...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

A shared future: Just returned from a trip to the EU, Diana West outlines some American-EU differences and commonalities, and warns of the bumps ahead:

…Such differences [EU socialism vs. U.S. capitalism] have helped turn Europe into the European Union, a nation-destroying behemoth both driven and empowered by the infantilizing machinery of the welfare state. Indeed, so shockingly totalitarian is the orientation of the EU, it strikes me that President Bush's misguided effort to democratize the Islamic Middle East might well have been better aimed at liberating the hostage peoples of the Brussels-dominated supra-state.

That said, it's crucial to recognize the precious common ground between the United States and Europe. While on a different plane from those fallow battlefields of the Ardennes, it is also sacred soil. I refer to our shared cultural and historical progressions as civilizations whose ideals are founded on liberty. Such liberty is once again under threat and from an ideological enemy -- the ideology of Islam, which, as spread by a massive influx of Islamic immigration over the past several decades, promises, as historians and writers from Bat Ye'or to Mark Steyn have copiously explained, to transform all of Europe into an Islamic continent.

And what do our presidential candidates think of the strategic ramifications of an Islamic Europe? Who knows? The likely but not inevitable civilizational shift is so far off the U.S. radar screen (with our government keeping it there, what with its recommended lexicon discouraging all terror-related references to Islam) it is invisible. American tourists -- those flush enough to pay their way with Euros, that is (and I didn't see many) -- can still visit the old Europe of gingerbread towns and Gothic cathedrals without noticing much more than a few hijabbed women, signs of Islamization that usually fail to register more than a multicultural nod.

Of course, even many (most?) residents are blind to the staggering changes in progress. This is something I discovered, to take one example, in conversation with a conservative British MEP (Member of European Parliament), who, after nine years of representing a sector of southern England in Brussels, both doubts the existence of "no-go zones" in Britain -- despite the writings on the subject by the Bishop of Rochester -- and has never visited the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek. A stone's throw from the ritzy EU environs in which we sat, this Islamic enclave more closely resembles a bustling outpost of the umma than the so-called capital of Europe.

"You ought to get out more," I suggested…

I recommend a visit to Canada, where the politician can see for himself what happens when political correctness is allowed to metastasize in the body politic. It should prove to be a real eye-opener.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:59 | link | comments

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