The Israelification of Europe

Mark Steyn:

In the post-New York, post-Bali, post-Madrid reconfiguration of terror, it was arithmetically small beer. It lacked the searing iconic precision of using airplanes to demolish the Manhattan skyline. It added up to a bad day in Iraq, or a couple of bad days in Thailand, where far from the gaze of CNN and the BBC some 800 people have been killed by Islamic terrorists in the first six months of this year.

The British and many Continental police forces have long experience of terrorism, and are good — within the political constraints they operate under — at dealing with it. In their glory days, the IRA blew up members of the Royal Family and the British Government. By the end of their campaign, they were reduced to splattering grannies and expectant mothers across shopping centres. Now as then, prestige targets will be secured against terrorism, and that will leave soft targets — in a word,you, your morning bus ride, that little restaurant you like. And, as in Israel, Europeans will get used to the idea that every so often, entirely at random, there will be days when your husband or daughter or best friend sets off for work and doesn’t come home.

I say “Europeans” because, granted that in the eyes of western intellectuals this is all the fault of George W Bush, there are significant differences between Europe’s and America’s relationship with Islam. It was the late Ayatollah Khomeini who popularized the idea that the United States is the Great Satan — a shrewd shorthand in that it acknowledges not merely that the hyperpower is evil but that he is a great seducer, too.And, when one contrasts the vast number of British, European and Canadian jihadists who’ve turned up in the thick of it in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Israel, Bosnia, Chechnya and beyond with the relatively insignificant number of American Muslims so embroiled, one begins to appreciate that the Great Satan is indeed a relatively effective seducer — at least to the extent that America seems to be doing a better job at assimilating Muslims than Europe or Canada. Of course, to assimilate you have to have something to assimilate with, and the yawning nullity of the European idea seems to be a wee bit deficient in that respect.

But there’s another difference, too, and this is what I mean by Israelification: the jihadists understand that Europe is up for grabs in a way that America isn’t.Israel/Palestine is,in the old joke, the twice promised land — a western democracy and a disaffected Muslim population exist in (for the most part) two solitudes but claim the same piece of real estate. As it happens, that’s also how more and more Muslims see Europe.