If you want to know whether Europe's treatment of Muslims is really about Islam, look at the Irish.
The Irish were white. They were Christian. They were European by every measure. And for the better part of a thousand years they were classified, used and ground down by their neighbour in ways that should be very familiar to Muslims in Europe today.
Remove religion, remove race, and the machine still runs. That tells you what the machine is actually about.
English writers from the twelfth century on described the Irish as barbarous and savage, in need of English rule for their own improvement.
They could not be called pagans, so they were called the wrong kind of Christian. Irish Christianity kept its own date for Easter, its own monastic life. The differences were small. They were enough.
That move is one of the machine's most effective. Concede the category, deny the substance. Christians, but not proper ones. Subjects of the crown, but not citizens in any real sense. Formally inside. Practically outside.
I carry a British passport. So do my children. In every legal sense we are British. In daily experience, we live in the gap between what that word promises and what it delivers. The gap is where the machine works.
The Penal Laws turned that gap into law. Catholics could not sit in Parliament, hold office, practise law, teach, or own a horse worth more than five pounds. Their clergy had to register with the authorities.
Set that list beside the direction of travel in Europe now: religious dress barred from public roles, imams registered and mosques watched, faith schools restricted. The Penal Laws are not a curiosity. They are a template.
During the Famine, a million people died and a million more left, while grain and cattle kept sailing out of Irish ports to English markets. The Irish were drawn in Punch as apes, and their poverty was presented as proof of their character rather than the result of their treatment.
The Irish survived. That is usually told as the happy ending: proof that integration works, that the machine eventually relents.
Look at the price. The language was pushed to the edge of extinction. The land was gone. The population was halved. The Irish joined the mainstream by confining their Irishness to its margins: music, literature, a saint's day.
That is the offer Muslims in Europe are now being made, in the gentle language of shared values. Acceptance, conditional and revocable, in exchange for the slow surrender of everything that makes a community a community.
The Irish are not proof that the machine relents. They are proof of what it costs when it does.
Survival through erasure is not survival. It is a slower kind of ending.