Within the Gates
"Eurabia." The vulnerability of Europe to the furies of this malignant Islamism is a defining feature of its contemporary life. There are the young men "next door" in Leeds and Madrid, and there are the burning grounds of the Middle East and North Africa hurling their disinherited young people across the Straits of Gibraltar to an aging European continent. We are not in "Eurabia" yet; that great city is still London and not "Londonistan," and no reverse reconquista of the Iberian peninsula by the Moors of North Africa looms on the horizon. Still, liberty is not a suicide pact. We should be done with the search for "explanations" that dignify the hatreds, that attribute them to western deeds and policies. We should see the new hatred dressed in religious garb for what it is: a war against the very order of contemporary life. A man of Moroccan origin, Muhammad Bouyeri, who killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, shot him, then slit his throat, and with his knife attached on his body a message of unadorned barbarism. "I knew what I was doing," Bouyeri said. "I slaughtered him."
It would have been nice to think that in the new lands of the West, a more tolerant version of Islam might have taken root. Instead, a neurotic zealotry has made its appearance. In Scotland the leaders of the industrialized world had assembled to discuss disease and poverty. Then a more deadly animus struck, reminding all of us of more atavistic furies still on the loose.
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