The other day a nice young man, the sort of nice young man who makes a good model for a sympathetic hero in one of my ghost stories, told me he had met a nice girl at a party, and my blood froze, for she sounded just like the girlfriend I made up for my sympathetic hero and she had come to a nasty end.

“But that’s…”

“I know. That’s what I thought,” said the nice young man, and now he has the perfect excuse not to ask her out.

I like to joke that my fiction has a habit of coming true, but it bothers me when it does. Naturally whole plots do not play out in real life, but suddenly elements of them appear, which puts me in an odd position if the work is not already in print. I have a novella that will remain forever unpublished because a central character is a beautiful Frenchwoman who appears in a traditional Catholic community. Her son joins the men’s choir. Before I could add a sub-plot to turn it into a proper novel, a beautiful Frenchwoman arrived in our traditional Catholic community. Her son joined the men’s choir.

You see the problem.

The plot of my novel _Ceremony of Innocence_ (Ignatius Press, 2013) involves a rash of bombings across Germany, which look like the work of foreign Muslim extremists. The privileged chattering classes, the socialites, the celebrities, the footballers, the well-heeled expats and their club-hopping children don’t let the bombings ruin their fun. Left-wing activists say “Isn’t it terrible? Islam means peace, you know.” A Catholic priest dances half-naked before an image of Krishna during a Mass in a Catholic seminary. A Catholic journalist lives in sin with her much-younger boyfriend, drowning her conscience in gin, keeping up with her club-hopping friends with uppers, and writing neo-con platitudes.

Same old, same old–except that there hasn’t been a successful Islamist massacre in Germany since 1972. Two foreign students gave it the old college try in 2006, and as I had been on that train route two days earlier, I took it personally. It didn’t help my frame of mind that in Cologne I had been unnerved by “men of southerly appearance” (as German “Wanted” posters tend to call them) lounging in the street staring at thirty-something me as I looked for a Catholic shrine. The Islamist attempt at mass murder of my hosts, coupled with the discovery of an Islamic terror cell near my native Toronto, made me want to DO something, and so eventually I wrote Ceremony of Innocence.

Because a string of bombs had not gone off across Germany, I had to imagine how Germans would react to persistent Islamist violence, and bless me if I wasn’t right about that. In my 2013 novel (first draft written in 2008), they take to the streets. And lo, in real life Pegida was founded in 2014. In my novel, cheesed-off young people join “far right” groups. And lo, more and more European youngsters are joining “far right” groups. If it turns out that there is a mysterious, nationalist organization meeting in a Frankfurt restaurant, I would not be at all surprised.

So how did I “know”? Am I psychic? I sincerely doubt it. It’s because artists and writers are supposed to look at the world and see what is actually there, not what we are told is there. We are supposed to retain memories for a period longer than the life-cycle of a gnat. And we are supposed to write, paint or mark them down. When reality is too hot to handle, turn it into fiction. All good fiction is, on some level, _fact_ion.

If an Islamist atrocity happens on Friday – people killed, people dying, people blinded, crippled, maimed for life – we should not be surprised that before the Islamist killers have even stopped shooting, goodie-two-shoes will be tweeting their love and support of their Muslim neighbours. By Tuesday, the media turns its back on the dead, dying, and maimed multi-racial Europeans/Americans/Australians to interview Muslims sad because people are looking at them funny, and a man snarled something bitter under his breath, and they found something rude scrawled the mosque. (Oh, how sad. Looks. Snarls. Graffiti.)

We should not be surprised because _this keeps happening._  Carnage. Panicked, soulful messages of love-and-peace-to-Muslims. Curfews. Names of Islamist attackers published. Media asks fifty year old ladies in headscarves and Turkish tourists in France to show their boo-boos. “That white European/Canadian said that mean thing!” Waaaaaah!

Never mind that if a Muslim sets off a bomb, or starts shooting willy-nilly, in most of the capital cities of the West, there’s a strong chance he will kill/maim a fellow Muslim. Muslims killing Muslims is apparently not calamity enough. Never mind that. The impotent revenges of the Evil White Demi-Gods – their hurtful words, the one rock one of them threw through one window – must be exposed and denounced!

So what will ultimately happen? Well, I am not sure of course.

But I think that more and more twenty-something Europeans of northern appearance will look at the Europe their parents and grandparents have handed them, compare it to Europe-Before-1990, and get really angry. I think they will take a page out of the the dodgier of the Muslim Students Unions’ book and get radicalized.

Charismatic nationalists my age or younger will start making videos of their own to inspire the resentful European young. French teenagers will read up on the French Resistance. Polish teenagers will read even more about the Polish Home Army. I haven’t the slightest idea what English teenagers will read up on–maybe they will read Winston Churchill, who loved England with all his soul and had some colourful things to say about Islam.

The more obvious the Muslim parallel society, the bloodier it will be. In 2013, Edinburgers mobbed UKIP’s Nigel Farage in a pub, yelling “Racist Nazi scum.” In 2011, 96% of Edinburgh was white. Scotland isn’t that arsed about Muslim migration because there is almost no Muslim migration to Scotland. When Scots mutter about migration, they’re talking about the Poles, but as Poles are obviously distinct from Scots only when they talk , such Scots look pretty silly.

When I was last in Poland, I saw exactly one man of southerly appearance in the street. I was waiting at a tram stop. The young drunk Poles who had been trying to talk to a pretty Polish girl turned their attention to a young guy in a baseball cap and rap-wear who had just got off the tram.

“Hej, Achmed!” yelled one of the drunk guys.

The young man of southerly appearance walked a third of the way to the next tram stop and stood there, looking nervously at the group at my tram stop. Eventually the guys beside me got tired of waiting, or decided they wanted another drink or whatever, so they took off, leaving me all alone at the tram stop.

I was not exactly thrilled to be left alone after dark at a tram stop in a crumbling bit of a Polish town, a wide expanse of park behind me. It was just me and this young guy, and even when I was an amateur boxer, 115 pounds of muscle-and-bone, I knew a young guy could do serious damage if he tried.  In my experience, young Polish guys leave middle-aged women alone. But I wouldn’t take my chances at that hour of night, and the guy wasn’t Polish, was he? So I kept an eye on him, a man, the only person around, and he kept glancing at me, and I started to wonder why he didn’t just come back to the tram stop.

Then I realized: he thought I was Polish middle-aged lady. He was scared of me, a middle-aged white woman, fair-haired, 5 foot 2.

Was that a good thing or bad?  Decide in the combox. And then buy my book.