How come that no Westerners migrate to the Muslim world – why is it always the other way around? asked Lars Hedegaard when speaking at Gallery Rönnquist & Rönnquist in Malmö on August 15.

 We are constantly being told that we are living in the age of globalization and multiculturalism. And indeed, if we look around in our Western cities, we notice that they have changed out of all recognition over the past few decades. We can now observe people from all corners of the world walking our streets, setting up their shops, building their temples and demanding their rights as our equals – sometimes even as our masters.

The states of Western Europe spend enormous sums in an attempt to integrate these foreigners, mostly with no good effect. Integration is a matter of willingness on the part of the newcomer to become a part of our societies and mingle with our people. And if you arrive here with the idea that your culture or religion is superior to ours, no amount of money will change your opinion. Quite the opposite. If you are rewarded financially for not integrating, then you are bound to conclude that you are living in the best of all possible worlds: You carry on doing what you did back home, and the infidels pay you for it.

It didn’t use to be that way. When I grew up, the populations of countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway, England, France etc. were more or less homogenous in the ethnic and cultural sense. No more. A few weeks ago it was announced that Englishmen are now a minority in London. The same just happened in Malmö and will soon come a great number of cities all over the European continent. It is a development with no parallel since the era of the Great Migrations some 1500 years ago.

But it is only natural, we are told. And what is natural must be good. And if we have any doubt as to the benefits of mass immigration and multiculturalism, we are branded as reactionaries, racists and Islamophobes.

But there is something fundamentally wrong with the concept of globalization. At closer inspection, it turns out that we in the Western world are the only ones that are becoming globalized.

Look at the balance between Western Europe and our immediate neighbors south and east of the Mediterranean. Globalization works in one direction and not in the other. Millions from countries such as Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and North Africa – in other words from the Muslim world – stream into Europe. We never hear of any migration in the other direction. How many Swedes have settled in Libya, Mali, Syria or Turkey? Only those who have come to fight – not because they love these particular places but because they hate somebody.