RUTHFULLY YOURS

There was a time, in the years immediately after 9/11, when I was reasonably (though not entirely) confident that we Americans would be too savvy to let ourselves be led down the primrose path of Islamization. I assumed that the alarming example of Europe – where the destructive nature of Islam’s impact was there for all to see – would be effective enough to persuade us to pull up the welcome mat and double-lock the door. What I didn’t count on was that so many of our politicians and media would do such a splendid job of covering up the facts about the European situation and whitewashing the Religion of Peace. Nor could I have imagined that the post-9/11 generation of Americans would grow up to be so thoroughly drenched in political correctness that many of them would, in fact, come to see Islam not as an violent existential threat but as the most vulnerable of victim groups.

Yes, Americans elected Trump. Red-state Americans, anyway. But coastal elites went ballistic over his executive order that sought to put a temporary halt to immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Hollywood, the bubble-headed brain trust of blue-state America, set the tone of the backlash: Judd Apatow denounced Trump’s “ignorance and cruelty”; Patricia Arquette suggested returning the Statue of Liberty to France; John Leguizamo reminded his Twitter followers that “The pilgrims came here on the #mayflower as refugees!” Several celebrity tweets implied that Europeans would never support such a monstrous act. Yet a new poll tells otherwise. Most EU citizens, it shows, would be happy to see a total and permanent end to immigration from the Islamic world. To be specific: 71% of Poles, 65% of Austrians, 53% of Germans, 51% of Italians, 64% of Belgians, 58% of Greeks, 61% of Frenchmen, and 64% of Hungarians want Muslim immigration to stop. For good. Only in two of the ten European countries surveyed did a Muslim immigration ban not win the support of a clear majority, and even in those cases a plurality approved of a ban: in Britain, the numbers were 47% for, 23% against; in Spain, 41% to 32%.

Chatham House, the London-based think tank that conducted the survey, plainly found these results distasteful. Calling them “sobering” and attributing them (at least in part) to the influence of the so-called “radical right,” the pollsters sought to discount opposition to Muslim immigration by emphasizing that it was stronger among pensioners, the undereducated, rural types, and those “who are dissatisfied with their life” – in other words, not the right sort of people. Of course, what self-respecting think tank would be willing to admit that Europeans – having had enough of doling out welfare to immigrants who, in return, rape women and children, torment Jews and gays, commit violent crimes on an unprecedented scale, and express contempt for democracy and their infidel neighbors while tacitly supporting terrorism and sharia – are finally waking up?

How depressing that while more and more Europeans are snapping out of their self-delusions, all too many North Americans remain first-class dupes. According to the results of a Rasmussen poll that were released just the other day, 56% of Democrats actually believe that Muslims undergo serious persecution in the U.S, while only 46% think that Christians are persecuted in the Islamic world. What could be more delusional? Meanwhile, a CBS survey showed that only one in seven Democrats consider Islam to be more dangerous than any other religion and that nearly seven out of ten Democrats think Islam encourages violence to approximately the same extent as other faiths. Insane. Not to leave Canadians out, on February 16 the Parliament in Ottawa will actually consider a motion, known as M-103, that would criminalize Islamophobia. It’s a move that should elicit mass protests in the streets; but most Canadians appear to be far more worked up about Trump than about the prospect of their own government severely curtailing their free-speech rights.

From all this, it’s hard not to draw a bleak conclusion: namely, that most citizens of Western countries don’t come to their senses on Islam until their countries are so far gone that it’s too late – or almost too late – to rescue them. Even bleaker is the determination of the media, academic, and political establishment to keep drinking the Kool-Aid even after the masses decide they’re done. Just the other day, Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, insisted that immigration into the EU would continue no matter what. “Europeans,” she loftily pronounced, “should understand that we need migration for our economies and for our welfare systems.” As if the Muslim tsunami were anything but a drain on Europe’s economies and welfare states! Her opponents’ views, Mogherini claimed, were “based on confrontation, instead of cooperation; on building walls, instead of building partnerships; on closures and bans, rather than dialogue.” Ah, “cooperation”! “Building partnership”! “Dialogue”! Imagine being so insulated from reality that you’re still capable of buying into all that empty rhetoric. The sooner Europe can junk the EU and kick Mogherini and her ilk to the curb, the better. But what’s to be done for America, where half the population, locked arm in arm philosophically with Meryl Streep and Lena Dunham, looks at the Islamic hordes over here and the Trump brigades over there, and sees the latter as a bunch of brownshirts?