Victor Davis Hanson evidently doesn’t like Europeans and some Americans and he’s isn’t afraid to say it.  You see, according to the one article, many Muslims are anti-Semites and the Europeans (along with select Americans) are “indifferent” to Muslim anti-Semitism, even though many if not all EU countries actually criminalise anti-Semitic speech and acts as hate crimes.  One might actually object to such criminalisation of speech on the basis that it infringes on free speech, which has lately become the fashionable idol before which American conservatives throw themselves, but it remains unclear how the Europeans enable rampaging anti-Semitism.  Oh, that’s right–they disagree with Hanson on foreign policy, so ipso facto….There are apparently Americans who are also doing this, because some attempted to have a conversation with Ahmadinejad (how dare they!).  

In the other, we are told that Europeans are “traitors to the Enlightenment.”  Well, maybe, but if they were actually traitors to the Enlightenment why would that necessarily either be a bad thing or reason for an ostensibly conservative person to complain?  Oh, yes, now I remember–they have allegedly lost faith in Reason, which is the other idol to which we on the right are now supposed to bow.  There is good reason to lament cases where Europeans cave in to Muslim intimidation, as happened with the Berlin opera, but it is by no means a universal phenomenon.  When Muslims were rioting and protesting the Danish cartoons, German government officials, among others, expressed support for free speech and several European newspapers republished the cartoons to state their support for free speech.  When Van Gogh was murdered, after Fortuyn had already raised the problem of Muslim immigrants’ assimilation to Dutch norms, such as they are, the Netherlands started taking a hard look at the problem of how or whether such people could be integrated into Dutch society if they are unwilling to accept the norms of that society.  When Muslims were rioting and protesting Pope Benedict’s speech, Aznar came out in support of the Pope and invoked the example of Ferdinand and Isabella–hardly the squeamish whinging of an appeaser.  There is change afoot and attitudes are changing in some places–not that the perpetual Europhobe Hanson would care to notice those things.  Europe’s ”tolerance” regime and its dogmatic multiculturalism are real problems, but they are also problems that Europeans, and European conservatives in particular, are taking on as best they can under the weight of decades of rot.  It is much easier to damn the whole of Europe than to see the potential hopeful signs for sanity and renewal.   

After this deluge of wisdom from old V.D., I am left wondering what on earth this last sentence even means:

And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past.

This would presumably be the “pre-Enlightenment past” when Europeans fought the Muslims in the field, summoned Crusades, prayed for deliverance from the Hagarene foe and viewed them simply and plainly as the Saracen and the infidel.  Not exactly a friendly attitude, but rather more like the kind of combative one Hanson seems to want to see in our European cousins.  In the “pre-Enlightenment past,” Christians did not insult their own intelligence with myths about the Golden Age of Islamic civilisation and the tolerance of Islam.  Before Voltaire and his ilk, people did not typically romanticise the Sultan and the Ottomans and admire the alleged moral superiority of foreign civilisations as a way of subverting and destroying Christian civilisation.  The lumieres were in many respects the first great Western enablers of Islam, and so naturally it is to their example that a neocon would look.  Before the Enlightenment, all of the pathetic, servile habits that Hanson finds offensive in Europeans were rare.  Those who sided with the Turk were considered renegades to the Faith and to Europe.  Now the modern renegades over here plead with the cowardly Europeans to let the Turks into Europe again, while the Europeans have enough sense to say no.  Each time a choice had to be made between aiding a Christian people or a non-Christian one, Hanson and friends reliably have chosen the latter–and for equally cynical reasons of Machtpolitik (Azeri oil is more important than justice for and solidarity with Armenians, for example) that they try to pin on the Europeans when Europeans don’t march in lockstep on questions relating to Israel or the Middle East in general.