Stephens:
People are dead in Paris because Europe decided to make a fetish of its tolerance for intolerance.
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.
