An unwanted birthday party.

A demonstration against the "Islamicisation of Europe", scheduled to take place in Brussels on September 11, 2007 and put together by the umbrella organisation Pax Europa, has been prohibited by the socialist mayor Freddy Thielemans. The intended demonstration, which was supposed to march by the headquarters of the European Union, has been declared to be a hostile gesture against the city's growing Muslim population. It might be noted in passing that the local Islamic population, which features women in burkas and other quaint reminders of who is repopulating the continent, votes heavily for Thielemans. Not insignificantly, he and his socialist allies in the municipal council have allowed the multicultural left and the Muslims, with the exception of one particularly well-known Turkish terrorist organisation that petitioned last year, to demonstrate to their hearts' content. The scheduled demonstration, which the mayor banned on August 9, had more than 20,000 participants already signed up; and many of them still plan to come, to mock Freddy at a party of their own making on the occasion of his 63rd birthday.

Note that the planned demonstration would by no means be an affair of the Right. The appeals put forth by the various European organising committees--and I have read with special care the German one issued at Wertheim by concerned citizens on February 6, 2007--emphasise such principles as gender equality, and supposedly universal democratic values. Only passing reference is made in the German document to the "Christian-Jewish humanistic tradition of Europe", and even this is equated with "human rights" and the guarantee of "equality between men and women".The logo for the German group has an EU flag; and its website shows a young black woman, who presumably is featured there less for her pulchritude than for her non-Teutonic appearance. One is also led to believe by the German critics of Islamicisation that a sudden, unexpected problem has interrupted the "peaceful evolution of our society." The Muslim problem is there because the societies in question have turned against their traditional identities and are now committing demographic suicide. A religion of human rights, which many of the German critics seem to be pushing, is unlikely to reverse the underlying situation of decay, one in which Europeans, and particularly the morbidly anti-nationalist Germans, have run to give up their inherited cultural identity as an insensitive remnant of the past.

Despite the organisers' failure in some of their statements of principle to address real problems, e.g., the rejection of European national identities and the erosion of bourgeois family consciousness, and despite the continued attempt to build societies on a pseudo-religion of human rights, Pax Europa has targeted genuine objects of concern. Its leaders are protesting the introduction of Islamic Sharia into European civil law codes, the construction of mosques, which tower above other religious buildings in European cities, against the express will of the majority of the residents, and the awarding of special collective rights to Muslims that are not given to Christian churches. Pax Europa has also begun to circulate on its website a demand that the Turks hand back Hagia Sophia, which is no longer a Christian place of worship, to the Orthodox Church. All of these grievances are likely to appeal to the European populist Right, and I know that my Flemish friends, Paul Belien and his charming wife Alexandra Colen, who help to lead the Vlaams Belang, have been involved in this scheduled demonstration. Despite the demonstration's not very traditionalist beginnings, the imbroglio with the mayor, Paul tells me, indicates that certain opportunities are presenting themselves.

The organisers of the banned demonstration, if one can judge by their announcements, have spread their nets quite wide: they have seized on the rhetoric of moderate feminists; they cite American neoconservatives about the mounting danger of Islamic anti-Semitism; and they have gone out of their way to bring into their activities such unlikely allies as Hindus, Muslim atheists, and concerned Western secularists. And while the English and Danish activists do allow themselves occasionally to sound patriotic and not merely addicted to human rights language, the Germans are rarely as good.

But none of this may ultimately matter. The anti-Flemish Fleming and Islamophile mayor of Brussels has just walked into a nasty trap; and it is one toward which equally reckless European and American multiculturalists may be pulled. He has gone a tad too far to curry favours with Islamicist and not merely Muslim voters; and he may reap the whirlwind for his stupidity. A tipping point comes when the populace has had enough of government-mandated cultural enrichment; and when it starts to protest. At that point it still harbours the illusion that the current brand of administered democracy is about constitutional freedom. The protestors may still believe even then that their form of control is the best of all regimes. Nonetheless, if the initially polite protestors continue to be held back, the reaction may escalate, and it is then that the Right will step into the picture. By then not all of the carrying-on by the multicultural leftist media here and in Europe will put the genie back into the bottle. As Sophocles put it, "Pride will be avenged." Or is it cowardly deceit that will be the cause of Thielemans' undoing?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

PAUL GOTTFRIED is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and a Guggenheim recipient. He is the author of numerous books and articles in several languages on intellectual history, paleoconservatism, ancient historiography, and political theory. His recent books include Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (2002) and The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (2005).