President Donald Trump has told Canada that if it recognizes Palestine as a state, it’s jeopardizing a trade pact with the U.S. The threat is more than leverage for talks. It’s a reminder that the West is giving up on civilization and needs to be rousted from its slumber.

“Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “That will make it very hard for us to make a trade deal with them.”

Canada is not the only Western nation that feels the need to recognize the terrorist-controlled Gaza Strip, which, with the Israel-occupied West Bank, is considered by some to be Palestine, a country that has never existed. Both France and the United Kingdom have said they will recognize Palestinian statehood next month. As loony as that sounds, there might be a practical reason for it. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron “are likely terrified of their local Muslim populations — and probably not without reason,” says Stephen Green.

It’s unfortunate, but more than 75% of the United Nations member countries already formally recognize Palestine. (But the U.N. doesn’t consider Hamas a terrorist group.) Now the holdouts in the West are beginning to surrender, even though Hamas, designated widely as a terrorist organization, governs the Gaza Strip.

Much of the West seems no longer interested in maintaining even a veneer of civilization. In the name of diversity, inclusion, and tolerance, and for the purposes of virtue signaling and assuaging their guilt for enjoying the benefits of civilization, Western “leaders” have actively imported migrants who have not just disrupted society but have taken it backward. They are ceding ground to those who actively despise everything about the West other than its wealth. The results have been appalling.

Some examples:

The rape gangs of England. In working-class Rotherham, “more than 1,400 girls,” some of them as young as 12, have been “systematically ‘groomed’ and gang-raped by Muslim immigrants, mostly of Pakistani origin,” says the New Criterion. The Economist calls “the grooming-gangs scandal” a “stain on the British state” fueled by “a toxic combination of victim-blaming and misguided political correctness.” Tablet magazine explains that “few issues expose the self-blinding of the Western progressive left more than the sexual violence waged against working-class girls” in the United Kingdom “by predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs.”

The no-go zones of Europe. These are “lawless ghettos that breed and harbor terrorists,” says the Canadian National Post. “How is it that in Europe, Muslim terrorists seem to just come out of the woodwork and are able to wreak havoc on civilian society?” More than seven years ago, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel “publicly admitted the existence” of no-go zones, described by the Center for Immigration Studies as “enclaves of migrants in various German cities who live insular lives that are resistant, and often downright hostile, to German values; places where it has become unsafe for tourists, outsiders of any kind, and even first responders such as firefighters and police, to venture.”

Despite her admission, the Center for Immigration Studies further noted that Merkel continued to push European Union “leaders to oblige all other EU nations to accept their ‘fair share’ of these unassimilated and, at least in some instances, potentially unassimilable individuals.”

Sweden’s rape problem. The Telegraph reported earlier this year that 63% of “convictions for rape or attempted rape” have been “handed down to people born abroad, or whose parents were born abroad.” Migrants born elsewhere or born in Sweden with two foreign-born parents make up only 26% of the country’s population.

Not every immigrant from the Middle East and Africa is a threat to society. But there are enough who refuse to assimilate, who have antipathy for Western civilization, who don’t recognize Western customs, laws, and morals, and who wish to crush civilization for religious reasons to have fundamentally changed Europe, maybe forever.

Maybe there’s no reason to be disturbed that Muhammad is the most popular name for all babies, not just boys, in England and Wales for the second straight year. That is, if no one is concerned that with a swelling Islamic population’s Sharia law, which is incompatible with Western civilization, will overtake our legal traditions.

Multiculturalism was a mistake. Any culture that values the rule of law, truth, human dignity, and individualism, and is guided by the Enlightenment, struggles to coexist with cultures that respect none of those. It becomes a clash not of civilizations but of civilization itself manning the ramparts against invasion. It’s disheartening that some in the West have switched sides.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board