You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up

Sometime you read the newspaper, and have to go back and re-read something several times, just to be sure you weren't imaging it. Occasionally, having read an article, you have to check the front page again to make sure you're not actually reading a printout of The Onion or that the editors aren't running an April Fool's joke. But sadly, the inanities coming out of Washington, and in particular, the Bush administration continue to nimbly exceed the stupidity of anything comedy writers could produce.

The State Department, concerned about a "nativist surge" in Western Europe, has created a position to coordinate efforts to reach out to European Muslims and help them better integrate into society, a senior official said yesterday.

Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said U.S. embassies and consulates in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries will decide what exactly they can do, instead of "Washington bureaucrats dreaming this up."

The growing Muslim presence in Europe is "a fascinating issue and one that the American government is just now trying to get its mind around," Mr. Fried told editors and reporters at The Washington Times. "It's a huge problem, we are thinking about it seriously, and we've tried to do some intellectual framing-up."

Farah Pandith, until recently a staffer on the National Security Council (NSC), moved to the State Department last week to head the new effort.

Unrest among Muslims in Europe, particularly those who have turned to extremist acts such as the 2005 London transit system bombings, has spurred a heated debate across the continent.

The French government, for example, now regrets having resettled North African immigrants in de facto ghettos, where unemployment and bad schooling led to desperation among young people, Paris' ambassador to Washington, Jean-David Levitte, told The Times last month.

"The unrest that existed in poor neighborhoods had nothing to do with jihad and much to do with social conditions," he said. "That's why we have to put the emphasis on improving the social conditions -- schools, jobs, better housing -- and hopefully all this will trigger better absorption in the social fabric of France of this minority."

Mr. Fried said that a "process of alienation" is occurring within Europe's Muslim communities, and that their host countries have "no sense of integration."

"Europe has to learn to do that," he said. "You have a weird nativist surge in Western Europe, and a kind of odd panic: Aliens are here, they don't accept our values, they are a threat to our way of life and turn to radicalism."

If you needed any further proof that Washington doesn't understand the nature of the problem facing the West vis-a-vis Islam, this article clearly provides it. The State Department, clearly taking its direction from the White House, assumes that all people are basically the same, no matter what their cultural or religious background. Thus, Muslims are just one more group of immigrants to be assimilated into happy little Westerners. Anyone who objects, or who points to implication of current demographic trends - which show that Europeans will be a minority in Europe in several generations - are "nativists," which is meant as a nice way of saying "racists" or "luddities."

From these false premises flows easily the State Department's incredibly wrong-headed and very dangerous push to help "integrate" Muslims into the population of Europe. Note how this position blithely, deliberately ignores the abundant evidence that Muslims don't want to assimilate or that Islamic culture and theology are incompatible with an naturally hostile to liberal, Western culture and custom. The evidence is self evident to anyone who has visited the Middle East, or much of Europe. The Muslims themselves understand it. But Western leaders cannot bring themselves to admit what everyone else intuitively grasps. Thus, a presumably educated adult like Mr. Fried can say, incredulously:

"You have a weird nativist surge in Western Europe, and a kind of odd panic: Aliens are here, they don't accept our values, they are a threat to our way of life and turn to radicalism."

What's odd about the panic that Europeans (and to a lesser extent Americans) are experiencing is that it took so long to manifest. Why shouldn't people panic if they discover that their government has foolishly imported millions of people from an alien culture, a significant minority of whom wish to use violence to impose that alien culture on them? It's a perfectly natural reaction. But Mr. Fried can't see it because he's bought so deeply into the multiculturalist theology that no amount of evidence can cause him to question his premises. He and those like him in Washinton, London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Madrid, Ottawa and Rome, resemble the geriatric members of the Politboro in the 80's. Communism was collapsing all around them, but they would have rather died than admit anything was wrong.

Washington shouldn't be helping European Muslims integrate - that will only weaken European societies and turn them more anti-American. Washtington should be forcing European leaders to recognize the mortal peril posed to their cultures by mass immigration from the Middle East, and finding ways to close off that immigration and persuade Muslims living in Europe to leave.

But no, Washington continues to slumber under Bush & Co.'s univeralist, multiculturalist delusion, while the Western world weakens and frays. It would be funny if it weren't for the disastrous consquences of their foolishness.