Troubling News from Europe

While debate continues about the wisdom of importing large numbers of unvetted Muslim refugees into the country it's instructive to look to the experience of the Europeans. We're all familiar with the rise in Islamic terrorism in Europe perpetrated by indigenous Muslim residents, but Strategy Page has a piece that gives us a different slant on the danger. The article focuses on the number of radical Muslims in the police and military in several European countries. Here are some excerpts:

In the wake of the late 2015 ISIL attack in Paris and the early 2016 attack in Brussels most European countries were forced (by the majority of voters and much of the local media) to reveal data on the extent of Islamic terrorist activity in local security forces.

Germany reported that since 2007 at least 22 military personnel have been identified as Islamic radicals and supporters of Islamic terrorism. Five of these people had completed their service and were civilians again but 17 were still in uniform and were dismissed from service. In addition at least 65 military personnel are currently under investigation for Islamic terrorist sympathies and 29 former military personnel have been identified as having gone to Syria to join ISIL.

The situation is no less troubling elsewhere in Europe:

France recently admitted that since early 2015 the number of suspected Islamic terrorists in general had risen 50 percent to 8,250. Worse, the French admitted they had problems with some Moslems in their own security forces. France had identified 17 Moslem policemen who had been radicalized since 2012. It was already public knowledge that by early 2015 at least ten Moslem French soldiers had deserted and joined ISIL in Syria. Some of these deserters have since been identified as training other terrorists in skills they learned in the French military. One of these deserters had risen to a leadership position in ISIL.

The problems with radicalized police were worse because police have access to police databases containing information about terrorism suspects, counter-terrorism tactics and ongoing counter-terrorism operations. Not all the details of this infiltration of the security forces has become public and it is believed there is more of it and the French are, for obvious reasons, not revealing exactly what they are doing about it.

We keep telling ourselves that it's only a minority of Muslims who've been radicalized, and that it's unjust to be suspicious of the intentions of all Muslims, qua Muslims. Perhaps so, but liberals, at least, are pretty selective in how they employ this claim.

For example, it's only a small minority of gun owners who use their weapons illegally, but the left wants to punish all gun owners by banning firearms altogether. Moreover, it's probably only a small minority of Klansmen who would actually do something to harm people they don't like, but it's considered a moral virtue to despise anyone associated with the Klan which, in its bigotry, is probably no worse than that of many intrepretations of Islam. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see why it's right to despise the Klan but wrong to be merely wary of adherents of a religion that has spawned so much carnage, death and terror over the last three decades.

Polls in Britain found that almost 20% of British Muslims felt little loyalty to Britain but were completely loyal to Islam, a finding which leads one to ask, at what point does the risk associated with bringing among us people who believe that God hates us and who want nothing more than to destroy our way of life, become intolerable? At what point do we decide that maybe it's not a good idea to have people, many of whom have contempt for this country and its people, occupying positions of leadership in the military and police forces?

A lot of Europeans are evidently asking themselves those same questions right now.