Bruce Bawer's article, 9/11, Five Years Later: A View from Europe, should go into one's "Europe" file. It chronicle's Europe's continuing dissent into obscurantism and self-nullification. Choosing a few quotes out of so many possibilities is difficult, but I'll try.
Islamist terrorism continues to be characterized by many as a desperate response to poverty, oppression, and/or Western foreign policies, rather than what it is: a jihad by people who seek to conquer the West as Muhammed did North Africa, subduing infidels and imposing sharia. . . .
Some understand the enemy, yet underestimate its capabilities. One’s comfort can be one’s downfall: just as it seemed inconceivable that the Twin Towers could be brought down so easily, so our Western civilization can feel indestructible, and the idea of having to defend it can feel like – well, something out of an old movie. . . .
Bawer speaks of the
beginnings of a fast-growing, self-segregating European Islamic society that was becoming ever more confident and assertive in its rejection of Western values. . . It is a war, moreover, in which the enemy’s most powerful weapon is not bombs but demography. Muslim immigration levels remain high; so do reproduction rates. Yes, only a tiny percentage of European Muslims are terrorists; but many more – who get their “news” from satellite channels such as Al-Jazeera and who feed one another’s animosity toward the West in mosques, in community centers, and on Internet message boards – find European culture intolerably decadent and share the jihadist goal of a European caliphate governed according to Koranic precepts. Recent polls show that at least 40% of Muslims in the U.K. would like to see Britain under sharia law, and that at least one in four approved of the 7/7 attacks. European-establishment rhetoric to the contrary, poverty and ignorance aren’t the explanation: the most intense anti-Western sympathies are nursed not by illiterate immigrants from rural Arab villages but by their well-educated, European-born children who live well and drive BMWs. . . .
I would never have believed on 9/11 that in 2006, most Europeans would still be surprised to learn – to pluck two examples at random – that over seven in ten immigrant women in Sweden (according to an EU study) are affected by “honor-related violence” and that Jewish children (according to a French government report) “can no longer get an education” in France because of abuse by Muslim classmates. Some law-enforcement authorities have already thrown in the towel: in 2004, Swedish police admitted they “have no control over the situation in Malmö,” a city plagued by Muslim rapes and robberies; this August, after a Muslim gang shootout in Oslo, police said they were “reluctant to crack down on the gangs out of fear for their own safety.”
On 9/11, the free world was powerfully reminded of its freedom. In Europe, alas, that day’s spirit has been steamrollered by an establishment that – apparently having already accepted the inevitability of Europe’s Islamization – routinely turn the truth on its head, representing aggressors as victims and self-defense as inflammatory. (more)