
Two facts are usually kept in separate rooms, because most writing on this subject can hold only one at a time.
The first: the overwhelming majority of Europe's Muslims want exactly what everyone else wants — to raise their children, earn a living, and be left in peace.
The second: that majority tolerates in its midst a faction that preaches the sword for the apostate, marries children, treats women as property, and despises the free society it chose to live in.
Both are true at once. An account that suppresses the first collapses into bigotry; one that suppresses the second collapses into surrender — and almost everything written on political Islam in Europe commits one of those two failures on purpose.
This essay refuses both. It follows the argument wherever it goes: the surveys the apologists won't read; the foreign states — Saudi, Qatar, Iran, Turkey — that fund the mosques; the reformers who keep being killed for reforming; the grooming-gang victims the police would not name for fear of a word; the Christians no one marches for; the antisemitism that has found a new home on the Left. And it rejects, just as flatly, the nativist's fantasy of collective expulsion.
The answer is neither. It is a muscular liberal universalism: one law for everyone, applied without the flinch, the exemption, or the cultural discount that four decades of misplaced guilt have taught us. Popper said it plainly — a society that extends unlimited tolerance to the militantly intolerant will be destroyed by them.
The European failure of the last forty years was not an excess of racism, nor an excess of tolerance. It was a failure of confidence. This is an argument for getting it back.
Neither bigotry, nor surrender.
Pedro Santa Clara@psantacl
English


