What's Going on in Europe?

Europe's liberal open door immigration policies are having an adverse effect on the continent and no one seems to have many answers to the growing problems brought on by out-of-control
multiculturalism:

PARIS. -- For nearly 50 years Western Europe has weathered the storm of the Cold War, living with the threat of the Soviet Union on its doorstep. Now Europe is waking up to a new threat, only this time the danger comes from within.
From Paris to Amsterdam and from Brussels to Berlin, decades of liberal open-door immigration policies are bearing their mark on Europe's domestic politics, not to mention the demographics of the Old Continent.

The arrival of several million immigrants -- mostly from North Africa, Turkey and Southwest Asia, and mostly Muslims -- has forever changed the face of a once largely white, overwhelmingly Christian Europe. Germany alone has some 7 million non-German residents, the majority of them Turks.

This influx of immigrants has caused a knee-jerk reaction from worried Europeans who have turned to right-wing parties for answers. Witness France's National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen who came close to winning the last presidential election.

The failure of many immigrants to integrate has resulted in communities living parallel to one another instead of blending. Exacerbating the problem, Islamist activists have found refuge and anonymity among these immigrant communities into which they can easily blend.

Many in Holland, shaken by brutal murders by islamo-fascist thugs have found their own solution:

For years Holland was celebrated as a symbol of racial tolerance. But two high-profile murders have changed all that, reports Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

Escaping the stress of clogged roads, street violence and loss of faith in Holland's once celebrated way of life, the Dutch middle classes are leaving the country in droves for the first time in living memory.

Victor Davis Hanson makes a brilliant analogy between Europe and Tolkien's "Ents":

One of the many wondrous peoples that poured forth from the rich imagination of the late J. R. R. Tolkien were the Ents. These tree-like creatures, agonizingly slow and covered with mossy bark, nursed themselves on tales of past glory while their numbers dwindled in their isolation. Unable to reproduce themselves or to fathom the evil outside their peaceful forest — and careful to keep to themselves and avoid reacting to provocation of the tree-cutters and forest burners — they assumed they would be given a pass from the upheavals of Middle Earth.

But with the sudden arrival of two volatile hobbits, the nearby evils of timber-cutting, industrial devilry, and mass murder became too much for the Ents to stomach. They finally "wake up" (literally). Then they go on the offensive — and are amazed at the power they still wield in destroying Saruman's empire.

Can we liken Europe to Tolkien's Ents? Hanson continues:

More specifically, does the Ents analogy work for present-day Europe? Before you laugh at the silly comparison, remember that the Western military tradition is European. Today the continent is unarmed and weak, but deep within its collective mind and spirit still reside the ability to field technologically sophisticated and highly disciplined forces — if it were ever to really feel threatened. One murder began to arouse the Dutch; what would 3,000 dead and a toppled Eiffel Tower do to the French? Or how would the Italians take to a plane stuck into the dome of St. Peter? We are nursed now on the spectacle of Iranian mullahs, with their bought weapons and foreign-produced oil wealth, humiliating a convoy of European delegates begging and cajoling them not to make bombs — or at least to point what bombs they make at Israel and not at Berlin or Paris. But it was not always the case, and may not always be.

This is a must read. As Hanson mentions later in the piece, it's easy for us to be amused by Europe's leftist, effete, elitist, arrogant (my words, not his...I just can't restrain myself sometimes!), methodology of dealing with continent threatening issues. He wonders if a Demosthenes will come to the fore and do the heavy lifting or will they remain in a state of slumber.