Every civilisation has a logic: assumptions so basic they are almost never named, shaping outcomes more consistently than any party or policy could.
Europe's logic is hierarchy. And hierarchy, left running long enough, stops being a ranking and becomes a process.
The process has three stages.
Classify. A population is marked as different, and the difference is made to mean danger. The tools change with the century. In the medieval period it was theology. In the colonial period it was race, dressed as science. Today it is culture. Nobody respectable says Muslims are racially inferior. They say Muslim values are incompatible with European ones. The vocabulary moves on. The function stays.
Extract. The classified population is put to use while being denied full membership. Medieval Jews were pushed into money-lending and despised for it. After the war, Europe's factories needed hands and found them in the people it had spent centuries ranking beneath itself: Windrush in Britain, the Gastarbeiter in Germany, North Africans in France.
My grandfather was one of them. He did not come with the choice and aspiration the word "immigrant" now suggests. He came because the mills were recruiting. When the mills closed, his presence was reclassified from a contribution to a problem.
Purge. When the population is no longer useful, or a crisis needs someone to blame, the machine removes it. Mildly, through law: restrictions on worship, dress and education, always presented as integration or common sense. More severely, through forced assimilation. At the extreme, through expulsion or extermination: England's Jews in 1290, Spain's in 1492, Europe's Jews in the 1940s, Bosnia's Muslims in the 1990s.
And each time it ends, Europe tells itself it was an aberration.
Here is the part most people get wrong.
The machine does not need its targets to be guilty. It selects them because they are classifiable: visibly different, numerous enough to notice, without the power to defend themselves, brought in through extraction and never granted full membership.
That is why arguing your innocence does not work. You can prove, again and again, that most Muslims are law-abiding, employed and loyal. It changes nothing, because guilt was never the entry requirement. The machine is not responding to evidence. It is responding to availability.
Every one of those conditions was met by every population the machine processed before. Every one of them is met now.
So the useful question is not whether we deserve this. The useful question is the one the pattern forces on anyone willing to look at it honestly.
Who is next?