Mark Steyn’s take on the situation in Europe is, in my opinion, right on the mark. I find it incredibly sad, but inevitable.
A couple of excerpts.
On the difference between the Jordanian (Arab) response to terrorist attack and the Old European response:
Or take last week’s attacks in Jordan by a quartet of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s finest suicide bombers. The day after the carnage, Jordanians took to the streets in their thousands to shout “Death to Zarqawi!” and “Burn in hell, Zarqawi!” King Abdullah denounced terrorism as “sick” and called for a “global fight” against it. “These people are insane,” he said of the husband-and-wife couple dispatched to blow up a wedding reception.
For purposes of comparison, consider the Madrid bombing from March last year. The day after that, Spaniards also took to the streets, for their feebly tasteful vigil. Instead of righteous anger, they were “united in sorrow” – i.e. enervated in passivity. Instead of wishing death on the perpetrators, the preferred slogan was “Basta!” – “Enough!” – which was directed less at the killers than at Aznar and Bush. Instead of a leader who calls for a “global fight”, they elected a government pledged to withdraw from any meaningful role in the global fight.
And on why the population–in France at least–is likely to remain bicultural:
So Europe’s present biculturalism makes disaster a certainty. One way to avoid it would be to go genuinely multicultural, to broaden the Continent’s sources of immigration beyond the Muslim world. But a talented ambitious Chinese or Indian or Chilean has zero reason to emigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancien regime of indolent geriatrics.