THE TRUMPET.COM: An unseemly revelation in an Italian newspaper illustrates a side of the Continent that is about to slip into history.
In the 1970s, Italy made a blood pact with Muslim terrorists. Groups like the Palestinian Liberation Organization were allowed free movement in Italy—receiving prosecutorial immunity while they plotted terrorist murders—in exchange for pledges not to launch attacks on Italian soil.
This revelation emerged last month, when former Italian President Francesco Cossiga published a letter of confession in the newspaper Corriere della Sera. The deal—which, he says, was essentially “don’t harm me and I won’t harm you”—was approved and directed by the premier at the time, Aldo Moro.
“During my time as interior minister I learned that plo people were holding heavy artillery in their homes and protected by diplomatic immunity as representatives of the Arab league,” Cossiga wrote.
“The terms of the agreement were that the Palestinian organizations could even maintain armed bases of operation in the country,” he wrote, “and they had freedom of entry and exit without being subject to normal police controls, because they were ‘handled’ by the secret services.” Similar deals existed between these groups and the governments of France and Britain.
This ugly truth typifies a cancerous, self-preserving opportunism that infects much of Europe to this day. It masquerades in moralistic rhetoric and political correctness—respect for the religion and culture of Muslims and such. But in truth, it’s just naked fear.
“[E]very attempt is made to prevent what radical Islamists perceive as insults even at the cost of throwing away key democratic freedoms,” Barry Rubin wrote in Global Politician after Cossiga’s admission. “This is not sensitivity to perpetrating bigotry but sensitivity to violence being perpetrated on themselves.”
The idiocy of these shortsighted, terrorist-friendly policies has since proven itself in at least two predictable ways. First, these deals were an open invitation to extremists of all stripes. From the 1980s, Europe became a hive of Islamist activity. The policy of toleration made European governments abettors in creating one of the most extensive terrorist networks on the planet. Most of modern history’s most famous terrorist attacks were planned on European and British soil, including 9/11.
And this gaggle of violent extremists was embedded within a massive exodus of Muslims into Europe: some 20 million over the last 30 years—equal to the combined populations of Ireland, Belgium and Denmark. UN reports say that Muslim communities throughout Europe have grown over 100 percent in just a decade and a half. Islam has become Europe’s second-largest religion. Says Bernard Lewis: “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.” Soft Europe, Hard Europe >>> By Joel Hilliker | September 3, 2008
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