JAMES LILEKS WONDERS:

How long until America is hit by European terrorists?

Maybe it’s a stupid question. Probably so. But anti-Americanism in Europe is starting to resemble Islamic nutballism. Like a religion unhinged, it is desperately intense, gripped with eschatological certainties and devoted to an unswerving belief in a caricature that bears little resemblance to the actual nature of its enemy. Like Islamicists, the anti-Americans despise the Jews, although the latter group wouldn’t get their hands dirty getting rid of them. They’d prefer the Jews went up in the attic for a while, sat quietly, and waited for the sound of boots on the steps. (Someone else’s boots.)

Meanwhile Eric S. Raymond is pretty pessimistic about the future of Europe, too:

The EU has two major advantages the Soviets did not — a better tech and infrastructure base, and a functioning civil society (e.g. one in which wealth and information flow through a lot of legal grassroots connections and voluntary organizations). But they have one major disadvantage — large, angry, totally unassimilated immigrant populations that are reproducing faster than the natives. This is an especially severe problem in France, where housing developments in the ring zones around all the major cities have become places the police dare not go without heavy weapons.

We’ve already gotten a foretaste of what that might mean for European domestic politics. At its most benign, we get Pim Fortuyn in Holland. But Jörg Haider in Austria is a more ominous indicator, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s startling success in the last French presidential elections was downright frightening. Far-right populism with a racialist/nativist/anti-Semitic tinge is on the rise, an inevitable consequence of the demographic collapse of native populations. . . .

One way or another, the cozy Euro-socialist welfare state is doomed by the demographic collapse. Best case: it will grind to a shambolic halt as the ratio of worker bees to drones goes below critical. Worst case: it will blow itself apart in a welter of sectarian, ethnic, and class violence. Watch the frequency trend curve of synagogue-trashings and anti-Jewish hate crimes; that’s bound to be a leading indicator.

I hope that both of these predictions are wrong, as most predictions of doom in the West have been for the past several decades. But I’m not at all sure that they are.

UPDATE: Reid Stott has more on this, in response to an antiwar email from a European reader.