Defense of the West

Fire of Liberty

As I was catching up on my reading this weekend, I came across yet another great and thought provoking piece by Victor Davis Hanson (VDH) on why the Europeans seem to be turning towards our corner in this stage of the war with Islamic fascism. While Hanson (as well as I) have noted in the past that the European's seemed to be losing their way in confronting the fascists of Islam by believing that if you went to these groups and tried to deal with them via "Diplomacy" because they though they "Understand" what makes them (Islamic fascists) tick, he notes that after the bombings in Madrid, London, the murder of Theo van Gogh, deaths threats of Dutch parliamentarians (Because she was a Muslim who contradicted the claims of radical Islam), Islamic radicals threatening to install sharia law to Europe, the killing Rafik Harari, the elections of Ahmadinejad in Iran, Hamas in the Palestinian parliament, the riots over the cartoons from Denmark, the Europeans have seen enough and are trying to put a little bit of steel in their spines. I think VDH pretty much summed up the Europeans growing need for steel in their diets when he noted the following:

Two other developments better explain the warming in Atlantic relations and the Europeans’ sudden muscularity. First, the Bush administration wisely adopted a Zen-like strategy of keeping low and letting the ankle-biting Europeans take the lead in dealing with radical Islamists like the Iranian theocracy and Hamas. As we stayed silent and played the sullen bad cop, the good guys were sorely disappointed at learning that, yes, the Iranians want both the bomb and Israel destroyed, and that, yes, Hamas, is still intent on annihilating the Jewish state and expecting subsidies to realize that aim. Second guessing and cheap anti-Americanism are easy without responsibility, but the Europeans found very quickly that for all their subtlety and exalted rhetoric they did no better than George Bush in dealing with these anti-Western fanatics.

Second, the two most difficult hurdles are now past—the removal of the odious Taliban and Saddam Hussein. And thus the overblown caricature of Americans as war-mongering bombers has run out of gas. Europeans, of course, always wished both autocracies gone, but quickly learned they could admit that desire only in the first case.

But now that the Americans are doing the fighting and dying, the Europeans can still be against the war, but “for the peace” with the utopian rationale that “whether the war was right or wrong, Iraq must not become a failed state.” Even the most diehard leftists are beginning to see that the fascists who once threatened Salman Rushdie and now bully the Danish cartoonists are the same as those who blow up female school teachers and reformers in Baghdad.

So let's just say that if someone like the US can trailblaze their way into the radical wilds of Afghanistan and Iraq and bring about change like we are in the process of doing, not to mention the various events that occur throughout the world and Europe that provide a great demonstration of how Islamic fascists are a force you can't deal with, then one can see why the folks in Europe are indeed marching in this direction. I just hope they become more steely than they currently are so we can evaporate the threats to the freedoms that we in the West sometimes take for granted from time to time.