Mark Steyn On The Fall Of Europe

Mark Steyn is a regular guest on Hugh Hewitt's show, and the man is positively brilliant. In today's Sun Times, Mark shows the world exactly what is goin on over in Europe when it comes to the rise in Muslims "pilgrims" going to the old country.

In five years' time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven."

Is that an gripping story? You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.

Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.

Stop!. Does this surprise anyone at all. I mean, seriously. We were warned years ago by none other than John Bolton that anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe. This is why he worked closely with those in the UN to take notice of it. Of course, this lasted as long as the ink was wet on the agreements signed by signatories claiming that they would work to curb such actions. The UN, for the most part, is anti-Semitic in nature if not demeanor. How many times has Israel been condemned by the UN for it's retaliatory strikes against terrorists in Gaza? How many nations threw a hissy fit when Israel obtained nuclear weapons? I'm not surprised to find out that no one paid any heed to these stories, especially in snobbish, elitist France.

This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.

We can discuss moderate Muslims to our heart's content. However, they're not the problem in the world right now. It's the radicals that are, and those same radicals are not only driving the debate, but they're driving the press; that is, of course, when the press wipes that yellow streak down their backs away. Has anyone asked the serious question of why the MSM won't cover events such as this, or why they downplay the Cartoon War? They won't admit it in the open, but I'm sure it's got something to do with their cowardice in the face of an enemy that cares nothing for the vaunted ideals they supposedly uphold. They have an ideology that is bloodthirsty, and as unforgiving as an Arizona summer.

This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone. And, if the gang did seem inordinately fixated on, ah, Jews, it was just because, as one police detective put it, ''Jews equal money.'' In London, the Observer couldn't even bring itself to pursue that particular angle. Its report of the murder managed to avoid any mention of the unfortunate Halimi's, um, Jewishness. Another British paper, the Independent, did dwell on the particular, er, identity groups involved in the incident but only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by ''radical young Jewish men'' who'd attacked an ''Arab-run grocery.''

Notice how the papers seemed to dwell on the talking points of the anti-Semites? "Jews equal money." This is a constant swipe made by those that dislike Jews. Jews, according to anti-Semites, control everything from the media to the money. Funny that, as the papers pointed out by Mark refused to address both of those issues, and instead the Independent opted to go from reporting on one extreme crime to another, which was nothing compared to the original.

At one level, those spokesmonsieurs are right: It could happen to anyone. Even in the most civilized societies, there are depraved monsters who do terrible things. When they do, they rip apart entire families, like the Halimis and Selams. But what inflicts the real lasting damage on society as a whole is the silence and evasions of the state and the media and the broader culture.

BINGO! Give Mark the fuzzy bunny. The governments of Europe and it's willing press (state-run or controlled, most of them) love to turn a blind eye to the rampant radical Muslim population infiltrating Europe. I know it's been a couple months, but anyone remember the riots in France? All started over two Muslims youths running from the police that were killed, and the Muslim population took to the streets in weeks of rioting night after night. The European press, while it did cover it, refused to tie Muslims to the rioting. And it didn't just apply to the Euro-press. It was going on right here in America, too. As the Washington Times pointed out in an editorial dated 10 November 2005:

In a recent editorial, The Washington Post went so far as to deny any Islamist influence. "[The riots are] not the European version of an intifada: Islamic ideology and leaders play no role in the disturbances, and many of those participating are not Muslim," said the editorial. This is clearly wrong, especially since one week before the riots, The Post reported how Algerian terrorists were singling out younger French citizens for indoctrination.

Other newspapers have been careful to avoid labeling the rioters as anything other than "youths." An article in yesterday's New York Times about the riots never once mentioned the words "Muslim" or "Islam." In stark contrast, the Arab media is all over the story. The Middle East Media Research Institute translated one Saudi columnist who seems to have a better understanding of the conflagration than his Western counterparts. "The fires in Paris also set fire to all [the problems] that had accumulated with regard to Arab immigration... Whoever blames only the French government for the grave situation in these Parisian suburbs is mistaken," he wrote.

The point of this is simple. No one wants to call a spade a spade. And in the politically-correct world, the PC people are going to lose badly. They can't seem to see the forest through the trees when it comes to radical Islam. Treating these people with kid gloves is not the answer.

A lot of folks are, to put it at its mildest, indifferent to Jews. In 2003, a survey by the European Commission found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the "greatest menace to world peace." Only 59 percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of 'em? Well, don't worry: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. Since then, Iran has sportingly offered to solve the problem of the Israeli threat to world peace by wiping the Zionist Entity off the face of the map. But what a tragedy that those peace-loving Iranians have been provoked into launching nuclear armageddon by those pushy Jews. As Paul Oestreicher, Anglican chaplain of the University of Sussex, wrote in the Guardian the other day, "I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee."

If I may correct Mr. Oestriecher, Jews in Israel don't dislike or distrust all Palestinians. There are many Palestinians that have abided by the Israeli government's laws, and live peacefully there. They vote, they work, they participate in the political process. Again, the Jews dislike and distrust the radicals within the Palestinian Authority. Remember those radicals? The same ones who after getting their noses wacked with a Hellfire missile, they cry foul, demand a truce, only to retunr later renewed and reinvigorated, and start lobbing missiles and sending suicide bombers into Israel proper? Yeah, sorry, but the Anglican chaplain's way off base on his assessment. And why is it that in his statement he practically justifies the rhetoric emanating from Tehran. Ahmadinejad is a completely insane nut, and if he gets a nuke--just one--he's going to drop that rock on Jerusalem. Make no mistake, radical Islam has been waiting for the day to remove their enemies from the face of the planet. Israel is target number one, and the West is target number two. The West was put on notice last November with the riots that broke out in France. Of course, Europe was asleep at the wheel, and missed the memo.

It's not surprising when you're as heavily invested as the European establishment is in an absurd equivalence between a nuclear madman who thinks he's the warm-up act for the Twelfth Imam and the fellows building the Israeli security fence that you lose all sense of proportion when it comes to your own backyard, too. "Radical young Jewish men" are no threat to "Arab-run groceries." But radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond. If you don't care for the Yids, big deal; look out for yourself. The Jews are playing their traditional role of the canaries in history's coal mine.

Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well:

''We won't stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.''

HELLO! ANYONE LISTENING TO THIS? It can't be said any plainer that what is above. The radicals are our enemy. They have made this more than apparent. And if the appeasers, the kumbaya crowd, and the ostriches in the world want to ignore this. Fine. Stick your heads in the sand. Better yet, go back to the sandbox with the children. The adults will handle this. We'll deal with the radicals. All we ask is that you stay out of our way.

Stated that baldly it sounds ridiculous. But, simply as a matter of fact, every year more and more of the world lives under Islamic law: Pakistan adopted Islamic law in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. Four decades ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it's in the grip of sharia, and the other half's feeling the squeeze, as the death toll from the cartoon jihad indicates. But just as telling is how swiftly the developed world has internalized an essentially Islamic perspective. In their pitiful coverage of the low-level intifada that's been going on in France for five years, the European press has been barely any less loopy than the Middle Eastern media.

What, in the end, are all these supposedly unconnected matters from Danish cartoons to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker to gender-segregated swimming sessions in French municipal pools about? Answer: sovereignty. Islam claims universal jurisdiction and always has. The only difference is that they're now acting upon it. The signature act of the new age was the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran: Even hostile states generally respect the convention that diplomatic missions are the sovereign territory of their respective countries. Tehran then advanced to claiming jurisdiction over the citizens of sovereign states and killing them -- as it did to Salman Rushdie's translators and publishers. Now in the cartoon jihad and other episodes, the restraints of Islamic law are being extended piecemeal to the advanced world, by intimidation and violence but also by the usual cooing promotion of a spurious multicultural "respect" by Bill Clinton, the United Church of Canada, European foreign ministers, etc.

The I'd-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing-in-perfect-harmonee crowd have always spoken favorably of one-worldism. From the op-ed pages of Jutland newspapers to les banlieues of Paris, the Pan-Islamists are getting on with it.

The one-worldism that the radicals believe in is anything but peace and harmony. Even if we were to imagine a world like Robert Ferrigno paints for us in his newest novel, it would still be one where sharia would rule. That's what these people keep forgetting. The radicals don't want moderation, they want domination. Europe can turn a blind eye to it, much the way it did when Hitler rose to power in 1933, but we can't afford to. Not with our enemy willing to resort to the measures they went to in 2001.

Mark's correct on so many levels, and it's a shame that the Euro appeasers and the kumbaya crowd can't see it. That's their problem. And like Ike, we'll save the world from itself again.

Whether it likes it or not.

Publius II