A commenter on the Michel Houellebecq thread replies:

Jaakko Raipala says:

January 29, 2015 at 11:59 pm GMT • 500 Words

Replying to @Whiskey:

“There will be nothing but say, Pakistan writ large all over Europe. Fundamentally European men lack the will to fight and kill to keep what is theirs from about 1.5 billion Muslims who want it — and most European women will happily go along at least they get domination.”

It would be hard to come up with sillier nonsense. If history has proven anything at all it has proven that European men certainly do not lack the will to fight and kill. That is why our states keep mainly cracking down on native men, they’re much more afraid of the European man than the Muslim and for a good reason. Unfortunately these things tend to turn into self-fulfilling prophecies and trying to ignore growing problems because you’re scared of the people offering solutions will often just give you a more radical solution in the end.

The root of the conflict is that European ethics restricts fighting and killing to the state monopoly of violence, Islamic ethics does not. If, say, a bunch of Englishmen had attacked Charlie Hebdo for mocking something important to Englishmen (it is a French satirical, after all), it would be expected for the Prime Minister and the Queen to show up on TV to condemn the atrocity and promise action against whichever faction pulled it off. Most Englishmen would be disgusted as Englishmen will never approve of shooting Frenchmen for some English cause outside the context of a European war with European cultural rules of engagement – but then, if such a war were to happen most Englishmen would be perfectly OK with shooting at Frenchmen for the sake of some English cause.

With Islam nothing works like this. No Muslim organization shows up to assume the responsibility for policing extremists. Islamic terrorists hide behind the fact that Islam isn’t organized in a European way of assigning responsibilities. Islam deliberately obfuscates the difference between combatant and civilian. This is all a perfect inverse match for a Europe that’s now phobic about assigning “collective responsibility” to minorities. We are in the uncomfortable situation that we see that a war is being waged and a lot of us would fight in it but the enemy doesn’t act like a European state power.

Our leaders are reluctant to even acknowledge the conflict because they don’t know what to do about it. If no one figures that out in time Western Europe will just fall into a similar situation as much of Eastern Europe with unclear national identities and loyalties and a lot of men who will just choose to fight, damn the consequences. It’s not the end of Europe but it’s the end of nice clear identities that much of Western Europe had finally figured out (only to demonize them because well-being makes people stupid and they start attacking the ideas that made them successful).