The two jihadist attacks in Brussels on March 22, which killed 32 people and injured 300 others, have changed the tenor of European media commentary.  While many editorialists have routinely bewailed “alienation” among Muslim youths and warned against “Islamophobia” and “intolerance,” a significant minority are considering the causes of terrorism with courage and frankness.

In Britain The Spectator commented that “we are living with the consequences of an immigration and ‘integration’ fantasy which should have been abandoned years ago,” resulting in “one of the largest population replacement exercises in history.”  Uncontrolled immigration and open borders have “created the perfect conditions for those who want to kill us,” opined the Daily Express: “The way we are going, the jihadi breeding ground of Molenbeek is just the start.”  Germany’s top-circulation magazine Der Spiegel noted that Molenbeek provided a network on which terrorists could rely, “a tightknit group in which everyone protected everyone else . . . [T]here is an ‘omertà’ in the community, a code of silence reminiscent of the Mafia.”  It quoted Bart De Wever, head of the New Flemish Alliance, who called Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy an “epochal mistake.”  Reflecting the angst of millions of Europeans, Le Figaro simply asked, “Who’s next?”

Steven Erlanger of the New York Times was quick to denounce the trend: “Even before the identities and nationalities of the attackers were known, there was an immediate association in popular discourse between the attacks . . . and the migrant crisis.”  Erlanger approvingly cited a Muslim “consultant” who told him that “these attacks will increase xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiment across the EU.”

The labels are old, but the new tone of public discourse is real.  Only days before the Brussels attacks, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban warned that in today’s Europe it is forbidden even to acknowledge the nature of the problem, “to say . . . that the masses arriving from other civilizations endanger our way of life, our culture, our customs and our Christian traditions.”  In Poland, Slovakia, and other eastern E.U. countries, people are becoming aware that calls for a “joint European response” to the migrant crisis are but euphemisms for Angela Merkel’s Diktat on migrant quotas imposed from Brussels.

Former Soviet-bloc countries may save themselves from mandatory demographic and cultural suicide, but it could be too late for France, Germany, Britain, Benelux, Austria, and Scandinavia: The “population-replacement exercise” has gone too far.  An involuntary repatriation of the multimillion-man Muslim diaspora is no longer theoretically viable.  Even if politicians like Marine Le Pen, Heinz-Christian Strache, and Geert Wilders come to power and stop further immigration, their nations’ long-term prospects will remain grim.  They will live permanently with the consequences of their leaders’ fateful decisions.  Their homegrown jihadists will go on killing hundreds if not thousands of their “fellow citizens” every year.

Though attack follows attack, the establishment does not give up on its fantasies.  When Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull criticized Europe’s security failures and porous borders, the Belgian ambassador in Canberra warned against “making a confusion between terrorism and migrants, and between terrorism and Islam.”  “There is no way any community can make itself immune to terror attacks,” Simon Jenkins wrote in the Guardian.  “Intelligence and surveillance can go so far, but the bombers and killers will get through any net.”

Jenkins’s assertion is misleading.  It ignores the fact that Islamic “bombers and killers” cannot function in a country devoid of an Islamic diaspora, with its network of Saudi-financed mosques, schools, and “cultural centers,” halal diners and cafés, and safe houses with sympathetic neighbors alert to the presence of infidel intruders.  Where no such neighborhoods exist there is no terrorism.  Japan has none of them, and she is jihad-free.  Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Slovakia have none, and there has been no carnage on Warsaw’s trains or Bratislava’s airport concourses.

The lesson of Brussels for America is clear: The emergence of an autonomous and politically untouchable Muslim diaspora must be prevented.  It is in the American interest for the U.S. government to introduce an open-ended moratorium on Muslim immigration now, while those who are present still lack the numbers and infrastructure to wreak havoc.  In addition, Islamic activism should be treated as grounds for the exclusion or deportation of any alien, regardless of his status in or ties to the United States, because sharia advocacy is inherently prejudicial to the public interest and injurious to national security.  The alternative is the predictable pattern of terrorist violence, social corrosion, and cultural decline that we are witnessing in today’s Europe.