L’Europe qui tombe

Roger Simon has a good piece on the swift pace of events, especially in what I call the former Western Europe. The phenomenon he describes — Europe’s clash with its unassimilated Islamic population — has been occurring apace for a considerable period of time. What’s happening swiftly now is that the Europeans are finally coming to realize the problem. However, the fate of large portions of Europe may well be sealed already.
Roger focuses on the murder of Dutch film-maker and columnist Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh’s latest project was a documentary about the late Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, a strong critic of Islam and opponent of immigration. He had also enraged Muslims (and others) with his film “Submission” about abuse of Muslim women.
Police are investigating a possible connection between Van Gogh’s murderer and al Qaeda. That’s a potentially a big story, but the real story in Europe is that ordinary Muslim youths (by some accounts one-third of all French youths) are conducting daily acts of violence in places like France. My wife has a cousin who lives in Paris. She is French by birth but lived in Israel for many years, and her children were born there. Her kids are regularly beaten by Muslim kids. Not long ago, she was riding a crowded bus in Paris. A Muslim teen-ager demanded her seat. When she didn’t give it up quickly enough, he punched her and knocked her down. When an older Muslim tried to intervene, the youth shouted “shut-up, Jew.” And , though the lawlessness of unassimilated Muslims may be most pronounced against Jews, we receive plenty of reports about violence directed at non-Jews in France.
Western Europe ceased to exist as we knew it a decade or more ago. Europe, as we have known it, is probably on its way out too.
For additional and related reasons why this seems to be the case, see my prior posts here and here.
CORRECTION: Pim Fortuyn was murdered by an anti-fur activist, not Muslim extremists, as I said in the original version of this post. Fortuyn did refer to Islam in less than flattering terms, and had called for a moratorium on immigration. But it seems to have been his support for re-legalizing the breeding of animals for fur that led to his demise. I wrote about the light sentence his murderer received here. My thanks to the several readers who alerted us to the error.
HINDROCKET adds: While it is true that Fortuyn’s killer was an animal rights nut, the real point here is that Fortuyn was best known for his warnings about the lack of assimilation of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands, and the danger they pose to a liberal western society whose norms they often reject. Immigration is the third rail of Western European politics, and anyone who dares to question its benefits is demonized as a right-wing extremist. That’s an odd label to apply to Fortuyn, who was a gay sociologist, but it was nevertheless applied. Whether the demonization of Fortuyn in the Dutch press contributed to his killer’s motivation, we’ll never know. But it is not at all a stretch to see Van Gogh’s murder as a tragic sequel to the killing of the Netherlands’ most prominent critic of Muslim immigration.

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