For those of us of a “certain age,” Europe was the height of old world cool and sophistication—Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the glorious Julie Christie. We wanted to be like them. That was a long time ago. No more Nouvelle Vague. No more Beatles. Now it’s a continent on the verge of imploding with moribund or worse economies, intermittent (and, in the case of France, persistent) violence, and a growing Islamization that is turning countries once among the most free on Earth into Sharia-laced nightmares.
The European Union—consciously or unconsciously—has been complicit in all that, an ever-growing bureaucratic miasma that seems more distant from the needs of its constituents than even our own government.
Americans—concerned ones anyway—watch from afar as right-wing separatist parties have sprung up across the continent, gaining popularity from Austria to the UK. Are they avatars of the World War II-era fascist parties the liberal-left (our guardians at The Guardian) would have us believe or are they natural responses to this monolithic EU and its fruits and therefore the true protectors of the Enlightenment?
It’s hard to say at this point. A welter of conflicting forces are at play. The only thing that is clear is that things are bad.
Those of us who travel often to Europe have seen it, ever-expanding Islamic enclaves in and around many of the major cities that are now larger, quite literally, than any since the days of Muslim-ruled Spain. The “Reconquista” is in progress via what Robert Spencer calls “the stealth jihad.” (Sometimes, as we know, it’s not so stealthy.) Putting up barely a fight, Europe appears to be relinquishing the values they have fought for since the Magna Carta. Who cares about misogyny, homophobia or that outdated separation of church and state when you don’t have any religion of your own to separate? We’re multicultural! We’re diverse! We’re…. dead? Well, not quite but wait.
Meanwhile, here in the US of A, the same process has been revving up. Under the Obama administration we’re on track to admit a million new Muslim immigrants—and that doesn’t include those overstaying their visas, etc. Our politically correct, morally narcissistic president has decreed that these people are culturally our equal and deserving of citizenship even though roughly half (probably more if we really knew) of those already here, and therefore supposedly assimilated, believe in that oppressive religious legal system straight out of the Dark Ages—Sharia law.
Is that what we want? Call me a bigot, but I don’t think so. There are lots of places believers in Sharia can live, thank you, and I have long passed my tolerance for wife beatings, adultery stonings, and repellent women-hating rape laws—even, maybe especially, if they’re only practiced in secret—not to mention mass shootings in Florida gay bars and at California Christmas parties in the name of somebody’s twisted vision of God, events that are from from secret.
Which leads me to “Brexit” (Britain-exit) and the coming June 23 vote on whether the United Kingdom will remain in the European Union. Enough ink has been spilled to fill every issue of the Times Literary Supplement back to its 1902 founding with a few Virginia Woolf novels thrown in about the economic ins and outs of the UK leaving the EU. I am not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion about that, but suspect the witty Daniel Hannan, a 17-year Member of the European Parliament who asked to be “sacked” by his readers in his recent book on Brexit, is a more than reliable source. Hannan makes the case that Brussels has become ground zero for crony capitalism—hardly a surprise, alas.
But what this is really about, what Britain and we really need from this vote, is a firewall against Islamization. Economic niceties aside, that is finally how “Brexit” will be judged—here and in Europe. The Brits have to suck it up, brave the inevitable accusations of Islamophobia and put poor old Hannan out of a job.
There may not “always be an England,” but let’s give her a chance, even if her neighbors have given up (some of them, anyway). The arrogant moral narcissism of Angela Merkel and her ilk has caused enough problems. It was truly tragic and horrible that that Labor MP was murdered by a psychotic the other day —this time a right-wing one—but I sincerely hope it won’t overly affect the vote. I can’t cast one myself, but were I a Brit, I’d be voting “LEAVE” wholeheartedly.
Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His next book— I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already—is just published by Encounter Books on June 14, 2016. You can read an excerpt here. You can see a brief interview about the book with the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal here. You can order the book here.
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