9/11, Five Years Later: A View from Europe
- by Bruce Bawer
Recently I watched Casablanca for perhaps the 20th time. Its characters include people
from the U.S., Norway, Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and
Bulgaria whose harrowing experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe have taught them a
precious lesson: the value of freedom. Many seek passage to America, a beacon of
liberty in a darkening world. In one stirring scene, Nazi officers at Rick’s café begin
singing Die Wacht am Rhein, and the other customers respond with La Marseillaise.
Something like that sense of international unity in the cause of freedom is rather what I
expected of the West after 9/11. But it didn’t happen. Why? Largely because of a
failure to comprehend the nature of the enemy: Islamist terrorism continues to be
characterized by many as a desperate response to poverty, oppression, and/or Western
foreign policies, rather than what it is: a jihad by people who seek to conquer the West as
Muhammed did North Africa, subduing infidels and imposing sharia. Only recently did
George W. Bush finally confess that we were fighting “Islamic fascists” – only to revert,
in the face of criticism, to the empty term “war on terror.”
Some understand the enemy, yet underestimate its capabilities. One’s comfort can be
one’s downfall: just as it seemed inconceivable that the Twin Towers could be brought
down so easily, so our Western civilization can feel indestructible, and the idea of having
to defend it can feel like – well, something out of an old movie. There are few more
telling symbols of many young Europeans’ sense of absolute security, their utter
unconsciousness of any clear and present threat to their freedom, and the alienness to
them of any concept of moral responsibility than the Che t-shirts and Palestinian scarves
by which they play at identifying with the perceived glamour of violent revolution
against their own civilization.
On 9/11 (as now), I was a New Yorker living in Oslo. Yet that day I realized I’d never
left home – for this was, I knew, an attack not only on my hometown but on the free
world. Clearly, we were at war – not only with terrorists, but with their philosophical
allies in the West. I already knew a bit about the latter: in 1999, living in Amsterdam’s
Oud West, I looked around me and realized I’d failed to notice a key piece of the
European puzzle – namely, the rise of Muslim communities that weren’t transitional
phenomena (like the now-vanished Polish neighborhood in Manhattan where my father
grew up) but the beginnings of a fast-growing, self-segregating European Islamic society
that was becoming ever more confident and assertive in its rejection of Western
values. The celebrations in the streets of Ede and elsewhere on 9/11 affirmed my sense
of the grim possibilities these enclaves represented.
In the wake of 9/11, European leaders felt obliged to join America in invading
Afghanistan. But the initial show of solidarity by politicians and intellectuals (“we are all
Americans”) quickly gave way to declarations that the U.S. – by supporting Israel,
buttressing Arab dictators, fostering globalism, etc. – had asked for 9/11. But not
Europe. Europe was the Muslims’ friend. Muslims knew this. Hence Europe was
safe. This soon became Western European orthodoxy. Only days after 9/11, Norwegian
author Gert Nygårdshaug sneered at the idea that there might soon be an attack on “Oslo
or Rome or Copenhagen.” He was far from alone in his mockery.
Then came Madrid, London, Bali, Beslan, Mumbai. Van Gogh was butchered; Muslims
rioted in France; their coreligionists in Denmark rampaged over newspaper cartoons of
Muhammed. The Western European elite played down, even denied, any connection
among these events. Yet year by year the truth has become increasingly clear: though the
U.S. was the target on 9/11, the front line of the war with Islamism is Europe.
It is a war, moreover, in which the enemy’s most powerful weapon is not bombs but
demography. Muslim immigration levels remain high; so do reproduction rates. Yes,
only a tiny percentage of European Muslims are terrorists; but many more – who get their
“news” from satellite channels such as Al-Jazeera and who feed one another’s animosity
toward the West in mosques, in community centers, and on Internet message boards –
find European culture intolerably decadent and share the jihadist goal of a European
caliphate governed according to Koranic precepts. Recent polls show that at least 40% of
Muslims in the U.K. would like to see Britain under sharia law, and that at least one in
four approved of the 7/7 attacks. European-establishment rhetoric to the contrary,
poverty and ignorance aren’t the explanation: the most intense anti-Western sympathies
are nursed not by illiterate immigrants from rural Arab villages but by their welleducated, European-born children who live well and drive BMWs.
In all of Europe, only the Danes have taken remotely serious actions to halt the advance
of what the scholar Bat Ye’or has called “Eurabia.” The results: immigration to Denmark
is down, integration improved. Yet even in Denmark, death threats against cartoonists
have made the free word less free. Elsewhere, too, sharia is on the march. Belgian law
now forbids “Islamophobia”; similar legislation was passed by Britain’s House of
Commons last year, but nixed by the Lords. In Norway, you can now be imprisoned for
“insulting” someone’s religion (and the burden of proof is on the accused). A grim
foretaste of Europe’s future was provided last February in Oslo, where, at a statesponsored press conference, editor Velbjørn Selbekk – who, after reprinting the
Muhammed cartoons, had defied death threats for weeks – did a sudden about-face,
apologizing abjectly to the largest assemblage of imams in Norway’s history. The
Norwegian government hailed this capitulation, calling it a “reconciliation”; later an
official delegation visited Qatar to beg Muslim leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s forgiveness,
too.
What of America? No question, Bush’s arrogance, incompetence, inarticulateness,
deafness to criticism, and tolerance of torture have (in Andrew Sullivan’s words)
“managed to muddy the moral high ground against the evil of Islamism” – thereby
polarizing Americans and helping alienate Europeans at a time when unity is
crucial. (The U.S. military’s dismissal of desperately needed Arabic-language experts for
being gay testifies to the endurance of an absurd bias that I thought, on 9/11, would fade
in the face of a real and deadly foe.) In the U.S., as in Europe, politicians and journalists
who should know better continue to repeat the ludicrous mantra that Islam means
“peace,” jihad means “inner struggle,” and extremists are “hijacking Islam.”
Yet for all America’s missteps, the European elite’s charge that the U.S. is the world’s #1
menace has been obscene and self-destructive – as has that same elite’s tireless
whitewashing of the real menace. On 9/11, I would never have imagined that five years
later, a man who refuses to condemn the stoning of female adulterers would be respected
as the leading voice of “moderate” European Islam; that European governments would
still be funding within their borders mosques and Muslim schools that teach contempt for
democracy, Jews, gays, and sexual equality; that Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen would
argue for accepting the oppression of Muslim women in the West; and that Britain would
still be sheltering radical clerics, Queen Elizabeth knighting the likes of Iqbal Sacranie
(who calls homosexuality “unacceptable”), and London mayor Ken Livingstone praising
as “progressive” the above-mentioned al-Qaradawi (who has defended suicide bombers
and the execution of gays). The delusion endures: in August, the AP reported that
Germans were “stunned” by news of a planned train bombing in their country because
they thought their “opposition to the Iraq war would insulate” them from terrorism; and
Britain’s “Communities Secretary,” following the arrest of “English lads” who’d planned
to blow up London-to-U.S. flights, promised to consider a proposal by Muslim leaders to
pacify would-be domestic bombers by introducing sharia law in immigrant areas.
I would never have believed on 9/11 that in 2006, most Europeans would still be
surprised to learn – to pluck two examples at random – that over seven in ten immigrant
women in Sweden (according to an EU study) are affected by “honor-related violence”
and that Jewish children (according to a French government report) “can no longer get an
education” in France because of abuse by Muslim classmates. Some law-enforcement
authorities have already thrown in the towel: in 2004, Swedish police admitted they
“have no control over the situation in Malmö,” a city plagued by Muslim rapes and
robberies; this August, after a Muslim gang shootout in Oslo, police said they were
“reluctant to crack down on the gangs out of fear for their own safety.”
On 9/11, the free world was powerfully reminded of its freedom. In Europe, alas, that
day’s spirit has been steamrollered by an establishment that – apparently having already
accepted the inevitability of Europe’s Islamization – routinely turn the truth on its head,
representing aggressors as victims and self-defense as inflammatory. That upside-down
picture needs to be set aright, and the spirit of 9/11 resurrected. For the bottom line is
simple: if we don’t cherish our liberties with the fervor that the jihadists treasure their
faith, we’ll lose.
DE VOLKSKRANT, 2 SEPTEMBER 2006
This piece was written at the invitation of the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, in which it appeared on
September 2, 2006. it appeared on September 2, 2006.