Holland was the first European country I set foot in as a lad, and it continues to have a special place in my memory. But the country I encountered in the summer of 1970 is all but unrecognizable now. In a fit of cultural enervation, social ennui, and just plain suicidal stupidity, it was among the first Western countries to throw open its doors to the avant-garde of Islam, and is now paying the price. So with the Dutch elections now looming, the question is: can the tide of Muslim social conquest be reversed?

The question is precipitated by the extraordinary sight of riots in Rotterdam this weekend when the Dutch government forbade the Turkish minister of family affairs from landing in Holland in order to openly campaign among Holland’s Turkish “emigrant” community on behalf of Turkish strongman Erdogan’s latest power grab, which is coming up for a vote on April 16. Naturally, she simply snuck across the border from Germany into the Netherlands, but the Dutch somehow managed enough backbone to block her.

Police using water cannon, horses and dogs moved in to disperse the crowds after several hours of demonstrations on Saturday evening. Protesters hit back, throwing rocks at the police, while hundreds of cars jammed the streets blaring their horns. Tensions tipped over into violence after a day of fast-moving events, triggered when Turkey’s family affairs minister Sayan Kaya was stopped from attending the rally by being expelled from the Netherlands. Ms Kaya could be seen in images on Dutch NOS television appearing to argue with officers about the situation. Earlier, Dutch authorities also refused permission for foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to land in the city, saying he was not welcome to campaign for the referendum. In response, Mr Erdogan accused the Dutch, who were once under Nazi occupation, of being “the vestiges of Nazis“.

To which a Dutch official replied: “It is a crazy remark, of course. But I understand they are angry, but this is of course way out of line.” If that’s the best riposte the Dutch government can muster, they’re going to need a lot more riot police.

Four planned Turkish rallies in Austria and one in Switzerland have also been cancelled in the dispute. The diplomatic row comes ahead of the Netherlands going to the polls on Wednesday for a parliamentary election, where far-right politician Geert Wilders is set to make big gains.

“Far-right” is the far-left media’s recharacterization of what used to be called “patriotism” or simply “cultural self-preservation.” The international Left, of course, can’t have that — it interferes with the whole Frankfurt School/communist mission to destroy the West by undermining its faith in its own institutions, and then using those institutions against it. This movement has long employed “open borders” as part of its strategy, couching it in liberal pieties about “the free movement of peoples in search of a better life.” A better life, perhaps — but for how long? And at whose expense?

Naturally, it was the Germans who started this mess. Postwar Germany was poor and short of manpower, so the Federal Republic (what was then West Germany) imported Turkish “guest workers” by the carload, employing them in menial tasks, isolating them in ghettos, and making it near-impossible for them or their children to receive German citizenship. (To be fair, that was also true of European and American non-Germans as well.) They were Germany’s invisible people.

Now, not so much. Once Europeans prayed to be delivered from the cruel, marauding Turk. Christian armies defeated the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683, the high-water mark of the previous Islamic assault on Western civilization. As the threat from Islam steadily receded, Mozart’s comic opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782), concerns the rescue of Christian women from a Turkish harem.

Now, it’s back, disguised as a “refugee crisis.” This is not to gainsay the genuine human misery resulting from the dislocations in the Middle East — dislocations caused for the most part by Islam itself. But it is not the West’s obligation to solve the Islamic ummah’s problems. The Muslim attack on 9/11 succeeded beyond Osama bin Laden’s fondest dreams; seized upon by the Left, it has pitted the West against itself, unable to articulate what it stands for without being accused of a chimerical racism, unilaterally disarmed in the face of withering media/establishment scorn.

As I remarked in a speech last week on Capitol Hill, you can’t have a foreign policy if you don’t know what it is you’re preserving, protecting and defending in the first place.

This will not end well. With no tradition of assimilation or integration in Europe, the restive Muslim minorities will only grow louder in their complaints, more violent in their attacks on the religio-cultural foundations of Christendom, and more driven to complete the conquest of the West their holy book demands of them. The Europeans, foolishly, swallowed the Marxist myth of “multiculturalism” whole — not in the manner of the American melting-pot, ethnic holidays and festivals and the like, but of co-equal cultures peacefully coexisting side by side in what was once a largely mono-ethnic state like Holland or Sweden. It was a beautiful fairy tale, but one that has foundered on the rocks of reality.

Knowing and endorsing the end game, the Left would have you believe that is a failure of the host cultures, and their refusal to sit quietly while their entrails are being devoured. The backlash — Wilders in Holland, Marine le Pen in France, perhaps even Frauke Petry in Germany — has finally begun, as politicians now openly wonder how many Europeans will have to die in order to accommodate a dysfunctional, alien, and largely hostile culture’s desire for “a better life.”

Better than what, one wonders. Unless they’re prepared to abandon the legal and political aspects of Islam, all they will succeed in doing is reproducing the moral and physical squalor they’re allegedly fleeing. Turkish politicians openly campaigning among “Dutch” Turks for something occurring in Turkey is the sign of a culture confident it can get away with anything. Meanwhile, Erdogan plays Angela Merkel and the other Europeans for suckers as he eyes his grand project — the final overthrow of Atatürk’s secular state and the restoration of the Ottoman empire that died in World War I.

“Tomorrow belongs to me” sang the young Nazi in Cabaret. The Turks, Arabs and North Africans currently investing old Europe don’t have to sing it. They just have to believe it: