Menace In Europe Part 11

They aren't buying it because the strains are showing. When the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, took office, in 2001-the first leftist to take charge of the city since the Paris Commune-the foreign tabloids made predictable jokes about Gay Paree, because Delanoe is, as everyone knows, gay. And Paris has been unusually gay under Delanoe. Every summer, he redecorates the banks of the Seine, importing 10,000 tons of sand, potted palm trees, little cafe tables, and umbrellas so Parisians can enjoy the ambience of the Riviera in the heart of the city. Cool gla.s.ses of Ricard by the river during the day! Singers and jugglers at night! Men in Lycra and women in bikinis playing volley-ball in the sand! He even decreed a special beach for dogs. He implemented pedestrian days in the city center-and if the merchants didn't like that because they couldn't get their wares to the shops, he shrugged. To h.e.l.l with them. He organized citywide scavenger hunts. He arranged for Hollywood movies to be broadcast at night onto giant screens outside the city's famous landmarks, and everyone thought the Cathedral of Notre Dame much improved by the ninety-foot-tall likeness of Clint Eastwood, gesturing in the vague direction of the gargoyles and enjoining them to make his day. The mayor has been enormously popular, of course. What's not to like?

The Nuit Blanche celebration-the Sleepless Night-took place on October 5, 2002. This was another one of the mayor's gay ideas: Throw the city's monuments open to the public, all night, and have a giant free party for everyone in Paris. The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe all were open. Jazz pianists and cabaret singers played the bistros until sunrise. Giraffe-limbed models in sungla.s.ses put on a fashion show at the Palais Royale. A gla.s.s facade of the National Library became a giant interactive light show: Pa.s.sersby could operate the display by sending messages with their cell phones. And for those who made it to dawn, free croissants! Outside the Hotel de Ville, enamored, grateful citizens chanted "Bertrand, Bertrand!"- and this before anyone heard the bad news.

I was on the scene when it happened. In fact, judging from the news accounts, I was about twenty feet away. I missed the entire thing and read about it the next day in the New York Times. Frankly, I wasn't all that sober, and neither was anyone else. Delanoe had decked out the foyer and the hall of mirrors like a 1930s nightclub; everyone was preening and flirting and doing the cha-cha, and zut, who was paying attention?

I'd been living in Paris for a while, but I'd never been inside the Hotel de Ville before, and neither had most native Parisians. Under Delanoe's predecessors, the opulent town hall-which looks like a statuesque wedding cake from the outside and a magnificent bordello inside-was closed to the public for security reasons. But Delanoe threw the gates open. There were no metal detectors or pat-downs at the door, because, he insisted, that wouldn't have been festive.

That was why the a.s.sailant was able to throw himself on the mayor, who was circulating without bodyguards among the crowd, and stab him in the stomach, missing his aorta by less than an inch. Delanoe was gravely wounded but insisted he be evacuated quietly: "Let the party continue," he said, wanting no one's night to be spoiled. Doctors at Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital operated on him for more than three hours, and saved his life.

The attacker, Azedine Berkane, was a Muslim immigrant from Algeria. Initially, the media suspected organized terror. But the man, police concluded, was a lone nutball, more John Hinckley than Mohamed Atta. According to Le Monde, the police had at least fifteen files on him, half concerning drugs, the others, theft. He had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and prisons for years. He lived with his parents.

He had stabbed the mayor, he declared, because he hated politicians and he hated h.o.m.os.e.xuals even more. Berkane came from one of the tough, hopeless Parisian suburbs that recently exploded in rioting and arson. Le Monde reported, At the foot of his building about twenty young adults described their neighbor's personality. . . . [One neighbor] remembered above all that this childless bachelor "didn't much like h.o.m.os.e.xuals," and that "he made this clear to everyone he hung out with." On that matter, opinions among the group were unanimous. "He was a bit like us," continued [another neighbor]. "We're all h.o.m.o-phobic here, because it's not natural." "It's against Islam," added [yet another neighbor]. "Muslim f.a.gs don't exist."1 Of course, most Muslim immigrants do not attempt to murder the mayor because he is gay. Nor, for that matter, are all murderers of gay martyrs Muslims: Daniel White, after all, whose last name rather sums up his ethnic situation, killed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk. But the story is revealing nonetheless. It is a hint that Europe may have a problem on its hands. It is a hint that the veneer of gaiety may be thin.

This story, and stories like it, are why the French voted non.

REVERSION BY DEFAULT.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the life of every single European, from peasant to lord, from knight to tradesman, was ordered and a.s.signed meaning by the Church. The village church was the center of his community. His days and seasons were governed by the rhythms of the liturgical calendar. Sacramental rituals demarcated the milestones of his life. He received the Eucharist on Holy Days. He confessed his sins. He feasted on feast days and fasted on fast days. His cycle plays enacted the drama of creation and judgment. The Church was the source, the only source, of his education, and often his only connection to the world beyond his village. All music, all literature, all art, all philosophy-all emanated from the Church. His understanding of his place in the universe came from the stories and examples of the lives of the saints, from devotional treatises, from religious and mystical lyrics, from religious allegories in poetry and prose.

Each man's life was infused with a sense of supernatural meaning. His monarch ruled by divine right. His place in a rigid, hierarchical structure of loyalty was divinely sanctioned. Human history unfolded according to an ineffable divine plan, represented in the paintings and stained gla.s.s on the walls of his church. G.o.d was directly involved in human affairs: He rewarded the just, and punished the wicked. Plagues and famine were the Devil's work. There was no other explanation for the mysteries of human existence on offer, and none conceivable.

The rise of modern science facilitated the death of Christianity, and thus the nullification of this entire social and political order, by replacing religion as a framework to interpret human experience. The origins of European atheism, however, were political as much as intellectual, rooted in protest against the power and corruption of Europe's Church inst.i.tutions. (It is not an accident that atheism, like Marxism, captured the imaginations of Europeans, but not Americans.) Nothing about the Scientific Revolution inherently entailed the demise of religious belief. Atheism gained strength through its loose a.s.sociation with the triumphs of science, not through its logical emergence from any particular scientific discovery: The existence of G.o.d, after all, was never specifically disproved. And no scientific discovery provided anything like a comprehensive and fully satisfying answer to the questions posed by religious inquiry. Nonetheless, medieval piety was extinguished, and with it every ordering principle of medieval life, leaving a vacuum in its wake. This made possible the rise of the nation-state- and made it necessary, as well.2 Since the death of Christian Europe, Europe's new social order has been rooted in the nation-state. Nationalism, propagated through the emerging secular channel of print media, restored meaning and ritual to European civic life. National ceremonies replaced those of the Church. The nation-state in Europe has always been more than an administrative structure; it has been a pseudo-spiritual ent.i.ty, imparting meaning to the lives of men.

The nation-state was predicated, precisely as the term suggests, on this idea: one nation, one state. The nation includes all and only those who share a particular historical, linguistic, and cultural heritage. By definition, it excludes those who do not. Unsurprisingly, nation-states are confounded when they meet large-scale immigration. If Europe is unable to integrate its minorities as the United States does, it is because the United States is, in effect, an empire, and empires successfully integrate minorities. Indeed, the empires of European history-the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the French Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire-successfully encompa.s.sed a mult.i.tude of racial and ethnic groups. But the First World War delivered the death blow to the great multinational empires. The Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were destroyed. National self-determination emerged as the official doctrine of Europe, enshrined in the Versailles Treaty: From then on, Europe was to be a continent of small nation-states, not empires.46 The European nation-state was predicated as well on the idea of national sovereignty. Following the war, Roosevelt and Stalin were determined to extirpate nationalism forever from Europe, and indeed succeeded in repressing nationalism, in favor of ideological empires, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Western Europe was rebuilt as a symbol of liberalism, capitalism, and free trade, while Eastern Europe was forced to adopt Soviet Communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union has ended this epoch. No longer under the control of the superpowers, Europe has in many ways reverted by default to the era of Versailles. The treaties that established the European Union work at cross purposes with the essential character of the nation-state. The persistence of the nation-state as the source of social order in Europe, despite the stubborn efforts of the superpowers to eradicate it, is key to understanding modern Europe.

A BLIND BALANCE OF POWER.

Directly following the terrorist attack on Madrid, one of al Qaeda's key ideologists, the pseudonymous Lewis Atiyyatullah, published an article in the Global Islamic Media Internet forum. "The international system built-up by the West since the Treaty of Westphalia," he prophesied, "will collapse; and a new international system will rise under the leadership of a mighty Islamic state." Again, al Qaeda's keen sense of history is in evidence: Who in the West is apt to give a moment's thought to the Treaty of Westphalia?

But he is right to think that treaty significant. Modern Europe's political order can be traced directly to the conclusion of the Thirty Years War and the signing of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the terms of which afforded the various German princ.i.p.alities both religious autonomy and a measure of political independence. The secular state system that emerged replaced the medieval system of feudal loyalties. Subsequent European wars were fought not for reasons of religion but for reasons of state.

The French Revolution ignited a blaze of nationalism throughout Europe, one that has not yet been extinguished. The French revolutionary armies, followed by Napoleon, his soldiers on fire with faith in France, provoked in their aggression an equal and opposite nationalist vitalization throughout Europe. The 1815 Congress of Vienna represented a compromise with this new nationalism, tempering-but not halting-its advancement.

Europe is still organized along the lines of the Congress of Vienna: It remains a collection of independent nation-states governed by ever-shifting coalitions designed to prevent any one state from repeating the dominance achieved by Napoleonic France. This model has governed Europe for almost two hundred years, with two notable failures-the First and Second World Wars. The idea of the balance of power has never disappeared. (Indeed, the internal organizations of France and Germany are both governed by balance-of-power calculations. France is essentially a corporate state, with at least half a dozen powerful fiefdoms eternally trying to form coalitions and limit the power of other fiefdoms.) But a balance-of-power system is inherently blind when confronted with an ideologically driven, internationalist movement. Confronting Communism during the interwar years, Europe found itself in the same position it now finds itself with respect to radical Islam: under a.s.sault by an international movement that did not identify itself with a nation-state.47 Some-Britain's intellectual elites, for example- underestimated the threat, finding much to admire in the Bolshevik Revolution; elsewhere in Europe, fascist parties rose to power by grossly exaggerating the threat. Then as now, Europe was incapable of marshaling an appropriate, effective, unified response. It reacts to radical Islamism now by default, as a large bureaucracy. Its leaders lack the imaginative power truly to appreciate the nature of their adversary. Europeans expect Islamic radicals to be, at heart, like Europeans: open to negotiation, amenable to reason, susceptible to bribery. They do not appreciate that their posture engenders not reciprocal conciliation but contempt.

This tendency is reinforced by the nature of Europe's governing cla.s.s. Every modern European country is the legatee of feudalism's system of social stratification. Based originally on birth, it is now based on compet.i.tive examinations. The EU countries now const.i.tute a Mandarin system as complete as the Mandarin system of Imperial China. Historically, little has changed but the rules by which the aristocracy is defined. This idea is best traced in France: In large measure, the Revolution destroyed the old hereditary cla.s.s; Napoleon created a new aristocratic cla.s.s, however, through the system of the grandes ecoles, schools designed to produce another kind of self-perpetuating cla.s.s. The French system has now been adopted in all but name by the EU itself, since entry into EU employment is based on an endless series of compet.i.tive examinations. As a consequence, Europe's leaders are bred of young Europeans who want nothing more than to pa.s.s those examinations. The kind of mind produced by elite schools and compet.i.tive examinations: bureaucratic, anti-entrepreneurial, and risk-averse.

Of course, the conflict with the Islamic world is nothing new for Europe. Europe's conflict with the Islamic world dates from the era of the first caliphs. Clearly it remains unresolved-at least, much of the Islamic world thinks so. But with the collapse of faith in Europe, the nature of this conflict has changed. In the era of the Crusades, Islam and the Christian West were equals in piety and pa.s.sion. The eschatology of the Crusaders was uncannily similar, in tone and vocabulary, to that voiced in the ancient and contemporary mosques of the Middle East and broadcast daily now, via satellite dish, into the homes of Muslims in Europe. European eschatology has since changed completely. Islamic eschatology has not.

The Crusaders had two chief goals: to rescue their coreligionists and to liberate Jerusalem. So do the jihadis who murdered 200 Spaniards in Madrid. But the fervor now runs only one way. No European is now prepared to die for Jerusalem or his fellow Christians. Few Europeans are even prepared to admit that there is, indeed, an unresolved conflict. But there is, and most Europeans cannot, or will not, confront it.

THE LONG WITHDRAWING WHIMPER.

All these ancient conflicts and patterns are now shambling out of the mists of European history. This is why Europe has lately appeared so bewildering-and often so thoroughly obnoxious-to Americans. At the beginning of this book, I proposed that we must understand this to understand Europe, and must understand Europe to construct an intelligible relationship to it. Upon what principles, then, should this relationship be based?

The first principle must be this: European anti-Americanism is a cultist system of faith, rather than a set of rational beliefs, and as such is impervious to revision upon confrontation with facts, logic, evidence, gestures of good will, public relations campaigns, or attempts on the part of the American secretary of state to be a better, more sensitive listener. I do not believe the United States to be beyond reproach. Like all societies, America has defects, often grave, and in some instances Europeans are correct to note them. But the vast bulk of this criticism is exuberantly irrational. Americans need not attempt to correct Europe's antipathy toward the United States by means of pained introspection and efforts to improve themselves: it will not work. Nothing Americans might do, short of dying politely en ma.s.se, will change this. The American Left's contention that it is the current administration's foreign policy that has made the United States an object of hatred is a naive delusion.

Americans need not be much impressed by, or attempt to emulate, Europe's controlled economies and social welfare policies. French newspapers chortled gleefully during the 2001 economic slowdown, when unemployment in the United States reached 5.5 percent. This occurred precisely as the French government was admiring itself for reducing levels of unemployment to 8.7 percent. Americans who are tempted to consider high levels of structural unemployment a reasonable price to pay for cradle-to-grave social welfare should consider more closely the social costs of that unemployment, particularly the barrier it const.i.tutes to the economic integration and advancement of immigrants, and thus to the entire polity's harmony and welfare.

Precisely as the United States has succeeded dramatically in slashing its rates of violent crime over the past decade, European crime rates have soared. If former French minister of justice Marylise Lebranchu was quick to rea.s.sure her countrymen that in matters of police technique, "The government has no desire to copy the American model," this is not because the French model has proved superior, as any quick trip to the suburbs of Paris will prove, if you survive it. Where police tactics have worked in Europe-as in Ma.r.s.eille-they have worked by emulating Americans ones. Where they have not emulated the Americans, they have failed.

There is a popular myth, accepted by most Europeans and a surprising number of Americans, that Europeans enjoy a superior quality of life, that their societies are less plagued by inequality, that European societies are less violent, more civilized, more rational, even that Europe's popular culture is more tasteful. This simply is not so. When films by Michael Moore receive rapturous ovations at Cannes, the audience stopping just short of ululating and firing AK-47s into the air, it is not because Michael Moore makes a great many excellent points. It is because Michael Moore, like Europe, is lost in what is evidently a pleasurable miasma of perverse fantasy, internal contradiction, and hysteria.

Our policy and posture toward Europe must be informed by the belief that this popular myth is just that, a myth, and by a deeper appreciation of European history. Politicians with no appreciation of that history should not determine our policies toward Europe. Ted Kennedy, lamenting the failures of the Bush administration, proposed that "we should have strengthened, not scorned, the alliances that won two World Wars and the Cold War." But it is logically impossible to strengthen the alliances that won the two World Wars and the Cold War. The two World Wars were fought against Germany, but the Cold War was fought in alliance with West Germany; Russia was our ally in the First World War and the Soviet Union was our ally in the Second World War, but the Soviet Union was our enemy in the Cold War; j.a.pan was our ally in the First World War and our enemy in the Second World War and our ally again in the Cold War, as was Italy; Turkey was our enemy in the First World War, neutral in the second, and our ally in the Cold War; Vichy France was our enemy for a time, too. So really, Britain is the only major power to which this statement might logically apply, and no one could fairly argue that this is an alliance we scorned. Am I quibbling here? No, not really. Anyone who has spent time thinking about Europe and its history would be incapable of making such a comment in a well-rehea.r.s.ed and widely broadcast speech. And no one so unfamiliar with the history of our European alliances should be giving us advice about those alliances now.

As someone who has spent time thinking about Europe and its history, I do not prophesy the imminent demise of European democratic inst.i.tutions, nor do I predict imminent catastrophe on European soil. But I don't rule out these possibilities either. Europe's ent.i.tlement economy will collapse. Its demography will change. The European Union may unravel. Islamic terrorists may succeed in taking out a European city. We have no idea what these events would herald, but it is possible and reasonable to imagine a very ugly outcome.

And once again, the only people to whom this will come as a surprise are those who have not been paying attention.

AFTERWORD FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION.

I TOLD YOU SO.

THIS BOOK BEGAN with a prediction that the next major terrorist attack on America would come from Europe. So when recently it emerged that British counterterrorism officials had foiled a plot to blow up as many as a dozen transatlantic airliners with liquid explosives, the news did not come as a surprise to me. In fact, shortly after September 11, 2001, I spoke to American counterterror officials who told me they were concerned about precisely this scenario. Nor was I surprised to learn that the arrested men and women were British citizens, some of a "wholly ethnic British" background, as the newspapers delicately put it. (In plain speech: They were white).48 Authorities suspected that a British charity ostensibly dedicated to earthquake relief in Pakistan had helped to fund the plot. Again, no surprise there.

From the moment the word terrorist pa.s.sed over the news feed, it was a.s.sumed by the public that the suspects were Islamic radicals, as indeed they were. But no mention of this was made for an entire news cycle-as if quite possibly they were extremist members of the Order of the Elks or radical Rotarians, and only time would tell. b.l.o.o.d.y Elks, it's always them, innit, mate? The media's delicacy was also unsurpising, for mentioning Islam in the same breath as terrorism is now considered in Europe to be a breech not only of good manners but the law. According to European Union guidelines drafted in April 2006, officials are to avoid the phrase "Islamic terrorism" to avoid causing "frustration among Muslims."1 The words fundamentalist and jihad are also to be eschewed. Quite right, too; we wouldn't want some frustrated Islamic fundamentalist going on a jihad now, would we?

The suspects were who I said they would be in this book's introduction: deranged homegrown ideologues who sought to take advantage of the freedom of movement afforded them by their European pa.s.sports to attack the United States. It was this prediction, among others, that caused certain critics to argue that my view of Europe was unduly pessimistic. In light of the events of the past six months, I would suggest that the views offered in this book were, on the contrary, unduly bright.

I wrote in this book, for example, that the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali represented an important light of moral courage in the Netherlands. That light has now been extinguished. In April, Hirsi Ali was evicted from her apartment in The Hague. Her neighbors had filed a lawsuit charging that Hirsi Ali was likely to be murdered by terrorists; her neighbors could be caught in the cross fire, and therefore Hirsi Ali's very presence violated their right, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, to feel safe in their homes. The court, agreeing-and inadvertently ill.u.s.trating the consequences of relinquishing sovereignty to the Council of Europe-effectively ruled that Hirsi Ali had no right to live near anyone. No Hirsi Ali, no problem. Perhaps Hirsi Ali's neighbors' right to security had been infringed, but the court's decision to penalize Hirsi Ali for this, rather than those who wished to kill Hirsi Ali, reflects a species of moral reasoning so dismal that one might think it parody.

As if this were not sufficiently craven, in May 2006 Dutch immigration minister Rita Verdonk revoked Hirsi Ali's citizenship outright on the grounds that she had lied on her citizenship application, in 1992. This had been public knowledge for years, and the lies were trivial. She had used her grandfather's last name on her application rather than her father's, and she had neglected to mention that she had arrived after transiting through Kenya and Germany. According to Hirsi Ali, she lied to avoid retribution from her family. If that is the case, she in no way violated the spirit of the asylum laws, if indeed those laws had anything to do with providing real asylum. She admitted the falsehoods in 2002; her party at the time accepted her explanation, and, until recently, so did Dutch immigration authorities. Yet suddenly-at precisely the moment the courts were concluding that Hirsi Ali's very existence was a violation of her neighbors' human rights-Verdonk decided that Hirsi Ali must lose her citizenship. It is impossible to imagine that this was a coincidence or that the reasoning behind the decision was not the same: No Hirsi Ali, no problem.

In response to widespread criticism, the Dutch government reinstated Hirsi Ali's citizenship in June 2006, but she had by then resigned from parliament. She plans to leave the Netherlands and come to the United States to work with the American Enterprise Inst.i.tute. Who can blame her?

One year after the London Tube bombings, and one month before the exposure of the plot to blow up U.S.-bound aircraft, the Times of London conducted a poll among British Muslims. It found that 13 percent of them considered the Tube bombers "martyrs." That is, slightly more than 200,000 British Muslims thought the murderers not only admirable, but sanctified. This const.i.tutes a minority of Muslims, true, but obviously not a trivial minority. In the same month, a previously unknown group of Islamic terrorists narrowly failed to blow up German pa.s.senger trains in Dortmund and Koblenz. Only a design flaw prevented the bombs, concealed in suitcases, from exploding and killing civilians in numbers similar to those in the attacks in Madrid and London. "But why is Germany in the crosshairs of international jihadism?" asked a bewildered columnist in Germany's Spiegel. "After all, al Qaeda's two major attacks in Europe to date were attributed to the fact that the governments of Spain and Britain were involved in the Iraq war, which Germany is not. And Germany itself was not the direct target of the previously thwarted attacks. In one case it was an Iraqi politician and in the second it was German Jews, whom Islamists planned to attack because of their religious affiliation, not their citizenship." 2 Imagine that! Despite all that earnest German pacifism and all that stern denunciation of Israel, the terrorists are refusing to confine their attacks to Jews. How inexplicable and unsporting! (Note the columnist's a.s.sumption that an attack on German Jews is not an attack on Germany.) But no matter how often the bombs go off or narrowly fail to go off, it seems impossible to persuade a large segment of the European public-and the American one-that the threat is real. Within minutes of the announcement that a plot to blow up aircraft had been foiled, rumors began circulating on the Internet suggesting that there had been no plot, only a hoax perpetrated by the Bush and Blair administrations to sh.o.r.e up support for their foreign policy and strip their subjects of their remaining civil liberties. "More propaganda than plot," sneered British broadcaster and former amba.s.sador Craig Murray. "Be skeptical. Be very, very skeptical."

I'm all for skepticism, as a rule. But it would take the very opposite quality-extraordinary credulity-to endorse Murray's view. You would have to believe that an enormous number of people with no obvious interest in perpetrating such a hoax had been convinced to go along with it-including hundreds of members of MI5, Scotland Yard, and the SAS; local British and American law enforcement authorities of mixed party affiliation; the government of Pakistan; and significant numbers of the Pakistani intelligence service (which is said to have provided key information leading to the arrests). You would have to imagine that Bush and Blair seriously expected everyone in the loop to keep their mouths shut about the hoax forever. All the evidence to be presented at the trial would have to be manufactured-the detonators and the bombmaking chemicals and the thousands of hours of surveillance tapes, photographs, and videos-and the silence of the technicians who manufactured the evidence would have to be guaranteed forever. (I can think of only one way of ensuring that.) British authorities claim to have several of the suicide bombers' farewell videos in their possession. Did they convince actors to play the terrorists? What actor would play that role, knowing it would be used as evidence to send him to prison? It could all theoretically be done, I suppose- though, for my money, I'd hazard that if our leaders had the organizational talent, cunning, discipline, and diplomatic skill to pull the whole scam off without a hitch, we wouldn't be losing in Iraq.

Some of the skeptics speculated that this Potemkin plot was concocted by the Bush administration as a panicked response to Joe Lieberman's Senate primary defeat by Ned Lamont. This requires imagining that foreign conspirators in the hoax knew who Joe Lieberman was, first, and gave a rat's patoot about his political fortunes, second. And it requires believing that at some point, George Bush placed a phone call to Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf and asked him to arrest a few dozen innocent citizens, torture them for verisimilitude, and then subject them to a show trial-just to distract Americans from the fortunes of the Democratic Party's Lieberman wing. How can anyone in full possession of his faculties seriously entertain this idea? What's that, Pervez? You say you don't have the first clue who this Lieberman guy is and he's sure as h.e.l.l not your problem? . . . Oh, no, you've got it all wrong; Lieberman's not a Jewish name, Pervie, we wouldn't ask you to do that for a . . . Perve? You still there, Perve?"

It is psychologically fascinating to recognize that so many people are willing to dream up these extraordinarily unlikely scenario, and blindly put their confidence in them, in preference to confronting an unpleasant but perfectly obvious truth: Europe is home to a significant number of homicidal maniacs who want to kill as many of their countrymen, and as many Americans, as they possibly can. In Freudian a.n.a.lysis, the term "displacement" refers to an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind redirects emotion from a dangerous object to a safe one. This concept, in conjunction with the equally useful Freudian concept of denial, goes quite some ways toward explaining what we are now seeing in Europe.

Two days after the plot was revealed, an unknown number of suspects remained at large. I was in Paris and scheduled to fly out of Orly Airport. I personally had no doubt that the plot was real. Trying to convince myself that this must, in fact, be the best time to fly, since security would now be so rigorous, I looked on Google to see what new, rea.s.suringly tough screening measures the French airports had put in place. To my astonishment, I discovered that Orly's security screeners had gone on strike. France-2 television showed them marching gaily through the terminal at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, carrying huge banners demanding more job security.

Now, no one, no one on this planet, has more job security than a French government employee. Short of having the next hundred years' worth of paychecks stapled directly to their pampered posteriors in dollar-denominated T-bills, there is no way French government employees could be more secure in their financial futures than they already are. Yet the strike couldn't be postponed by even a day-even if it put at risk the lives of every man, woman, and child traveling through French airports.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, having convened an emergency meeting in Paris to discuss the terrorist threat, called for 100 percent searches of all hand luggage on flights heading for the United States. Not possible, responded the head of the security screeners' union. You see, he said, we need higher wages and better working conditions .

I, for one, thought what they really needed was to be taken out and shot.

I stressed in this book that Europeans have taken the idea of a right to job security to its pathological outer limits, and this point was beautifully demonstrated not only by the security screeners' strike, but also by the recent protests in France against the contrat premiere embauche. Last March, French students took to the streets to protest the new law, which was proposed to combat unemployment by giving employers more flexibility to fire-and thus hire-young employees. This was the second time in four months that France had been seized with violent protests. But the goals of the golden flock of imbeciles on the streets in March were in fact in perfect conflict with those of unemployed immigrants who took to the street in the previous round of protests. If the suburban rioters wanted a change in their circ.u.mstances, the students wanted things to stay exactly the same. And because the students' anxieties closely mirrored the concerns of the majority of the French public, the CPE was swiftly defeated. No surprise-in France, job security will win every time.

No one in France is willing to admit that French labor laws are absurd; no one will say that barring their reform, France faces economic eclipse, if not collapse. So powerful is the sense of ent.i.tlement in France that even during a crisis involving a genuine threat to bodily security, French luggage screeners felt confident that they could blackmail the government in the name of job security and get away with it. I very much doubt that the economic and social reforms needed to ameliorate the desperate conditions in French slums will ever be put in place. Thus, for those at the bottom of the French socioeconomic heap, all that stretches out before them is hopelessness, indolence, and the dole.

I'm under no illusion that reforming Europe's labor laws and welfare economies would be the miracle cure for Islamic radicalism. If that were the case, Britain, with one of the most liberalized economies in Europe, would be the European country with the least significant problem on its hands, whereas the reality is just the opposite. The men and women, including one pregnant woman, who planned to detonate themselves over the Atlantic in August appeared to be, like the London Tube bombers before them, comfortably middle cla.s.s. They were full beneficiaries of Britain's liberalized economy. Some were university educated. They were not planning to commit murder because they were poor and oppressed, no more than Theo van Gogh's murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, acted from desperate poverty. They were acting, as Bouyeri said at his trial-and as these miserable wretches surely will at theirs-out of conviction. An ideology is again the source of the violent impulse spreading across Europe. This seems a particularly difficult point for many to grasp. Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Marxist a.s.sumption that ideology must be the consequence, not the cause, of economic circ.u.mstance remains almost impossible for many Europeans to shake.

After this book was published, some suggested that I believed the solution lay in a Christian revival throughout Europe. Let me make myself even clearer: I don't, and I have called for no such thing. My observations about the sociological consequences of the decline of religious faith in Europe are descriptive, not prescriptive; I doubt that it would even be possible for the forms of Christianity that once prevailed on the Continent to return, not least because the political structures to which they were attached have been erased. The key point of my book is to recognize that certain forms of essential human longing remain, and equally to recognize that they are now being expressed in other forms. Once this is acknowledged consciously-as in psychoa.n.a.lysis-there is a freedom to choose more appropriate behavior, whether religious or secular.

I am, however, an advocate of Enlightenment values, including the strict separation of church and state. Europe is certainly far from those values now, as the cartoon riots, which erupted shortly after this book's publication, made it all too clear. On September 30, 2005, Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper published an article ent.i.tled "The Face of Muhammad," consisting of twelve cartoons-only some of which depicted Muhammad-and a text by Flemming Rose, the newspaper's culture editor, explaining that the cartoons had been commissioned to test the new boundaries of freedom of speech in Europe. The ensuing protests and violence were fomented by opportunistic Danish imams who made political capital of the cartoons by touring the Middle East and pointing out to certain fascinated heads of state the intriguing opportunities for mischief-making inherent in the situation. Expressing infinite contempt for every value of the Enlightenment, protesters outside Danish emba.s.sies in Europe loudly cried for Osama bin Laden to "bomb Denmark," to "nuke Germany, nuke France, nuke the USA," to "behead those who insult Islam" and "spread blood in the streets of England." Interestingly, some protesters were seen burning the flag of the European Union. One must be grateful for the EU's decision to ban such terms as "Islamic fascism," for surely it would be fearsome to see such men when they were really "frustrated."

I was initially heartened to see Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen setting a fine example of defiance in the face of intimidation, refusing even to discuss the idea that the Danish government should be in the business of censoring political speech. "This is a matter of principle," he said. "I won't meet with [Muslim amba.s.sadors] because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so . . . I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humor, and satire in the press." His splendid words inspired in me a shy flicker of hope until, soon afterward, I received an utterly dispiriting e-mail from Denmark. Several months prior, I had posted an ad on craigslist seeking someone to care for my pets in Istanbul while I went to the United States on my book tour. Two elderly Danish women had replied, and recently I had written back, asking if they were still free to come. Their message offered their regrets. It seemed, they wrote, that it was unsafe and inadvisable for Danes to visit any Muslim country. There had been demonstrations against their emba.s.sy in Istanbul, they noted, and all travel from Denmark to Egypt had been halted. The violence was spreading quickly. Then the punch line: They apologized for the situation. They understood full well, they wrote, why Muslims were offended by their newspaper's treatment of the Prophet. Would I please extend their apologies to all of my Turkish friends?

Could anything more poignantly sum up the thesis of this book? By all accounts, the att.i.tude evidenced by these two bewildered and kindhearted old ladies was widespread among the Danish public. Indeed, throughout Europe, tentative displays of backbone were followed immediately by whimpering, tail-wagging supplication, as if the muscles supporting the European spine had atrophied through disuse.

Some in the press did make an attempt to stand up for the principle of freedom of speech. Directly after the riots began, France Soir carried a fine editorial stating that the cartoons were indeed blasphemous, and if Muslims didn't like it, tough. The Catholic Church, noted the editorialists, had once claimed the right that Muslims were now demanding. France had taken care of that problem with the Revolution. Good stuff, that editorial, and long overdue. One day later, the editor was sacked.

The Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers condemned the Danish media's "intolerance." The Swedish government closed down a political party's website for displaying the cartoons. A Norwegian editor who ran the cartoons apologized abjectly. European companies with interests in the Muslim world competed to see who could distance themselves fastest from the cartoons and from their own principles.

Shortly after the controversy arose, Norwegian political cartoonist Finn Graff explained in an interview that he wouldn't dream of drawing cartoons that offend Muslims-"out of respect." This is the same man who recently depicted the prime minister of Israel dressed in the regalia of a concentration camp commander at Auschwitz.

European enthusiasm for cartoons that depict Jews dressed as n.a.z.is has been much in evidence during the recent Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. For the sake of argument, let's a.s.sume that Israel's actions in Lebanon were unjustified, stupid, cruel, disproportionate, outrageous, and a violation of international law. This is the view held by a majority of European statesmen and is the official editorial stance of a vast majority of European news outlets. Even a.s.suming that this is so, why are Europeans so exercised about it?

This is a serious question. The reader might think, given our a.s.sumptions, that the answer is self-evident: Israeli actions were unjustified, stupid, cruel, disproportionate, outrageous, and a violation of international law. And this, of course, is why we have also seen an out-pouring of rage throughout Europe toward Pakistan-Pakistani mosques daubed with loathsome and hateful graffiti, politicians denouncing Pakistani brutality, anguished editorials in every major European press organ about the civilian deaths for which Pakistan is responsible. It is only natural, since Pakistani nationalists appear to have been behind the July 11, 2006, bombing of Bombay commuter trains and stations that deliberately killed more than 200 civilians. Any thinking person would be outraged by such as atrocity, would he not?

Apparently not. The event made headlines in Europe for all of about six hours, then disappeared completely from public consciousness. Of course, there was a particularly embarra.s.sing aspect to that crime-the bombers seem to have been funded by British businessmen.3 Even so, civilians were killed deliberately, and one might expect Europeans, with their exquisite sensitivity to civilian deaths, to take notice.

But they didn't. One might wonder if the difference is that Israel is a recipient of American military aid. That, perhaps, is why Europeans find Israeli human rights abuses so much more difficult to stomach-because America could stop them if it so chose. That is what I am often told when I press critics to explain what's so different about Israel. But Pakistan, too, receives ma.s.sive military a.s.sistance from the United States. As does Turkey, for that matter, and Turkey has had more than a few mishaps involving civilians in its war with Kurdish separatists-so many, in fact, that one begins uncharitably to suspect a pattern. This is why we have seen so many anti-Turkish demonstrations on the streets of London and calls to send the Turks to the gas chambers; it's why we've seen the Spanish prime minister dressed in colorful Kurdish pantaloons as a mark of solidarity, why European jounalists are streaming into razed Kurdish villages to snap photos of dead children and wailing families. Except that none of this has taken place, not least because the Turkish government won't let journalists anywhere near those villages. I live in Istanbul and have heard quite a few firsthand stories about what happens to journalists who ask what happened to those civilians. Let's just say, since I cherish my life here, that enchanting Turkey has everything to offer the discerning tourist.

The truth is that it takes a special hatred of Jews to prioritize Israeli atrocities so far above others in a world awash with cruelty, violence, and violations of international law. Shiites killing Sunnis? Eyes go gla.s.sy with boredom. Muslims killing Hindus? Footnote! Africans killing other Africans? h.e.l.l, it would be news if they weren't. No one in Europe notices, protests, cares, or bestirs himself. As I wrote earlier in this book: Yes, you can criticize Israel without being an anti-Semite-in fact, I am about to. But generally, you won't bother.

Now look at the a.s.sumptions we have adopted-have Israeli military actions in Lebanon been unjustified, stupid, cruel, disproportionate, outrageous, and a violation of international law? Cruel, certainly. Stupid? Given that Israel seems to have lost the war, yes, by definition their actions were stupid. Unjustified? Only in some pacifist universe where nations are expected to allow their neighbors to lob missiles over their borders without doing a thing about it. A violation of international law? Well, for all the talk of about Israel's "disproportionate" use of force, I have seen no European politician or newspaper editorial attempting to explain what a "proportionate" level of force might look like-should Israel respond by lobbing an equal number of Katyushas back over the border, at Lebanese civilians, perhaps?-and these howls of outrage are almost always issued with no acknowledgment of the context: Hezbollah's expressed profession of its intention to eradicate a United Nations member state.

France took a particularly vocal lead in criticizing Israeli actions, pushing aggressively for an immediate cease-fire-one that would be monitored by a United Nations peacekeeping force. The French volunteered splendidly to lead it. As soon as Israel accepted the cease-fire, however, Le Monde reported that the French contribution to this peacekeeping force would, in fact, be "small and symbolic." Perhaps ten officers. French defense minister Michele Alliot-Marie defended this decision by saying, "You can't send in men telling them, 'Look what's going on but you don't have the right to defend yourself or to shoot.'" Quite. But that, of course, is exactly the posture they are insisting the Israelis must adopt. Shortly after this, the Italians announced that they would put up 3,000 troops and take command of the force in France's place. French president Jacques Chirac, presumably itching to head-b.u.t.t his Italian counterpart, replied by grudgingly offering to send 2,000 troops. Better late than never, I suppose.

Since the war in Lebanon began, the criticism of Israel in Europe has been obsessive, incessant, unrelenting. Anti-Semitic crime has surged again. Jews in Norway, following an a.s.sault on a man wearing a yarmulke on the street in Oslo, have been advised not to speak Hebrew in public or wear clothing that might identify them as Jews. In Rome, some twenty shops owned by Jews were vandalized with swastikas. Flyers with Hezbollah slogans were left at the shops and signed by group calling itself Armed Revolutionary Fascists. In Belgium, an urn that contained ashes from Auschwitz was smashed and the shards smeared in excrement. Rallies were held on the streets of Berlin, not far from the Brandenburg Gate, where protesters chanted, "Death to the Jews." In Madrid, protesters took to the streets chanting, "n.a.z.is, Yankees, Jews: No more chosen people!" A ma.s.s rally in solidarity with Hezbollah took place in London in July. Note: not a protest, per se, against Israeli military tactics, but a rally in solidarity with Hezbollah-the group that killed 241 U.S. Marines, sailors, and soldiers in Lebanon, in 1983, and is basically a Special Forces brigade of the Iranian army. Any place where they are victorious would look just like Iran.

Dutch Socialist Party leader Jan Marijnissen gave that idea some deep thought and concluded that Hezbollah's genocidal campaign against the Jews reminded him of the n.a.z.i epoch, although not quite in the way one might imagine. He proposed that Hezbollah might reasonably be equated with the Resistance. "During World War II, Dutch people thwarted n.a.z.i Germany's destruction machine by blowing up town halls, because this was where the Jews were registered. Things are not all that different in the Middle East. Islamic fundamentalism, including the terrorist wing, is a reaction to Israel's occupation of Palestine, to America's presence in the Middle East and to the West's support of undemocratic regimes in the Middle East," he said. Let's leave aside his fantasies about the record of the Dutch Resistance. The key points are these: Lebanon, first of all, is not in Palestine. Israel does not occupy Lebanon and hasn't for years. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, and more than 2,000 U.S. troops have died in Iraq because American policy in the Middle East, for the past five years, has been to replace undemocratic regimes with democratic ones. He must have missed those items in the newspaper, but that's understandable, since they were probably buried on page 32, after thirty-one pages of cartoons equating Jews and n.a.z.is.

In Norway, the well-known writer Jostein Gaarder published a gorgeously histrionic editorial, to much general applause, announcing that "Israel is history. We no longer recognize the State of Israel. There is no way back. The State of Israel has raped the world's recognition and will not receive peace before it lays down its weapons. . . . We laugh at this people's fancies and weep over their misdeeds. To present themselves as G.o.d's chosen people is not just stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. . . . There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance...."4 Echoing this sentiment, Spanish newspapers were suddenly awash with those original, hilarious Jews-dressed-like-n.a.z.is cartoons. Prime Minister "White Flag" Zapatero, who blazed the trail in condemning the publication of the Muhammad cartoons-he wrote in the International Herald Tribune that "the publication of these caricatures may be perfectly legal, but it is not indifferent and thus ought to be rejected from a moral and political standpoint"-had not a word to say about cartoons equating Jews and n.a.z.is, which, I suppose, suggests that he thought they ought not to be rejected from a moral and political standpoint. Zapatero then pitched up in public wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh. No significance to that, he a.s.sured worried Spanish Jews: someone just handed it to him at a public appearance and he put it on to be polite. Forgive me the cynicism of suspecting that had he been handed a T-shirt embossed with a Star of David, he might not have slung it on with such mannerly alacrity.

But Israeli air strikes in Lebanon killed children. Indeed they did, and let me be the first, or rather the millionth, to say that those deaths were a disaster, monstrous, all the more so since the children seem to have died for nothing-and certainly not for Israel's greater security or Lebanon's. But I note that at roughly the same time, the government of Sri Lanka bombed an encampment filled with what they claimed were terrorists, but what UNICEF claimed were orphans. Reportedly, fifty-one schoolchildren were killed on the spot. The Sri Lankan military swiftly agreed that yes, the intended targets were children. "If the children are terrorists, what can we do?" shrugged a Sri Lankan military spokesman.

Do the experiment yourself: go to Google and see what the European press had to say about this on the day following this gory slaughter in Sri Lanka. Try entering the search term Sri Lanka. You will not, I a.s.sure you, find a single editorial declaring that "Sri Lanka is history." The story of the ma.s.sacre is not even the highest-ranked news item. That honor belongs to the revelation that the opening match of the Unitech Cup triangular cricket tournament had been called off due to soggy ground conditions.

While singularly preoccupied with Israeli excesses, Europeans have been oddly quiescent about Iranian ones. The French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, at the height of the Lebanon crisis-which was, of course, started by Iran-remarked with a straight face that Iran was "a great country, a great people, and a great civilization which is respected and which plays a stabilizing force in the region." Beg pardon? Iran's merry nutball of a leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, breathlessly antic.i.p.ates the return of the Twelfth Imam, who will be coaxed from his Occultation, the president has hinted, by means of a regional nuclear exchange. His nation is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. He has repeatedly threatened his neighbor with annihilation. Iran is the world's chief sponsor of Islamic terrorism. It harbors al Qaeda terrorists, causes havoc in Iraq, controls Hezbollah in Lebanon, has turned Syria into a client state, pulls Hamas's puppet strings in the Palestinian Authority, meddles to profoundly evil effect in Afghanistan and Pakistan, denies the Holocaust, and would see the world's women reduced to the status of cattle. Ahmadinejad contemplates with a visible sensual excitement the prospect of annihilating every last Jew on the planet. Yet Iran, according to official France, is a great stabilizing force in the Middle East. I invite the critics who have called me an alarmist about Europe to consider Douste-Blazy's comments and their implications and then share with me the secrets of their enviable composure.

The foreign minister's remarks, and the mentality they reflect, indicate that there is no political will in Europe to take effective action in the face of the Iranian threat. I don't expect that the prospect of being hauled before the Security Council much disturbs Ahmadinejad's rest; after all, Britain, France, and Germany have been threatening Iran with the Security Council since 2003, and what of it? I can't say I know what to do about Iran any more than anyone else does. But at least I can see that whatever that country is, it is not a stabilizing force in the region. I reckon that puts me well ahead of the game.

Since the publication of this book, many readers have written to ask me where the solution to Europe's problem lies. I propose the following. As matters of policy, radical clerics funded by Wahhabi Saudi or subcontinental Deobandi money-any cleric in Europe who incites violence and lawbreaking and who advocates the destruction of Western civilization-must be deported or imprisoned. Start with the Danish imams who began the cartoon wars. Cut off their funding; arrest them. Enforce all European laws pertaining to domestic abuse and violence against women with especial vigor. End all state support for extremist Islamic clubs-or any Islamic club where men and women do anything but pray for peace or play backgammon. At the same time, reward moderate Muslims by respecting and encouraging legitimate religious aspirations and practices. Provide funding and support for groups that promote the reform and liberalization of Islam, and welcome law-abiding, Westernized Muslims with open arms and real economic opportunities.

Demand that all immigrants learn the language and history of their adoptive countries. Do not cower or capitulate to the threat of violence. Make it perfectly clear that the price of admission to European society is accepting such European practices as the lampooning of religious figures. End the practice of firehosing cash into hermetic immigrant ghettos. Finally, bring back some form of military conscription: A structured military organization is an excellent place for unemployed young men who are p.r.o.ne to radicalism and violence. If the state does not impose this structure on them, they tend to form their own kind of military organization. The Dutch abolished compulsory military service in 1996, shortly before violent extremism in the Netherlands began making headlines. That was obviously a mistake.

The point of this book, however, is not to propose solutions-all of the measures I've stated here are obvious and have been proposed by many others. It is to explain why Europe is incapable of seeing and solving its own problems. The inability to recognize and confront growing Islamic radicalism is only one symptom of a deeper European crisis, and that crisis is the source of the phenomena I have described in this book. Some readers have asked why I devoted so much s.p.a.ce to figures such as Jose Bove and the members of Rammstein. I did so because they are windows through which we see a broader European mood-a widespread cultural and moral void, the existence of which encourages every species of historically dangerous European lunatic to rise from the dead. In all matters, not just ones pertaining to Islam, Europeans seem increasingly to be acting as slaves to historic forces they do not even recognize.

If it is pessimistic to observe this, then so be it.

Istanbul, August 23, 2006.

NOTES.

CHAPTER 1 : EUROPE ON FIVE DOLLARS A DAY AND A FLAMETHROWER.

1. Doug Saunders, "British Bombers Likely Recruited at Government-Funded Centre," Globe and Mail, July 14, 2005.

2. The complete poll data, including the methodology and precise wording of the questions, can be consulted at http://www.yougov.com/archives/pdf/TEL050101030_1.pdf 3. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/05/20/britain. protest/index.html 4. "London Bombers Have Ties to United States," ABC World News Tonight online, July 15, 2005.

5. Ipsos News Center Poll, Measuring Hope for the Future and Quality of Life: A 12-Country Survey, September 4, 2002.

6. Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters, updated edition (New York: St. Martin's, 2003), pp. 24244.

7. Michael Gonzales, "Vive le Checkbook: How France Bankrolls America's Enemies," Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2003.

8. Report on the Manipulation of the Oil-for-Food Programme, issued by the Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme, October 27, 2005.

9. Paul Krugman, "French Family Values," New York Times, July 29, 2005.

CHAPTER 2 : SELF-EXTINGUISHING TOLERANCE.