Islamic Terror in Bologna
By Robert Locke
FrontPageMagazine.com | June, 25 2002

The AP is reporting that the Carabinieri have uncovered and disrupted (thank God!) a planned attack by Islamic terrorists on the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna. For you see, that church contains a Renaissance fresco depicting Muhammad in Hell.

While the plot and the plotters will be roundly denounced, what will perhaps go unremarked is the arrogance of these supposedly mainstream
Italian Moslems who dared to petition the Vatican to have the fresco effaced. That Italy has been a Catholic nation for 1700 years (longer by
centuries than Islam has even existed) apparently matters nothing to them. Preserving an irreplaceable product of the greatest age of Western art, if it be at the expense of their dogmatic sensibilities, apparently matters even less.

In the case of the would-be terrorists we see yet another example of fundamentalist Islam's frightening impulse (so strikingly realized in
Afghanistan, the Indian Subcontinent, & elsewhere) to destroy, rather than incorporate, the previous cultures of the lands to which they succeed. It is the cultural equivalent of what Mark Steyn, when describing political revolutions, has called the "Year Zero approach." And if present demographic trends continue, we can expect to hear of more such plots, not just in Italy, but in France, Spain, & England as well.

The approach of the soi-disant moderates, if slower, is nonetheless dangerous, especially when it plays upon contemporary Western multiculturalism. For the multiculturalists, of course, all religions are equal, being "offensive" is the only mortal sin, and minority victims are the noblest of men. The newly controversial fresco is a figurative depiction (do these Moslems have no understanding of the nature of art?) of an
article of Catholic belief, that Muhammad was a false prophet, and perhaps an heretic, whose followers (with a few notable exceptions) have
been a menace to Christendom from the beginning. Naturally, this is offensive to those Moslems, and, while the Vatican may always refuse
them permission to whitewash it, in a future Bologna composed of more Moslem immigrants and aging Italian multiculturalists, Stalin's mocking
question will again become relevant: "How many divisions has the pope?"

All this ought to confirm the common-sense proposition that it is impossible to integrate into an existing culture more than a small number of persons whose basic values and beliefs are at variance with it. Such is the case between Islam and the historic cultures of Europe. Today's
Islamic immigrants do not want to be assimilated into Europe; on the contrary, they want to assimilate Europe. To say so, and vigorously to
oppose the process, is not xenophobia but self-preservation. The people, and now at last some of their leaders, understand what is at stake. Let us hope they take appropriate action.