Victor Davis Hanson - On Europe and the Future
Another brilliant piece by Victor Davis Hanson - the sort of opinion rarely expressed in German media.
Excerpt:
"Abroad, the European public is more schizophrenic. It wants to make no sacrifices to stop the jihadists, but fears them terribly. It damns the U.S. as responsible for the tense, unpleasant global environment, but then — apparently in private — votes to ensure it has leaders favorable to us. Europeans offer moral lectures to Americans who are paying a great price in blood and treasure for constitutional alternatives in Iraq, even as their own elites in shameful timidity mortgage the Western Enlightenment to two-bit thuggish Islamists.
Afghanistan is not seen as a line in the sand to stop the spread of jihadism, but an embarrassing entanglement that can be blamed on George Bush’s inordinate anger following 9/11. The European attitude toward America seems to be “you must intervene in the Balkans to lead us in the fight against the twilight, but we won’t follow you into Afghanistan to battle against abject darkness.”
For those who thought that the level of European appeasement could not be surpassed following the Dutch murderers, the opera and cartoon fiascos, the pope’s remarks, or the Iranian kidnapping of British sailors, we now are to listen to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s admission that the implementation of sharia law in Britain is “unavoidable” and probably useful as well. Never was so much surrendered by so few to so many.
The new multicultural and relativist British elite in just a decade or so has managed to make in comparison the 12th-century England of Thomas Becket seem humane. In the last analysis, the real worries about the survival of the West in this war are not with America and its courageous twenty-something suburban kids in Anbar trying to offer something better than the sharia morality of the seventh century, but with the likes of sanctimonious and cowardly churchmen in England trying to spread it."
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