Fred Siegel in a City Journal article, "Hope for Old Europe," brings us up to date on Europe's slow awakening to the Muslim threat, fogged over until now by clever Muslim extremists' employment of Western freedoms and accommodated by liberal obtuseness and blindness. It's a useful read. A few excerpts:
Sarkozy’s road [Nicolas Sarkozy, newly elected French President] to the Elysee Palace was paved not only by the mini-Intifada in the Paris banlieues, but also by a memorable public exchange about Islam. An intellectually confident Sarkozy, then the interior minister, debated suave, articulate Tariq Ramadan, the grandson and heir of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. With 6 million viewers watching, Sarkozy asked Ramadan, famed as an Islamic version of a Euro-Communist, if he agreed with his brother Hani Ramadan—who had argued, in line with Muslim law, that adulterous women should be stoned to death. Pressed to agree or disagree of free speech
without obfuscation, Ramadan, his Western facade crumbling, said he favored a “moratorium” on such stoning. Sarkozy responded with anger, “A moratorium?” He went on to mock the Islamists’ leftist apologists. “If it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive.
. . . But there are signs of a shift in England as well. Blair, who is about to leave office, has knighted Rushdie. A Pakistani legislator greeted the announcement with a call for suicide attacks on England. Blair responded in turn with aplomb. Writing in the Observer, the jihad-friendly Guardian’s Sunday paper, left-wing journalist Will Hutton has admitted that “the space in which to argue that Islam is an essentially benign religion seems to narrow with every passing day.”
. . . For the past decade, men like [Tarique] Ramadan have played a skillful double game. They have used Western liberal tropes to undermine Western values—extremism, they would suggest, was just another form of free speech. Aiding them in this game have been Western apologists for Islamic extremism . . .