“The errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are just the worst.” — Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, Chapter 1
Clausewitz warned that errors made in a spirit of benevolence can be the worst errors in war. Europe should heed that warning now.
A government may call it compassion to admit people it cannot vet or integrate, avoid difficult questions about sexual violence, or postpone enforcing its own laws for fear of seeming unkind. But mercy measured only by what feels generous today may impose a terrible cost on tomorrow’s victims - our sons and daughters.
Where people are endangered and facts obscured, trust in the state is squandered. The merciful course is to restore control through lawful, decisive action while there is still time. If citizens cease to believe that the law will protect them, the risk of communal conflict will increase.
For years, girls in English towns were raped and exploited while officials worried about the political consequences of identifying their abusers. On New Year’s Eve 2015–16, women in Cologne were sexually assaulted in large numbers while the authorities struggled to control the scene. Across much of Europe, recorded rape offences are now far higher than at the turn of the century.
A national rape total is not a census of perpetrators. Those responsible must be identified through investigations and offender data. Such data exist in some countries. They are deeply uncomfortable, but suppressing them is no service to victims.
Europe’s Demographic Transformation
The scale of change is visible in national data. Germany’s federal migration office estimated 6.6 million to 7 million Muslims with a migration background from predominantly Muslim countries in 2025, up from 5.3 million to 5.6 million in its 2020 study.
France’s national statistics institute found that 10 per cent of metropolitan residents aged between 18 and 59 identified as Muslim in 2019–20. Among those aged between 18 and 49, the proportion rose from 8 per cent in 2008–09 to 11 per cent in 2019–20.
In Spain, CEU’s demographic observatory estimated 2.4 million to 2.5 million Muslims at the beginning of 2025, approximately 5 per cent of the population. That average concealed substantially higher concentrations: approximately 9 per cent in Catalonia, 10 per cent in Murcia, and around 24 per cent of men aged between 20 and 44 in Almería. It also estimated that 11 per cent of babies born in Spain in 2024 had at least one Muslim parent.
Spain’s subsequent migration decisions also belong in this account. Its migration ministry recorded 1,174,978 applications for extraordinary regularisation by 30 June 2026, more than twice the government’s initial estimate. Separately, Spain’s statistics institute counted more than 10 million foreign-born residents at the beginning of 2026, approximately one fifth of the population.
Britain’s latest censuses put the Muslim population at 6.5 per cent in England and Wales in 2021, or 3.9 million people, up from 2.7 million in 2011. London was 15 per cent Muslim, while 36.8 per cent of its population identified as White British.
In the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium’s statistics office reported that 21.5 per cent of residents were Belgians of Belgian background on 1 January 2026. The remaining 78.5 per cent were Belgians of foreign background or non-Belgians.
Vienna offers a striking historical frame. Ottoman armies besieged the city in 1529 and 1683. In the 2024–25 school year, Muslim children accounted for 41.2 per cent of pupils in Vienna’s public compulsory schools, ahead of the 34.5 per cent registered as Christian, according to figures released by the city’s education authorities.
A child attending school is not an Ottoman soldier. But a city once defended as a frontier of Christian Europe has changed profoundly. Its citizens are entitled to ask what cultural continuity, integration and allegiance to a common civil law will mean for the next generation.
Demographic change is not itself evidence of criminality. The question is whether governments have honestly examined the social and security problems emerging alongside rapid migration, and whether they have protected those most at risk.
The Crime Figures Europe Cannot Ignore
Sweden recorded 2,024 rapes and attempted rapes in 2000. Its official statistical database recorded 10,014 reported rape offences in 2025.
Norway recorded 555 rapes in 2000, compared with 2,306 in 2025, according to its official crime statistics.
In England and Wales, police recorded 8,593 rape offences in the year ending March 2001. By the year ending March 2026, the Office for National Statistics recorded 74,727.
Germany recorded 7,499 offences in 2000. In 2024, its broader category encompassing rape, sexual coercion and serious sexual assault contained 13,320 recorded offences, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office.
Legal definitions, reporting behaviour and recording practices have changed, so these figures are not directly interchangeable. But those qualifications do not justify waving away the women and children behind them.
Swedish researchers followed 4,032 people convicted of rape between 2000 and 2020. Some 50.6 per cent were born outside Sweden, compared with 18 per cent in a matched control group. The study also found elevated conviction odds among people born in Sweden with one or two foreign-born parents. These were conviction data, not merely allegations.
Finland’s official figures for 2017–18 found that, after standardising for age and sex, foreign citizens were suspected of rape at a rate of 0.46 per 1,000 people, compared with 0.08 per 1,000 Finnish citizens.
Britain provides a concrete account of what happens when official caution overrules the duty to protect. The independent Rotherham inquiry estimated that at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. The majority of known perpetrators identified by that local inquiry were of Pakistani heritage.
Officials failed to act effectively for years, and staff described a reluctance to discuss ethnicity. The children paid the price.
The British government’s 2025 national audit found an overrepresentation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage suspects in several local police datasets. It also found that ethnicity was missing for approximately two-thirds of perpetrators in national records.
No serious investigation begins by declining to record who committed the crime.
When One Law Is Challenged
In east London, members of a self-styled “Muslim Patrol” confronted people whom they judged to be behaving in an un-Islamic way. In Wuppertal, men wearing “Shariah Police” vests walked through the city to discourage young Muslims from drinking, gambling or engaging in other conduct they condemned.
The quieter question of religious authority matters as well. A Home Office-commissioned review found that sharia councils possess no civil-law jurisdiction in England and Wales. Nevertheless, some women faced discriminatory practices while seeking religious divorces, while unregistered religious marriages left others without access to civil divorce.
Religious advice is lawful. Coercion, and any claim that religious authorities can displace rights guaranteed by the state, is not. Europe must enforce one civil law for everyone.
France supplies another warning. Protests over teacher shortages and deteriorating schools escalated into arson and attacks on police. Reuters reported on 30 September that the interior minister had described seven incidents involving hydrochloric acid being thrown at law-enforcement officers.
A school is an instrument of integration. Burning it attacks the institution through which society teaches a common language, shared obligations and a common future. A shortage of teachers deserves an answer. An attack on a teacher or police officer deserves a lawful response.
From Criminal Failure to Security Crisis
A state loses more than public confidence when it cannot protect children, women and ordinary people. It loses the argument that disputes should be entrusted to law rather than settled by force.
According to Europol’s 2026 terrorism report, EU member states reported 45 completed, failed or foiled terrorist attacks in 2025. Twenty-four were jihadist, while 347 of the 486 terrorism-related arrests were connected to jihadism. Jihadist attacks killed five people and injured 81.
Each atrocity places pressure on the police and feeds fear. Victims believe that the authorities are withholding facts. Opportunists claim that no lawful remedy exists. Extremists recruit from the resulting anger, and reprisals fall upon people who had nothing to do with the original crime.
Northern Ireland offered a disturbing preview in June 2026. After Stephen Ogilvie was gravely wounded in a knife attack, a man with refugee status was charged with attempted murder. The attack preceded anti-immigrant rioting in which homes and cars were burned and police came under attack. Ogilvie’s family rejected the violence committed in his name.
The accused must answer for his alleged act. Families who merely shared a migrant background were made to answer for it in the streets. That is the leap from individual crime to collective reprisal that could make a wider conflict possible.
The Conflict Europe Must Prevent
Islamist ideologues have described their political ambitions openly. In a 2007 broadcast, Yusuf al-Qaradawi spoke of Islam conquering Europe through da‘wa, preaching and ideology, rather than through the sword.
The Islamic State pursued something far more violent. It called upon recruits to migrate to its self-declared state and subjected Yazidi women and girls to rape and sexual slavery documented by the United Nations.
Hijra has a religious and historical meaning, the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina, but jihadists have also used the language of migration as recruitment propaganda. A propagandist’s use of that word does not turn millions of ordinary migrants into soldiers. It does show that ideologues employ religious concepts to organise political violence.
The warning has also come from inside the Muslim world. In 2017, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed warned that European countries could become incubators of terrorism if they failed to confront extremism. He criticised political correctness and indecision.
If Europe allows mass immigration, failed integration, predatory networks and jihadist recruitment to fester until the state loses control, the danger of conflict will grow. Nationalist forces may demand collective expulsions. Armed Islamist factions may attempt to restore practices imposed by Islamic State.
These are the horrors that delay could produce, and why governments must act before conflict begins.
Act Before It Is Too Late
The answer begins with the oldest obligation of government: protect the people under its authority.
Investigate sexual violence aggressively. Publish offender characteristics accurately, including nationality, migration status and relevant criminal history. Identify organised networks before they acquire another generation of victims. Remove officials who bury evidence or abandon children.
Enforce immigration and deportation law through due process when serious offenders have no right to remain. Confront jihadist recruitment and violent retaliation with equal determination. Make clear that rape, forced marriage, intimidation and religious coercion are crimes under one law, whoever commits them.
Governments must decide openly how much migration their countries can absorb, enforce integration requirements and refuse any attempt to place religious authority above civil law.
Clausewitz’s warning is that benevolent intentions do not excuse disastrous consequences. If leaders refuse to act because they wish to appear merciful today, they may leave newcomers and their neighbours exposed to a merciless conflict tomorrow.
Act before there are militias, before neighbours become enemies and before expulsions and enslavement become the terms upon which factions fight.
