RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Less Islam” is the key. Forget the currency crisis, social policy, welfare payments, and other nitty-gritty elements of most European elections. The biggest loser is Holland’s soon-to-be former Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, and his demise is long overdue. Six years ago, in a display of idiocy be expected from a supine Euro-Socialist, he rushed to declare — in the immediate aftermath of the Jihadist murder of Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street — that  “nothing is known about the motive” of the killer, and called on the nation “not to jump to far-reaching conclusions.” Balkenende also referred to van Gogh’s “outspoken opinions” — hinting that he had it coming — and added that it was “unacceptable if a difference of opinion led to this brutal murder.” Mijnheer Balkenende seemed to be implying that “this brutal murder” would have been deemed less “unacceptable” had it been caused not by “a difference of opinion” but by some more profound reason — by the sense of pain and grievance in the Muslim community, perhaps, caused by the late filmmaker’s insensitive and inappropriate actions.

Balkenende’s defeat was also due to a host of other issues, but his undissenting dhimmitude is the key. His Islamophile inanities are no longer acceptable to a growing segment of Holland’s electorate. The Old Continent is waking up, slowly, to the possibility that by 2050, Muslims will account for over a quarter of its young residents west of the Trieste-Stettin line. Millions of them already live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country, toward which they have a disdainful and hostile attitude.

Today’s “United Europe,” epitomized by Balkenende and his fellow-bien-pensants in Brussels and most national chancelleries, does not create social and civilizational commonalities except on the basis of wholesale denial of old mores and disdain for inherited values. It creates the dreary sameness of multicultural “tolerance.” Their decrepitude breeds contempt and haughty arrogance on the other side: Tariq Ramadan thus calmly insists that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of the host-society. Muslims in Europe should feel entitled to live on their own terms, Ramadan says, while, “under the terms of Western liberal tolerance,” society as a whole should be “obliged to respect that choice.”

If such “respect” continues to be enforced by the elite class, by the end of this century there will be no “Europeans” as members of ethnic groups that share the same language, culture, history, and ancestors, and inhabit lands associated with their names. The shrinking native populations will be indoctrinated into believing — or else simply forced into accepting — that the demographic shift in favor of unassimilable and hostile aliens is a blessing that enriches their culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. The “liberal tolerance” and the accompanying “societal obligation” that Tariq Ramadan invokes are the tools of Western suicide. “No other race subscribes to these moral principles,” Jean Raspail wrote a generation ago, “because they are weapons of self-annihilation.”

The Dutch voters — traditionally among the most liberal in Europe — are waking up to the fact that those weapons need to be discarded, and the upholders of those deadly “principles” removed from all positions of power and influence, if their nation is to survive.

In 1938 Hilaire Belloc wondered, “Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Muhammadan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans — still nominally Christian — and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?” Seven decades later, the same traits of decrepitude are present in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States, including both the primary cause, which is the loss of religious faith, and several secondary ones. Topping the list is elite hostility to all forms of solidarity of the majority population based on shared historical memories, ancestors, and common culture. The end result is the Westerners’ loss of the sense of propriety over their lands.

Widers is shaking an elite consensus that de facto open immigration, multiculturalism, and the existence of a large Muslim diaspora within the Western world are to be treated as a fixed and immutable fact. That consensus is flawed in logic, dogmatic in application, and disastrous in its results. The grand Gleichschaltung of nations, races, and cultures, which will mark the end of history, is not preordained. In Holland the fruits are all too visible. Gibbon could have had today’s Rotterdam in mind, when he wrote of Rome in decline, its masses morphing “into a vile and wretched populace.”

Wilders has shown that this crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty, on both sides of the Atlantic.