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A fault line opened in European society. On one side were those keen to keep their world whole and theirs; on the other was elite opinion, insisting on the inevitability and legitimacy of the new immigration. For their part, the new arrivals, timid at first, grew expansive in the claims they made. This was odd: they had fled the fire, and the failure, of their ancestral lands, but they brought the fire with them. Political Islam had risen on its home turf in the Middle East and North Africa, in South Asia, but a young generation in Europe gave its allegiance to the new Islamist radicalism. Emancipated women had shed the veil in Egypt and Turkey and Iran in the 1920s; there are Muslim women now asserting their right to wear the burqa in Paris.
The European welfare state tempted and aided the new Islamism. Two-thirds of the French imams are on welfare. It was hard for Europeans, Caldwell writes, to know whether these bold immigrants were desperate wards or determined invaders, keen on imposing their will on societies given to moral relativism and tolerance. In Caldwell’s apt summation, the flood of migration brought with it “militants, freeloaders and opportunists.”
The militants took the liberties of Europe as a sign of moral and political abdication. They included “activists” now dreaming of imposing the Shariah on Denmark and Britain. There were also warriors of the faith, in storefront mosques in Amsterdam and London, openly sympathizing with the enemies of the West. And there were second-generation immigrants who owed no allegiance to the societies of Europe.
A study by Britain’s House of Commons of the July 7, 2005, bombings against London’s Underground caught the hostility of the new Islamism to the idea of assimilation, to the principle of nationality itself. Three of the four bombers were second-generation British citizens born in West Yorkshire. The fourth, who was born in Jamaica and brought to England as an infant, was a convert to Islam. Mohammad Sidique Khan, age 30, was the oldest of the group. He “appeared to others,” the report notes, “as a role model to young people.” Shehzad Tanweer, age 22, was said to have led a “balanced life.” He owned a red Mercedes, and enjoyed fashionable hairstyles and designer clothing. The evening before the bombings, he had played cricket in a local park.