Belgium and The Netherlands are extreme but not unique cases. The European Left, which, as in the United States, includes most of the so-called Right, has been pandering to “the other” since the days of Montaigne, the anti-Christian ironists who first taught the French to admire the Cannibals and despise themselves. In every generation it gets worse, from Voltaire to Rousseau to Robespierre to Anatole France and the Surrealists. At this point, the only thing Europeans are proud of is their tolerance, a word that in today’s languages means only self-hatred. Muslims are dangerous, not because they reject Christ and hate Christians and even the entire post-Christian West. No, it is only their resistance to feminism, homosexualism, and immorality. European liberals have been designing loyalty oaths, requiring Muslims to reject the oppression of women and to accept homosexuality as normal. No wonder so many pathetic would-be men are turning to Islam as a wholesome alternative.

I should not single out the Europeans, since we Americans are hardly any better. Yes, it is true that a certain redneck element is disgusted by both Islam and anti-Christianism, but the same class of normal people exists in France. It is just that it is a smaller class, corresponding roughly to people whose livelihoods do not depend directly on the government. As more and more Americans become government school teachers, social workers, software designers in the defense industry, and university economics professors who tout the free market but suck their salaries out of the tax payers, we can expect to reach the level of European self-hatred in less than a decade.

I hope Paul Belien is not cherishing any illusions about America as the land of the free. At least in Europe the liberals feel free to despise their government in public. In our country, loyal Republicans and their Democratic allies in the media wanted to convict Stephen Colbert of Lèse Majesté for speaking the truth on television. Isn’t that forbidden somewhere in the penumbra of the Constitution? ~Thomas Fleming