How apposite that the British commemorations to mark the end of the second World War should fall on the 10th anniversary of the massacre of Srebrenica., observes Kevin Myers
That same day, Luxembourg voted not to reject the 200,000 pages (or so) of the European Constitution, a result hailed by its genial idiot of a prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, as proof that the constitution is not dead. Indeed - and with as much logic, because a group of ancient communists in Kaliningrad demand it, the Soviet Union is alive and well.
On July 11th, 1995, the two international institutions which resulted from the genocide of the second World War, the UN and the EU, allowed us to time-travel back to eastern Europe in the early 1940s. On that day, over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were marched to their doom from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica by their Serb captors, aided by a compliant battalion of Dutch UN troops.
And so Srebrenica in its way characterises the vanity and the ineptitude of this project of a united Europe, which, the last time it was tried, was also the home of the Final Solution. Yet fifty years later, the 50 might of democratic Europe proved utterly incapable of preventing another little exercise in genocide, though it had full warning - for those who had been there knew what was coming.
After several trips there in 1992-93, I said in this newspaper that unless Serbian nationalism was violently suppressed - and I specifically proposed the use of massive air power against the infrastructure of both the Bosnian Serb regime and the Serb-dominated Yugoslav state - genocidal catastrophe was certain.
Of course, as we know, there were no such pre-emptive measures, for Europe's élites had another project on their minds: the bureaucratic creation of a vast but toothless super pan-European welfare state. And throughout the melancholy and self-deluding process of creating a united Europe, there has been one great give-away word which reveals how the Euro-elite regarded the peoples it was steering towards its chosen destiny.
Whenever national authorisation was required - by parliamentary vote or referendum - the process was always called "ratification". Not consultation, not consideration, not authorisation, and certainly not veto-ification; instead, the plain people of Europe became the mere ratifiers of the Euro-élites' decisions and rubber-stampers of their paperwork.
Except, no longer; notwithstanding the gallant Luxembourgers' re-enactment of Horatio on the bridge, the Dutch and the French peoples have essentially ended the Euro-élites' project. Yet even the Euro-élites themselves have throughout the processes of unification continued to follow their own national interests. France is only a European country until its glance reaches the Straits of Gibraltar, and then it reverts to its imperial mode.
Even more fatuously, the various aerospace industries of Europe are spending billions producing three rival fighters - the Rafale, the Gripen and the Typhoon - thereby both triplicating research and development costs (making aircraft which are almost certainly inferior to Russian and American designs).
So the fantasy that is "Europe" was not exploded in the Dutch and French referendums this year, but 10 years ago in the hills around Srebrenica. And more than the death of a dream occurred as the Serbian Scorpion paramilitary gang began their butchery. The murders convulsed Europe's Muslims, and turned Omar Sheikh, a beer-drinking, womanising, rock-loving Englishman of Pakistani origin into a Islamic fundamentalist. He finally expressed his new ardour by beheading the captured American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.
The irony here is perfectly terrible. For it was the US, acting almost unilaterally, which brought the agony of Bosnia to an end, and which similarly curtailed the pogroms of Albanian Muslims by Serbs in Kosovo. But this seems to have made little difference to the perception of the US among European Muslims. That 70 per cent of the population of Iraq turned out for the election there, despite murderous terrorist threats, has made little or no difference to anti-US Islamic opinion within Britain.
Moreover, for all the condemnations of last Thursday's atrocities in London from Islamic leaders, there have been few enough Muslim voices calling for their entire community unconditionally to assist the British security forces against the jihadists. No fatwa of the kind which sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade has been issued against Thursday's bombers, nor is even likely. However, one Muslim cleric in London last weekend declared that any future use of tracker dogs in London's underground to check travellers would be offensive to Muslims.
British politicians and clergy have been falling over one another to declare the innocence of the overwhelming majority of British Muslims. However right, proper and accurate that is, it is not of itself sufficient. We in this country have taken a similarly Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook-Farm approach in the past. For years, the voice of official Ireland declared that support for the IRA in the Republic was confined to a tiny and wholly unrepresentative minority - in the late John Kelly's lapidary words, to "a few savage old hill-billies". But we were telling ourselves lies. In fact, unspoken support for the IRA among Northern nationalists probably never fell below 40 per cent, and was powerful throughout large pockets in the Republic.
Similarly, an opinion poll in Britain after 9/11 showed that 40 per cent of British Muslims actually supported al-Qaeda in its campaign against the US - a figure which is so shocking, with such unspeakable implications, that almost no one now mentions it.
Across Britain, however, I don't doubt that a great many ethnic Britons are contemplating the immigration policies of the past half-century and are asking: Oh my God: what have we done?