BRUCE BAWER
353
ruary
2002
(the same month in which a British Labour MP demanded
official action against a London imam and other Muslim leaders who
were inciting the murder of non-believers), it was reported that anti-Jew–
ish violence by French Muslims was skyrocketing. In April, Danish Prime
Minister Rasmussen condemned a Muslim group, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, for call–
ing for the murder of Danish Jews; later that month, a front-page head–
line on the Norwegian tabloid VG called attention to Hizb-ut-Tahrir's
plans to "turn Norway into an Islamic state." (Only two days later came
the news that yet another immigrant had perished in an apparent "honor
slaying"-this time just outside the police station in Kristiansand.)
The disinclination of social-democratic leaders to properly address
such matters has doubtless contributed to the recent growth of conser–
vative parties in many European countries. In the Netherlands, where
gay bashings by Moroccan and Turkish youths have been on the rise,
and where the government cracked down in February on the teaching of
anti-Western hate in state-supported Muslim schools (one of which was
raising money by selling calendars featuring a photo of the New York
skyline ablaze), a Rotterdam politician named Pim Fortuyn gained
widespread support by speaking frankly about the threat that funda–
mentalist Islam poses to Western liberties. It was a threat of which he,
as an openly gay man, was acutely aware. ("In Rotterdam," he told the
New York Times
in March, "we have third generation Moroccans who
still don't speak Dutch, oppress women and won't live by our values. ")
Fortuyn's brutal assassination on May 6,
2002,
deprived European pol–
itics of a brave and articulate voice for change.
Of course, not all politicians who dare to raise the issues of immi–
gration, Islam, and integration are necessarily admirable. As Anne
Applebaum noted in
Slate
in April, the lesson of the unsavory Jean–
Marie Le Pen's electoral success "is that if French politicians make it
unacceptable to discuss such things in the mainstream, then the discus–
sion will take place on the far-right fringes." Indeed, it is dismaying that
while many leaders on the European Left continue to do their best to
avoid criticizing fundamentalist Islam-which is, after all, among the
most reactionary forces on the planet-they persist in attaching the label
"racist" or "right-wing extremist" to any politician, such as Fortuyn,
who makes bold to raise it as an issue. The longer the Left keeps trying
to stifle discussion in this manner, the higher the chances of a rise to
power of genuine racists and right-wing extremists.
The good news is that ordinary Western Europeans are beginning to
recognize all this. They are also coming to realize some crucial truths.
Fundamentalist Islam is not a race or an ethnicity; it is an ideology. Its
