HEIRS TO FORTUYN? Europe's Turn to the Right.

• Author: Abrahamson, James L.
• Position: Pim Fortuyn on Muslim immigration

HEIRS TO FORTUYN? Europe's Turn to the Right

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124043553074744693.html

http://ac.matra.free.fr/FB/bawer.pdf

By Bruce Bawer, author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom

In the spring of 2002, an environmental fanatic murdered openly gay Dutch parliamentarian Pim Fortuyn, whom Bruce Bawer describes as an early victim in the battle for the soul of Europe. Pim had condemned Islam for its treatment of women and rejected the socialist and multicultural orientation of European politics, which prompted Western media to describe him as a fascist, an enemy of both minorities and democracy. Research for his book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, has convinced Bawer that Europeans are now taking a turn to the right, making them heirs of Fortuyn and less critical of everything American--at least for the moment. Even so, the fate of America's principal allies--those whom it saved from Soviet domination--remains uncertain as they face the cultural and financial challenges posed by their growing and unassimilated Muslim populations.

One of the causes of that shift derives from the European public's growing rejection of the region's leftwing parties for their three-decades of support for large Muslim immigration, which brought the European Muslim population to between 15 and 20 million by 2005. Roughly representative of Europe as a whole, Britain's Muslim population grew from 82,000 in 1961 to two million by 2000.

Faced with that wave of immigration, Europe's social democratic governments failed to encourage the new arrivals to assimilate and become integrated into European society. The new Muslim arrivals have, he writes, formed undemocratic, patriarchal, "self-segregating parallel societies run more or less according to Shariah [law]." Knowing little of the language and culture of their adopted countries, they subsist largely on government welfare and "at least in spirit" support terrorism aimed at the West. Muslim youth gangs now make many European cities dangerous places for...