The menace of ‘Islamofascism” in Europe, small potatoes beside the resurgence of real Fascism

There’s an insightful article in the January 7, 2008 issue of The Nation by Gary Younge entitled "In Europe, Where’s the Hate?" on the abject hypocrisy of some of the shrillest voices in Western societies baying for Muslim blood…err, I mean… speaking out against ‘Islamofascism’ 

The article begins as follows:

Over the past year or so the rural Italian idyll of Colle di Val d’Elsa has played host to a bitter battle for Enlightenment values. On one side, the hamlet’s small Muslim community has raised a considerable amount of money to build a large mosque. Having gained the mayor’s approval, the Muslims signed a declaration of cooperation with the town hall and even planted a Christmas tree at the site as a good-will gesture.

In response, other locals pelted them with sausages and dumped a severed pig’s head at the site. On a wall near the site vandals daubed: "No Mosque," "Christian Hill" and "Thanks to the communists the Arabs are in our house!!!"
Such is the central dynamic in European race relations at present.

It is probably not the dynamic you have heard most about. The most popular one making the rounds this side of the Atlantic involves hordes of Muslims, rabid with anti-Semitic and misogynistic views, running amok as they bomb, bully and outbreed their clueless liberal hosts in a bid to build a caliphate.

Listen to most discussions in Internet fora of the evils of Muslim "hate" and you’re likely to hear  bigotry and hatred every bit as repugnant and ignorant as that of White Supremacist fora towards Jews, African-Americans and other "inferior" races. 

A curious thing about modern Western political life is that since it no longer socially acceptable to be openly racist , it is bigots that often preach the loudest about such ills. They understand full well that the best way to protect themselves is to clothe their demoninzation campaigns in sanctimonious lectures about Muslim hate.  (Talk about "taqiyyah".)

Hence the truly surreal spectacle of the extreme wing of the Christian Right–long the fetid redoubt of anti-Semitism in American society–preaching about Muslims hating Jews.

Other notable insights:

But the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not "Islamofascism"–that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning–but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority.

For fascism–and the xenophobic, racist and nationalistic elements that are its most vile manifestations–has returned as a mainstream ideology in Europe.

Another important insight that is so glaringly absent from most MSM
discussions of the periodic friction between Muslims and non-Muslims in Western
life today. It often takes two to tango.

This is just as an important a factor as Islamic fundamentalism in understanding events like the Danish cartoon conflict, which certainly inspired a lot of "jihadi" rhetoric among non-Muslim observers.

Here’s the supreme irony of the political situation in Europe:

The most potent anti-Semites and bigots in Europe do not live in run-down housing projects but grace the corridors of power. They are not Muslim; they are Christian. The continent is not suffering from some new strain of bigotry imported from the Arab world or the Maghreb–it is simply suffering from one of its oldest viruses harbored among its most established ethnic populations.

As the author notes, there are problems in Muslim communities, but the idea that these mostly marginalized enclaves pose the pressing threat to peace, democracy and rule of law in Europe is utterly out of touch with reality as brown shirts are making a comeback in political life across the Continent.