Are we watching the collapse of Western Europe in real time? - comment

We thought we were watching an atrocity. We were actually watching the beginning of the end of Europe as we knew it.

These weren’t random acts of violence. They were tutorials. These were demonstrations of how terror rewrites the rules of free societies without the need to pass laws.

The lesson was easy to comprehend: Publish what we don’t like, and we’ll kill you. Be visibly Jewish in public, and we’ll kill you. Once we’ve done it a few times, the fear will do the rest of the work for us.

That’s the evil genius of the strategy. You only have to strike once or twice before the inhibition becomes self-sustaining.

This procedure is what I call “censorship by Kalashnikov.” The gun fires in a Paris newsroom, and the blast impacts every editorial meeting in London and New York. This phenomenon permeates every university classroom in Berlin and Toronto. It is included in every synagogue security briefing in Los Angeles and Miami.

An editor spikes a cartoon without anyone having to ask her to do it. A teacher skips over a section on secularism because he’s already doing the risk assessment in his head. A Jewish day school adds another layer of armed guards and taller fences and decides that some field trips are no longer worth it anymore.

The terrorists don’t need to show up again. The inhibition is already installed, running quietly in the background like software that updates itself. That’s how you know that the strategy worked.

Last year, on the 10th anniversary, Francois Hollande, president at the time of the attacks, publicly acknowledged the unspoken issues. He talked about self-censorship driven by fear. He discussed how the murders continue to influence both what is published and what is taught.

When a former head of state admits that terrorism successfully changed the behavior of a free press, he’s telling you the attackers achieved their strategic objective. The attackers’ strategic objective was not to kill 12 cartoonists or four Jews in a supermarket. It was killing the confidence of an entire civilization in its principles.

And that’s exactly what happened. The Europe that existed before January 2015, the Europe that believed it had settled the question of blasphemy in the Enlightenment, thought secularism was a done deal, and assumed Jews could live openly without armed guards at every synagogue, that Europe started dying that week.

THIS STRATEGY had been tested for decades across the Middle East and North Africa. Speech about religion functions as a criminal offense in nearly every country in the region. The infrastructure of censorship operates openly, backed by state power, social coercion, and sometimes mob violence.

Pew Research found that 18 out of 20 countries in the region – 90% – had blasphemy laws on the books as of 2019. Thirteen of those countries made it illegal to leave Islam. This tells you everything you need to know about whether these legal systems believe people have the right to think their own thoughts.

Freedom House reported last year that every single country it surveyed in the Middle East blocks political, social, or religious content online. The information ecosystem across an entire region is shaped by the principle that certain ideas are too dangerous to permit and that offense qualifies as a form of violence.

The power of the state, the threat of the mob, or the edge of a blade is the correct response to speech you don’t like.

Jihadist terror simply exports that principle at gunpoint. It seeks to make the reflex automatic in societies that spent centuries trying to build something different. You don’t publish that cartoon. You don’t teach that history.

You don’t want to talk about Muhammad, Islam, or religious reasons for violence. This is because you’ve already thought about what might happen if you do. You have decided that exercising discretion outweighs the risk of being murdered.

The Hypercacher assault made it very clear that the problem is much more than just making fun of people. When you murder Jews in a grocery store, you’re saying their presence in public life remains negotiable.

Their security hinges on the extent to which they are prepared to disappear. A society might quietly, incrementally, and in ways that seem indecisive, decide that accommodating those making threats is easier than protecting those threatened.

AND THAT’S precisely what Western Europe has been doing for 11 years. When looked at on its own, each compromise makes sense. We won’t watch this animation since we don’t want to make them mad. We’ll skip this cartoon because we don’t want to provoke them. We’ll avoid this topic because the security costs are prohibitive.

Collectively, they amount to defeat. They amount to the slow-motion collapse of the principles that made Western civilization worth defending in the first place.

Look at what’s happened to European cities since 2015. Jewish families are leaving France in record numbers. Entire neighborhoods in major capitals have become de facto no-go zones for certain forms of expression. Publishers reject manuscripts.

Museums cancel exhibits. Universities disinvite speakers. Police tell Jewish community leaders they can’t guarantee protection during the High Holy Days. Synagogues look like fortresses. The list goes on and on.

This is what the beginning of the end looks like. It doesn’t come all at once. It comes in a thousand small accommodations. It comes in the form of a thousand quiet retreats – a thousand moments where you decide that maintaining peace is more important than defending principle.

Millions of Muslims find this ideology repugnant and face severe consequences for voicing their opinions. Journalists, activists, comedians, atheists, women, and LGBTQ people in Muslim-majority countries risk their lives every day for saying things that would be utterly mundane in Brooklyn or London, or Paris.

Ex-Muslims or reformist Muslims who have lived under a system that treats thought as a crime are some of the bravest defenders of free expression in the world.

The problem is the ideology and the infrastructure – legal, social, and theological – that turns it into enforceable policy and builds entire societies around the principle that certain questions are forbidden, certain conclusions are rejected, and certain people are prevented from leaving.

Western democracies have responded to this threat with better security and tougher prosecutions. Which matters. Which helps. Which saves lives. What we haven’t been willing to do is say the most important thing: Violence cannot be permitted to define the boundaries of speech.

That we will not edit ourselves out of fear. That the right to offend and blaspheme and say things that make people uncomfortable is the foundation of everything else we claim to value about free societies.

Every time we don’t say that, every time an editor kills a story, every time a museum cancels an exhibit, and every time a speaker gets disinvited because security costs too much, the extremists pocket a win without having to fire another shot. We’ve done their work for them.

And we’re watching the consequences play out in real time. Europe is unraveling. The social contract that held for generations is breaking down. The assumption that you could live freely, speak freely, worship freely, draw freely – that assumption is dead. And we killed it ourselves through a thousand acts of accommodation that seemed reasonable at the time.

SECURITY NEEDS to become standard infrastructure. Security needs to become as standard and non-negotiable as fire exits and building codes. Journalists covering extremism receive protection.

Jewish institutions receive protection. Public intellectuals under threat receive protection. We stop making people choose between safety and visibility, as if that’s a reasonable choice to impose on citizens of a free country.

We need to be direct about what we’re defending. We should defend the right to critique Islam with the same rigor we apply to Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion. We are free to be rude. People think that blasphemy is a sort of expression that is protected.

People and editors can argue about taste and responsibility until they are tired. Violence is always wrong, no matter what someone says.

We need to be able to last. The plan to scare us depends on our being tired. We might lose control or conclude that the conflict isn’t worth it.

The strongest answer is a society that refuses to shut up. That keeps publishing, teaching, arguing, and protecting the people brave enough to do those things. Year after year. This continues until the cost of attempting to silence us becomes intolerable.

Eleven years is a long time to spend managing fear instead of defeating it. The people who were killed at Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher were casualties in a war over whether free societies can remain free.

The question remains whether journalists can continue to practice their profession. Whether Jews are allowed to buy groceries without calculating the risk. Whether any of us get to live in countries where the threat of murder looms over every editorial decision and every public gathering.

We can build memorials, light candles, and recite speeches about unity. Or we can recognize these murders for what they were: the opening salvo in the collapse of Western Europe. This is an enemy strategy that has proven far more effective than we are willing to acknowledge, that continues working every single day, and that depends entirely on our willingness to continue accommodating it.

We can decide to stop letting it work. But the time is running out. And Europe as we knew it is already gone. The question is whether the rest of the West follows.

The choice is still ours. For now.