Europe Besieged

In the aftermath of the terror attack in Manchester Mark Steyn has measured the extent of the assault on European civilization. (via Maggie’s Farm) The European continent is besieged by people it happily welcomed into its midst. Whether they arrived yesterday or a generation ago Muslim refugees are wreaking havoc on kind and gentle Europe.

The newspaper The Independent advises people to “carry on” as though nothing has happened. In some places its good advice. Yet, carrying on in the face of terrorism means submitting … and accepting the disintegration of a great culture. Europe has gone soft. It has gone multicultural. It has gone weak and pusillanimous. It is terrorized and terrified. It is acting as though it is afraid. This signals to aspiring jihadis that terrorism works. If Europe does not fight back, if it does not erupt in outrage, the terrorists will continue their work. 

Europeans, like many in America, do not have any fight left in them—unless it’s to fight Islamophobia. It veils a fundamental cowardice, a willingness to live in a fantasy world defined by magical thinking. It is manifeset in the title of the Ariana Grande tour: "Dangerous Woman."

Is it not ironic that Westerners believe that women become stronger because we say they are stronger, that women become empowered because we keep saying that they are empowered, and now, that women are dangerous because a sylph-like chanteuse says they are dangerous.

Poof… you might think that a Europe run by empowered women is just as strong as it used to be. Apparently, jihadis missed class that day. They see weakness where you imagine that you are strong. And they are more than happy to expose your softer side, your weaker side, your illusion of strength. To their minds, it’s not a great leap forward for human rights. It’s a sign of terminal decadence.

An illusion does not become truth because everyone believes it. The prevailing orthodoxy does not become fact because no one dares challenge it.

Steyn describes a continent under siege. At first, the attacks were directed against Jews:

Carrying on in Germany, Angela Merkel pronounced the attack "incomprehensible". But she can't be that uncomprehending, can she? Our declared enemies are perfectly straightforward in their stated goals, and their actions are consistent with their words. They select their targets with some care. For a while, it was Europe's Jews, at a Brussels museum and a Toulouse school and a Copenhagen synagogue and a Paris kosher supermarket. But Continentals are, except for political photo-ops on Holocaust Memorial Day, relatively heartless about dead Jews, and wrote off such incidents as something to do with "Israeli settlements" and "occupation" and of no broader significance.

In America, everyone is for gay rights. If you are not, you will be viciously denounced as a homophobe. And yet, when a Muslim terrorist attacked a gay night club in Orlando, the silence of gay rights advocates was deafening. When it comes to bigotry, Muslims get a pass. How to read it other than an expression of fear?

So they moved on to slaughter 49 gays in a nightclub in Orlando - the biggest mound of gay corpses ever piled up in American history and the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11. But all the usual noisy LGBTQWERTY activists fell suddenly silent, as if they'd all gone back in the closet and curled up in the fetal position. And those Democrats who felt obliged to weigh in thought it was something to do with the need for gun control...

Christians have not been spared:

So they targeted provocative expressions of the infidel's abominable false religion, decapitating a French priest at Mass and mowing down pedestrians at a Berlin Christmas market. But post-Christian Europe takes Christianity less seriously than its enemies do, and so that too merited little more than a shrug and a pledge to carry on.

Attacks on nationhood, on national pride, followed:

So they selected symbols of nationhood, like France's Bastille Day, Canada's Cenotaph, and the Mother of Parliaments in London. But taking seriously assaults on your own nation's symbols would require you to take your nation seriously, and most western citizens are disinclined to do so. As the great universal talismanic anthem of the age has it, "Imagine there's no countries/It's easy if you try..."

Of course, jihadis detest pop music and especially the notion of young people having fun:

So the new Caliphate's believers figured out that what their enemy really likes is consumerism and pop music. Hence the attacks on the Champs-Élysées and the flagship Åhléns department store in Stockholm, and the bloodbath at the Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris and now at Ariana Grande's "Dangerous Woman" tour.

How has life changed in besieged Europe?

"Carrying on exactly as before", as The Independent advises, will not be possible. A few months ago, I was in Toulouse, where Jewish life has vanished from public visibility and is conducted only behind the prison-like walls of a fortress schoolhouse and a centralized synagogue that requires 24/7 protection by French soldiers; I went to Amsterdam, which is markedly less gay than it used to be; I walked through Molenbeek after dark, where unaccompanied women dare not go. You can carry on, you can stagger on, but life is not exactly as it was before. Inch by inch, it's smaller and more constrained.

You can carry on exactly as before, but in a decade or two, just as there are fewer gay bars in Amsterdam and no more Jewish shops on the Chaussée de Gand, there will be less music in the air in western cities. Even the buskers, like the one in Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens today serenading a shattered city with "All You Need Is Love", will have moved on, having learned that it's a bit more complicated than that.

Where are Europe’s leaders? Angela Merkel opened her arms to Muslim refugees and then instructed the local gendarmes to suppress the data on Muslim crime. The same is true in Sweden. Angela May has yet to show the backbone that Margaret Thatcher made her signature. Francois Hollande was generally tougher than the others, but his successor, Emmanuel Macron, the man who married his mother, has proudly declared that his administration will be half male and half female. You can hear the jihadis quaking at having to deal with so many dangerous women:

All of us have gotten things wrong since 9/11. But few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither - and, for the sake of the dead of last night's carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly. Theresa May's statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be "defiant", but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it - like the Eloi in H G Wells' Time Machine, too evolved to resist the Morlocks.