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.

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