Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  Some of the skeptics speculated that this Potemkin plot was concocted by the Bush administration as a panicked response to Joe Lieberman’s Senate primary defeat by Ned Lamont. This requires imagining that foreign conspirators in the hoax knew who Joe Lieberman was, first, and gave a rat’s patoot about his political fortunes, second. And it requires believing that at some point, George Bush placed a phone call to Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf and asked him to arrest a few dozen innocent citizens, torture them for verisimilitude, and then subject them to a show trial—just to distract Americans from the fortunes of the Democratic Party’s Lieberman wing. How can anyone in full possession of his faculties seriously entertain this idea? What’s that, Pervez? You say you don’t have the first clue who this Lieberman guy is and he’s sure as hell not your problem? . . . Oh, no, you’ve got it all wrong; Lieberman’s not a Jewish name, Pervie, we wouldn’t ask you to do that for a . . . Perve? You still there, Perve?”

  It is psychologically fascinating to recognize that so many people are willing to dream up these extraordinarily unlikely scenario, and blindly put their confidence in them, in preference to confronting an unpleasant but perfectly obvious truth: Europe is home to a significant number of homicidal maniacs who want to kill as many of their countrymen, and as many Americans, as they possibly can. In Freudian analysis, the term “displacement” refers to an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind redirects emotion from a dangerous object to a safe one. This concept, in conjunction with the equally useful Freudian concept of denial, goes quite some ways toward explaining what we are now seeing in Europe.

  Two days after the plot was revealed, an unknown number of suspects remained at large. I was in Paris and scheduled to fly out of Orly Airport. I personally had no doubt that the plot was real. Trying to convince myself that this must, in fact, be the best time to fly, since security would now be so rigorous, I looked on Google to see what new, reassuringly tough screening measures the French airports had put in place. To my astonishment, I discovered that Orly’s security screeners had gone on strike. France-2 television showed them marching gaily through the terminal at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, carrying huge banners demanding more job security.

  Now, no one, no one on this planet, has more job security than a French government employee. Short of having the next hundred years’ worth of paychecks stapled directly to their pampered posteriors in dollar-denominated T-bills, there is no way French government employees could be more secure in their financial futures than they already are. Yet the strike couldn’t be postponed by even a day—even if it put at risk the lives of every man, woman, and child traveling through French airports.

  Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, having convened an emergency meeting in Paris to discuss the terrorist threat, called for 100 percent searches of all hand luggage on flights heading for the United States. Not possible, responded the head of the security screeners’ union. You see, he said, we need higher wages and better working conditions .

  I, for one, thought what they really needed was to be taken out and shot.

  I stressed in this book that Europeans have taken the idea of a right to job security to its pathological outer limits, and this point was beautifully demonstrated not only by the security screeners’ strike, but also by the recent protests in France against the contrat première embauche. Last March, French students took to the streets to protest the new law, which was proposed to combat unemployment by giving employers more flexibility to fire—and thus hire—young employees. This was the second time in four months that France had been seized with violent protests. But the goals of the golden flock of imbeciles on the streets in March were in fact in perfect conflict with those of unemployed immigrants who took to the street in the previous round of protests. If the suburban rioters wanted a change in their circumstances, the students wanted things to stay exactly the same. And because the students’ anxieties closely mirrored the concerns of the majority of the French public, the CPE was swiftly defeated. No surprise—in France, job security will win every time.

  No one in France is willing to admit that French labor laws are absurd; no one will say that barring their reform, France faces economic eclipse, if not collapse. So powerful is the sense of entitlement in France that even during a crisis involving a genuine threat to bodily security, French luggage screeners felt confident that they could blackmail the government in the name of job security and get away with it. I very much doubt that the economic and social reforms needed to ameliorate the desperate conditions in French slums will ever be put in place. Thus, for those at the bottom of the French socioeconomic heap, all that stretches out before them is hopelessness, indolence, and the dole.

  I’m under no illusion that reforming Europe’s labor laws and welfare economies would be the miracle cure for Islamic radicalism. If that were the case, Britain, with one of the most liberalized economies in Europe, would be the European country with the least significant problem on its hands, whereas the reality is just the opposite. The men and women, including one pregnant woman, who planned to detonate themselves over the Atlantic in August appeared to be, like the London Tube bombers before them, comfortably middle class. They were full beneficiaries of Britain’s liberalized economy. Some were university educated. They were not planning to commit murder because they were poor and oppressed, no more than Theo van Gogh’s murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, acted from desperate poverty. They were acting, as Bouyeri said at his trial—and as these miserable wretches surely will at theirs—out of conviction. An ideology is again the source of the violent impulse spreading across Europe. This seems a particularly difficult point for many to grasp. Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Marxist assumption that ideology must be the consequence, not the cause, of economic circumstance remains almost impossible for many Europeans to shake.

  After this book was published, some suggested that I believed the solution lay in a Christian revival throughout Europe. Let me make myself even clearer: I don’t, and I have called for no such thing. My observations about the sociological consequences of the decline of religious faith in Europe are descriptive, not prescriptive; I doubt that it would even be possible for the forms of Christianity that once prevailed on the Continent to return, not least because the political structures to which they were attached have been erased. The key point of my book is to recognize that certain forms of essential human longing remain, and equally to recognize that they are now being expressed in other forms. Once this is acknowledged consciously—as in psychoanalysis—there is a freedom to choose more appropriate behavior, whether religious or secular.

  I am, however, an advocate of Enlightenment values, including the strict separation of church and state. Europe is certainly far from those values now, as the cartoon riots, which erupted shortly after this book’s publication, made it all too clear. On September 30, 2005, Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper published an article entitled “The Face of Muhammad,” consisting of twelve cartoons—only some of which depicted Muhammad—and a text by Flemming Rose, the newspaper’s culture editor, explaining that the cartoons had been commissioned to test the new boundaries of freedom of speech in Europe. The ensuing protests and violence were fomented by opportunistic Danish imams who made political capital of the cartoons by touring the Middle East and pointing out to certain fascinated heads of state the intriguing opportunities for mischief-making inherent in the situation. Expressing infinite contempt for every value of the Enlightenment, protesters outside Danish embassies in Europe loudly cried for Osama bin Laden to “bomb Denmark,” to “nuke Germany, nuke France, nuke the USA,” to “behead those who insult Islam” and “spread blood in the streets of England.” Interestingly, some protesters were seen burning the flag of the European Union. One must be grateful for the EU’s decision to ban such terms as “Islamic fascism,” for surely it would be fearsome to see such men when they were really “frustrated.”

  I was initially heartened to see Danish prime m
inister Anders Fogh Rasmussen setting a fine example of defiance in the face of intimidation, refusing even to discuss the idea that the Danish government should be in the business of censoring political speech. “This is a matter of principle,” he said. “I won’t meet with [Muslim ambassadors] because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so . . . I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humor, and satire in the press.” His splendid words inspired in me a shy flicker of hope until, soon afterward, I received an utterly dispiriting e-mail from Denmark. Several months prior, I had posted an ad on craigslist seeking someone to care for my pets in Istanbul while I went to the United States on my book tour. Two elderly Danish women had replied, and recently I had written back, asking if they were still free to come. Their message offered their regrets. It seemed, they wrote, that it was unsafe and inadvisable for Danes to visit any Muslim country. There had been demonstrations against their embassy in Istanbul, they noted, and all travel from Denmark to Egypt had been halted. The violence was spreading quickly. Then the punch line: They apologized for the situation. They understood full well, they wrote, why Muslims were offended by their newspaper’s treatment of the Prophet. Would I please extend their apologies to all of my Turkish friends?

  Could anything more poignantly sum up the thesis of this book? By all accounts, the attitude evidenced by these two bewildered and kindhearted old ladies was widespread among the Danish public. Indeed, throughout Europe, tentative displays of backbone were followed immediately by whimpering, tail-wagging supplication, as if the muscles supporting the European spine had atrophied through disuse.

  Some in the press did make an attempt to stand up for the principle of freedom of speech. Directly after the riots began, France Soir carried a fine editorial stating that the cartoons were indeed blasphemous, and if Muslims didn’t like it, tough. The Catholic Church, noted the editorialists, had once claimed the right that Muslims were now demanding. France had taken care of that problem with the Revolution. Good stuff, that editorial, and long overdue. One day later, the editor was sacked.

  The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers condemned the Danish media’s “intolerance.” The Swedish government closed down a political party’s website for displaying the cartoons. A Norwegian editor who ran the cartoons apologized abjectly. European companies with interests in the Muslim world competed to see who could distance themselves fastest from the cartoons and from their own principles.

  Shortly after the controversy arose, Norwegian political cartoonist Finn Graff explained in an interview that he wouldn’t dream of drawing cartoons that offend Muslims—“out of respect.” This is the same man who recently depicted the prime minister of Israel dressed in the regalia of a concentration camp commander at Auschwitz.

  European enthusiasm for cartoons that depict Jews dressed as Nazis has been much in evidence during the recent Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Israel’s actions in Lebanon were unjustified, stupid, cruel, disproportionate, outrageous, and a violation of international law. This is the view held by a majority of European statesmen and is the official editorial stance of a vast majority of European news outlets. Even assuming that this is so, why are Europeans so exercised about it?

  This is a serious question. The reader might think, given our assumptions, that the answer is self-evident: Israeli actions were unjustified, stupid, cruel, disproportionate, outrageous, and a violation of international law. And this, of course, is why we have also seen an out-pouring of rage throughout Europe toward Pakistan—Pakistani mosques daubed with loathsome and hateful graffiti, politicians denouncing Pakistani brutality, anguished editorials in every major European press organ about the civilian deaths for which Pakistan is responsible. It is only natural, since Pakistani nationalists appear to have been behind the July 11, 2006, bombing of Bombay commuter trains and stations that deliberately killed more than 200 civilians. Any thinking person would be outraged by such as atrocity, would he not?

  Apparently not. The event made headlines in Europe for all of about six hours, then disappeared completely from public consciousness. Of course, there was a particularly embarrassing aspect to that crime—the bombers seem to have been funded by British businessmen.3 Even so, civilians were killed deliberately, and one might expect Europeans, with their exquisite sensitivity to civilian deaths, to take notice.

  But they didn’t. One might wonder if the difference is that Israel is a recipient of American military aid. That, perhaps, is why Europeans find Israeli human rights abuses so much more difficult to stomach—because America could stop them if it so chose. That is what I am often told when I press critics to explain what’s so different about Israel. But Pakistan, too, receives massive military assistance from the United States. As does Turkey, for that matter, and Turkey has had more than a few mishaps involving civilians in its war with Kurdish separatists—so many, in fact, that one begins uncharitably to suspect a pattern. This is why we have seen so many anti-Turkish demonstrations on the streets of London and calls to send the Turks to the gas chambers; it’s why we’ve seen the Spanish prime minister dressed in colorful Kurdish pantaloons as a mark of solidarity, why European jounalists are streaming into razed Kurdish villages to snap photos of dead children and wailing families. Except that none of this has taken place, not least because the Turkish government won’t let journalists anywhere near those villages. I live in Istanbul and have heard quite a few firsthand stories about what happens to journalists who ask what happened to those civilians. Let’s just say, since I cherish my life here, that enchanting Turkey has everything to offer the discerning tourist.

  The truth is that it takes a special hatred of Jews to prioritize Israeli atrocities so far above others in a world awash with cruelty, violence, and violations of international law. Shiites killing Sunnis? Eyes go glassy with boredom. Muslims killing Hindus? Footnote! Africans killing other Africans? Hell, it would be news if they weren’t. No one in Europe notices, protests, cares, or bestirs himself. As I wrote earlier in this book: Yes, you can criticize Israel without being an anti-Semite—in fact, I am about to. But generally, you won’t bother.

  Now look at the assumptions we have adopted—have Israeli military actions in Lebanon been unjustified, stupid, cruel, disproportionate, outrageous, and a violation of international law? Cruel, certainly. Stupid? Given that Israel seems to have lost the war, yes, by definition their actions were stupid. Unjustified? Only in some pacifist universe where nations are expected to allow their neighbors to lob missiles over their borders without doing a thing about it. A violation of international law? Well, for all the talk of about Israel’s “disproportionate” use of force, I have seen no European politician or newspaper editorial attempting to explain what a “proportionate” level of force might look like—should Israel respond by lobbing an equal number of Katyushas back over the border, at Lebanese civilians, perhaps?—and these howls of outrage are almost always issued with no acknowledgment of the context: Hezbollah’s expressed profession of its intention to eradicate a United Nations member state.

  France took a particularly vocal lead in criticizing Israeli actions, pushing aggressively for an immediate cease-fire—one that would be monitored by a United Nations peacekeeping force. The French volunteered splendidly to lead it. As soon as Israel accepted the cease-fire, however, Le Monde reported that the French contribution to this peacekeeping force would, in fact, be “small and symbolic.” Perhaps ten officers. French defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie defended this decision by saying, “You can’t send in men telling them, ‘Look what’s going on but you don’t have the right to defend yourself or to shoot.’” Quite. But that, of course, is exactly the posture they are insisting the Israelis must adopt. Shortly after this, the Italians announced that they would put up 3,000 troops and take command of the force in France’s place. French president Jacq
ues Chirac, presumably itching to head-butt his Italian counterpart, replied by grudgingly offering to send 2,000 troops. Better late than never, I suppose.

  Since the war in Lebanon began, the criticism of Israel in Europe has been obsessive, incessant, unrelenting. Anti-Semitic crime has surged again. Jews in Norway, following an assault on a man wearing a yarmulke on the street in Oslo, have been advised not to speak Hebrew in public or wear clothing that might identify them as Jews. In Rome, some twenty shops owned by Jews were vandalized with swastikas. Flyers with Hezbollah slogans were left at the shops and signed by group calling itself Armed Revolutionary Fascists. In Belgium, an urn that contained ashes from Auschwitz was smashed and the shards smeared in excrement. Rallies were held on the streets of Berlin, not far from the Brandenburg Gate, where protesters chanted, “Death to the Jews.” In Madrid, protesters took to the streets chanting, “Nazis, Yankees, Jews: No more chosen people!” A mass rally in solidarity with Hezbollah took place in London in July. Note: not a protest, per se, against Israeli military tactics, but a rally in solidarity with Hezbollah—the group that killed 241 U.S. Marines, sailors, and soldiers in Lebanon, in 1983, and is basically a Special Forces brigade of the Iranian army. Any place where they are victorious would look just like Iran.