The School of Acquiescence and Denial: Europeans' standard metric regarding the long-term influence of Muslim populations on European society

Of all Europe’s great and present miseries, the one receiving the most uncertain remedies is the failing integration of its increasingly large and alienated Muslim communities

warns John Vinocur in his article With Muslims, Europe Sees No Problem, and That's the Problem.

Valentine's Day Banned in Iran
by Plantu in Le Monde
— Here, sweetheart, a brand-new Koran!
— Oh you shouldn't have!

…denial is [the Europeans'] standard metric: That bomb didn’t go off here, our national soccer team is full of Muslim players, and we haven’t elected any anti-immigrant parties to Parliament, or if we have, they’re ultimately manageable. The less we talk about this stuff the better.

Then something happens. A conflict comes into focus that, beyond its particulars, raises the question of the ultimate compatibility of Islamic communities in Western environments. An issue that, most comfortably, is kept vague, suddenly demands that Europe — in this case, the Netherlands — draw the line. But where is the line?

What has taken place here is that Frits Bolkestein, the former leader of the Liberal Party, which now heads the Dutch government, has advised “recognizable Jews, orthodox Jews” that their children should emigrate from the Netherlands to Israel or the United States. He said, “I see no future for them here because of anti-Semitism, above all among the Moroccan Dutch, whose numbers continue to grow.”

The remark last month twice shocked the Netherlands.

…Concerning the harassment of orthodox Jews in public places, Mr. Bolkestein, who is not Jewish, says that it is an “outrage” and “a tragedy” and that he sees similar circumstances existing in France and Sweden.

…Population growth that is faster than the native population’s, extremists’ murderous plots, sharp-edged disaffection for their adopted countries among third-generation Muslim males, and societies where large segments of the ethnic majority insist they feel increasingly less at home — what should the Netherlands, and by extrapolation Europe, do?

Revert to a kind of multiculturalism that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, at least, insists is dead?

In fact, the School of Acquiescence and Denial has its followers. … Frits Bolkestein, whose father was a Buchenwald inmate, described Mr. Cohen’s vision of reality [the Labor Party's Job Cohen jabbering on about "Muslim suffering and exclusion from European society"] to me as “cultural masochism.”