The tragic killing of the 13 U.S. soldiers in Fort Hood by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is one is a string of events involving Muslim soldiers and veterans who have gone astray, raising delicate questions about the role and trustworthiness of the 3,000 Muslim soldiers in the U.S. military. The major incidents include the March 2003 attack in Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait by an American Muslim soldier, Asan Akbar, who rolled grenades into three tents where officers of the 101st Airborne’s 1st Brigade were sleeping, killing one serviceman and wounding 15; the six Islamic radicals who in May 2007 plotted to storm New Jersey’s Fort Dix Army Base with automatic weapons and execute as many soldiers as possible; and John Allen Muhammad, the Beltway Sniper, a Gulf War veteran and convert to Islam who was responsible for 16 shootings and 10 murders and who is scheduled to be executed today.

It would be inappropriate to malign or even question the loyalty of the hard-working Muslim men and women wearing the uniforms of the United States. But it would be equally irresponsible to ignore the amassing evidence that subversive and combustible elements with radical Islamic persuasion have infiltrated our military, often putting our personnel at bigger risk in their own bases than from their enemies on the battlefield.

While Muslim soldiers have served in uniforms loyally for decades, it is the rising number of Wahhabi-trained and converted Muslims that is a relatively recent phenomenon. Since Wahhabism is one of the most radical and puritan strands of Islam, the penetration of Wahhabi thinking into the ranks of the military must be treated with care.

The genesis of radical Islamic thinking within the military was in the 1990-91 Gulf War, when nearly half a million soldiers and marines were deployed in Saudi Arabia to liberate Kuwait and defend the oil kingdom from Saddam Hussein’s aggression. While the Saudis were adamantly opposed to any expression of religious practice by their guests, including a ban on Christmas carols, bible classes and Christian and Jewish prayers, they embarked on a well-orchestrated and generously funded effort sponsored by the Saudi government to convert as many American military members as possible to Islam.

According to General Norman Schwarzkopf’s aide Rick Francona,

Saudi officers appeared to have been directed by their senior military or religious leadership to spot and assess potential converts to Islam among American military members. Once a particular American was ‘targeted,’ […] a few Saudi military officers, including a military imam, would attempt to meet the American in either a purely social setting or at least outside of the work area. These approaches usually included fairly generous gifts and of course, literature about Islam. The gifts included expensive briefcases, pens, books and other personal items. Americans who decided to convert to Islam were rewarded handsomely […] including all expenses paid trips to Mecca, and payments as high as $30,000.

The commander of Saudi forces in the Gulf, Prince Khaled bin Sultan bragged in his memoir that more than 2,000 American troops converted to Islam through this campaign. “These Muslim troops are now the messengers of Islam in the U.S. forces,” said Dr. Abu Ameena Bilal Phillips, a Jamaican-born convert to Islam (1972) who worked during the Gulf war under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force while converting U.S. troops to Islam in his spare time. After the war, Phillips moved to the United States to “set up Islamic chapters in the U.S. Defense Department.”

Nearly two decades have passed since the Saudi conversion campaign, and most of the converts may no longer be in uniforms. But the seeds sown during the Gulf War have germinated, creating scores of radicalized Americans who are a threat to their comrades in uniforms as well as to their civilian communities.

Fort Hood’s Hasan yelled “Allahu Akbar“—Arabic for “God is Great”—just before the shooting. As Camp Pennsylvania’s killer Akbar was being led away after the incident, fellow soldiers heard him shout: “You guys are coming into our countries and you’re going to rape our women and kill our children.” Allahu Akbar, “you guys,” “our countries”—strong words which tell us that it is time to investigate what exactly happened back then in the desert and assess how serious and deep-rooted the damage is.

Walter Laqueur contributes a new paper to MESH’s Middle East Papers series, on Russia’s Muslim strategy. That strategy, barely coherent, is riddled with contradictions, as Russia vacillates between resentment of the American-led world order and fear of an ascendant Islam. For now, it’s the resentment against the West that dominates the Russian outlook, resulting in a makeshift approach to Islam at home and abroad that may prove inadequate as Russia’s own Muslim minorities and neighboring Muslim states grow stronger. Download here.

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The British website LiveLeak.com has removed Fitna, intoning that it had to “place the safety of its staff above all else.” You would have thought that this is a typical reaction for all those “Euroweenies,” as the satirist Peter O”Rourke once called America’s cousins from across the sea: Let’s cave in to the mere threat of violence. In fact, the debate is a lot more thoughtful and diverse.

This is all the more significant because European constitutional practice does not share the American tradition of the “heckler’s veto.” First enunciated by Justice Douglas in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949), the basic idea is that utterances, works of art or rallies must not be suppressed just because they might arouse uncontrollable anger on the part of those who take offense. (The actual term “heckler’s veto” was first invoked in Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U.S. 131, 1969.) The most dramatic recent case was a planned demonstration by American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois in 1978, a home to many survivors of the Holocaust. An Illinois appeals court lifted the ban. That episode gave rise to the immortal scene in Blues Brothers, where John Belushi and Dan Akroyd plow their car into the Nazi ranks, hurling them into the lake below.

Yet in Europe, the mere expectation of communal violence against hateful speech routinely leads to bans and prohibitions. Significantly, the Dutch government has imposed no such sanctions on Geert Wilder’s Fitna. The Hague as well as the EU have merely condemned the 16-minute film. On the other hand, no television station would air it, so Wilders had to “premiere” it on the Internet.

Fitna is the kind of montage that can be applied to anything in order to disgrace it. The familiar tools are selectivity, suggestive juxtaposition, incendiary commentary. In that, Fitna resembles your basic anti-semitic tract where quotes from the Hebrew Bible are used to depict Jews as murderous fanatics and their god as a vengeful, cruel deity—never mind what else is in the corpus and how revelation has been changed by two millennia of interpretation.

Come to think of it, as the respected NRC Handelsblad reminded its readers, the agitprop produced by Sergei Eisenstein or Michael Moore used the very same techniques. And what about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which oscillates between manipulation and mendacity, but profits from its obeisance to contemporary standards of correctness?

The Dutch have not forgotten the murder of politician Pim Fortuyn and the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, and so this haven of multiculturalist laissez-faire has become a lot less tolerant of militant self-righteousness in the name of Allah. So have the French in the aftermath of bloody riots by young Muslims in their squalid suburbs. The Germans, always willing to turn the other cheek, given their murderous racism in the Nazi years, have been shocked by foiled terrorist plots as well as “honor killings” in their midst. Perhaps, Europeans are also afflicted by a nagging sense of shame, having left little Denmark in the lurch while the country faced boycotts and burning embassies in the wake of the Muhammad cartoons.

This time, Europe is walking the fine line between appeasement and self-assertion. The Dutch are a perfect example. No, they would not ban Fitna. Instead, they went into full defensive mode. The government dispatched faxes to the municipalities: Beware, Fitna is on the Net. The police were placed on alert throughout the land. Embassies in Islamic countries were instructed to ready emergency procedures planned long ago, all the way to preparing for evacuation.

On the other hand, the Dutch bent over backward to assuage Muslim rage, knowing full well that such fury is never spontaneous, but a convenient pretext for scoring another Big One in the “clash of civilizations.” Dutch diplomats were dispatched to assure Muslim regimes that Fitna was strictly a private affair—and by no means condoned by the powers that be. Alas, so the line went, we Westerners have a tradition of free speech that keeps governments from enforcing an official truth.

What these emissaries did not cite, one surmises, is another, now safely banished part of our history. This is those three centuries of million-fold annihilation in the name of the One True God, be he the Lord or a secular Deity, as in the guise of Stalin or Hitler. To invoke this bloody past in defense of free speech would have been totally incorrect, the kind of cultural hauteur that would assign to the West a higher perch on the scale of civilizational progress.

So far, so good. In their Friday sermons, Muslim clerics in Holland called for reasonability and restraint. So far, the government’s “counter-insurgency” apparatus is just idling. Islamic bloggers are keeping the flames of rage low. Have these good folks been intimidated by the harsher mood in Europe? A note of caution: In the wake of the Danish Muhammad cartoons, it took a few weeks before the propaganda engines in Libya, Pakistan and Egypt kicked in.

Next stop is Germany, where a municipal theater in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, will premiere Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses on Sunday. Recall that this led to Khomeini’s death fatwa against the author in 1989 and innumerable eruptions of Muslim rage throughout the world. Recall also the submissive response by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie: “Only the utterly insensitive can fail to see that… Salman Rushdie’s book has deeply offended Muslims both here and throughout the world.”

This time, twenty years later, submission and self-assertion, rage and restraint are more balanced. For now.

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As early as this weekend, Geert Wilders, controversial Dutch politician and vocal critic of Islam, will release his new film, Fitna, on the internet. Fitna, which in Arabic means “dissension,” promises to be even more inflammatory in Muslim-majority countries than the Danish cartoons that sparked riots in many capitals in 2006. According to Wilders, the 15-minute film will show that the Quran is “a fascist book” that “incites people to murder,” and he promises something special at the end of the film: “Something will happen to [a picture of Muhammad] but I won’t say what.”

The State Department has been in routine discussion with the Dutch government about the film and was hoping that Wilders would be persuaded not to release it. He has resisted such entreaties and has said he is housing the server from which the film will be released “in North America” to prevent the Dutch government from shutting it down.

Even before its release, the film has caused a backlash, particularly in Egypt, where a government spokesman has already chastised “European lawmakers and politicians” for using “gratuitous methods to gain electoral votes by attacking” Islam. Shortly after that statement, the organizers of the International Film Festival for Children in Cairo boycotted the Dutch entry, Where is Winky’s Horse? For good measure, they boycotted the Danish entries as well. In universities around Egypt, thousands of students have already joined protests—all in response to a yet-to-be-released film that no one has seen.

Whatever Wilders’ ultimate motivation for releasing the film, he aims to tap into a deep ambivalence about the cultural drift taking place within Dutch and broader European society, and the fact that too few people are reflecting on what it means. Whether it’s the Dutch foreign minister stating explicitly that Islamic culture will become part of Dutch culture, or the Archbishop of Canterbury stating that Sharia should be made part of British common law, there is the sense that European leaders are simply surrendering to political correctness without asking basic questions about what it is to be Dutch, British, European or—for that matter—Muslim.

At times, radicals on both sides of a question are needed to propel those in the center forward—to shake them from their lethargy and lift their heads from the sand. But almost all of the radicals, Wilders notwithstanding, have been on the Islamic side. Ever since 9/11, Western societies have responded to rising radicalism by doing all of the soul-searching, adjusting and accommodating. As a result, Western governments have sought ways to connect with the Muslim communities within our own societies and sought partnerships with them to solve shared problems in a shared way. On the whole, this has been a good thing.

Unfortunately, Muslim-majority governments, especially in the Arab world, have not responded in kind. Rather than become self-critical and recognize how they have helped radicalize their populations, governments have made the situation worse by steadily accentuating the role of Islam in politics while pretending in their narratives to be secular. The reason is simple: insecure in both their ideas and their legitimacy, they have sought to borrow both from Islam, hoping in this way to secure their flank against populist Islamists. It is not working.

Egypt is a case in point. Not until 1971 did the Egyptian constitution make the principles of Sharia a source of legislation for the legislature and government to consider. In all previous constitutions, amended or otherwise, going back to 1923, this phrase was absent. Later, under pressure that likely accompanied the signing of the Camp David Accords, President Sadat in 1980 went further making Sharia the source of all legislation (Article 2). Even this was not enough to save him from a hail of bullets, however, and since then increasingly conservative Egyptian courts have had to do back-flips to justify huge swathes of secular law.

Recently, in an unprecedented ruling by Egypt’s highest administrative court, the court determined that a group of Coptic Christians who had converted to Islam could have their re-conversion officially recognized. This was proclaimed by the New York Times as something of a triumph to be celebrated: “Egyptian Court Allows Return to Christianity,” it trumpeted.

Although a fairly radical step for Egypt, it was not a blossoming of religious freedom. Agreeing with the lower court that Islam does not envision conversion from Islam to “a less complete religion,” the court required an asterisk of sorts be placed on the returning Christians’ national ID cards. The cards will have added to them the brief phrase: “adopted Islam for a brief period”—marking their bearers as apostates and possibly for death.

In May of last year, Habib al-Adly, Egypt’s Minister of Interior, wrote a memo urging the blanket rejection of all re-conversions to Christianity. Al-Adly insisted that Islam is the state religion, meaning that any Muslim man who abandons his faith should be killed. Happily this was not the case for women. A Muslim woman, he wrote, “should only be imprisoned and beaten every three days until she returns to Islam.” What is ironic about this is that al-Adly is also charged with protecting the Egyptian state from the purported scourge of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Last year’s constitutional amendments reflect the continuing confusion over the role of religion in Egyptian society. Articles 5 and 46 as amended sought to separate religion from politics by banning the formation of religious parties and by guaranteeing the freedom of religion. Both of these moves were rightly applauded in the West. Nothing was done, however, to make them compatible with Article 2—and how could they be? The Muslim Brotherhood argues that not only is a ban on its organization unconstitutional, but that Article 2 in fact mandates its existence and the use of its campaign slogan “Islam is the Solution.” Most Egyptians probably agree. The courts, too, have refused to allow Muslims who convert to Christianity to have their ID cards record the fact. Only one Egyptian has been courageous enough to test the courts on the question.

If yesterday, governments in the region, including Egypt’s, sought to co-opt the symbols of Islam to legitimize their rule, today the genie they’ve released is out of their control. The governments have argued for years in Washington that they were the only bulwark against radical Islam. Today they say they really mean it. And yet the main strategy for dealing with political Islam seems to be repressing it with one hand while stimulating it with the other.

When Wilders’ film is released, many Muslims (not all) in many countries (not all) will riot; cries will go up far and wide for the West to come to terms with Islam, and the radicals will again try to shift the ground toward them. Predictably, such violence will take place mostly in countries that are not free or only partly free by Freedom House’s standards.

When this happens, it should be more than another occasion for the West to apologize for its irresponsible politicians. Western governments, particularly the United States, should challenge Arab “allies” to adopt policies that begin to reverse the long trend. Unless and until these governments become convinced that tolerance is something to be resolutely cultivated—not for the West but for the health of their own societies—it is they who will bear much of the responsibility for the violence unleashed as a result of a (yet unseen) 15-minute film.

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Despite all that is going on in the Middle East, what caught my eye recently are three items concerning western Europe. Each is very different, but all indicate that the question of the integration of Muslims into European societies will remain contentious for some time to come.

The first involves Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s visit to Germany. Khaled Diab has an account of it here. Erdogan’s success in attracting a large crowd of Turks and his pleas to them not to lose their cultural identity irritated Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said, “If you grow up in Germany in the third or fourth generation, if you have German citizenship, then I am your chancellor.” But as Diab notes, due to Germany’s unwillingness to grant citizenship to immigrants, very few Turks in Germany fit Merkel’s definition. Europe, Diab concludes, is increasingly multicultural, and increasingly polarized.

One way to deal with this reality is to accommodate multiculturalism by institutionalizing polarization. By establishing clear boundaries between communities one reduces the likelihood of clashes. This in essence is the recommendation of the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams, who in his lecture of February 7 on the topic of civil and religious law in England suggested the recognition in Britain of the sharia’s jurisdiction in certain spheres, such as marital law and the regulation of financial transactions. As he states, “But if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it [recognition of Islam law] seems unavoidable.” (The lecture and related materials can be found here.)

Williams’ lecture has caused quite a stir, not for its intellectual content—the relationships between law, religion, and identity are famously knotty, and rather than engage the difficult issues in those relationships Williams instead skims over them by making a series of glib assumptions—but because of what many see as its message of “appeasement” or “surrender.” I don’t think that this was Williams’ intention, but his lecture does lend support to the argument that with the Islamization of Europe now underway, Muslim immigrants should not accommodate European norms and assimilate European culture, but instead they should strive to reshape Europe in accord with their vision(s) of Islam.

Meanwhile the popular Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders is sending a radically different message. Wilders declares Islam “an ideology of a retarded culture” and “something we can’t afford any more in the Netherlands.” Not only does he want to ban the “fascist Koran” but he claims to have prepared a short ten-minute film on Islam in which he desecrates the Koran. (Go here for an interview with Wilders.)

Wilders claims he loathes Islam but not Muslims. His overtly hostile rhetoric and inflammatory cinematic projects, however, ensure that even lax Muslims in the Netherlands and Europe will, at least in the public and political spheres, identify more closely with their faith and culture, not less. The result will be to foster the growth of suspicion and hostility between Europe’s Muslim immigrant and native populations.

The presence of immigrant Muslims in western Europe in the coming decades is projected to continue to increase in both absolute and proportional numbers. Muslim immigrants have been a significant part of the European landscape for some four decades. Yet, as these three items all highlight, European societies remain anxious and at a loss at how to deal with their immigrant communities. Discord will remain a feature of relations between native Europeans and Muslims. As the incident with the Danish cartoons illustrated, with today’s transnational communities and global communications, conflict inside Europe can and does ripple throughout the Middle East and beyond, with destabilizing consequences.