Barbarians at the Gate

News of the dastardly terrorist attack in London today hit me quite hard; as a graduate student at the London School of Economics in the late 1980s, I frequently rode the "tube" to Russell Square, where the Senate House library of the University of London is located. I remember frequent spells at the little cafe in the center of Russell Square park, where on cold days I would sit sipping "white coffee" in old china cups. For those who have never been to Russell Square, it's an unlikely sanctuary, sandwiched as it is between the traffic streaming down Southampton Row and the frenetic tourist bustle of the British Museum. But even on the most hectic days you could find there a moment of respite, as if suddenly transported to the English countryside.

Thrust against this quietude, the terror of Thursday's attack must have seemed all the more horiffic to those who were there. And with the collective memory of September 11, 2001, more devastating to those who were not. The difference in scale notwithstanding, the site of bloodied victims littering the curbs and thousands of Londoners streaming on foot out of the city center provide eerie reminders of the images of 9/11. Especially for Americans. We are all Londoners now.

It will be interesting to see how the British react to this attack. There seem to be two clear options. The first will be to follow the Spanish into the nadir of appeasement -- moving collectively to the Left, abandoning Iraq, giving in to the terrorists. This option reflects the view among some that the only reason for this attack on London (and last year on Madrid) is because of support for the war in Iraq -- as if these evil doers need a pretext for causing death and destruction among innocents. The second option will be to react as they did during the London Blitz, with a stiff resolve to perservere and not be intimidated by the threat of random terror. The choice they make will say a lot about the future of the Anglo/American alliance and the continued role of Britain in the war in Iraq and against Al Qaeda world-wide.

The truth is, of course, that the British can't hide from this threat -- because the threat is among them. The multi-cultural mecca that is London includes a huge percentage of emigres from the Arab world, where radical Islam is practiced openly in mosques in Finsbury Park and other working class suburbs of the city. On any given day in London, a multitude of Islamic groups operate openly, propogating the language and ideals of the "true believers". Who can doubt that many of these groups, protected in the cloak of multi-cultural tolerance, are not secretly working to promote the cause of their radical brethren?

This same story is true across Europe, which is being beseiged by Islamist culture and thought. In the name of sameness and bureaucratic synergy, the technocrats who run the European Union have decided that efficiency matters more than culture -- resigning the glorious (and inglorious) past of Europe's great nation states to history's distant past. Included in this were important lessons of the defense of freedom against tyranny, and the real world examples that certain ideals are actually worth fighting for. In the quest for Pan-European social tolerance the EU has created a vacuum -- one in which the intolerant, inexorable march of Islam is more than willing to fill.