Europe’s rude awakening

Excerpted from JPost:

Seventy years after emerging from World War II’s rubble, a shrinking Christian Europe is facing a steadily growing Muslim Europe that will not be melted into its multicultural pot.

At the same time, the EU’s Jews are feeling increasingly insecure and steadily trickling away. Still numbering 1.1 million, West European Jewry is not about to vanish, but it is shrinking even faster than Christian Europe. European leaders are obviously sincere when they say that Europe must retain its Jews. Sadly, from those leaders’ viewpoint, that does not seem to be history’s direction.

Surveying the sprawling map of Islamist trouble-spots in today’s world, from Nigeria and Somalia through Iraq and Iran to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Philippines, powers like America and China see mainly a strategic problem. Europe, on the other hand, sees a social problem, as Islamism threatens not only its diplomatic ambitions, but its political structure and social fabric.

Hamas’s adventurism encapsulates all these European fears, and that is why Europe responded so sharply to the war it has waged on Israel.

Back in that Austrian soccer field, Maccabi Haifa’s Serbian goalie Vladimir Stojkovic was also attacked, and like his Jewish teammates, he fought back, even enthusiastically, apparently fueled by the rioters’ waving of a Turkish flag, which often reminds Serbians of their historic archenemy, and a history of Muslim-Christian discord that harks back more than 500 years.

Serbia is not a member of the EU. In four years, however, it will be.