Douglas Murray writes at National Review Online that Europe appears resigned to inaction in the face of a significant terrorist threat.
Then after the slaughter of 130 people in one night in Paris last November something changed. But the change was not what anyone predicted it could be. Opinion polls had for some time suggested that across the continent European publics had been forming a view of this problem for years, and quiet majorities in most countries now saw Islam itself as being at odds with our societies. The publics of Europe had formed this view in the face of the entirety of their mainstream political class who had cried “Islam is a religion of peace” after every atrocity. But despite this rather startling wake up and contrary to some scare-mongering, there were no pogroms of Muslims, nor any mass rejection of the majority of decent ordinary Muslims living among us. People woke up quietly and reacted decently. But they also became fatalistic.
After November 2015, we started to accept the terror. We accepted that this is what the Islamists are going to keep doing, and that our governments have no answer to the problem they have lumbered us with.
Of course there are those on the left who will continue to try to pretend that Belgian foreign policy, colonialism, innate racism, or Brussels housing policy are to blame. And there will continue to be sinister Muslim figures across our media who pretend that the Islamists do not believe in Islam. But such people are losing purchase. As the American scholar of Islam Daniel Pipes has noted, this is a one-way street. Nobody in Europe says that they used to be worried about Islam but no longer are. All that you hear is people saying that they are getting more and more worried.
