In the 1970s, Italy made a blood pact with Muslim terrorists. Groups like the Palestinian Liberation Organization were allowed free movement in Italy—receiving prosecutorial immunity while they plotted terrorist murders—in exchange for pledges not to launch attacks on Italian soil.

This revelation emerged last month, when former Italian President Francesco Cossiga published a letter of confession in the newspaper Corriere della Sera. The deal—which, he says, was essentially “don’t harm me and I won’t harm you”—was approved and directed by the premier at the time, Aldo Moro.

“During my time as interior minister I learned that plo people were holding heavy artillery in their homes and protected by diplomatic immunity as representatives of the Arab league,” Cossiga wrote.

“The terms of the agreement were that the Palestinian organizations could even maintain armed bases of operation in the country,” he wrote, “and they had freedom of entry and exit without being subject to normal police controls, because they were ‘handled’ by the secret services.” Similar deals existed between these groups and the governments of France and Britain.

This ugly truth typifies a cancerous, self-preserving opportunism that infects much of Europe to this day. It masquerades in moralistic rhetoric and political correctness—respect for the religion and culture of Muslims and such. But in truth, it’s just naked fear.

“[E]very attempt is made to prevent what radical Islamists perceive as insults even at the cost of throwing away key democratic freedoms,” Barry Rubin wrote in Global Politician after Cossiga’s admission. “This is not sensitivity to perpetrating bigotry but sensitivity to violence being perpetrated on themselves.”

The idiocy of these shortsighted, terrorist-friendly policies has since proven itself in at least two predictable ways. First, these deals were an open invitation to extremists of all stripes. From the 1980s, Europe became a hive of Islamist activity. The policy of toleration made European governments abettors in creating one of the most extensive terrorist networks on the planet. Most of modern history’s most famous terrorist attacks were planned on European and British soil, including 9/11.

And this gaggle of violent extremists was embedded within a massive exodus of Muslims into Europe: some 20 million over the last 30 years—equal to the combined populations of Ireland, Belgium and Denmark. UN reports say that Muslim communities throughout Europe have grown over 100 percent in just a decade and a half. Islam has become Europe’s second-largest religion. Says Bernard Lewis: “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.”

The second reality is that pacts with terrorists don’t actually protect anyone. Despite its deals with Palestinian groups, Italy suffered several attacks by Palestinians during the 1970s and ’80s, including a 1980 explosion in an Italian train station, and the famed hijacking of the Achille Lauro ship in 1985. Cursed be the man who trusts in man, the scripture says—especially a man who believes he’s doing God’s business by deceiving and killing infidels.

Nevertheless, this failed appeasement policy still exists in many forms across Europe today. The most egregious offender is Britain. For years the Brits lived under a “covenant of security”—a sinister, tacit agreement with a burgeoning population of local radicals to look the other way in exchange for no attacks in Britain. In her book Londonistan, Melanie Phillips calls this “the dirty little secret at the heart of the British government’s blind-eye policy.” The covenant was exposed for the sham it was on July 7, 2005, with coordinated suicide bombings in London.

Nevertheless, Britain has responded by going even further into self-inflicted servitude to Muslims, subjecting itself to the most inane of peculiarities of Islamic culture to avoid offense and thereby reduce its susceptibility to attack. Recently, for example, the Association of Chief Police Officers mandated that, since Muslims apparently consider dog saliva impure, Britain’s police sniffer dogs must wear rubber-soled booties while searching Muslim homes. As if dogs salivate out of their feet.

If it weren’t so stupid, this might look like taking the moral high road. But it is fear, plain and simple.

Soft Europe is very much on display. Witness the French foreign minister’s recent comment, “We fear a war and we don’t want one.” He was responding to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s statement that Russia did not fear a new cold war. “If it’s only cold, that’s not a problem,” the Frenchman said. “If it’s hot, we don’t want it.” In the face of a threat like today’s Russia, this is exactly the kind of language that will lead to conflict. And that is essentially the message Europe has been sending to Islamists for the last 30 years.

But watch Europe closely. While there are still plenty of examples of this sort of submissive activity to point to for those who prophesy Europe’s demise, there is also much to suggest a very different outcome.

Such softness, for Europe, is a historical anomaly. The Continent has been the birthplace of the most dominating and brutal empires in human history. A biblical description of the fearsome Roman Empire, an entity that has ruled the Continent in various forms over the centuries, can be found in Daniel 7:7: “dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly,” with “great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces.” Conquest has been not the exception, but the rule in Europe—for millennia.

Now, Europeans are being pushed and poked by an astonishing collection of global events and trends, only one of which is the continued creep of Islamification threatening its historic identity. There is Russia at the gates. China leading a global resource grab. Energy insecurity. Gathering economic storm clouds.

Yes, there is a soft element in Europe—decaying, even—that is getting softer as the world gets harder. Politicians kowtowing, always looking for and finding another diplomatic or bureaucratic reason to avoid taking action.

But there is a simultaneous hardening. Hard-line, even Nazi-sympathetic, parties gaining popularity. Politicians all over the political spectrum taking firmer stands against immigration. Public discussion becoming more concerned with reclaiming Europeanism than in offending “outsiders.” More Europeans are coming to recognize that the “if it’s hot, we don’t want it” approach to the world’s mounting challenges will leave Europe victimized. As surely as Francesco Cossiga’s Italy.

Witness the success of the right-wing National Democratic Party in Germany, which Ron Fraser reported on in his column Monday: “The npd’s electoral victories are reinforcing racism and anti-Semitism in German society, as well as great-power fantasies, strengthening the view that Germany should be a world power, in rivalry with the United States. The npd calls for ‘Europe’ with ‘Germany as its focal point’ becoming ‘an effective political and economic counterbalance to the USA.’” As Mr. Fraser wrote, we are hearing echoes of the 1930s, the period of unrest in Germany that brought a fiercely nationalistic demagogue into power.

Biblical prophecy foretells Britain and Europe taking two decidedly different trajectories—the island nation continuing on its path toward submission and subservience, which will end in that nation’s demise, and the Continent rejecting that path, purging itself of the softness that infects it today, and marching into the future with a mind to confront its enemies and conquer. Read Germany and the Holy Roman Empire to see where that choice will lead.