QandO

March 17, 2004

Reality begins to dawn in Europe
Posted by McQ

It looks like a new awareness is beginning to dawn in Europe:

The Islamist forces behind the Madrid bombings "confirmed that they can choose the moment and the target with a frightening precision," says the French daily Le Figaro (in French).

"The bombs of Madrid have shown us how much we are without defense and how much our knowledge of the terrorists is insufficient," says Le Figaro. "Each country can be hit, whether or not it has participated, like Spain, in the Iraq war, whether or not it has decided, like France, to forbid Islamic headscarves in the schools."

So, per Le Figero, Iraq is really irrelevant to the jihadists. Its all about the west.

March 11, said the Milan daily Corriere della Sera (in Italian), "is going to be more important than 11 September" for Europe. The Madrid attacks they say, mark the beginning of "a European war that the [European] Union is going to have to fight from now on with a far greater degree of unity and solidarity than it has shown over the past few months."

Actually it doesn't mark the "beginning" of a European war, it simpy has awakened those that have been denying the war's existance on for some time now.

In London, the Guardian says "emergency security meetings across Europe yesterday signaled the deepening recognition that the 200 deaths in four trains blown up in Madrid on Thursday probably constitute more than just a domestic Spanish terrorist event." The leftist London daily says no European nation will be spared, no matter what its past stance on the war on terror or Iraq.

Which is what the US has been trying to point out to the naysayers since 9/11.

"Only a dreamer would believe that Germany will not be attacked," say the editors of Bild, Germany's best-selling tabloid. "Islamic terrorists are waging a war against the West, not just against individual countries."

Welcome to the real world, Germany. You of all countries should understand what aggressors do to appeasers.

Sociologist Emilio Lamo de Espinosa says Europeans have been dreaming. Writing in Le Monde (in French), Lamo says Europeans have thought they would be spared because they haven't supported the Bush administration's policies.

And were quite smug about it as well, weren't they? Crow, I understand, is best eaten warm.

"When the Americans declared war on terrorism, many of us thought they exaggerated. Many thought terrorism was not likely to occur on our premises, [inhabited by] peaceful and civilized Europeans who speak no evil of anybody, who dialogue, who are the first [to] send assistance and offer cooperation. We are pacifists, they are warmongers. . . . . Don't we defend the Palestinians? Are we not pro-Arab and anti-Israeli?"

Yes. And it has bought you NOTHING. You're as much a target as any "infidel".

Wake up calls come in various forms and fashions. This one came in the blood and lives of 200 Spaniards. It should have come with the 3,000 lives in New York. But much of Europe was too smug and arrogant to consider they might be next. It tut-tutted when the cowboy Americans went after the terrorists. It shook its ancient finger at the upstart and explained, condecendingly, why America was wrong. It banked on appeasment being the coin that would sway terror to look elsewhere for its victims.

They were wrong. Madrid's atrocity says it IS finally time to wake up to the reality of Islamic terrorism ... isn't it, Europe?

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