Jihad in Europe is winning.

Don’t take my word for it. Read Douglas Murray’s account of a conference he recently attended in Holland, as posted at The Times Online.

If his observations don’t confirm the title of this post in your eyes, I fear the state of affairs that needs to come to pass that will convince you.

Murray provides background to the occasion of the conference, which among other objectives sought to memorialize the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, assassinated for allegedly offending Islam and his stance against Muslim immigration to Holland and Europe.

I had been invited to deliver the closing speech to the memorial conference on what would have been Pim Fortuyn’s 58th birthday. I said I would talk on the effects of Europe’s increasingly Islamicised population and advocate a tougher European counterterror strategy. There was no overriding political agenda to the occasion, simply a desire for frank discussion.

Murray explains that many of the conference participants felt compelled to participate under aliases. He also reports that the Dutch security forces responsible for protecting the conference judged the threat as just one step below “national emergency.” At the end of the conference, Murray had planned on speaking to Duth MP Geert Wilders. Wilders was unable to make a meeting due to having to follow up with his staff about over 40 recent death threats he has received.

Murray explains why the affairs of Holland should be of grave concern to western observers:

Holland — with its disproportionately high Muslim population — is the canary in the mine. Its once open society is closing, and Europe is closing slowly behind it. It looks, from Holland, like the twilight of liberalism — not the “liberalism” that is actually libertarianism, but the liberalism that is freedom. Not least freedom of expression.

Murray sees the most serious danger, not so much from violence and threats of violence, but from the cunning orchestrators of repression. These same beat the plowshares of political correctness and multiculturalism, into weapons of legal prosecution of a less free press, and diminishing free speech:

Europe is shuffling into darkness. It is proving incapable of standing up to its enemies, and in an effort to accommodate the peripheral rights of a minority is failing to protect the most basic rights of its own people.

Read the whole thing. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for providing the link, with extensive excerpts. Glenn’s take:

People talk about Eurabia, but what's really happened is that Europe has become Weimarized, with governments and institutions too morally and intellectually weak to stand up for the principles they pretend to embody. And we know what that led to last time . . . .

He’s right of course. It’s one thing to accept that Europe will rarely allow itself to act in coalition with a beleaguered US in standing up against Islamo-fascism. It is quite another state of affairs, when Europe, in impotence, succumbs altogether. For the day may yet arrive, when Europe herself is not just against war against the fascists, but on the other side.