“Europe’s Muslims hate the West” is not a title from Jihad Watch or Gates of Vienna, but left-leaning website Politico. It could make one wonder if Trumpian immigration policy will one day be the norm.
The writer, Dutch novelist Leon de Winter, sets out to tackle a certain politically correct assumption. As he writes, “The first reaction to the Brussels massacres among postmodern European intellectuals was predictable: What did we, Europeans, do to them, our Muslims?” His answer?
Nothing.
The conventional narrative on Muslim terrorism is now familiar and multi-faceted. For example, State Department spokesman Marie Harf floated the notion last year that providing “jobs” was a solution to combating jihadism. Yet de Winter points out that “the unemployment figure in Brussels’ infamous Molenbeek neighborhood — now referred to as the jihadi hothouse of Europe —” of 30 percent is “not unusual in southern European countries or the Arab world.” He not only points out that blue-collar Belgian youth and Muslim youth are identical socioeconomically, but also writes “In Spain, youth unemployment has reached 50 percent and the welfare state is less developed than in Belgium, yet Spanish citizens aren’t blowing themselves up in metro stations.”
In reality, there’s simply no correlation between poverty and terrorism. The economic conditions of hundreds of millions of South Americans and non-Muslim Africans and Asians are far worse than those of Europe’s Muslims, yet terrorism simply isn’t noticeably present in their populations. In fact, Europe’s Muslims enjoy the fruits of Western living: ample food, medical care, available schools, and opportunities for success unimaginable in their native lands. There is also this simple statistic: Only one in six jihadists in Belgium comes from a poor home.
Then there’s the notion that Muslims’ rage is explainable by way of Belgian “xenophobia.” De Winter calls this “ridiculous” and asks, “Why would Muslims choose to stay in societies that showed such deep disrespect for their migrant population? [In fact, they flock to these societies.] Because they realize that an unemployed citizen in a European welfare state run by infidels has a better material life than an employed citizen in pious Morocco?”
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