Europe: A Murder and Taboos.

The assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn shocked Europeans, and deserves notice here.

Fortuyn was a 54-year-old maverick, a professor turned journalist turned politician, who upset the cozy world of Dutch politics when his brand-new party won a third of the seats in local elections at Rotterdam, Holland's second-largest city. Fortuyn, who called for lower levels of immigration and lower taxes, and for a crackdown on crime, was sometimes called a populist, but more often a right-winger, or an extreme right-winger. His party was contesting the national parliamentary elections when he was gunned down.

His death is the most lurid symbol of the vilification of conservative opinion in the brave new world of the EU. While it is often wrong to extrapolate from the deeds of lone gunmen, Fortuyn's murderer may well have been politically motivated. Dutch police are holding a 32-year-old eco-activist -- a man of the wild Left. The timing of Fortuyn's murder, within a fortnight after the French presidential elections, was also suggestive. As all the world knew, Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the French run-off. Le Pen is a demagogue who has said deplorable things. But in a race that included a former Trotskyite (Lionel Jospin), as well as current Communists, of both the Third and Fourth Internationals, it was grotesque to treat him as a portent of the end- times. In Europe, radicals and totalitarians of the Left are part of the order of things, but the non-establishment Right is beyond the pale.

Consider, also, the elasticity of European definitions. The 73-year-old Le Pen carried the baggage of a French Right tainted by Algerian violence and by Vichy. Economically, he was also an old-fashioned French statist. Fortuyn, in most of his beliefs, was a lefty libertarian. He supported drug legalization and euthanasia, two popular Dutch nostrums; he was an ostentatiously out homosexual. But if one breaks ranks on immigration -- and on the related issue, in Europe, of urban crime -- one is lumped in a monolithic "Right," cheek by jowl with Hitler. The vehemence of the European taboos bespeaks an elite facing a problem it dare not address. The more it stonewalls, the more success corsairs like Le Pen and Fortuyn will have. The leadership of America's major parties is equally unwilling to discuss the immigration issue, but because American politics is more decentralized and more democratic, it does pop up from time to time.

The specific immigration problem that Europe faces suggests a bifurcation of the threat. Le Pen and Fortuyn were outspoken about the Islamic reconquista of Europe -- what Fortuyn called "immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don't assimilate." Hermetic Middle Eastern communities in the United States provided safe havens for some of the 9/11 hijackers as they prepared their deadly attacks. Our most pressing problem, however, especially in Florida and the Southwest, is immigrants from Latin America. They would pose massive problems of assimilation even if we decided to require them to assimilate. But they have not killed thousands of our citizens. Even as we seek to control our borders and propagate our culture, we should also count our blessings.