Zygmunt Bauman made an observation about persecution that is easy to state and hard to live with. The infrastructure is always built before the persecution begins.
The gas chambers were not the first step. The census was. The registration was. The law that separated one category of citizen from another was. Each step was rational. Each was legal. Each was defensible on its own terms. And each made the next one possible.
So the useful question about Europe's Muslims is not whether anyone intends harm. Most of the people building this infrastructure do not. The useful question is what the infrastructure makes possible.
That is an audit of capability, not of intent. And the capability is already there.
The law now treats Muslim citizens differently from others. France's anti-separatism law. Austria's Islam Law. Denmark's ghetto laws. Britain's counter-terrorism duties. Belgium's bans on religious dress. Each addresses a particular concern. Together they create a category of citizen with an asterisk: rights that come with conditions others do not face.
Citizenship can be revoked. Britain, France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium all hold the power, and in Britain it has fallen disproportionately on Muslim dual nationals. Today it reaches a small number of people convicted of the gravest offences. But the mechanism exists. It does not need to be invented. It only needs to be scaled.
And the data exists. Mosques, imams, religious schools, civic organisations, social networks, travel and online life are mapped by intelligence services across the continent, with facial recognition and algorithmic profiling added year by year. None of this is secret. It is in government reports.
The last element decides whether the others are ever used: political will. And the political will is being assembled, election by election, headline by headline.
History is clear about what activates infrastructure like this. A crisis. Economic collapse and the demand for scapegoats. A terrible attack and the demand for emergency powers. A far-right government. A demographic panic. After the Paris attacks of 2015, a state of emergency lasted two years and then passed into ordinary law.
None of those triggers has been pulled. All of them are loaded.
This is not a prediction. The future is not fixed, and people can still change it. But a community that waits for the persecution before it responds has misunderstood how persecution works. By the time it is visible, the census has already been taken.
The architecture is nearly complete. Watching for the last step means you have missed all the others.
Watch the first ones. They are being taken now.