This is perhaps nothing more than wishful thinking, but my sense is that in Europe, when it comes to Islam, things may just possibly be coming increasingly to a head. I suspect that the monstrous Hamas attacks of October 7 awakened the imaginations of millions of Europeans who, although on some level surely knowing better, had lulled themselves into passivity with the notion that those surly-looking Muslims living in their midst, some of whom occasionally spoke out loud about conquering Europe in the name of their prophet, couldn’t possibly mean what they said or be as dangerous as they looked. Surely, moreover, the far from peaceable pro-Hamas protests that have taken place every weekend in any number of major cities around Europe have impressed upon people who, until recently, had their heads firmly stuck in the sand, that over the last few decades they had imported into their countries huge numbers of people who not only loathed and looked down on them but who might very well be prepared, early on any given morning, to do to them more or less what Hamas did to innocent Israelis on October 7.

Which brings us to the recent elections for the European Parliament (EP). Now, the parliament itself, for all its air of self-importance, is a rather meaningless and impotent organ, a rubber-stamp legislature whose function within the European Union brings to mind the role of the Supreme Soviet back in the USSR. Traditionally, European citizens, recognizing its irrelevance, have tended not to bother voting in EP elections. Even this year, the voter turnout was nothing to write home about. Nonetheless, those people who did bother to cast their ballots produced a set of results that have caused an earthquake from one end of the continent to the other. The French President immediately called for new elections. The Belgian Prime Minister resigned, reportedly in tears.

In 2006, I published a book entitled While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. If I had written the book a couple of years later, I’d have omitted the word “radical” – and removed references within the text to “extreme Islam” and the like. Because in the meantime I had come to realize that Islam is Islam. So-called “radical Islam” isn’t some kind of aberration, some twisted deviation from the peaceful norm – it’s Islam itself, the Islam of the Koran, the Islam of the prophet. It’s what Islam looks like when it’s taken seriously and practiced by the book. In the nearly two decades since that book came out, I’ve been writing endlessly about the topic – and, along with fellow truth-tellers, being dismissed as a racist, a conspiracy theorist, an Islamophobe, and a subscriber to an apparently bizarre, far-out, cult-like set of ideas known as the “Eurabia theory.”

Our allies in the corridors of power have been thin on the ground. One of them has been the courageous Dutch politician Geert Wilders, whose Freedom Party, now the largest in the Netherlands, won big in the EP elections. Other European politicians have also sounded the alarm about Islam, but have been routinely isolated, suppressed, and demonized by the political and media establishment. No more. Jimmie Åkelsson’s Sweden Democrats, which has been vociferously critical of Islam and which was long depicted as the virtual equivalent of Nazis, are now the second largest party in the Swedish Riksdag. In France, Marine Le Pen has run for President three times, coming in third once and coming in second twice; in the recent EP elections, her party, the National Rally, crushed Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party, after which she told a gathering of supporters: “Give me one reason, only one, to keep on our territory foreigners who collaborate with a totalitarian ideology that wants the death of the French.”

Yes, Le Pen – like Wilders, and Åkelsson, and others – has made similar declarations in the past. But in the aftermath of the EP elections these words suddenly sound rather different. They feel as if they carry more weight. They sound, at long last, as if they’re being spoken from a place of potential power. No, gaining a bunch of seats in the EP isn’t the world’s largest electoral coup, but it certainly signals that the veteran Le Pen and 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, the charismatic president of National Rally, may well be on the verge of displacing Macron and the rest of the useless, wishy-washy French political establishment and actually being in a position to take France back. “We are ready to govern,” Bardella said in an interview on Tuesday, and when his interviewer replied with a typical reference to him and Le Pen as leaders of a “far right” that strikes fear into the hearts of millions of Frenchmen, Bardella didn’t even bother to dismiss that stupid label “far right”; all he said was: “Times have changed.”

And it looks as if they really have changed. Or are, at least, changing. I’ve previously mentioned that another of the parties that did well in the EP elections, the Alternative for Germany, has its ticklish aspects (to put it mildly), but the other day one of its leading members, Maximilian Krah, sounded for all the world like Justin Peterson, reminding us that, as Andrew Breitbart said, the political is always downstream from the cultural: “One in three young men in Germany has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them?…Don’t watch porn, don’t vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don’t believe you need to be nice and soft.” If Bardella didn’t bother to reject the term “far right,” Krah went so far as to embrace it: “Real men stand on the far right.” Some might read this as nothing less than a declaration of solidarity with neo-Nazis, but to me it sounds more like a tongue-in-cheek thumbing of the nose to mainstream journalists and politicians who reflexively use the term “far right” to label anyone to the left of Stalin. “Real men are patriots,” declared Krah. “That’s the way to find a girlfriend!” This kind of rhetoric might have sounded frightening if delivered by certain figures in the Germany of the 1930s, but today I read it, tentatively in any case, as a welcome corrective to the sort of political and social thinking that has bred a generation of cowardly soy boys who put on masks, pick up truncheons or other weapons, and, ganging up against helpless innocents, pretend to be fighting fascism.

These developments are happening, note well, at a time when challengers, Muslim and otherwise, to the European status quo are increasingly outspoken about their determination to conquer and increasingly violent – not just toward ordinary citizens but toward the previously immune people at the top. Last Friday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen suffered whiplash after a man approached her in a Copenhagen square and punched her in the arm. Yes, her assailant was Polish – an immigrant group that’s heavily represented in Western Europe these days, and known far more for being law-abiding and for being hard workers than for committing acts of violence. But, hey, it happened. And it’s the kind of thing that simply wouldn’t have happened in Denmark a couple of generations ago.

As the Guardian noted, this was the latest of many violent attacks on politicians in Europe: “In May, Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was shot and seriously injured. A German Social Democrat MEP was hit putting up posters in Dresden.” Two German politicians were also assaulted – one of them hit in the head, the other stabbed. Frederiksen’s comments on her own incident sounded naive. “I am so sad about this,” she said, “because we have always been so happy – and I think proud – of a country where the prime minister cycles to work.” Well, way back in 2004 – twenty years ago this coming November 2 – the filmmaker, columnist, TV personality, and all-around raconteur Theo van Gogh was cycling to work in Amsterdam when he was shot multiple times and then had his throat slit by a young Dutch-Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri, whose motive for this chilling act of butchery was that van Gogh, in collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, had made a short film critical of Islam’s treatment of women.

Van Gogh’s murder followed that of another Dutchman, Pim Fortuyn, who was killed on May 6, 2002, at a moment when he was on the verge of becoming his country’s prime minister. Fortuyn, a professor, sociologist, journalist, and old–school boulevardier, was an eloquent voice against the Islamization of Europe. He was gay, and, apropos of the Islamization of his country, famously commented: “I have no desire to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again.” The exciting prospect of his rise to power seemed to portend a remarkable new era in Europe – an era when political leaders, learning from Fortuyn, would dare to speak the truth fearlessly and act upon it responsibly. Then, all at once, he was dead – and the Dutch queen herself, to her everlasting disgrace, was obviously so worried about how Muslims might react that she avoided saying or doing anything of substance to express her respect or mourning. After that horror, it somehow took a very long time for the Dutch people to rally again, in significant numbers, behind a gutsy critic of Islam. But now, all these years after the martyrdom of Fortuyn and van Gogh, it’s finally looking as if, under Wilders, the promise they embodied may yet be fulfilled. Of course, some of us wonder whether it’s already far too late to speak seriously, as Le Pen does, of removing from Europe “foreigners who collaborate with a totalitarian ideology that wants the death” of the continent’s native inhabitants. But better to try than to surrender.