Licking the Boot That Kicks You

It’s what Europeans do best. Better than chiding other westerners about not being as “culturally European” in the trivial matters of culture as they are – cuisine, urbanism, work ways, and the like, as though those pet peeves was the only remaining features of a culture that one is permitted to defend in a miasma of post-modern emptiness.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s article published in the UK’s The First Post notes:

Take anti-Semitism in Europe. The sensitivity and guilt Europeans feel about the Holocaust is comparable to the sensitivity and guilt that Americans feel towards black Americans. A decade or two ago, it was unthinkable for Jews to be slandered openly and be targeted for no other reason than their Jewishness.

Today, in the name of Islam, synagogues are vandalised. There are open denials of the Holocaust. There is an active network of Muslim organisations lobbying to curtail or even get rid of Israel. There are incidents of Jews being harassed, beaten, even killed. All this is met with grim silence and rationalisations that it's not really anti-Semitic but anti-Israel. Can you imagine anything like this happening today in America to black people and it being met with silence?

Europe is a continent where they know well enough that being servile doesn’t bring you peace, or for that matter leaves you in peace for any length of time.

It is this state of affairs that makes Christopher Caldwell's book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration and the West (Allen Lane, £17.99), which opens with the sentence, "Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind," a chilling read.

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Caldwell discusses this theme in an interesting light: he does not overlook the Europeans who feel that Islam is a danger to European values but asks, "How can you fight for something you cannot define?" And this is Europe's problem - insecurity about who we are, what our various flags mean, why, with every turn, we spend less and less on the military.