A couple days before the London bombing, I wrote that I believe Europe's Moslem problem might be beyond their power to correct. If Europe can't assimilate Moslems as America has done with far greater success, Europe will have a fateful choice:
Eventually the Europeans will have to choose between surrender and harsher options. Will Bosnia and Kosovo be the models the Europeans will follow in desperation as the alternative to surrender? I don't think the Euros are so permanently soft after five decades of easy life under our protection that they have forgotten centuries of brutal ruthlessness. The Europeans turned the Moslems back inside Europe itself at Tours and Vienna, and expelled them from Spain. They are capable of doing so again.
After the London bombing, the idea of expulsion has been raised:
"We will look urgently at how we strengthen the procedures to exclude people from entering the UK who may incite hatred or act contrary to the public good, and at how we deport such people, if they come here, more easily," Blair said.
Prior to the bombings on three underground trains and a bus in London that killed at least 52 people and injured 700 -- the worst attack on British soil since World War II -- counter-terrorism proposals by the British government had been denounced as a threat to civil liberties.
The London attacks have plunged the country back into a painful debate about how best to prevent terrorist attacks without undermining democratic values.
Tolerance is a luxury thrown aside very easily when you have to scrape human remains from your subways. Should the death toll in an attack exceed July 7th's 52, or should WMD be used, much wider expulsions might be considered. And if that doesn't work? Well, we can win ugly.
Jeff at Caerdroia has a long post that explores what I've said about needing to win on our terms to avoid facing the choice of losing millions or nearly literally destroying Islamic society if it won't control the nut cases who seek to kill us in nuclear blasts. He too wants our effort to reform Islamic politics and society to succeed:
If this fails, though, eventually we are once again led down the road to genocide, ours or theirs. If we won't surrender, and they won't stop, and we cannot reduce the attacks to the point where they don't threaten our existence as free and prosperous societies, it is virtually inevitable that genocide will occur. And given the imbalance of power, which itself is the reason that a stalemate will never happen as long as the West is threatened, the likelihood is on the side of the Arabs/Muslims being the targets of the genocide. Short of surrender or us being the targets of genocide, that's the worst outcome I can imagine.
All of this is why I deeply, sincerely hope that the President's strategy is correct, and that we can stay with the strategy long enough for it to have determinative effect. The alternatives range from aweful to unthinkable to unconscionable.
Losing is not an option. Moslems need to carefully consider whether they wish to indulge the wishes of a violent jihadi minority to spark a war of civilizations between Islam and the West.
Right now we have a choice of winning strategies and we've decided to win by saving Islam from its violent minority. Should our casualties grow too high and should the wider Moslem world remain too detached from fighting the terrorists, we can always decide to fully exploit our power to win the old fashioned way--by destroying our enemies.
I won't sleep well at night if we have to decide to destroy our enemies utterly to avoid defeat. But the alternative of defeat is no alternative. Not to me and I imagine not to a majority in the West. How we win depends on the Moslem world.
That scares the hell out of me.
