In 1993, Harvard professor and founder of the journal Foreign Policy Samuel Huntington published an article that described the increasing levels of conflict between Western and non-Western cultures. The title of the article coined a term in the form of a question: “The Clash of Civilizations?”

Therein, Huntington detailed both the population explosion in Muslim countries and the growing economic might of East Asian countries like China, both of which were beginning to challenge Western civilizational dominance and the ostensibly universal ideals that have embodied that civilization for centuries.

But when Huntington published a book by the same title three years later, the regions he listed as “fault lines” of civilizational conflict were largely devoid of East Asian examples. Instead, they had a decidedly Muslim flair to them: Bosnia, Chechnya, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, Kashmir, the Middle East, and Sudan. Nearly three decades later, we can now add Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Gaza Strip, Yemen, Nigeria, and numerous other places to the cauldron. Again, in all these cases, the common thread is conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims — or, as with Iraq and Syria, between Muslims.

In an essay in mid-September 2001, British author Martin Amis put it more bluntly, more viscerally:

It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her. … That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanized with malice, and wholly alien. For those thousands in the South Tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.

Since 9/11, that “coming future” has ebbed and flowed, but it hasn’t abated. The Muslim world still seems ascendant — and certainly so in Europe, where its demographic march to dominance continues apace.

Complicating matters for the Western world is a general sense of apathy or accommodation or — let’s call it what it really is — appeasement.

Germany just had its national elections, and the results were both striking and unequivocal: The anti-unfettered-immigration Right won, and the pro-migrant-invasion Left lost. Indeed, the top two vote-getters were the Christian Democratic Union and the upstart Alternative for Germany (AfD). The CDU is essentially the GOP of Germany, while the AfD is — wait for it! — a “far-right” party that ran on a strongly anti-immigration platform. This seemed like great news when we first heard it, but 69-year-old CDU leader Friedrich Merz, who’s now poised to become chancellor, is already tacking left instead of right, talking to the enfeebled Social Democrat Party, which finished a distant third, to form a coalition government and freeze out the ascendant and populist AfD.

So much for the people making their voices heard. Back in 2004, the West’s foremost scholar on Islam, Bernard Lewis, was asked whether he thought Europe would be a superpower by the year 2100. Lewis scoffed: “Europe will be part of the Arabic west.” Germany, one of the foundational planks of modern Western culture, seems committed to ushering in Lewis’s grim vision.

In any case, history may be repeating itself in Germany, where the political establishment’s refusal to acknowledge and respond to the very real and legitimate concerns of the populist AfD party will likely only strengthen that populism.

As for other such foundational planks, we can feel even worse about the prospects of the so-called United Kingdom. There, as our Emmy Griffin wrote about last month, the most horrific of scandals continues to unfold, as young — and I mean as young as 11 — predominantly lower-class white girls have been groomed and gang-raped by predominantly Pakistani Muslim men. The number of victims is in the tens of thousands, and the time period of the sexual barbarity is more than 20 years.

As Griffin writes: “If the girls refused to comply, they were beaten and threatened. One young girl was doused with petrol and would have been set on fire had she not complied. The biggest common denominator was the obvious anti-Western, anti-white, anti-Christian bigotry that these men used to justify their crimes against these children. … What’s worse, the government, local police force, and others were actively involved in covering up these crimes.”

Why on earth would these vile authorities want to cover up such monstrousness? Because they don’t want to inflame religious, cultural, or racial tensions and because they don’t want to shine a bright light on the utterly failed British experiment in multiculturalism.

What on earth are law enforcement and criminal justice meant to do if not protect our children? Where, for heaven’s sake, are these girls’ parents? Where are the gangs of their fathers and brothers, armed with baseball bats and going door-to-door to mete out justice now that the British system has so catastrophically failed them?

Critics of Western civilization often make the perfect the enemy of the good. Sure, the West has its historic blights, as have all civilizations, but those have in recent decades been thoroughly denounced in the academies of the Western world.

Let’s be clear: Western civilization and our Judeo-Christian values — from free speech to the nuclear family — are not just a nice-to-have; they’re a need-to-have. They’re not just a good thing; they’re the greatest of things — and they’re well worth defending against the barbarity of the Muslim world and the drip-drip-drip depredations of their apologists and enablers on the useful-idiot Left.

Today, it’s Germany and Great Britain. Demographically and culturally, they’re going out of business. Tomorrow? The day after? It could never happen here are the most infamous of famous last words.