Europe Is Burning, and There's More to Come: Islam, and Hard Choices for U.S. Voters

By Eric Florack

A few short months ago, France was polling at 70% support for banning Islamic veils in public – and France doesn't do things by half measures, so don't be shocked if "considering" becomes "voting on" faster than Brussels can draft a strongly worded memo about it. They've already been closing mosques and dissolving organizations tied to extremism, which is French for "we tried tolerance, and tolerance did not go well."

• Austria's chewing over dissolving Islam-linked organizations of its own.
• Germany's playing it cautious – banning the loudest radical groups while pretending "keeping an eye on" the rest counts as a strategy.
• The Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden are all somewhere on that same spectrum, each quietly admitting what none of them wanted to say out loud a decade ago: the open-door experiment isn't going the way the brochure promised.
• Northern Ireland has also seen riots break out in Belfast.
  • In Ireland as a whole, my research shows at least 10 attacks on churches across the island have also been documented in the same period – arsons in Westmeath, at Tinure, and vandalism at St. Augustine's in Drogheda in the Republic, plus six attacks on churches or chapels in Northern Ireland between April 2025 and March 2026.

Meanwhile, over in the "authoritarian regimes handling this with their usual subtlety" category:

• China's got Islam on a very short leash, right alongside every other religion it doesn't control outright.
• North Korea, shockingly, isn't a beacon of religious liberty either.
• And Russia's treatment of the subject runs exactly as you'd expect from a country that considers "freedom of religion" a rounding error.

So there's your scoreboard: half of Europe finally waking up to a problem it spent 20 years being told didn't exist, and the other half of the world never bothering to pretend it cared about religious liberty in the first place.

Progress...  sort of.

One of the axioms that I’ve been leaning on pretty heavily for decades, is this:

Any government that wants to survive for long needs to understand; Its first duty is to defend – and if possible, expand – the influence of the culture that gave it life.

All of this leads to the question of, what should our actions in these matters be"

Say as you will about “religious freedom,” but be prepared to defend what you say against some wise guy like little ol’ me (for example) pointing out that the freedom of religion you champion is exactly what you won’t have following an Islamic takeover.

Dearborn, Michigan is an example. The aftermath of population growth and protests there has had local politicians calling for “unity” for years. But what precisely are we supposed to be unified behind?

Need a domestic preview?

Try Dearborn, where political rallies turn into a chorus of "Allahu Akbar" loud enough to make headlines, followed immediately by the traditional post-controversy ritual: local politicians rushing to podiums to call for "unity."

"UNITY" you say? Well here's a question: Unity behind what, exactly? Nobody ever says. That's not an oversight – it's the entire strategy. "Unity" is the word you reach for when you'd very much like everyone to stop asking what just happened and move along. It's the political equivalent of "nothing to see here," dressed up in a tie and given a press conference.

So here's a suggestion, free of charge: before the next politician stands up and asks us all to unify, maybe somebody should ask him to finish the sentence.

• Unified behind what, Senator?
• Behind whom, Mr. Congressman?
• Behind which set of values exactly, Ms. Candidate?

I solemnly promise you, that the chanting crowd and the objecting crowd are not reciting the same list.

"Unity" without an answer to that question isn't leadership – it's just noise dressed up to sound like it.

They’re trying to avoid making the hard choices.

Do I sound annoyed? Good, because that’s exactly what I intend.

As a nation, along with the rest of the free world, we have some seriously hard choices to make in these matters – and soon. Our very survival as a culture, as a people, depends totally on the choices we make now.

I’m annoyed because despite all the coal mine canaries being toes-up on the bottom of their respective cages, we have yet to act.

Interesting, too, that the people complaining about the supposed attempts to make this a white nationalist, Christian nation, are saying nothing about the increasingly loud efforts to make this an Islamist nation.

Perhaps we should start considering the limits the rest of the world has been considering. The EU members, particularly, have been on the front lines of calling for open borders – and are now starting to pay the price for that self-congratulating generosity.

Suicidal empathy, I call it.


Those “values” have now been exposed as self-destructive nonsense, and it’s now to the point where their cultural survival is an open question.

Let’s not let that happen here.

We can prevent that from happening by insisting our government perform its first duty, as I’ve stated.

Like it or not, the foundation of our nation is the Judeo-Christian culture. Freedom of religion in the 1st Amendment is a wonderful thing, but when that threatens our survival, as it increasingly does today, it’s time to have the courage to make the hard choices.

The hard choice is perhaps best described this way: Constitutional guardrails are fine, but become problematic when there’s a truck heading right at you and those guardrails prevent your escape from the head-on crash.