By Douglas Murray
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
After any terrorist attack — until last year — those
familiar with the threat always asked the question, “Will this wake people up?”
Until quite recently I used to think, “Possibly.” After the March 2004 Madrid
train bombings killed 200 people, there were those who said something would
change. But the only thing to change was the Spanish government, booted out by
an electorate irritated that it had fingered the wrong culprits in the moments
after the blasts.
In July 2005, when four home-grown “British”
suicide-bombers took to the subways and buses of the capital, killing 52
people, many wondered if this would make a difference. Prime Minister Tony
Blair claimed that “the rules of the game have changed.” But they didn’t. His
government continued to oversee a massive increase in immigration from the
Muslim world and continued to give hate-preachers free reign and free benefits.
In the years that followed, in the U.K. alone, at least
one mass-casualty terrorist attack was thwarted each year. For a while the
spectacular attacks fell off, and the main targets of Islamist assault seemed
to be Danish artists. So as long as you didn’t draw pictures in the Scandinavian
region you could have been forgiven for thinking you’d ducked it. Of course
there was the occasional irritation like the slaughter and decapitation on a
London street of a British soldier at home on leave. But such things led to
nothing but inconsequential government reviews and an increase in the
semi-fraudulent study of “radicalization.” Attacks like the one on the Jewish
museum in Brussels in 2014 (four dead) also had no impact.
After the January 2015 terror attacks in Paris, there
were those who thought things would change. But the victims were, again, only
journalists and Jews and after a million-man march and some serious political
grandstanding everyone went home. Then after the slaughter of 130 people in one
night in Paris last November something changed. But the change was not what
anyone predicted it could be. Opinion polls had for some time suggested that
across the continent European publics had been forming a view of this problem
for years, and quiet majorities in most countries now saw Islam itself as being
at odds with our societies. The publics of Europe had formed this view in the
face of the entirety of their mainstream political class who had cried “Islam
is a religion of peace” after every atrocity. But despite this rather startling
wake up and contrary to some scare-mongering, there were no pogroms of Muslims,
nor any mass rejection of the majority of decent ordinary Muslims living among
us. People woke up quietly and reacted decently. But they also became
fatalistic.
After November 2015, we started to accept the terror. We
accepted that this is what the Islamists are going to keep doing, and that our
governments have no answer to the problem they have lumbered us with.
Of course there are those on the left who will continue
to try to pretend that Belgian foreign policy, colonialism, innate racism, or
Brussels housing policy are to blame. And there will continue to be sinister
Muslim figures across our media who pretend that the Islamists do not believe
in Islam. But such people are losing purchase. As the American scholar of Islam
Daniel Pipes has noted, this is a one-way street. Nobody in Europe says that
they used to be worried about Islam but no longer are. All that you hear is
people saying that they are getting more and more worried.
Our governments continue to talk a big game (a
“generational challenge” they say), but nobody believes they will do anything.
And that is why across Europe those parties who have consistently been vilified
as “racist” for expressing the concerns of the people on Islam, immigration,
and national identity, are in each country in turn becoming the leading parties
in the opinion polls. This is already the story in Sweden and Holland, and
earlier this month a German party that is only three years old — but willing to
break the German political consensus on these issues — came second in a
regional election. The mainstream will keep covering this as the “march of the
far-right” but many involved in such parties are far from far-right, strikingly
liberal, but fed up with the pass to which their societies have been led.
Of course some Americans will survey this scene and think
how much better off America is. But after losing 3,000 people in a single day
15 years ago, America didn’t change much. You invaded two countries, with
deeply mixed results. But at home you continued to be willing to be lied to by
your politicians and intimidated into silence by Islamist front-groups whose
propagandist intentions are so clear that a child could see through them. You
continue to suck up to mainstream-media frauds who tell you that Islam is a
religion of peace and that everyone who says otherwise is a bigot. And now you
are having a political reaction of your own. We’re all in the same boat: stuck
between the actions of our enemies and the inability of our existing political
class to face up to them.
So how many will it take? Ten Brusselses? A Paris every
month? More. Much more. Illusions only break when you can’t afford to hold them
anymore. It seems we can hold these illusions through a lot more Brussels-style
attacks, just as you held yours throughout 9/11 and its aftermath. But one day
those illusions really will crack. And what a painful day that will be — for
everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment