Before Europe can deal with Islam.

Victor Davis Hanson nails the Europeans for their abandonment of an effective national military option and consequent fatal reliance on the corrupt and weak multilateral organization of their dreams, the United Nations. And for other sins. See extract of his thoughts in Junge Freiheit at "Europe’s Future: Prescription for Disaster." The Brussels Journal, 2/29/08

For a very illuminating article about the details of France's present predicament, see "Can France Be Saved?," by Michel Gurfinkiel, Commentary, May 2007.

Many Europeans illusions are being shattered.

I doubt, though, that illusion is being replaced by insight. Before Europeans can mount a defense against the silent insurrection taking place before their eyes, many of them will have has to come to terms with their intellectual failures vis-a-vis socialism and communism – the Something for Nothing and the Let Thieving Swine Lead You into Madness schools of thought.

Even before Islam was the remotest threat to modern Europe, massed throngs of Europeans fell for the outright fraud of socialism and communism. That necessarily involved a wholesale betrayal of bedrock principles of the West and a descent into pure fantasy. It was a betrayal because illiberalism was raised high above the liberal foundation of Europe. Fantasy, because otherwise intelligent people maintained that life in communist countries was not a life of degradation, fear, and hypocrisy.

Why exactly should it surprise anyone then if Europeans can't presently figure out what's wrong with Islam if, for decades, they casually rejected what's right about themselves?

The first step for Europeans to regain their intellectual integrity is to acknowledge that they fell for the biggest fairy tale in history. When the communists talked nonsense about the dictatorship of the proletariat European minds went blank and they just could not see that behind that empty phrase there was the mailed fist, the knock on the door, the nine grams in the basement of the Lubyanka, and Wagon Zek to Vorkuta.

I'm speaking primarily of the sins of the intellectual class, though ordinary citizens need to accept blame too for spooning up promises of cradle to grave security and a host of benefits purchased at the cost of greater and greater drag on the productive sector.

Until Europeans can appreciate the mortal threat of a culture whose bedrock principles include imposition of the death penalty for independent thought, they will need honestly to face how they revere the use of political correctness to silence critics today, and how they did not have the integrity to admit that the communism they loved and admired executed its dissidents outright or inflicted on them a slow death in the Kolyma from cold and starvation or in the psychiatric prisons from chemicals that destroyed their brains.