Are The French Toast Yet?

Is Europe toast, or merely warming up the toaster? Mark Steyn has advanced the theory that the lack of heat between the matrimonial sheets (indeed the lack of any matrimonial sheets) in Europe and the demographic deficit in Eurobabies pretty much defines Europe as over, unless. But it’s a pretty big Unless.

Ralph Peters isn’t buying the Steyn gloom-and-doom. Europe has done a pretty good job in the past of euthanizing problematic populations, he writes.

This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing, the happy-go-lucky slice of humanity that brought us such recent hits as the Holocaust and Srebrenica.

Yes, but what have they done for us lately?

We need to differentiate between the articulate elite, the one that we read and hear because they are the people who write and talk. They are the people who can get up and leave Europe if things get too tough on the Muslim front.

But the ordinary European cannot up and quit. And it is their rage and hate that would fuel any anti-Muslim cleansing. But will they fight?

An early indication should be the French presidential election in 2007. It was six years ago that Jean-Marie Le Pen came an unexpected second in the French presidential election. At that time the reaction of the bien pensant was shock and amazement.

But this time the nationalist banner has been raised by the current interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy. That means that the Muslim problem will actually get a voice from one of the respectable parties.

As the riot of soccer hooligans in Paris after the defeat of Paris Saint-Germain by an Israeli team shows, there are plenty of young French men spoiling for a fight: with Jews, black, Muslims, whoever.

Fortunately the French government is going to “eradicate violence from the stadiums.”

"We do not want racists in stadiums any more, Nazi salutes, monkey noises. Football is not war."

So that’s all right.

The results of the French election should tell us a lot about the future of Europe.