“We will rise up, my dear Muslims,” shouted Anjem Choudary to cheering supporters at a gathering this past New Year’s. “One day we will have the sharia here. And who knows, maybe even Southall can be the capital of the Islamic state when we conquer it.”

Southall, where this meeting took place, is a suburb in west London.

Choudary’s hope of conquering Southall is probably far-fetched. After all, the majority religion there is Sikh; the next largest religion is Hindu. Indians and Pakistanis make up two thirds of the borough’s population.

Yes, we’re talking about west London. Railway signs there appear both in English and in the Gurmukhī alphabet. The majority of Southall’s residents were born outside the UK; officially only 12 percent are indigenous white British—though this figure is sure to have fallen since it was recorded in the 2000 census.

London is experiencing a major population shift. More than a third of its residents—2 million people—fled the city between 1998 and 2007. This equated to a net loss of 345,000 Londoners who moved to the countryside or skipped the country altogether. But that loss was more than made up for by the 1.8 million international immigrants that flooded into Britain’s capital over the same period. Today, in parts of London, the person walking the streets might wonder if he’s in South Asia or the Middle East. As a Hindustan Times writer quipped in a recent headline, “Been to London, but not seen the British.”

This demographic reality is playing out across Britain. The stream of foreigners coming into the United Kingdom is relentlessly growing broader and deeper. In 1997, the year the Labor Party came to power, 37,000 foreign nationals were granted UK citizenship. In 2006, that number was up over 330 percent—to 160,000. Nearly 1.2 million immigrants became British citizens during that decade.

As foreign nationals are coming in, native Britons are fleeing in record numbers. Over that same decade, nearly 1.6 million British citizens emigrated abroad—200,000 in 2006 alone. From 2002 to 2006, the established white population in England declined by almost a quarter of a million.

Today, one in seven British students ages 4 to 11 does not speak English as a first language. Almost half a million of them instead speak Middle Eastern or Eastern European languages. At nearly 600 primary schools, at least 70 percent of the children primarily speak a foreign language. And at 10 of these English schools, not a single student speaks English as a first language.

The immigration think tank Migration Watch is alarmed. “The unavoidable conclusion,” says Sir Andrew Green, the group’s chairman, “is that the whole nature of our society will change very rapidly unless the government moves from spin to serious action ….”

Such a move is unlikely, considering it would require an about-face from the government’s years-long effort to create and legally enforce a multicultural Britain.

Britain once had a firm sense of its own identity—rooted in biblically based morals and high standards—and of obligation to set an example of uprightness and civility for the rest of the world. Today, however, traditional British values have been almost wholly replaced by a rabid devotion to the hollow ideals of tolerance and multiculturalism. This “tolerance,” in practice, translates into a violent repudiation of tradition. British society has vitiated its people’s sense of identity and history. By trampling on its own sense of Britishness, this nation created a void that the immigrants are filling up with cultures, identities and dogmas of their own.

Instead of producing a stronger, more unified, more harmonious, peaceful and prosperous nation, the diversity cult has done untold damage. It is straining Britain’s already broken welfare system, as the government allows Muslim men with multiple wives and numerous children to claim added welfare benefits—despite polygamy being illegal in Britain. Compulsory multiculturalism has created ghettos, fragmented British society, and empowered the most dangerous and radical of ideologues.

As the Brussels Journalwrote last week, “Britain in 2009 is no longer the nation that gave us Shakespeare, Newton or Adam Smith; it is the world’s largest open-air prison, an enlarged Marxist reeducation camp, a horror story where the authorities wage cultural and demographic warfare against the indigenous people of the country.”

Consider one recent telling example.

A member of the House of Lords extended an invitation for a private meeting of her colleagues with Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, whose controversial film Fitna has Muslims seeking to kill him. But another Lords member threatened to mobilize 10,000 Muslims to bar Wilders from the House. His protest got the event canceled.

The Home Secretary’s office wrote a letter to Wilders explaining the decision: “[T]he secretary of state is of the view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society.

“The secretary of state is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.”

It is important to note that the Lords member who successfully lobbied for Wilders’s ban was Pakistani-born Nazir Ahmed. Lord Ahmed, whom Tony Blair appointed to the Lords as the first Muslim life peer in 1998 and is called a “moderate” Muslim, took his oath on a Koran.

Melanie Phillips wrote, “So let’s get this straight. … [A] Dutch politician who doesn’t threaten anyone is banned for telling unpalatable truths about those who do; while those who threaten life and liberty find that the more they do so, the more the British government will do exactly what they want, in the interests of ‘community harmony.’”

Britain is caving in to cultures that were once foreign because it has lost its identity—and knowledge of its true history. The first chapter of Isaiah’s prophecy describes curses that would come on the modern nations of biblical Israel as a result (read The United States and Britain in Prophecy for proof that Britain is a primary nation of biblical Israel). Verses 3 and 4 describe a nation that does not know its history or its God and has rebelled against God’s law. Verses 5 and 6 outline the sick state this nation is now in as a result. Verses 7 and 8 continue, outlining specific curses God would send: “Your country is desolate … your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.”

These prophecies are now in the process of being fulfilled.

In Luke 21, Jesus Christ further tells of a time when the “Gentiles”—simply a biblical term for non-Israelitish nations—would come to rule the world. For the past several hundred years, beginning with the rise of Britain and its empire, the Anglo-Saxon nations have dominated the globe. That is now changing—rapidly. And perhaps nowhere is this reality clearer than within the capital of what was, not long ago, the world’s greatest empire. The British are beating a hasty retreat from London, just as the nation’s government, education and society are beating a hasty retreat from all things British.

Britain today is commonly described as being “broken.” Many Britons can see it and are fleeing. They have had enough of the crime, the mass illegal immigration, the political correctness, the rising cost of living, the social breakdown. The highest percentage of those emigrating are making their new home in either Australia (50,000 a year; 1.3 million British-born emigrants reportedly live there) or New Zealand (30,000 a year), which are still seen as lands of relative opportunity to Britons exhausted of hope in their own country.

What they may not realize, however, is that the same curses tearing Britain apart are also descending upon its daughter nations—and will soon tear them apart just as surely. For while many see the effect of national decline, few understand the true cause: disobedience to God and His laws, morals and standards. And because that cause plagues all the nations of end-time Israel, they are all reaping the bitter results. Britain is just leading the way.