The Gathering Storm of Extremism in Europe

As Mark Steyn’s new book

America Alone
climbs up the bestseller lists, with its message of demographic collapse for our European friends we had better pay attention to the other side of the story.

It is the rise of right-wing parties in Europe.

We all tut-tutted when Jean-Marie Le Pen beat the socialist candidate to advance to the runoff in the last French presidential election. But nationalist parties are gaining strength elsewhere.

In local elections in Belgium on October 8, according to Emanuele Ottolenghi, “the Vlams Belang won 20 percent of the overall national vote, reaching almost 33 percent in the city of Antwerp and even more in smaller communes.”
The Vlams Belang is a far-right Flemish nationalist party.

The reason for the explosion in the far-right vote is not hard to figure out. Voters are afraid of the rapid increase in Muslims in their countries and they are angry that the center parties have done nothing about it.

For many Europeans, the multiplying list of outrages where an intolerant, aggressive, violent, and retrograde Islam openly challenges liberal values such as freedom of speech and gender equality is a sign that a strong response is in high order. If they vote for the extremists, it is not necessarily because they have become extreme, but because the parties at the political center, which should best interpret this anxiety and give it concrete political expression, are paralyzed by political correctness, fear of antagonizing a growing Muslim electorate, or simply too naïve to understand what is at stake.

It is ironic that the Left, which believes in giving no quarter to extremism on the right, is relaxed about Muslim extremism.

When confronted with Islamic extremism, they make the claim that by talking to them and engaging them, the Muslim extremists will gain a stake in the political process and thus become more moderate — the exact opposite policy they advocate for right-wing extremism.

The Hard Left, of course, sees the Muslims as a new revolutionary class that they can lead against the Great Capitalist Satan, the United States.

Stay tuned. This problem is going to get worse before it gets better. And that assumes, pace Mark Steyn, that Europe will actually be around demographically in the years to come.