Europe's quandary

The following is an example of how being humane can come back to bite you: A Belgian court ruled this month that a Muslim teacher could teach Islam in class while wearing a hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women.

Two years earlier, police were sent to the school where she teaches to prevent her from entering the premises wearing her hijab, because the township had decided that only students were allowed to wear the head covering, and then only in the classroom. The court has now ruled that when teaching religion the teacher is not required to be neutral. The Muslim community celebrated the decision, which eats away even further at Europe's secularism.

In a month that saw a British soldier butchered to death in London, a French soldier stabbed in a Paris suburb, and a wave of Muslim violence sweeping across Sweden, it is legitimate to wonder whether the Belgian court is disconnected from reality.

"There is no problem with wearing a hijab in front of students who chose to study Islam," the court explained. The township was stunned by the decision, believing that it contradicted the school's secular principles, and said that the ruling would influence the students' religious freedoms. The secular-public school, municipal officials say, could become a place where Islam is preached.

The court's decision, incidentally, obligates not only the small town of 20,000 residents, but the entire predominantly French-speaking district of Wallonia, which includes Brussels. Were it not for the painful reality of the past few days, this story could have been told as some sort of Belgian joke. But this is not the case.

Europeans did not discover the Islamists in their midst just this month: London remembers the suicide bombings from July 2005, while France still has not recovered from the terrorist Mohammed Merah, who acted on behalf of "Allah" in Toulouse in 2012. Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent, killed three "treasonous" (in his words) French soldiers, before killing three schoolchildren and a teacher at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in the city.

The attacks on the soldiers in France and Britain last week, just three days apart, merely highlight the depth of the problem. These two countries practice opposing immigrant absorption policies. Secular France rejects the idea of religion-based communities. Britain, in contrast, is more tolerant and allows isolated communities of Muslim citizens to live according to Islam and its customs. In France, community schools run counter to the country's ideology, but in Britain this is allowed. Last week we saw how jihadists sprouted from both systems.

Clearly we should not generalize, because most of Europe's Muslims are not terrorists. However, for two decades now, the majority of violent acts in Europe have been perpetrated in the name of Allah. Those who claim that the economic situation in France and Britain is the catalyst for this violence are invited to see for themselves the violence being perpetrated by Muslim immigrants in Sweden, the country that has perhaps been the most generous toward immigrants.

Europe is in a quandary: Discussing the problem of radical Islam will foment anger and fear among its citizens and strengthen the radical Right (as in France in 2002), but if it continues to bury its head in the sand it risks being beheaded when it comes up for air.

How did Europe come to this? This is what happens when being humane comes back to bite you.

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