Mark Steyn's column in yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times is sobering at best. It's a logical follow-up to his column from early January on the way demographics are spelling doom for the West.
Yesterday's focus was on Muslim-Jewish relations in Europe. They're bad. But not in the sense that we're used to hearing about. Steyn details the brutal murder two years ago of a Jewish Paris disc jockey at that hands of his Muslim neighbor, Adel, then states:
Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven."
That same night, a Jewish woman was murdered in front of her daughter by another Muslim, and the major French papers didn't report the story.
This month, another Jewish Parisian was tortured for three weeks, then murdered.
During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.
This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things.
[R]adical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond.... The Jews are playing their traditional role of the canaries in history's coal mine (emphasis added).
It doesn't look as though the canary is doing too well. And the rest of us will follow along in a while if we keep to the same course.
Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well:
''We won't stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.''
What, in the end, are all these supposedly unconnected matters from Danish cartoons to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker to gender-segregated swimming sessions in French municipal pools about? Answer: sovereignty. Islam claims universal jurisdiction and always has. The only difference is that they're now acting upon it.
We need to keep taking action as well, until we stop the extremists working toward a one-world caliphate in their tracks. It won't be quick. It won't be easy. But it's absolutely necessary for the survival of our way of life.
Update:
Nidra Poller has a column in yesterday's OpinionJournal which gives more detail on this month's murder of a Parisian Jew at the hands of a Muslim gang. She makes a point that is in line with Mark Steyn:
Yet one detail was consistently played down by the investigators and missing from the early media reporting on the killing. The victim, whose full name is Ilan Halimi, was Jewish. Most of the men targeted in other kidnapping attempts were Jewish. Most members of the gang who allegedly carried out the crime are Muslims, whose families come from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa and live in the very sort of neighborhoods that went up in flames during three weeks of nationwide rioting last fall.
Poller manages to find the faintest glimmer of light in the midst of the darkness of this issue.
The initial response to the kidnapping of Ilan Halimi suggested a comparably selective ignorance. But many things have changed in French society in the past two years. Then, faced with the new tide of anti-Semitism, the Jewish community was left alone with its distress and at times even accused of being justifiably targeted because of its support for Israel. Today the government has apparently decided that the barbarous hatred unleashed against one Jewish man is a threat to all of France.
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