YOU really can take your pick from the interconnected headlines of the past fortnight: the church-massacres of Christians in Egypt and Iraq by al-Qa’ida, and the murder of the governor of the Punjab, followed by a petition of support for his killer from 500 “moderate” Islamic scholars in Pakistan.

Closer to home there were the terrorist conspiracies in Denmark, Sweden and Britain, and the revelation that while the Christian population in Britain fell by two million in four years, the Muslim population there increased by 74pc to 2.9 million since 2001 (yes, the very year when Islamophobia supposedly became endemic).

But surely the most pathetic headline of all was the one announcing the Greek government’s decision to build a 128-mile wall to keep out “illegal immigrants”.

What a treasury of intellectual dishonesty and cultural cowardice is embodied in that term “illegal immigrant”. For if Greece had a border with Germany, would it erect a barrier to keep illegal Germans out? Or English? Or Swedes? Unlikely somehow.

For some immigrants are more immigrant than others. What the Greeks are keeping out are their old friends from Anatolia, with whom they have been conducting a racial, religious and cultural struggle for over a thousand years. These used to be called Mussulman and later Ottoman and later still Turkish. Now they’re called “illegal immigrants”, in a nice congenial pretence that the illegal immigrant in Thessaloniki is much the same as the illegal immigrant in Arizona.

Which is certainly true, to a degree. The opening decade of the 21st Century has seen the clarification of the divide between Birth Control societies and those where Nature Inevitably Takes Its Course. The BC societies of the USA and the EU are facing increasing pressure to take in the population increases from NITIC countries along their southern borders: African countries double their population every 25 years, whereas Europe’s population has gone up by 50pc in 90 years.

This is unquestionably a major issue for western (once-Christian) civilisations: how many immigrants should they admit? The even more important issue, concealed in the Greek government’s wall-plan, is this: how many Muslim immigrants can any society take, and yet retain the qualities that made it attractive to Muslims in the first place?

Now aside from “refugees” from one Muslim country to its neighbour, there’s little sign of mass-population movement from one Islamic country to another. Bangladeshis, Pakistanis. Afghans, Somalis, may operate as guest workers in Saudi Arabia, where they have no rights, but if they seek a brighter economic future, they move their families to the Christian/secular countries of Greater Europe, which includes North America and Australasia.

And of course, if the immigrants then conform with local norms — as British Hindus and Sikhs have usually done — then there is usually no long-term problem. The result is a cultural enrichment and fusion in which everyone gains.

This is simply not true of Muslim immigration. Not merely is there not a single stable, prosperous Muslim democracy in the world, free of terrorism and fundamentalism, there is no society that has received large numbers of Muslims that has not soon been confronted by an Islamic defiance of existing societal norms. This defiance can be cultural, in which dissident dress code is sought as a religious right; or educational, in which Muslims are raised within their own autonomous school system; or legal, with a demand for Sharia law; or insurrectionary, in which local Muslims opt for terrorist jihad against the state which admitted them.

No European country — not one — that has admitted large numbers of Muslims has been spared any of these outcomes.

No European country — not one — that has admitted Hindus has had to face any comparable problem.

THE EU’s response has been to ignore what it finds uncongenial to talk about, as meanwhile dogmatic “multiculturalists” silence sceptics with the perverse gagging laws that have arisen in every European country. These make it almost impossible for Europeans to defend European values without being called “racist” or an “Islamophobe”.

Perversity then heaps upon perversity, because the political group that has most to lose from the political triumph of Islam, feminism, is totally silent at its inroads. Somali girls are circumcised; polygamous Muslim men are given state-allowances for all their wives and children; and subordinate gynaecostans are created for women in British cities, in which the burqa (body covering), hijab (head covering) and niqab (face veil) are becoming almost mandatory. Meanwhile, girls are covertly being withdrawn from education and prepared for forced marriage. Yet the feminists stay silent.

It might very well be that Islam, with its unapologetic determination to spread its norms wherever it goes, will prove to be the more robust and vigorous civilisation. So be it. In which case, might the 128-mile Greek Wall not simply join the Maginot Line and the Great Wall of China as yet another historically doomed defensive line? Well, not quite.

There is still a China, still a France. But what about the great Graeco-Roman Christian civilisations that once existed across Asia Minor and North Africa, from Anatolia through Syria and Tunisia and on to Casablanca, and which failed to defend themselves against militant Islam? What remains of them? The remains remain.

– Kevin Myers