MESSAGE
| DATE | 2023-10-31 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout - NYLXS] repeating cycle
|
Opinion | Middle East War Becomes a European Crisis
Dominic Green
5–7 minutes
London
A war in the Middle East is a foreign-policy crisis for the U.S., but it
is a domestic crisis for Europe. The streets of London, Paris and Berlin
are blocked by marchers calling for jihad. In Brussels, the European
Union’s capital, an international soccer match was halted after a
Tunisian asylum seeker shot two Swedish fans on their way to the game.
Synagogues and Jewish schools are vandalized, and Jews physically
assaulted. Police are outnumbered in the streets, undermined by legal
activists, and supported only equivocally by politicians.
This is the rotten fruit of decades of mismanaged immigration and a
mealy-mouthed failure to reckon with the limits of multiculturalism.
Most of the perpetrators aren’t white nationalists. Nor, although the
useful idiots of the upper-middle-class left clog the streets and the
airwaves, are they environmental catastrophists, angry vegans, or adepts
of the trans cult. They are Europe’s fastest-growing religious minority,
and its largest bloc of social conservatives: Muslims.
Europe’s left sees the postcolonial world as a moral playground, but
liberal Europe has become a stage for the Islamic world’s communal
conflicts. The canary in this coal mine wasn’t Jewish; he was an
Indian-born British Muslim. The riots, death threats and parcel bombs
that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel “The
Satanic Verses” led European governments to adopt a three-pronged
approach. They defined Islamism as a security issue. They tried to
reduce fundamentalism by integrating Muslim communities. And they tried
to reduce friction by stigmatizing and suppressing the concern of the
liberal-minded majority as “Islamophobia.”
The partial success of these policies amounts to failure. Immigration,
much of it illegal, has topped up Europe’s reservoir of Islamists, and
some of them have committed terrorist atrocities. When governments
endorse Islamist gatekeepers as communal interlocutors, as the British
did with the Muslim Association of Britain in the early 2000s, they make
it harder for Muslims to assimilate. Polish and Hungarian nationalists
boast that they don’t have migrant or terrorist problems because they
defy the EU on accepting immigrants. Western Europeans, moderate Muslims
included, face the consequences of their governments’ institutionalized
sanctimony and cowardice.
The French state is already in a struggle with the descendants of its
North African colonial subjects. The first pro-Palestinian march after
Oct. 7 was so alarming that Emmanuel Macron’s government banned further
demonstrations. This didn’t prevent thousands from marching in Paris on
Saturday, where they were exhorted by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the communist
leader of a resurgent left bloc. When people ignore the law and cheer on
mass murder, which is what “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the
Sea” mean, there is no doubt who controls the streets. Even before last
summer’s riots, polls showed that in a 2023 rematch of the 2022
presidential runoff, voters would choose the ex-fascist Marine Le Pen
over Mr. Macron.
“If we are able to deport Hamas supporters, we must do this,” Germany’s
interior minister, Nancy Faeser, said Oct. 20. Ms. Faeser sounds like a
member of the hard-right Alternative for Germany, which topped German
polls for the first time in early October, but she is a Social Democrat
running scared of the voters and her own party’s policies.
Ministers in Britain’s floundering Conservative government also talk
tough for similar reasons. Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, has
told Home Office officials to look into revoking the visas of foreigners
who commit anti-Semitic acts or praise Hamas. Perhaps the Home Office
can also look into why it gave British citizenship to Hamas leader
Muhammad Sawalha. Mr. Sawalha, who was named a co-conspirator in a 2004
money-laundering indictment handed up by a Chicago federal grand jury,
is an organizer of London rallies where participants call for “intifada
from London to Gaza” and chant the Quranic verse about Mohammed’s
extirpation of the Jews of Khaybar. U.K. media are especially offended
that the British state gave Mr. Sawalha a discount on his mortgage.
Many Western Europeans aren’t personally invested in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In May, YouGov Eurotrack polling across
seven European countries found that the conflict matters “not very much”
or “not at all” to 73% of Germans, 56% of Britons and 47% of the French.
Europeans are, however, deeply concerned about immigration, terrorism,
law and order, and overcrowding in welfare, housing, schools and
hospitals. The Tunisian suspect in the Swedish soccer fans’ killing was
still in Brussels three years after a Belgian court ordered his deportation.
Support for Europe’s nationalist and anti-immigration parties has risen
for three decades. Establishment figures such as the archbishop of
Canterbury call this democratic movement the return of fascism.
Governments can tighten Europe’s already restrictive speech laws, as the
head of London’s police suggested in response to calls for “jihad” in
London, but they can’t escape a reckoning, socially or electorally, for
their failure to control their borders and assimilate their immigrants.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical
Society.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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