Obviously at the top of the list are
Europe’s liberal immigration policies. They are not as
undoable as many would believe, since Europe’s generous cradle-to-grave social
systems are hamstrung by fundamental demographic issues which require the
importation of foreign workers to sustain. But compounding this
longstanding policy are gratuitous asylum
laws which serve little purpose other than to make Europeans, and
particularly elites, feel good about themselves, and absolve the continent of
its past sins. These can be reversed.
Europe’s embrace of secular humanist
multiculturalism as a belief system in place of religion and nationalism will
not go away anytime soon, if ever. If it persists as the
dominant Weltanschauung Europe
is likely doomed. Change, if it comes, will emerge from popular opinion
among the non-Islamic European masses, and the movements and parties that
represent them, like the National
Front in France, orPegida in
Germany. This is something that the elites will battle vigorously, possibly
with both police and military forces. Civil unrest and the repressive measures
that they may provoke may weaken Europe further, undermine democratic
principles, and possibly make things even easier for Islamic radicals. But if
European elites will tolerate popular change without imposing authoritarian
crackdowns, Europe has a chance in this regard.
Avoiding authoritarian crackdowns does not
mean that European nations can continue to allow Islamic minorities to
establish mini-states within
European cities, where authorities fear to go, sharia
law is applied, and terrorists can plot and sustain themselves. One
of the oddities of the Paris attacks (both in January and November)
is how afterward Paris looks like an armed camp, with bored and heavily armed
police and soldiers patrolling streets, exactly where the terrorists are not
going to strike. It is no accident that following the attacks on a media
outlet and a Jewish store January (both of which got heightened attention from
security forces) terrorists struck targets they knew to be unprotected with
gunfire and grenades (restaurants and a concert hall) while striking the one
protected site (the stadium) just with suicide bombers. Troops and police ought to be in
Paris’ no-go zones, rather than at the Eifel Tower, which makes for good video
but does little good otherwise. Conducting police
raids is not enough. National authority must be reestablished in
Muslim dominated areas.
