Self-destructive Hubris

Tunku Varadarajan writes at Indian Express

the world faces a monumentally greater threat today from the adherents of Islam than it does from the followers of any other religion — or from any cult of any kind, barring, perhaps, the Cult of Kim in North Korea; and even that lot doesn’t send footsoldiers into our cities to murder us as we eat and breathe and love each other.

...It hardly needs stating, also, that the Islamist terrorists are as brutal to those Muslims who aren’t of a hardline Salafi creed as they are to non-Muslim infidels. Turn your gaze to neighbouring Pakistan or Afghanistan, or Nigeria or Mali, or the territory under the control of the Islamic State, and you will see a running horror-show of slaughter, each episode more disgusting and stomach-churning than the last.

The West — Europe, in particular —is in a terrifying bind, for it has living in its midst substantial populations of Muslims, the majority of whom are poorly integrated into Western society. And by integration I don’t simply mean a case of Abdul or Cherif or Aicha getting up every morning to go to work with other citizens of Belgium or France or Denmark, but an embracing of the civic and social and constitutional values of these countries — what might, by useful shorthand, be called the Western “way of life”.

To the extent that we have the full facts, we know that every single perpetrator of the carnage in Paris was home-grown. That is a chilling fact (and phrase), conjuring visions of a venom that eats away at the body-politic, with echoes of a cancer in the human body. The fault, I fear, is that of Europe’s elites. For decades, they ignored — and even actively worked against — integration, scorning it as unfashionable, old-fangled, and, worst of all, racist. Is Our Way, they asked, with impressively self-destructive hubris, really better than Their Way?

That question now has an answer. It’s an answer the West must live and, increasingly, die with.

Read more here.