Of all the consequences to European politicians’ lack of foresight on immigration, national greatness isn’t one of them. Sovereignty itself is being gnawed away at, most notably in France: in 2006 there were 751 Zones Urbaines Sensibles – or less euphemistically, “places…that the French state does not control.”
Europeans’ right to speech is under assault: a Dutch filmmaker was shot and had his throat slit for making a film critical of Islam’s treatment of women, and the Somali-born woman who provided the voiceover for the film was forced into hiding; in Denmark, a one million dollar bounty was placed on the head of a mild-mannered cartoonist. (…)
Theodore Dalrymple, referring to an opinion piece in Le Monde that called for the abolition of prisons, coined a phrase that’s stuck with me ever since I read it:
“There is in the article a moral exhibitionism, which is generosity of spirit at other people’s expense. This, I think, is one of the sicknesses of our age, the desire to appear more-compassionate-than-thou.”
Salman Rushdie, Kurt Westergaard, the families and friends of Pym Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, European commoners and editors and journalists who censor their public expressions for the sake of their own safety and comfort, civic police forces who don’t dare enter “microstates” in the middle of what were, for many hundreds of years, their ancestors’ own cities – these people surely understand better than most of the rest of us that the West’s smug, self-satisfying “generosity of spirit” and openness – “accommodativeness”, as Soyinka put it – can indeed come “at other people’s expense.”
