Cracks in the European Facade

Bruce Bawer has written a thoughtful City Journal piece on politics in Europe. Unbridled immigration championed by the left is changing the face of the continent: overburdened social services, gangs of angry young men contemptuous of everything Western, rampant crime and domestic abuse, demands for Sharia law...

It's scary, leading some to look to the right at the ballot box. But there are scary things over there too, so voters are stuck.

...over the last three decades, social-democratic Europe’s political, cultural, academic, and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history.

According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth ten times that of the rest of that country’s population.

Yet instead of encouraging these immigrants to integrate and become part of their new societies, Western Europe’s governments have allowed them to form self-segregating parallel societies run more or less according to sharia.

Many of the residents of these patriarchal enclaves subsist on government benefits, speak the language of their adopted country poorly or not at all, despise pluralistic democracy, look forward to Europe’s incorporation into the House of Islam, and support—at least in spirit—terrorism against the West.

Europe's strength has become its weakness: It's passive tolerance makes it ripe for social conquest by aggressive bearers of intolerant dogma.

City Journal
http://www.brucebawer.com/