NOT YOUR FATHER'S EUROPE (UNLESS YOU'RE TED KENNEDY):

Muslim radicalism reshapes Euro-politics (David Frum, September 28, 2002 , National Post)

Curiously, the same British Muslim groups that plead for Saddam loudly support Yasser Arafat's terror war upon Israel. For them, the issue is not "peace" but power: They hate and fear American power -- and so they support Saddam, the one Arab leader strong enough and reckless enough to defy the United States.

Television pundits often claim that there simply cannot be an alliance between Saddam and al-Qaeda: Saddam, they say, is a secular nationalist; al-Qaeda is Islamic and fundamentalist. But as thousands of men and women in Islamic garb rally in support of Saddam, it's time to rethink. In a conflict between Saddam and the West, Muslim fundamentalists are backing Saddam: Why assume that Saddam would not back his local rivals against their joint enemy?

Is today's London demonstration a sign of things to come? Will the anti-American hard left in Europe make common cause with Islamic extremists? It has happened before. In the 1970s, the German Baader-Meinhoff gang collaborated with Palestinian nationalists in the Entebbe hijacking. The IRA received arms from Libya. This very year, the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn -- an outspoken opponent of radical Islam in the Netherlands -- was assassinated by an environmentalist fanatic.

Even when it does not turn to violence, Muslim radicalism is reshaping European politics. Gerhard Schroeder's anti-American appeal in last weekend's German election helped win Muslim votes for his Social Democratic Party. At a conference in Washington in June, leading French politicians explained that their country hesitated to join America's war on terror for fear of provoking terrorism inside France: In 1995, Islamic radicals detonated bombs all over Paris to deter France from supporting the Algerian government against its Islamist enemies -- and the French government feared more bombings if it joined America against the Sept. 11 killers.

The British government is stauncher than those of Germany and France. But even here, Europe's demographic realities are having an effect.

Sooner or later the media and the politicos, beyond the conservative fringe, are going to have to notice that the failure of Europe to assimilate and Westernize its Islamic immigrants and its growing dependence on those immigrant populations is fundamentally changing European politics in ways that do not benefit the United States. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 30, 2002 8:13 PM