People are dead in Paris because Europe decided to make a
fetish of its tolerance for intolerance.
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Belgian special force
officers prepare to enter a house in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
in Brussels on Nov. 16 after a series of
deadly attacks on Paris.
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By BRET STEPHENS
We live in the age of the sanctified tantrum—the
political and religious furies we dare not name or shame, much less confront.
Students
bully college administrators with contrived political demands. The
administrators plead they can do better, then capitulate. Incompetent writers
pen trite racial screeds aimed at the very society that lifts them above their
ability. They are hailed as geniuses. Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican
presidential nomination epitomizes the politics of the tantrum. He’s angry as
hell, and so is his base. We’re supposed to respect this.
And then
there is the tantrum of Islam, another eruption of rage that feeds off our
astonishing willingness to indulge it.
Before Friday’s
carnage in the City of Light, the world was treated to the hideous spectacle of
Palestinians knifing Jews in Israel. The supposed motive of these stabbings was
a rumor among Palestinians—fanned by Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas—that the Israeli government intended to allow Jews to pray on the Temple
Mount.
This was
a story the Israeli government adamantly denied and every serious person knew
was false. Yet no senior Western leader dared call out Mr. Abbas to correct the
record. Palestinian tantrums are sanctified tantrums. The violence they breed
might be condemned, but the narrative on which they rest has the status of holy
writ. It is no more to be questioned than the Quran is to be burned.
“To
counteract the radicalization [in Europe],” Swedish Foreign Minister Margot
Wallström said in a televised interview only hours
after the Paris attacks, “we must go back to the situation such as the one in
the Middle East in which . . . the Palestinians see that there is no future; we
must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”
Here was
the sanctified tantrum par excellence: People murder and maim because they have
been put (by Israel) to a bleak choice. Rage is not to be condemned but
understood, mitigated and mollified.
Later
that day, at the Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton and
the two noncontenders for the Democratic presidential nomination each refused
to use the term “radical Islam” in referring to the ideological force behind
the Paris killings. The furthest Mrs. Clinton would go to naming the enemy was
to say “you can talk about Islamists who also are clearly jihadists.”
Apparently,
however, you cannot mention Islamists who are not yet “clearly jihadists,” lest
some other invisible line be transgressed. To do so might set off another
tantrum among people who tend toward violence whenever they are accused of
violent tendencies.
Nowhere
are Islamist tantrums so richly indulged as in Europe.
Take the
Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, which turns out to have been home to at
least one mastermind of Friday’s attacks. “In Molenbeek, the newspaper Het Volk
published a study of the local Muslim population,” I noted in this
column in August 2006. “The editor, Gunther
Vanpraet, described the commune as a ‘breeding ground
for thousands of Jihad candidates.’ ”
For many
years the mayor of Molenbeek was a man named Philippe Moureaux, a
Socialist best known as the author of the 1981 Law Against Racism and
Xenophobia. In 2004 he helped pass a law allowing noncitizens to vote in
municipal elections. Roughly a quarter of Molenbeek’s 96,000 residents are not
Belgian citizens.
Mr.
Moureaux was also instrumental in engineering the political marriage of his
Socialist Party with Muslim arrivals from Turkey and North Africa—a Europe-wide
phenomenon that accounts for left-wing sympathies for Islamists whose views on
subjects such as gay rights or the equality of women are less than progressive.
It was
under Mr. Moureaux’s indulgent eye that Molenbeek became what it is. For years,
a group called Sharia4Belgium—no prizes for guessing its goals—was active in
the neighborhood until a Belgian judge shut it down in February. The Muslim
fanatic who last year opened fire on the Jewish museum in Brussels, killing
four, also once lived in Molenbeek, as had the man who tried to open fire on a
high-speed train in August. “I notice that each time [there is a jihadist
attack] there is a link with Molenbeek,” Charles Michel, Belgium’s
prime minister, admitted Sunday. Nice of him to connect the dots.
I lived
near Molenbeek for two years when I worked for this newspaper’s European
edition and used to jog along the canal that cuts through the neighborhood. It
took no special insight to see what was likely to come out of the place.
Now 129
people are dead in Paris because Europe decided to make a fetish of its
tolerance for intolerance and allow the religious distempers of its Islamist communities
to fester over many years. That’s what happens when you sanctify political
tantrums, explain and appease them, refuse to name them, try to look away.
