The career paths of those who took a contrary view did not flourish in the same way. In Holland, after long periods of having to live in army barracks and government safe-houses, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was finally allowed by the Dutch security service to live in a specially protected building in Holland. But her new neighbours sued to get her to move away from them, so fearful were they for their own lives with this trouble-maker so nearby. Soon afterwards, based on untrue claims made by a television station, the Minister of Immigration and Integration of Hirsi Ali’s own party, the VVD, withdrew her citizenship. The country that had allowed in hundreds of thousands of Muslims without expecting them to integrate, and which harboured some of the most radical preachers and cells in Europe, withdrew citizenship from one of the only immigrants who actually showed what a fully integrated immigrant to Holland would look like. Hirsi Ali moved to America, becoming, as Salman Rushdie subsequently put it, ‘maybe the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust’.9

Europe seemed for a time to have come to the conclusion that the problems of extremism would go away if the people who pointed to them went away. Yet whether the critics were killed, chased into hiding or chased from Europe, the problem did not go away. Not least, of course, because the immigrants stayed and had no intention of going anywhere. Many heeded the explicit as well as implicit advice in the countries they had come from to remain in Europe but not to become European. At a rally in Cologne in 2008 Prime Minister (later President) Erdoğan of Turkey told a crowd of 20,000 Turks living in Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands: ‘I understand very well that you are against assimilation. One cannot expect you to assimilate. Assimilation is a crime against humanity.’ Nevertheless, he told his audience that they should get involved in politics and gain influence so that the five million Turks then living in Europe would be able to wield ‘a constitutional element’ and not just be ‘guests’.10