Alarming rise of religious extremism in Western Europe?

[Jesus Saves]

This is an email from a conservative friend of Andrew Sullivan, who lives in the Netherlands, that Sullivan reprinted on his blog. I have read some media reports that may corroborate, at least in part, some of what his friend says.

"I would encourage all responsible-minded people, to get up to speed on what's going on in the Netherlands, and in Western Europe generally. The country I cherished a few years ago as the most liberal in the world has an increasingly large – and increasingly alienated – population of extreme reactionaries who despise, and seek to destroy, its liberalism. It is frankly stunning that Crain, in his posting, doesn't even mention Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, who were murdered for daring to take on this intolerance, or Dutch Parliament members Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, who have also spoken out and as a result are forced to live (respectively) on a Marine base and in a prison in order to avoid being murdered.

One night in December 1998, T. and I were walking along the Singel canal in central Amsterdam when a Moroccan teenager pulled a knife and demanded money. (T. saw the knife, but the kid held it so low and so close to me that I didn't see it.) A half dozen of his friends hovered nearby, at the edge of the canal, looking threatening. I told him angrily to hit the road. He hesitated, looked back at his friends, and then they all ran off. We were lucky. Year by year, it's only got worse. The assaults are more frequent now, and more likely to be violent. They're less about money now and more about contempt – not just toward gays but toward all infidels.

We still visit Amsterdam, but we keep our eyes open. It's a great city – you just can’t be naïve about what’s going on. We spent a weekend there in March. We checked into our hotel, went to our room, and I turned on the TV. The news had just come on (AT5 news, March 24, 8:30 PM). The lead story was about how Muslim intolerance of homosexuality was making life much worse for gays in Amsterdam.
But what are the authorities doing about it? What can they do? Half of Amsterdam's population is of non-Dutch origin. It was recently reported that 40% of Moroccan youths in Amersfoort between ages 15 and 17 were suspected by the police of criminal activity. The Amersfoort police have files on 21% of Moroccan youths and 27% of Somali youths. A criminologist said this was probably representative of the situation nationwide.

As for the cops finding the guys who beat up Chris Crain: I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they haven’t lifted a finger. They probably thought he was nuts for confronting the guys. The authorities’ traditional policy is: keep your head down and don’t provoke anybody. In January, two schoolboys in IJsselstein were ordered to remove Dutch flag patches from their backpacks because Moroccan students might consider them provocative. It turned out this flag ban is officially in force at many schools. Meanwhile Muslim kids have pictures of van Gogh's murderer on their lunchboxes because they consider him a hero, and nobody dares tell them to remove those pictures. In a recent article, a teacher at a school in Amsterdam said that a decade ago, ten-year-old Muslim kids were saying, 'We Moroccans are going to take over the Netherlands'; now five-year-olds who can hardly write are scrawling 'Fuck you Netherlands' on scraps of paper."

www.andrewsullivan.com