Let's get real: The danger facing Europe today is more and larger jihadist attacks like the massacre at Charlie Hedbo. The right wing parties likely to benefit politically are not "extreme." They're populist and they're anti-immigrant, for good reason. France has 751 "no-go" areas, which are radical Islamic enclaves in which sharia law has been imposed and French law completely abandoned. There is no assimilation. That's what's dangerous. The Times is pushing a paradigm of "sensitivity" and "inclusion" that reflects the politics of the second half of the 20th century. We're no longer in that time. Europe is at a crisis stage precisely because it hasn't managed the deterioration of its minorities policies. The socialist parties will kowtow to political correctness, and the result will be more bloodshed on a massive scale. Meanwhile, right wing populists will be the only force willing to stem the tide and preserve whatever is left of decent, determined Western culture on the continent.
It's a sad state of affairs.
At the Old Gray Lady, "‘Dangerous Moment’ for Europe, as Fear and Resentment Grow":
LONDON — The sophisticated, military-style strike Wednesday on a French newspaper known for satirizing Islam staggered a continent already seething with anti-immigrant sentiments in some quarters, feeding far-right nationalist parties like France’s National Front.
“This is a dangerous moment for European societies,” said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London. “With increasing radicalization among supporters of jihadist organizations and the white working class increasingly feeling disenfranchised and uncoupled from elites, things are coming to a head.”
Olivier Roy, a French scholar of Islam and radicalism, called the Paris assault — the most deadly terrorist attack on French soil since the Algerian war ended in the early 1960s — “a quantitative and therefore qualitative turning point,” noting the target and the number of victims. “This was a maximum-impact attack,” he said. “They did this to shock the public, and in that sense they succeeded.”
Anti-immigrant attitudes have been on the rise in recent years in Europe, propelled in part by a moribund economy and high unemployment, as well as increasing immigration and more porous borders. The growing resentments have lifted the fortunes of established parties like the U.K. Independence Party in Britain and the National Front, as well as lesser-known groups like Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West, which assembled 18,000 marchers in Dresden, Germany, on Monday.
In Sweden, where there have been three recent attacks on mosques, the anti-immigrant, anti-Islamist Sweden Democrats Party has been getting about 15 percent support in recent public opinion polls.
Paris was traumatized by the attack, with widespread fears of another. “We feel less and less safe,” said Didier Cantat, 34, standing outside the police barriers at the scene. “If it happened today, it will happen again, maybe even worse.”
Mr. Cantat spoke for many when he said the attacks could fuel greater anti-immigrant sentiment. “We are told Islam is for God, for peace,” he said. “But when you see this other Islam, with the jihadists, I don’t see peace, I see hatred. So people can’t tell which is the real Islam.”
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