Menace In Europe Part 1

Menace in Europe.

Claire Berlinski.

For my grandmother . . . who has seen it all I know that Europe's wonderful, yet something seems to lack;.

The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.

-Henry Van d.y.k.e.

CHAPTER 1.

EUROPE ON FIVE DOLLARS A DAY AND A FLAMETHROWER.

I KEEP A SPIRAL-BOUND notebook on my desk filled with miscellaneous notes-the usual collection of ideas that seem insightful at three in the morning but substantially less so at daybreak, ideas that may well have been insightful but have been lost to posterity because my handwriting is indecipherable, sc.r.a.ps of overheard dialogue, observations made from the windows of trains.

One scrawled pa.s.sage in particular stands out now. The date was July 3, 2005. "Within six months," I wrote, "there will be another major terrorist attack or political a.s.sa.s.sination in Europe." I am embarra.s.sed to admit that my next thought, apparently, was that this would be inconvenient for me, since it would necessitate making major revisions to this book.

Three days later, Trafalgar Square erupted in celebration at the announcement that London would host the 2012 Olympics. The next morning, as the rush hour drew to a close, four suicide bombers detonated themselves in central London, killing 52 people and injuring 700 more. Papers with headlines from the previous evening had not yet been pushed off the newsstands: "Blimey! It's London's turn!" said one, and I can only imagine how those jolly words must have appeared to commuters staggering off the smoke-blackened London Tube.

Four more bombings were attempted on the London transport system two weeks later. This time, the bombs failed to detonate and the bombers survived, leaving behind forensic evidence that permitted police to ascertain their ident.i.ties. Both the living and the dead bombers were British, born and raised-homegrown monsters who had not yet been apprised of the news that democracies don't breed terrorists. Some were from comfortably affluent families. Some had been living handsomely for years on state benefits. It now appears that al Qaeda, which took credit for the attacks, recruited some of the bombers at a Muslim community center in Leeds-one funded by the British government and the European Union.1 It was revealed in the weeks following the attacks that quite a number of British Muslims do not much care for their fellow Britons. According to a poll conducted shortly after the bombing, a full 32 percent of British Muslims agreed that "Western society is decadent and immoral and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end." Toward that goal, 1 percent-a seemingly small proportion until one considers that this comprises some 16,000 British Muslims-described themselves as willing, even eager, to embrace violence to destroy that society. According to the same poll, 6 percent of British Muslims saw the bombings as justified, 56 percent "understood why some people behave in that way," and 16 percent felt "not loyal towards Britain."2 This is not, of course, a problem limited to Britain: every European country is now home to large populations of alienated, una.s.similated Muslims who despise the West.

As the portrait of the bombers became clearer, sharply ill.u.s.trating these fissures in Europe's social fabric, a large cohort of the professional commentariat proclaimed themselves shocked. I believe I heard the same people, several months later, proclaiming themselves shocked by the news that Kate Moss uses cocaine. Those of us who had been paying attention were not shocked at all.

This protest, for example, outside the U.S. emba.s.sy in London on May 20, 2005, was the kind of clue some of us had been noticing: Shouting, "Down, down USA; down, down USA," the protesters called for the killing of Americans, the death of the U.S. president, the death of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the bombing of Britain, and the annihilation of the U.S. capital: "Nuke, nuke Was.h.i.+ngton; Nuke, nuke Was.h.i.+ngton! Bomb, bomb the Pentagon." . . . "Death, death Tony Blair; death, death Tony Blair. Death, death George Bush," the protesters chanted. . . . Holding their Qurans high, they called for death and mayhem, praising the destruction of New York's twin towers on September 11, 2001, and saying the White House is next.3 I did not think these demonstrators were just joking then, and I certainly do not now.

The trend has been in evidence for years. British-based terrorists were involved in the planning and execution of the suicide bombing of American emba.s.sies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. They were involved in the planned attack on the American emba.s.sy in Albania. They were a.s.sociated with the attempted attack on Los Angeles International Airport in 2000 and, most important, with the September 11 attacks on New York and Was.h.i.+ngton.

One week after the London bombings, it was reported that Mohammed Sidique Khan, believed to have been the operation's field commander, had been in contact with a suspected recruiter for an extremist group in New York. Two other men linked to the plot had direct ties to the United States: one had traveled recently to Ohio; another had been a student at an American university.4 I have those same handwritten notes beside me now. On the evening of July 7, 2005, having spent the day following the news on the Internet and exchanging e-mails with my friends in London, I wrote these words: "The same thing will happen soon in the United States, and the bombers will come from Europe." They will come from Europe because it is comparatively easy to enter the United States if you carry a European pa.s.sport, and because Europe is-as it always has been-the breeding ground of the world's most dangerous ideologues.

Although I take as much satisfaction as the next woman in being right, I'd much prefer to be wrong about this. Unfortunately, I don't think I am.

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED.

To judge from the number of books published in recent years about the challenges of renovating a farmhouse in Tuscany or Provence, large swaths of Europe are now populated by middle-aged American divorcees, living large on alimony and greatly occupied by the tending of their new olive terraces. As far as they are concerned, the chief problem with life in Europe is the difficulty of coaxing the medieval plumbing in their newly acquired Renaissance villas into action. (These women are survivors. They grow from this tough experience.) Many Americans know this version of Europe-Alimony Europe, Fodor's Europe, Europe on Five Dollars a Day-quite well. They know it from books and movies, they know it from their summer vacations. They remember backpacking through Europe after graduating from college. Amsterdam was great, until Flounder fell in the ca.n.a.l. They think wistfully of that ad in the back of the New York Review of Books: "Dordogne-18th-century stone manor. Antiques, all original beams, 18' cathedral ceiling, fireplace, pool. 28 bucolic acres of woods, meadow, fruit and walnut trees, stream. Must be willing to feed goats." When they visit Europe, they travel from one historic and lovely city center to another, making use of Europe's convenient railroads. They do not visit the places most Europeans actually live, and know little about them.

Indeed, most Americans born after the Second World War have grown up thinking of Europe, Western Europe in particular, as not much more than a congeries of windmills, gondolas, dissipated monarchs, and peculiar toilets. They have considered the political and moral essence of Europe, when they have considered it at all, to be much like our own. They have, of course, heard the stories about the cancerous, deranged thing of the past, but that Europe, they believe, is long dead, vanquished by the United States in the First and Second World Wars, resurrected in our image through the Marshall Plan. Europe? It's free, prosperous, peaceful, and democratic now, right? We don't need to worry about it anymore.

Yes, Europe is peaceful, prosperous, free, and democratic, relatively speaking. It is not Sierra Leone, and I'm not saying it is. I do not propose we worry overmuch that German nationalists will hijack commercial jets and pilot them into our skysc.r.a.pers. American troops stationed in Italy may leave their bases without benefit of armored convoys, unworried about the threat of capture and beheading by enraged fundamentalist papists. All of that is true; it would be absurd to deny it. Europe's achievements since the Second World War have been real and significant. There is unprecedented prosperity on the Continent, with standards of health care and education that in many places exceed those in the United States. The Great Powers of Europe are no longer cannibalizing one another. The Furor Teutonicus has for the moment subsided. No doubt, much of the darkness has been repressed.

But the repressed is known for returning.

Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, and particularly since September 11, some Americans have begun to sense, uneasily, a certain lack of love from our transatlantic brethren. Many Europeans did not seem to grasp the enormity of September 11, and never denounced the event as forthrightly as we had expected. The rift over the Iraq War exposed an extremity of anti-American pa.s.sion that simply made no sense, particularly given that European intelligence agencies were, like ours, persuaded that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of ma.s.s destruction, still more so because European cities would have been the obvious targets of those weapons. Iraq was, after all, believed to be building not long-range but medium-range ballistic missiles. To any European capable of reading a map, the implications of this should have been obvious. The spectacle of European leaders and citizens declaring themselves, in all seriousness, to be more alarmed by American imperialism than by Saddam's quite rightly made many Americans wander to their bookshelves and begin thumbing through their copies of Let's Go: Mexico.

The American political a.n.a.lyst Robert Kagan has suggested, rea.s.suringly, that the divide is not as serious as it looks: it is just that Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus. Now, I am all for interplanetary diplomacy-who isn't?-but having lived in Europe for most of my adult life, I see things just a little differently.

BLACKMAILED BY HISTORY.

I use the word Europe here as a shorthand. I mean by this the former members of the European Community, a distinct historic ent.i.ty comprising most of Western Europe and Great Britain. These nation-states are united now by their entangled pasts and their common dilemmas. I am writing about this Europe because it is the Europe I come from and the Europe I know; having never lived in Eastern Europe, I will leave that subject to someone who has.

I come from this Europe in the sense that my grandparents, musicians born in Leipzig, were refugees from the n.a.z.is; they crossed every border in Europe from Danzig to Bilbao in their flight from Hitler's armies. Their lives-and thus mine-were shaped by Europe's history. I know this Europe because I have lived in it for many years, studied its languages and history in its universities, and worked in its economies; I have closely examined its legal and medical systems, its bureaucracies, its rental markets, and its tax codes-not so much out of academic curiosity but because for anyone living here, a close examination is inescapable. These are, therefore, personal stories.

They are unified, however, by two larger themes-and a set of questions.

The first theme is that Europeans are behaving now as Europeans have always behaved. Many seemingly novel developments in European politics and culture are in fact nothing new at all-they have ancient roots in Europe's past. And what is that past? From the sack of Rome to the Yalta Conference, that past has been one of nearly uninterrupted war and savagery. Ethnic wars, cla.s.s wars, revolutionary wars, religious wars, wars of ideology, and genocide are not aberrations in Europe's history; they are its history. An interregnum from these ancient conflicts endured from 1945 to the end of the Cold War, when Europe's destiny was in the hands of the two superpowers. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, however, history has rea.s.serted itself. Those disturbing sounds you hear from Europe are its old, familiar ghosts. They are rattling their chains.

The second theme is that this history has culminated in a peculiar, palpable European mood. Europeans, especially young Europeans, sense in their lives a cultural, spiritual, and ideological void, one that is evident in the art, the language, the literature of contemporary Europe; in the way they talk about their existence in cafes, in discotheques, and on the Internet; in their music, in their heroes, in their family lives; and above all in the way they face threats to their own civilization-and ours.

At the same time, Europe now confronts an entirely new set of questions, ones to which no European leaders or thinkers have offered a coherent answer, about the ultimate effects of European integration, changing demography, ma.s.sive immigration from former European colonies, and the expectations to which the postwar welfare states have given rise. Without understanding this history, this mood, and these questions, there is no understanding Europe. Without understanding Europe, we cannot construct an intelligent relations.h.i.+p to it.

HOPELESSNESS AND THE VOID.

Two historic events in particular are reverberating throughout Europe today. The first is the death of Christianity. From the time of Constantine's conversion, Europe was above all a Christian continent, with every aspect of its political, social, and family life refracted through the prism of Christian faith. But Europe has in the past several centuries seen a complete- really complete-loss of belief in any form of religious faith, personal immortality, or salvation. In 2005, the death of Pope John Paul II occasioned profound, spontaneous grief, to be sure, but the emotion was an atavism: church attendance in most Western European countries is less than 5 percent, a statistic ultimately much more telling than the weeping crowds in St. Peter's Square. For all the pope's charisma, he was completely unable to persuade Europeans to return to the traditional beliefs and rituals that once defined them. The first draft of the new European Union const.i.tution did not include a single mention of Christianity. Almost a third of the Dutch no longer know why Christmas is celebrated. When asked by pollsters to name an inspirational figure, British respondents placed Christ well below Britney Spears.

The past two centuries of European history can be viewed as a series of struggles to find a replacement for what Europe has lost. Until recently, nationalism in Europe has been a subst.i.tute for religious belief. In France, for example, the idea of France itself and its civilizing mission has lent meaning to the lives of Frenchmen, just as some mystical Aryan ideal has served as a subst.i.tute for religious belief in Germany.

The second event, the complete catastrophe of the two World Wars, put an end to that, and to every other form of idealism in Europe besides. Europe is still experiencing postwar aftershocks that are at once deadening and deadly. All secular subst.i.tutes for faith, and particularly those based in a notion of the supremacy of European culture, have lost their hold. What Frenchman can stand before the graveyards of Ypres or Verdun and without choking on the words profess his allegiance to the mission civilatrice? The nation-state, the arts, music, science, fascism, communism, and even rationality-all of these were subst.i.tutes for Christianity, and all failed.

My point in making these observations could easily be misunderstood: I am not an apologist for the Church, an enemy of secularism, or an advocate of religious revivalism; I am in fact a secular Jew who is delighted never to have faced the Inquisition. I am simply reporting what I see. Not much seems to be left here now beyond pleasure and personal relations, and these do not seem to be enough to keep hopelessness at bay. A poll conducted in 2002 found that while 61 percent of Americans had hope for the future, only 42 percent of the residents of the United Kingdom shared it. Only 29 percent of the French reported feeling hope, and only 15 percent of the Germans. 5 These statistics suggest-to me, anyway-that without some transcendental common belief, hopelessness is a universal condition. I do not believe it an accident that Americans are both more religious and more hopeful than Europeans, and more apt, as well, to believe that their country stands for something greater and more n.o.ble than themselves.

The father of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, famously observed the prophylactic effects of religion on suicide, arguing that suicide rates may usefully be considered a measure of a society's state of disillusionment. In many European countries, suicide is now the second most prevalent cause of death among the young and middle-aged, exceeded only by transport accidents. Despite the prevalence of firearms, suicide in the United States is only the eighth leading cause of death. The American suicide rate is about half that of France. Suicide rates in the Islamic world are dramatically lower.

If the death of Christianity has left a void, what now is filling it? Bizarre pseudoreligious subst.i.tutes, of which anti-Americanism and antiglobalism are only the most obvious. The roots of European anti-Americanism are complex-they are in Europe's failed domestic politics, in the universal human propensity to turn complaints outward in preference to subjecting oneself to scrutiny, in humiliation over the loss of the leaders.h.i.+p role Europe played from the Age of Exploration to the Great War. But most interesting is the quasi-religious and messianic, even orgiastic, aspect of this anti-American ideology, especially in its coupling with undifferentiated antimodernism and anti-Semitism. Particularly revealing are the words and slogans of activists who conceive of their program as essentially spiritual or transcendental-French farmers, for example, who practice what is in effect a form of crop wors.h.i.+p, or the extremely influential German neo-Protestant fruitcake Eugen Drewermann, who writes, . . . whether in the battle against racism amongst influential circles in the US south . . . whether against the absolutely unfair trade conditions on the world market in exchange relations of raw materials and manufactured goods to the permanently aggravating disadvantage of Third and Fourth World countries . . . every little "success" in the fight against injustice, inhumanity and violence, is undoubtedly a little more "nearness" to the kingdom of heaven which Jesus wanted to bring us.1 George Orwell, observing the rise of fascism in Europe, described the wors.h.i.+p of power as "the new religion of Europe." Anti-Americanism, predicated in part on fascism's mirror image, the revilement of power-especially when that power is somebody else's-answers many of the fundamental needs once filled by the Church. There is a transcendent and common goal. There are crusades. There is a pleasing sense of moral superiority. There is community. There is zeal, a sense of belonging, even ecstasy in anti-American protest movements-yet there is rarely an explicit belief in G.o.d, for that is now widely viewed in Europe as the mark of primitivism.

Europe's anti-Americanism significantly antedates the presidency of George W. Bush. It has been a theme of European politics for some two hundred years, suppressed only during the Cold War, and then just barely. It is through ignorance of this tradition that American observers attribute Europe's recent satisfied spasm of anti-Americanism to our presumptively incompetent diplomacy or our military presence in Iraq. It is more helpful to place this emotion in the context of Eric Hoffer's still-relevant observations about ma.s.s movements. These, he a.s.serted, have distinct characteristics in common, no matter how disparate the subjects. They are convenient ways of avoiding personal responsibility. They can exist without a G.o.d, but will fail without something to hate. They are attractive to people whose lives are meaningless. They give hope to existence. And they are interchangeable: No matter the goals of the movement, the people involved are the same.

IT'S OUR PROBLEM.

It's their problem, not ours. That's what many Americans believe. For the most part, Europe is regarded by American policymakers as an irrelevant museum at best, a squawking nuisance at worst. The silent premise animating American policy is that we have more important things to worry about-terrorism, Iraq, nuclear proliferation, hurricanes. These are problems that should cause us all to lose sleep. But recall where the lives of American soldiers have in fact been squandered in the past century: in Europe, 344,955. In all other conflicts combined-including Vietnam, Korea, and the Persian Gulf- less than half this number of Americans have perished.

Why should this concern us now? We are, after all, in the process of removing troops from Europe. Can't we just leave them to their own devices and forget about them at last? No, we can't. Would that we could. A united Europe, even to the limited extent that it is united, is a major power-one bigger than the United States in territory and population. A morally unmoored Europe, imploding under the weight of social and economic pressures few politicians in Europe will even forthrightly describe, no less address, poses a threat to American interests and objectives everywhere on the planet. It threatens our trade policy and our economy. It threatens our policies in Iraq. It threatens our attempts to mediate the Arab-Israeli conflict, particularly given the alarming recrudescence of anti-Semitism on European soil. It threatens our posture toward North Korea. Toward China. Toward Iran. Toward Afghanistan. Toward Sudan. It impedes our efforts to prevent terrorism and halt the advance of Islamic radicalism.

This is not a hypothetical: There are radical Islamic terrorist cells in every major European city. The September 11 attacks were plotted in Hamburg. The a.s.sa.s.sins of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Shah Masood, carried Belgian pa.s.sports. Zacarias Moussaoui, who trained to be the twentieth hijacker on September 11, was born in France and educated in Britain. I could extend this list for pages. If Europe is unable to a.s.similate its immigrants, if Europe is a breeding ground for anti-Americanism and Islamic radicalism-and it is-this is our problem, and we need to understand why this is so.

Islamic radicals are far from the only problem in Europe. We have already been drawn back into armed conflict on European soil, where "Never again" has proved an empty slogan. Confronted with genocide-yet again-in the former Yugoslavia, European diplomats bickered helplessly until the United States intervened. Jacques Poos, the foreign representative of the European Community, surveyed the scene in 1991 and declared, "The hour of Europe has come!" Distinctly under-awed Bosnian Serb forces responded by capturing European peacekeepers and tying them to trees. The hostages offered no resistance, and their governments did nothing to retaliate. When Bosnian Serbs entered Srebrenica, the Dutch forces charged with the protection of the refugees failed to fire a single shot. The Serbs separated some 7,000 men and boys from the women, hauled them away, and slaughtered them. This kind of Europe-pa.s.sive, paralyzed, and fundamentally in disaccord with American idealism-is very much our problem. Our history is too deeply intertwined with Europe's to imagine it could be otherwise.

Throughout Europe, crude anti-Americanism now subst.i.tutes for serious attempts to construct farsighted foreign policy. European bookstores are full of t.i.tles such as American Totalitarianism; No Thanks, Uncle Sam; A Strange Dictators.h.i.+p; and Who Is Killing France? (The answer to the last question is, of course, the United States. Given the hectic imperial schedule we have apparently adopted, it is odd that the author believes killing the French would be high on our priority list.) The French journalist Thierry Meyssan has argued that no airplane crashed into the Pentagon on September 11; instead, he proposes, the American secret services and America's military-industrial complex invented the story to prime their sheeplike countrymen for a war of imperial conquest against Afghanistan and Iraq. The level of anti-American hysteria in France is such that his book, The Horrifying Fraud, was a galloping best-seller. Shortly before the beginning of the Iraq War, a poll showed that 30 percent of Frenchmen hoped the United States would be defeated by Saddam Hussein. It is one thing to oppose the war in Iraq on strategic grounds or out of heartfelt dopey pacifism; it is another to hope for the triumph of a genocidal maniac who transformed his own country-and its neighbors-into an abattoir. Who in his right mind hopes for the victory of a dictator who fed his opponents into industrial shredders and shoveled uncountable numbers of his compatriots into ma.s.s graves?

The popular Belgian musician Raymond van het Groenewoud recently wrote a hit song t.i.tled "Down with America." The lyrics are easily remembered: "Down with America! Down with the jerks from America. Down with America!" In Britain, newspaper headlines have proclaimed the United States to be the "world's leading rogue state" and "an unrepentant outlaw." In a comparison widely echoed by German entertainers, writers, playwrights, and talk show hosts, Germany's former justice minister, Herta Daubler-Gmelin, suggested an equivalence between President Bush and Hitler-this from a cabinet-level official, not some adolescent protester, an educated woman who should be fully conversant with the history of n.a.z.ism, the rape of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland, France, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Greece. She has heard of the Holocaust, I'm sure. She must be aware that some 52 million people perished in the Second World War. But these same critics, whose well-developed organs of indignation are so exceptionally sensitive to the infamies visited upon the globe by the United States, have had little to say about the outrageous human rights records of Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or China. When these countries are mentioned, the critics may be found coughing discreetly into their napkins and decorously picking lint from their neckties.

France and Germany, having long luxuriated under the American defense umbrella, appear now at long last to have converged upon a foreign policy principle: systematically undermining diplomatic and military initiatives emerging from the United States. European leaders who reviled the United States for deposing Saddam Hussein by force were consistently unable to propose, or even formulate in outline, any thoughtful or viable policy alternative beyond the one that had already been tried without success for twelve years. France and Germany were not content merely to voice their own objection to our diplomatic and military policies in Iraq; they obstructed both, aggressively lobbying African nations to vote against us in the United Nations and, it is credibly rumored, blackmailing Turkey with the threat of exclusion from the European Union should it permit the United States to stage operations from its bases.6 France was the princ.i.p.al investor in Saddam Hussein's regime and remains the chief lender to Iran, Cuba, Somalia, Sudan, and nearly every other kleptocratic state the United States seeks economically to isolate. Wherever French lending inst.i.tutions hesitate, German ones pick up the slack; their banks are the biggest lenders to North Korea, Syria, and Libya.7 In October 2005, a commission led by former U.S. central bank chief Paul Volcker concluded its lengthy investigation of the United Nations' oil-for-food program. The commission reported that in exchange for French diplomatic support, Iraq adopted an "explicit policy of favoring companies and individuals based in France." Beneficiaries of Iraqi kickbacks received oil barrel allocations based on their level of opposition to the sanctions regime. (Now mind you, countless European politicians piously insisted that this very same sanctions regime had not been given enough time to work.) The Volcker Report alleges that Jean-Bernard Merimee, France's former special adviser to the secretary-general of the UN, received oil allocations for 6 million barrels from Iraq; French businessman Claude Kaspereit received allocations for more than 9.5 million barrels; former French diplomat Serge Boidevoix received 32 million barrels; Gilles Munier, the secretary-general of the French-Iraqi Friends.h.i.+p a.s.sociation, received 11.8 million barrels. Munier, by the way, has been a particularly loud critic of American policy in Iraq. Former French interior minister Charles Pasqua was given allocations for 11 million barrels. Upon receiving this news, he is said gleefully to have exclaimed, "I will be the king of petrol!"8 (The line is almost too camp to be believed. It's something Dr. Evil would say while dangling Austin Powers above a tank of hungry sharks.) This is our problem, not that we ever asked for it. It is infuriating, of course. I am hardly the first person to observe that were it not for American soldiers and taxpayers, Russian tanks would long ago have rolled straight to the Atlantic, the troops pausing only to perform a traditional Cossack dance on the rubble of the Elysee Palace and then urinate on the remains of the flower beds. Indeed, one rarely hears discussed in Europe the threat now posed by Russia's descent into neo-imperial authoritarianism, but this is not because no such threat exists: it is because we may be counted on to nullify it. The United States still stations 26,000 combat personnel and 34,000 military support and administrative personnel on 294 military installations in Europe. It has cost us many billions of dollars to maintain these bases since the end of the Second World War. This is money that we have not spent on social welfare programs in America-nor has it been returned to those who earned it-and it is money that Europe has spent on its own social welfare programs.

But Europe should interest us for another reason: We share its problems. America is Europe's cultural, political, intellectual, and social progeny. Many of the problems now confronting Europe are also present, in lesser but growing form, in America. Hysterical anti-Americanism, for example, is widespread in America itself. It is not only Europeans who have compared the American president to Hitler. Europe is a test case, a laboratory, that shows us exactly where some of these ideas lead. It is significant that the French sheep farmer and antiglobalization activist Jose Bove has such a large American following. Before joining his herd, Americans might wish to know exactly who he is, where he comes from, and what people like him have already wrought in Europe.

Many Americans are besotted with Europe. They look to contemporary European political culture and its social inst.i.tutions for inspiration; they admire Europe's welfare states and believe American social welfare programs should be modeled on them. Paul Krugman, for example, has urged us in the pages of the New York Times to "learn from" the French and their admirable family values, which he believes to be nurtured by the shorter French workweek.9 France's government regulations, he writes, "actually allow people to make a desirable trade-off-to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family-the kind of deal an individual would find hard to negotiate."

Has Paul Krugman ever set foot on French soil? One wonders. The argument is, first of all, laughable on the face of it. For one thing, the most important family value is to have a family in the first place, and it is a notorious source of concern to French economists that French rates of marriage and reproduction have for years been drastically lower than those in America. Second, there's no evidence at all that the French are spending that leisure time with their families, even when they have them: During the great European heat wave of 2003, the corpses of the elderly were stacked up by the thousands in makes.h.i.+ft warehouses outside Paris because the French took their abundant vacation time and went to the Riviera, leaving their parents behind to perish. Their families? Where does he get these crazy ideas? Krugman may vaguely recall the French expression cinq a sept, which means "five to seven" and refers to the hours of the afternoon during which the French commit adultery, the traditional French pastime. That's what they do with that leisure time. There is, of course, no comparable expression in America-from five to seven in the evening, Americans are too busy working.

More seriously, Krugman does not for a moment consider the other consequences of those regulations-consequences that one encounters every day living in Paris. Among them is France's intractable structural unemployment, which bears a direct relations.h.i.+p to its inability to a.s.similate its Islamic immigrants, and thus the growing, murderous radicalism of its slums.

The riots that erupted in the suburban ghettos of Paris in November 2005-where unemployment among the young on average exceeds 30 percent and is, in some areas, as high as 50 percent-are in large part attributable to the very policies Krugman would have us emulate. The worst violence France has seen since 1968 quickly spread to more than 200 cities and towns, as well as neighboring countries. Curfews were imposed throughout France. The president declared a state of emergency. In some parts of France, commerce and transportation were brought to a halt. Lyon shut down its entire public transportation system following the bombing of a train station. In Bordeaux, a bus exploded when hit with a Molotov c.o.c.ktail. Thousands of vehicles and several public buildings were completely destroyed. There were many serious injuries and one death. By the time this book is in print there may be more. It would seem that a great many French families-or their children, at least-enjoy spending their leisure time torching cars, throwing firebombs, and choking on tear gas. Surely it would be no very cynical asperity to suggest that these kids would be better off working.

There are many Americans who, like Krugman, suspect that Europeans and their leaders are, as they style themselves, more sophisticated, worldly, and politically mature than Americans and their leaders. They believe that Europe's antipathy toward America is a proportionate and rational response to American failings.

I encourage them to feel uneasy in these sentiments.

CHAPTER 2.

SELF-EXTINGUIs.h.i.+NG TOLERANCE.

ON JANUARY 30, 2005, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands' largest film festival canceled a showing of Submission, a short film about the suffering of women in Islamic cultures. Theo van Gogh, the director, had several months before been slain on the streets of Amsterdam by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim who found the film offensive. The festival had planned to show Submission as part of a program t.i.tled "Filmmaking in an Age of Turbulence." Also on the agenda were films that had been censored in Russia, Indonesia, and Serbia: presumably the program's intended moral message was one of pious opposition to censors.h.i.+p. But when the doc.u.mentary's producer, Gijs van de Westelaken, of Column Films, received death threats, he chose with hideous unintentional irony to embody the t.i.tle of the film in question. Submission was promptly removed from the program. Added, however, were two Islamist propaganda films, one about the racism of British authorities, which, the movie offered, was understandably causing young British Muslims to join al Qaeda; the other a sympathetic interpretation of Palestinian suicide bombings as a natural response to the repressive practices of the occupying Israeli army.1 Explaining his decision, van de Westelaken remarked that he did not want "to take the slightest risk for anyone of our team." 2 Coincidentally, the showing of the film was canceled on the day of Iraq's first multiparty elections in half a century. The comparison is instructive. Describing the mood in Baghdad on that day, an Iraqi named Sam posted this entry to his weblog: We decided to challenge the terrorists who threatened to wash the streets of Iraq with our blood. We said . . . let them send their dogs to suck our bones we care not! We challenged them and we knew we may die and some of us wear their shrouds and voted in a civilized way with out problems. In one incident in Baghdad an Iraqi Hero suspected a terrorist. He chased him! The terrorist run and the Iraqi hero run after him and captured him. The terrorist blows himself with our hero who died to save many lives. 3 Another Iraqi in Baghdad, Ali, wrote this after casting his vote: This was my way to stand against those who humiliated me, my family and my friends. It was my way of saying, "You're history and you don't scare me anymore." It was my way to scream in the face of all tyrants, not just Saddam and his Ba'athists and tell them, "I don't want to be your, or anyone's slave. You have kept me in your jail all my life but you never owned my soul." It was my way of finally facing my fears and finding my courage and my humanity again. . . . As I was walking with many people towards the center explosion hit and gun fire were heard but most were not that close. People didn't seem to pay attention to that. 4 Hundreds of Iraqis posted to weblogs like these in the days after the election, expressing similar sentiments. You don't need to take my word for it: Do a quick Google search under the terms "Blog+Iraq" and you'll find them. Granted, there is no way to verify that these sites are authentic. Perhaps they were all created, as some charge, by the CIA. 5 If that's true, well then, chapeau!-and I apologize for all the times I made fun of you, old buddies. It's good to know our men in black have their act together at last.

But frankly, that seems unlikely. I watched CNN that day like everyone else. You saw what I saw, I'm sure: illiterate desert tribes-men, in dusty robes, walking for miles to reach the polls; young Iraqis carrying the elderly and the infirm in their arms to the voting booths; wizened women, dressed from head to toe in black, defiantly holding up their purple fingers to the cameras. I'm quite satisfied that the CIA didn't stage all of that and convince all the news stations, al-Jazeera included, to broadcast the phony footage.

Story after story reported on that day suggested that the sentiments expressed on these websites were typical. An Iraqi man who had lost his leg in a car bombing the year before announced to the press that he would have crawled to the polls if he had to. Voters stepped around the body of an exploded suicide bomber outside a polling station and in a particularly superb gesture spat on his corpse. Voters turned out in numbers that surpa.s.sed predictions, in percentages that exceeded any recent American election. They did so in the face of terrible danger: Thirty-five Iraqis were murdered on election day. In one instance the terrorists, apparently striving to set some kind of world record in depravity, used a kidnapped child with Down syndrome as an improvised explosive device.

The comparison to the mood of capitulation in the Netherlands is so striking that it cannot but arouse our curiosity. Of course it is understandable that the festival's administrators were spooked by the death threats. Surely the Iraqi voters were spooked, too. Why such a stunning discrepancy in bravery and defiance? Why did we see the Dutch capitulating to terrorists on the very day that Iraqis were- literally-spitting on them? Why, in fact, have we recently seen this kind of capitulation to Islamic radicalism over and over again throughout Europe?

BARGAINING WITH DEPRAVITY.

This is not the first time we have seen something like this in the Netherlands. The French have been widely and deservedly condemned- and are to this day remorselessly ridiculed-for collaborating with the n.a.z.is. They have never lived that down, despite the extraordinary French record of bravery in the First World War, which left almost every French village bled white and depopulated of young men.2 Everyone familiar with the history of the Second World War knows that the French offered little resistance to the n.a.z.i program for the destruction of French Jewry. It is not widely appreciated that the Dutch record is even worse. Perhaps it is because Anne Frank's diary is so well known that people now imagine Holland to have been overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g with st.u.r.dy towheaded heroes who at terrible risk to themselves stashed Jews in their attics. Careful readers will note, however, that the Frank family was betrayed to the n.a.z.is by their neighbors. 6 There is an important tradition in the Netherlands-as there is throughout Europe-of bargaining with depravity. The Dutch response to Islamic terror has much in common with the Dutch posture toward n.a.z.i terror. Both represent perversions of the n.o.ble Dutch tradition of accommodation and tolerance, one that dates from the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century-the age of Erasmus and the birth of humanism-when Dutch art, trade, and science were among the world's most acclaimed. The Jews of Portugal and Belgium fled to the tolerant Netherlands to escape the Inquisition. Scientists and philosophers from all of Europe, including Spinoza and Descartes, took refuge in the Netherlands. But in the past century, Dutch tolerance has had a notable tendency to shade into its ugly cousin-an inability to discern what cannot be tolerated.

The Dutch attempted to appease the n.a.z.is. This is not a taunt, it is simply a fact. The Netherlands' elites found much to admire in n.a.z.i Germany during the interwar period, and were particularly sympathetic to Hitler's anti-Communist and anti-Semitic agenda, as this typical comment from Willem Jacob Oudendijk, Holland's acting envoy to Petrograd, suggests: Unless . . . Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world as it is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things. The only manner in which this danger could be averted would be collective action on the part of all powers.7 By 1935, the Dutch were cooperating closely with the Germans in arresting their "Marxist and Jewish elements." Many of the German Jews who had taken refuge in the Netherlands following Hitler's seizure of power were forced to flee. In March 1935, Fort Honswijk, south of Utrecht, was redesigned as a concentration camp to contain "undesirable elements." In 1936, the influential newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant fired its Jewish foreign editor for criticizing the n.a.z.is.8 The Dutch royal family was surrounded by National Socialists. When the future queen, Princess Juliana, married a member of the Reiter-SS, Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld, guests at the wedding party hailed the couple with n.a.z.i salutes.9 The n.a.z.i diplomat Wolfgang zu Putlitz, a.s.signed to The Hague after a tour of duty in London, fondly recalled the Dutch and their cooperative posture in his memoirs: In England I had never come across officials in leading agencies who expressed their sympathy for the new Germanism as enthusiastically as in the Netherlands. . . . The National Socialists of Mr. Mussert [the leader of the Dutch n.a.z.is] had supporters in almost all ministries and even among the royal household. . . . There were Chiefs of Police who, summarily, at one signal from b.u.t.ting [an attache at the German emba.s.sy], deported German emigrants at any time of day or night, and handed them over to the Gestapo. . . . I have never heard that the Dutch government asked for a single doc.u.ment concerning such arbitrary acts, which were known to us by the dozen. 10 Following Kristallnacht, the Dutch government renounced the Netherlands' centuries-old tradition of sheltering fugitives, declaring that it would no longer accept Jewish refugees. The border was policed with especial care against desperate Jews attempting to escape from Germany. One week after Kristallnacht, the government issued a statement condemning Dutch citizens who privately attempted to rescue Jewish children: "The behavior of Dutch who transfer Jewish children by car or by train to the Netherlands has to be disapproved of."11 The Dutch appeas.e.m.e.nt policy ended as appeas.e.m.e.nt policies generally do when the German army invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 and overran the country within five days. Jews were swiftly dismissed from government positions and required to register themselves as non-Aryans, a demand to which the Dutch civil service acquiesced without complaint. On February 22, 1941, the first 430 Jews were picked at random, arrested, and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Within three months all were dead. Soon afterward, the ident.i.ty cards of Dutch Jews were stamped with the letter J, and Jews were forced to wear the yellow star. They were forbidden to travel and barred from public transportation, theaters, libraries, parks, and the homes of Gentiles. As the n.a.z.is demanded, the Dutch implemented the Nuremburg laws on racial purity. Jews were fired from their jobs. The n.a.z.is seized the valuables of Jews and transported them to German banks. During the entire Occupation, with the exception of a single day-and-a-half protest strike in February 1941, organized by the Communists, the Dutch took no public action to protest any of these policies.12 Indeed, the Dutch cooperated fully in their own moral destruction. The Dutch continued to trade energetically with the Germans, filling 84.4 percent of their orders. (The French filled only 70 percent of German orders.) 13 Dutch policemen arrested the Jews. Dutch officers guarded them in the transit camps. Dutch railway workers deported them for liquidation. Dutch security forces were praised by Himmler for their loyalty and industry. "Very good," the SS leader wrote at the top of a memo doc.u.menting their efficient contribution to the n.a.z.i death machine.14 Ordinary people were well aware of the fate that awaited those deported. Anyone who says otherwise is speaking nonsense. The n.a.z.is, with the help of the Dutch police, were seizing Jews from orphanages, hospitals, and homes for the aged. Their claim that these Jews were to be conscripted into labor service was patently ludicrous. No one ever received mail from the deported. Even a child like Anne Frank had a perfect grasp of the situation. "The English radio speaks of ga.s.sing," she wrote. "Maybe that is after all the quickest method of dying."15 When the ma.s.s deportations began, in July 1942, the Jewish population of the Netherlands stood at 140,000. Approximately 110,000 Jews were sent in sealed railway cars to the death camps. All but a handful were exterminated. The percentage of Jews who perished in the Netherlands exceeded that of any other country in Western Europe. This is why it is particularly disturbing now to see Dutch filmmakers taking orders from totalitarian fanatics who explicitly propose to destroy Dutch democracy and make no secret of their odium toward the world's remaining Jews.

It is not only the filmmakers who have exhibited a disturbing willingness to compromise with fanaticism. The Dutch state funds, with taxpayer money, hundreds of mosques and Islamic clubs headed by radical clerics who are committed to destroying Dutch civic order. In 2003, the Dutch government granted the Arab European League permission to open its first branch in the Netherlands. The league was founded in Belgium by Dyab Abou Jahjah, a former member of Hezbollah and self-described "armed resistor" in Lebanon. 16 It had already incited vicious riots and anti-Semitic violence in Antwerp, and had issued public approvals of September 11. "Sweet revenge," said Jahjah. Jahjah seeks the implementation of sharia-Islamic law- throughout Europe. In the "sharocracy" he envisions, all women will be covered.17 The organization has pledged solidarity with the Iraqi insurgency: With Dutch troops serving in Iraq, this would seem to be a posture that crosses the line between moral ignominy and treason.

The interim leader of the Netherlands branch of the Arab European League, Jamil Jawad, opened the league's inaugural meeting by calling for the destruction of Israel. He then demanded the abolition of the Netherlands' drug-selling coffee shops and legal brothels. His successor, Mohammed Cheppiah, urged that h.o.m.os.e.xuals be stoned to death. The league's press officer, Naima Elmaslouhi, announced that she found unproblematic the sight of Moroccan youths chanting "Hamas, Hamas, gas all the Jews" on the streets of Amsterdam, as they did during protest marches in 2002. 18 (This was reported in the NRC Handelsblad, commonly regarded as the Netherlands' highest-quality newspaper. Elmaslouhi subsequently denied making the remark. I know who I believe.) When, in November 2003, terrorists believed to be linked to al Qaeda detonated bombs throughout Turkey, killing more than 50 people, Elmaslouhi expressed her "support and understanding" of the murderers. They had, after all, blown up two synagogues. "I am against the killing of innocents," she said, "but how do you know who is innocent?"19 As far as I know, she has not denied making this remark. Following the Madrid train bombings that left nearly 200 dead and hundreds more injured, Jahjah, the league's founder, remarked in a televised debate that a similar attack was likely in the Netherlands. "It's logical," he said. "You make war with us, we make war with you." 20 Why on earth should the Dutch tolerate this, an official, legal terrorist organization dedicated to erasing Dutch tolerance?

OH, UNBELIEVING FUNDAMENTALISTS: THE MURDER OF THEO VAN GOGH.

Dutch courage does exist, however, and has recently been personified by the politician and author of Submission, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who happens to have been born in Mogadishu, not Holland. The daughter of a politician forced into exile by the Somali civil war, Hirsi Ali was raised throughout Islamic Africa and the Middle East, and thus observed the lives of Muslim women from a number of bleak perspectives. When Hirsi Ali turned twenty-three, her father announced her engagement to a kinsman in Canada, a man twice her age who grandly proposed to sire six children in a row. Hirsi Ali was en route to Canada, transiting Germany, when she slipped off the plane and fled, seeking and receiving asylum in the Netherlands. She spoke not one word of Dutch.

She was an uneducated woman with no financial resources. In one gesture, she exiled herself from everything familiar to her, from her family and her culture, even from her language. Supporting herself with cleaning jobs, she studied Dutch, acquiring a now-legendary fluency. She put herself through college, where she studied political thought from the Greco-Roman era to the present. She was particularly fascinated by the writings of John Stuart Mill. She joined the Dutch Labor Party and won a seat in the Dutch parliament, becoming prominent as an advocate for abused Islamic women. She denounced the forcible imposition of the veil, incest, spousal battery, and the monstrous practice of female genital mutilation. She carefully doc.u.mented thousands of these crimes among Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands.

Astonis.h.i.+ngly, her stance on these issues was both controversial and rare. Antipathy came not only from Muslims, from whom she received a steady influx of death threats, but from her own political party, which demanded she abandon her campaign. "They don't want to believe Muslim women in the Netherlands are beaten and locked up in their homes," she said, "or that girls are murdered for holding hands with a non-Muslim boy. When I took it up with the Labor Party they sided with the Islamic conservatives, and told me to stop, so that's when I became really inflamed."21 Hirsi Ali left the Labor Party and joined the Liberal Party, where she has led a campaign against the Dutch government's expensive support for the multiculturalism programs that, she argues, have succeeded only in isolating Muslim women still further from Dutch society. She particularly opposes the funding of education for immigrants in their own languages, rather than Dutch, and the government's underwriting of more than 700 Islamic clubs, many headed by radical imams who do not speak Dutch and know nothing about Dutch culture.

Submission-the film Hirsi Ali wrote and for which her friend and collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered-is only eleven minutes long. It depicts women in transparent veils and low-cut wedding gowns, with red lash marks on their flesh and blackened eyes. Texts from the Koran have been inscribed directly on their skin. Among these texts are the pa.s.sages sanctioning the physical punishment of disobedient women. The women pray out loud, asking Allah for strength to bear their suffering.

I wish I could report that Submission is a triumphant artistic achievement. It's awful, actually. It's set to music that sounds like a p.o.r.n flick sound track overdubbed with the muezzin's call to prayer- bow-chicka-mow-mow-allahu-akbar! Even worse than the sound track is the acting, which manages, curiously, to be both leaden and overwrought at once. After eleven minutes of watching these prissy martyred creatures roll their eyes heavenward as they supplicate and whinge to Allah, one finds sympathy for the urge to slap them around. But the film's artistic merits are not the point. No one should die for making a crummy movie. The film's moral message is one to which no civilized person-and particularly no feminist-should object.

Submission aired in the Netherlands on August 29, 2004. On November 2, 2004, a man dressed in a traditional Moroccan djellaba shot Van Gogh as he cycled to work in central Amsterdam. The filmmaker pleaded for mercy while the a.s.sailant stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. When Van Gogh tried to stumble away, his attacker shot him again, stabbed him again, slit his throat with a butcher knife, then used the knife to skewer a five-page letter to his chest, lodging the blade all the way to his spinal column. The letter called for the murder of Hirsi Ali, who was aligned, it said, with "Jewish masters," and threatened several other Dutch politicians, including the Jewish mayor of Amsterdam (who, curiously, responded to the murder by calling for greater trust between native Dutch and Moroccans). 22 It described the sounds the author expected presently to hear throughout the streets of Europe: "Screams, Miss Hirsi Ali, that will cause s.h.i.+vers to roll down one's spine; that will make hair stand up from heads. People will be seen drunk with fear while they are not drunk. FEAR shall fill the atmosphere on that great day."3 It concluded: I know for sure that you, Oh America, will go under;

I know for sure that you, Oh Europe, will go under;