Islam's Anschluss

From Islam's Anschluss, New York Sun, Jul 11 2005:

Despite the urge among Britain's friends across the Atlantic to present 7/7 as "London's 9/11," the label doesn't quite fit. Within 24 hours after September 11th, it was clear somewhere some sovereign state was going to get invaded. America could simply not afford not to respond. There's no sense of that in Britain.

The jihadists understand that Europe is up for grabs in a way that America isn't. It seems likely that wily Islamic leaders in the Middle East will embrace the cause of the rights of European Muslims in the same way that they claim solidarity with the Palestinians. When France began contemplating its headscarf ban in schools, it dispatched government ministers to seek the advice of Egyptian imams, implicitly accepting the view of Islamic scholars that the Fifth Republic is now an outlying province of the dar al-Islam. As the Zionist Entity can testify, that's not a club you necessarily want to be signed up for. Few European leaders have a clue what to do about this.