Europe and the enemy within

County View
John Healy

The gruesome killing of the French school teacher Samuel Paty by an Islamic extremist is at its core a reflection of the insoluble nature of the clash of values between ideologies which can never truly co-exist. Having beheaded his victim in the presence of his young students, the assassin went on to post pictures on social media of the severed head, with the shouted boast that he had executed ‘a dog’.
It was one more barbarous atrocity to add to the wave of depraved acts of terror which have been visited on European countries over the past decade. It is but a few years since a young soldier, Lee Rigby, met his death in the middle of the afternoon near Woolwich Barracks in London, when two Islamists ran him down with a car, and then hacked him to death in the street with a cleaver in front of horrified onlookers.
On a sunny Bastille Day evening in Nice, an Islamic terrorist ploughed a truck into the crowds of unsuspecting families celebrating on the promenade, sending 86 to their deaths. Innocent people were stabbed to death on London Bridge, concert goers in Manchester were massacred in an attack, a hundred people were killed at the Bataclan, all by terrorists screaming the deranged cry of ‘Allahu Akbar’.
In a small village church in Normandy, 86-year-old Fr Jacques Hamel had his throat cut on the altar by two Islamic fundamentalists as he celebrated daily Mass for his small congregation of elderly worshippers.
In the radical-Islamic battle to destroy western culture, all of us are the infidels who must be eliminated. Jews or priests, tourists or teachers, cartoonists or police officers, football fans or music lovers, ordinary citizens of every kind – anyone who espouses western values, however innocently practiced, is an infidel and a target.
The irony of immigrants exploiting host country values to their own ends is a reality which many European countries were either too complacent to recognise or are now at a complete loss as to how to contain. The parents of Samuel Paty’s killer had been granted political asylum in France, a place of safety and refuge where, it was thought, they could start a new life. But, like so many who became radicalised, they were happy to avail of the tolerance and acceptance which were the cornerstone of French civic values, but were ready to turn against the hosts and the culture which, deep down, they despised.
If the most recent atrocity has led to a renewed debate on why a country should continue to offer succour to those who avowedly seek its annihilation, there are many who fear that it may be all too late. Growing public discourse in France would accuse Western authorities of capitulation – and much of it self-inflicted – to terrorism. Europe has become submissive, they say, because we are afraid to say no, afraid to appear racist or intolerant.
France, for example, is not allowed to expel radical Islamists until their country of origin first agrees to accept them. A recommendation by the Council of Europe, issued to the British media, orders that it should avoid reporting the Muslim identity of terrorists.
It is a debate in which the radicals will be the certain winners. If the answer is to pit extremism against extremism, to reimpose an iron curtain and to create a fortress Europe in the interests of self protection, to follow the lead of Russia or China in suppressing dissent, then at what cost? Or are the values of tolerance and pluralism still worth the risk posed by those who see no other cause but their own?