Filling in the gap
Claire Berlinski reviews Walter Laqueur’s new book:
en route to the British Library, I strolled past the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Piccadilly. I was on foot because it was a beautiful day and because there is a distinctly creepy mood, these days, on London’s tubes and busses. Signs everywhere remind passengers that they are on CCTV. The police presence is heavy and visible. To be sure, the odds of any one bus blowing up are tiny, but the ubiquitous security prompts the unwelcome thought that there are people about who seek to better those odds. Days later, I flew out of Heathrow airport, where the mood was creepier still. Lines snaked for hours through claustrophobic security screening pens, and passengers stared balefully at the earnest sniffer dogs, wondering how much confidence to place in that goofy spaniel’s nose.
Then the British government awarded Salman Rushdie a knighthood. Pakistan’s minister of religious affairs, Mohammed Ijaz ul Haq, suggested suicide bombings would be a justified response. Muslim protestors outside London’s Regent’s Park mosque chanted “Death to Rushdie, Death to the Queen.” In a letter to the Guardian, the leaders of 12 British Muslim groups called the award (but not those protests) “a deliberate provocation and insult to the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world.” Shortly thereafter, Islamic terrorists — doctors, no less—left two car bombs packedwith gasoline and nails on the streets of London’s theater district, one of them outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub. When those failed to explode, they rammed a Jeep Cherokee into the arrival hall of Glasgow airport, crashing through the windows only yards from passengers at the check-in counters.
Britain’s new prime minister, Gordon Brown, ordered his ministers to refrain from using the words “Muslim” and “Islam” in connection with these outrages. I shall not follow suit. It is a simple fact that Muslim immigrants in Europe tried, once again, to kill people like me, and it is another simple fact that no one was even much surprised. It is part of a pattern and everyone knows it. I don’t feel sober and measured about that. And why should I? Why should anyone else?
But sober and measured, apparently, is precisely what we are supposed to feel. Walter Laqueur’s “The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent” (Thomas Dunne, 226 pages, $25.95) has been received with sighs of gratitude by critics who approve of its sober and measured tone. Mr. Laqueur calmly describes a Europe that is “bound to change, probably out of recognition.” Its dominant role in world affairs is “a thing of the past.” Many Muslims (and yes, that word is “many,” not “a tiny minority”) sympathize not only with the goals of the terrorists, but with their means. As Mr. Laqueur correctly notes, “26 percent of [British] Muslims interviewed felt no loyalty to Britain; 40 percent opted for introducing the laws of sharia in certain parts of Britain … 13 percent justified terrorist attacks Al Qaeda style and 47% supported suicide attacks such as in Israel.”…
“Future historians,” Mr. Laqueur concludes, “may well be at a loss to understand why the sorry state of affairs was realized only late in the day, despite the fact that all the major trends mentioned in this brief study — demography, the stalling of the movement toward European unity, and the crisis of the welfare state — had appeared well before the turn of the century.” Future historians please note: Not everyone was late.
It is noteworthy and odd that Laqueur does not much credit in the course of his work the books of Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips, Tony Blankley, Bat Ye’Or, or Oriana Fallaci on the same subject.