornerstone of Western economic theories. Present-day investors do not see ethnicity, culture, religion or race as a key factor in a country’s economic growth and progress. Rather, they believe that people are clean slates, that external factors alone contribute to their advancement and, such is the narrative, if countries open up their borders, allow free trade and implement the rule of law, then their populations pick up required skills, adopt Western solutions and with the aid of education set themselves on the path of development.

Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs former chief economist and inventor of the term BRICS, believes that the possible success of the so called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries is based on the implementation of market policies and democratic values. In other words he represents the view that if one provides, say, Zimbabwe with German education and the country implements the German rule of law, it will thrive as Germany. With this in mind Goldman Sachs and Fidelity Investments started to promote investing in such countries as Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. In 2014 Jim O’Neill popularized the acronym MINT referring to these economies, which would be the next growth miracles because their energetic young working forces will rival those of Germany, Japan and China. Much to their chagrin, they sustained big losses because their evaluation of the countries’ potential was grossly misplaced.

Jim O’Neil and his fellow economists stated that China’s incredible growth was the result of the introduction of market capitalism and inviting foreign investors. Yet, the Middle Kingdom is far from being a free market economy. Chinese people have some freedom to start their own business, but the banking sector and big companies are owned by the state. The whole economy at large is still planned and state-run. Since China has never implemented a free market economy, there must be a different explanation for the country’s remarkable growth. Wall-Street bankers and leading economists never once thought that perhaps it is the quality of the Chinese people rather than external factors that explains the nation’s success, for what has worked for Japan, Korea or China does not seem to have worked for African or South-West Asian countries.

Much the same is true of European migrant communities. Is it religion and culture or can it be biodiversity that is the key to explaining their failure to catch up and integrate with modern Western society? As for the term biodiversity, it happens so that nowadays such an approach in social sciences must not be assumed on pain of prosecution. What a paradox! Enlightened, twenty-first century Europe is prejudiced the way it was at the time of Galileo Galilei. The Italian thinker was not allowed to put the sun in the middle of the universe. He faced prosecution by the Church if he did not give up on his conviction that it is the earth that revolves around the sun. Today’s social and biological scientists are not allowed to investigate into biodiversity of the humankind.

Now that the Western ideology about diversity and multi-ethnic states is falling apart, we expect the intensification of the suppression of dissident voices. In his 1995 State of the Union Address, Bill Clinton said that Americans are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering their country. Similar statements by the current president Donald Trump draw widespread moral condemnation by the leading opinion makers. The intellectual political establishment has set the moral boundaries for the discussion about the multicultural society. Empirical and historical evidence will only be allowed if it fits the moral framework. Sociologists, the United Nations, and academia make a big effort in putting the blame for the failings of African Americans on white discrimination, history of slavery, xenophobia, intolerance and colonization. The United Nations even declared 2015-2024 the international decade for people of African descent. And as is fashionable nowadays, the United Nations sees the transatlantic slave trade as in important reason for the social economic backwardness of Africa and the African diaspora. In 300 years, during the period 1550 and 1850, about 11 million Africans were shipped from Africa to the Americas. To put things in perspective, during the first world war 11 million European soldiers were killed in 4 years.

After the colonial era, during which the Europeans basically failed to elevate the African tribes to the level approaching that of colonizers, Europe embarked on a journey that can be described as reversed colonialism, with an unprecedented immigration experiment i.e. accepting more and more people from Africa over to the Old Continent. Whatever the purpose behind it might be, those who doubt this experiment or oppose it are branded as right-wing extremists, fascist or racists and face legal prosecution. In Europe, people have been convicted for saying “our people first” or advocating, like Jan-Maat, a Dutch politician, the abolition of the multicultural society.Intimidated, anti-immigrant parties, like Front National in France, PVV in the Netherlands and AfD in Germany, rather than criticizing immigration as such have only started to find exception with Islam, which has been in keeping with the European spirit of questioning religion since the Enlightenment. Still, some of the critics of the faith were literally slaughtered in the streets of Amsterdam (Theo van Gogh) or Paris (editors of Charlie Abdo),” others, especially those who lapsed from Islam, are living in hiding under police protection.

Islam alone cannot explain the fact that immigration-induced criminality and lawlessness are rampant in the suburbs of Paris because not all immigrants are Muslims. Some of the areas inhabited by people of African origin are only accessible to civil servants under the protection of armed police units. In October four French police officers were set on fire as criminals pelted their car with petrol bombs, preventing the installation of surveillance cameras. In 2016 tens of thousands of Chinese took to the streets to protest against crimes committed by the French-Africans against the Chinese population.

The French social ideologues remain adamant in their belief that these are merely social-class differences that can be ironed out by means of education and improving the living standards of migrant communities. The reality, however, refuses to conform to this worldview. It becomes more and more clear that despite the wishful thinking, communities are not only formed according to religious but also ethnic and racial lines.

And although history teaches that multiculturalism has failed in the USA, and ethnic tensions resulted in many bloody conflicts in many parts of the world, this does not make the European elites doubt the sanity of their migration project.