Is Europe's Present America's Future?

The editorial below, from today's European Wall Street Journal (subscription), is proof that, left to its own devices, radical Islam will destroy hard-won liberties in Western democracies from within. It's also a reminder that the freedoms so many in the West now take for granted weren't so widespread in Europe just a few decades ago. Unless Americans recognize this enemy and take more seriously its ability to silence critics, it's hardly unthinkable that we'll be reading about domestic lawyers and journalists who quit their professions or censor their work, lest they, too, suffer the fate of Theo van Gogh.

Europe is home to a new class of dissidents. In this era, their oppressor is not the Soviets, but radical Islam.

Meet Seyran Ates. On Saturday, the well-known German lawyer of Turkish descent closed her practice in Berlin following threats to her life. Ms. Ates fought against forced marriages and so-called honor killings and beatings of Muslim women and girls.

She was also outspoken about the real causes of terrorism. After the London bombings last year, Ms. Ates said the terrorists of the future will be third- and fourth-generation Muslim immigrants who "under the eyes of well-meaning politicians have been raised to hate Western society from birth." In explaining her decision to close her practice, she wrote on her Web site: "Due to an acute threat situation, I was made aware again how dangerous my work as a lawyer is and how little I was and am being protected."

Speaking out about Islam can carry mortal risks, as was brought home in late 2004 by the gruesome murder on an Amsterdam street of Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh had made a film about Islam's treatment of women together with Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In May the Somali-born Ms. Ali left the Netherlands for the U.S., citing safety concerns.

Less well known outside Holland is the plight of another member of the Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders. Like Ms. Ali, Mr. Wilders went into hiding in army barracks and prisons before settling in a government-provided safe house, following death threats. In a conversation with us yesterday, he marveled that he now lived under such conditions though he "didn't do anything against the law." His crime was criticizing radical Islam and calling for a five-year moratorium on non-Western immigration.

Freedom of speech can't be taken for granted in Europe anymore. Take Necla Kelek, another prominent Turkish-born woman in Germany who has written about forced marriages and honor killings. She can speak in public only with police protection. Last May, Roger Köppel, the then editor of the German daily Die Welt, may have escaped an attempt on his life when a Pakistani student, armed with a knife, tried to enter his office building. Mr. Köppel's crime was to republish the Danish Muhammad cartoons, which have brought riots across the Middle East and death threats to publishers around Europe.

The cartoonists who originally produced the Muhammad caricatures for the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, still don't dare appear in public. Flemming Rose, the paper's cultural editor, told us that he usually receives police protection when he speaks in public. He finds the lack of solidarity with the victims of radical Islam "pretty scary." There is "too little outrage on behalf of the cartoonists," he says.

The new dissidents are the outgrowth of the rise of political -- and extreme -- Islam in Europe. But more worrying for them, and for all citizens of free societies, is the seeming public indifference to their plight. If that passes for "normal" these days, then the gradual erosion of Europe's democratic fabric will be hard to stop.