Stoppa Malmö

Apropå det alldeles vansinniga beslutet i Malmö att låta tennismatchen mellan Sverige och Israel spelas inför tomma läktare kan det vara värt att notera att kolumnisten Mark Steyn - ofta genialiskt provokativ humorist men också stundtals monoman i sin besatthet av den demografiska infallsvinkeln - snuddar vid Malmö i National Reviews blogg The Corner.

Lars Hedegaard looks at Europe and Islam from the left's point of view, starting with a forgotten line by Marx:

There are still a few grizzled post-socialists around that will remember what their old prophet, Karl Marx, had to say about religion in the very first sentence of his Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from 1843: “Criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism”.

Criticism of religion is not only the starting point of all criticism. It is the prerequisite of any kind of criticism. In a society where religion cannot be criticized, everything becomes religion – from the length of your beard to what hand to use when wiping your backside.

The above would have been unexceptional observations to any Continental lefties a generation ago. Why then are the Euroleft prostrate before Islam? Simple arithmetic:

They are now increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote, which they hope will guarantee them a perpetual foothold at least in the major population centers.

With Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, and many other Continental cities from Malmo to Marseilles approaching majority Muslim status in the next decade, the demographic reality of a re-religionized Europe is too hard to buck. For the soft-left establishment, to be unsolicitous of Islam is to condemn yourself to a few fast shrinking redoubts. (It's strange, for example, to hear American Jews still professing bewilderment at the ever more naked hostility in Europe toward Israel. Look at the electoral math: For your average squishy Europol, there is nothing to gain and an awful lot to lose by being perceived as insufficiently hostile to "Zionism".)