Islam versus Europe

The Kosovo war was the first international political event I can remember becoming really passionate about. It was in the pre-blog era but I participated in intensive discussions about it on Usenet forums. There was a kind of verbal cyber-war going on alongside the conflict on the ground (or in the air). I favoured the Kosovar side and developed a deep loathing of all things Serb, including Milosevic and Ratko Mladic.

I would once - and not so long ago either - have rejoiced about the capture of Mladic, which has just been announced. But today I feel strangely unmoved. My political thought has matured over the years and I now see those events in the context of the global jihad and the supremacist yearning that lies at the heart of Islam. In some of the debates I participated in at the time, I recall a few dissident voices mentioning the extraordinarily disproportionate involvement of Albanians in organised crime, but I screened those out; or the Islam factor, but I dismissed that as the ravings of (mostly American) Christian extremists.

Now, however, it seems to me that the fate of the Serbs in Kosovo prefigures in microcosm the fate of the people of Europe as a whole. Within the course of a century, the Muslims bred the Serbs out of their own country, their historic homeland. And the same processes are underway throughout the rest of the continent now, at least its western half. Like the Serbs, we are confronted with a demographic jihad.

In contemplating the scale of the challenge we face, and in particular the misplaced compassion that has brought us to this point, I have also concluded that we must abandon our conventional moral precepts insofar as they constrain us from taking the action necessary to preserve our way of life. In my view, there is literally nothing we should not be willing to do.

So, in the course of just over a decade I have gone from deeply loathing Ratko Mladic to, effectively, becoming him.