How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-laden career to be strangely disingenuous about certain realities of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, told the German newspaper Die Welt forthrightly that "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century."
Or maybe sooner. Consider some indicators from Scandinavia this past week:
Elsewhere in Europe the jihad is taking a more violent form. Dutch officials have uncovered at least fifteen separate terrorist plots, all aimed at punishing the Netherlands for its 1,300 peacekeeping troops in Iraq. And in Spain, Moroccan Muslims, including several suspected participants in the March 11 bombings in Madrid, have taken control of a wing of a Spanish prison. From there they broadcast Muslim prayers at high volume, physically intimidated non-Muslim prisoners, hung portraits of Osama bin Laden, and boasted, "We are going to win the holy war." The guards' response? They asked the ringleaders please to lower the volume on the prayers.
What are European governments doing about all this? France is pressing forward with an appeasement campaign to free two French journalists held hostage by jihadists in Iraq. The Swedish state agency for foreign aid is sponsoring a "Palestinian Solidarity Conference," which aims, among other things, to pressure the European Union to remove the terrorist group Hamas from the EU's list of terrorist groups - despite Hamas's long history of encouraging and glorifying the murder of civilians by suicide bombers.
What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, the institutionalized oppression of non-Muslims in Muslim societies, chronicles in her forthcoming book Eurabia how it has come to this. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication before Islam in pursuit of short-sighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitude,' i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing."
After the Beslan child massacres, however, there are signs from Eastern Europe that this may be changing. Last Sunday Poland turned away one hundred Chechen Muslims who were trying to enter the country from Belarus. This is the sort of measure that the countries west of Poland have been so far unwilling to take. But since one cannot by any means screen out the jihadists from the moderate Muslims, and the moderates are not helping identify the jihadists either, what choice did the Poles have?
It might not be too long before they will have to turn away entrants from Scandinavia and France as well.
