You'll want to read this article by George Weigel from Commentary on Europe's scary future. His thesis is that there are two culture wars going on in Europe, one between radical secularists and moral traditionalists, and the second between tolerant European mainstream culture and radical Islam. Weigel believes that the politically correct secularists have made Europe so liberal and tolerant that it despises its own traditions and is morally weak, which will lead to its eventual defeat by the very intolerant radical Islamists. According to Weigel, Europe's demographics make immigration a necessity, and more and more Islamists are crossing the Mediterranean to fill up the labor vacuum.

I think he's a little catastrophist, myself; Europe is very seductive, and an awful lot more immigrants and their descendants are going to Europeanize themselves, just as immigrants to America mostly Americanize, at least by the second generation or so. 

Still, have a look at this passage:

Earlier this year, five days short of the second anniversary of the Madrid bombings, the Zapatero government, which had already legalized marriage between and adoption by same-sex partners and sought to restrict religious education in Spanish schools, announced that the words “father” and “mother” would no longer appear on Spanish birth certificates. Rather, according to the government’s official bulletin, “the expression ‘father’ will be replaced by ‘Progenitor A,’ and ‘mother’ will be replaced by ‘Progenitor B.’” As the chief of the National Civil Registry explained to the Madrid daily ABC, the change would simply bring Spain’s birth certificates into line with Spain’s legislation on marriage and adoption. More acutely, the Irish commentator David Quinn saw in the new regulations “the withdrawal of the state’s recognition of the role of mothers and fathers and the extinction of biology and nature.”

At first blush, the Madrid bombings and the Newspeak of “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B” might seem connected only by the vagaries of electoral politics: the bombings, aggravating public opinion against a conservative government, led to the installation of a leftist prime minister, who then proceeded to do many of the things that aggressively secularizing governments in Spain have tried to do in the past. In fact, however, the nexus is more complex than that. For the events of the past two years in Spain are a microcosm of the two interrelated culture wars that beset Western Europe today.

The first of these wars—let us, following the example of Spain’s birth certificates, call it “Culture War A”—is a sharper form of the red state/blue state divide in America: a war between the postmodern forces of moral relativism and the defenders of traditional moral conviction. The second—“Culture War B”—is the struggle to define the nature of civil society, the meaning of tolerance and pluralism, and the limits of multiculturalism in an aging Europe whose below-replacement-level fertility rates have opened the door to rapidly growing and assertive Muslim populations.

Comment to Spaniards: US conservatives unanimously believe that Zapatero's victory on March 14, 2004 was a demonstration of Europe's attempt to appease the Islamists. I said so two years ago, and I stand by it.

Here's a similar piece linked to by A&L Daily, a review of Bruce Bawer's new book on the subject. And here's a review of Bawer's book and another one by Claire Berlinski from Front Page. The Commentary piece also mentions Bawer's book.

The Times of London blasts the BBC news and praises American television reporting. Will wonders never cease?

This piece by Shelby Steele in the Wall Street Journal is fascinating. Steele says that America and Europe are suffering from "white guilt" due to past racism, imperialism, and exploitation, without realizing that North Atlantic Western culture was the first and is still the only one to condemn itself for past evils and actually do something to eliminate or at least reduce them. Steele believes that this sense of guilt leads the US and Europe to be too gentle with Third World enemies. That's right, too gentle. He has a point; the Anglo-American army in Iraq does everything it can to avoid killing civilians, which its enemies most certainly do not do, and as recently as 1945 the Allies killed enemy civilians by the boatload, perhaps a million each in the bombings of Germany and Japan.

You'll also want to follow this dialogue in Slate between Robert Kagan and Amartya Sen on whether there is really a clash of civilizations or not. It will continue over the next few days, and promises to be very interesting.