Questions for a Europe-hating conservative

I have sometimes commented on those patriotic, Bush-loving conservatives whose (understandable) dislike for contemporary Europe is such that they (incomprehensibly) cheer its ruin at the hands of Moslems. Here is an e-mail I wrote earlier this year to one such person, whose comment I had read at Lucianne.com.

You wrote:

“Prepare for the Worst? The Worst has only begun Europe … Islam is coming. Then you’ll see what a real holocaust is.”

Can you explain something? I don’t understand Americans who gleefully predict Europe’s coming doom due to the Islamic influx, while ignoring the fact that America is just a couple of steps behind Europe in the same process. It would be as though you had a neighbor you didn’t like, and there was a fire raging across your neighborhood, and you saw your neighbor’s house get burned, and you made fun of your neighbor for failing to protect his house from this fire, even as the fire was heading for your house next.

If having a large Muslim population spells the ruin of a Western country, as you (and I) believe, and if Europeans deserve to be ruined for letting the Muslims into Europe, don’t we in America deserve the same ruin? Or do you think that mass Muslim immigration is a terrible thing for Europe, but not for America?

My point is, we and the Europeans are in the same fix. You’re acting as though only they have this problem and not us.

The practical question is, what do you think Europe should do about Muslim immigration and about the millions of Muslims already living in Europe? What do you think the U.S. should do about Muslim immigration and about the millions of Muslims already living in the U.S.?

I did not receive a reply. One possible explanation is that the person to whom I was writing had no thought-out position about the Moslem problem. He simply had an animus against Europe, and the Moslem problem there gave him a convenient way of expressing it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 24, 2005 07:26 AM | Send