Mark Steyn’s new book is a welcome wake-up call.
In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know
It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in
different ways, I know well. The first is novelist Martin Amis,
ridiculed by Steyn for worrying about environmental apocalypse when the
threat to civilization is obviously Islamism; the second
is Jack Straw, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, mocked for the
soft and conciliatory line he took over the affair of the Danish
cartoons. The dazzling fiction writer and the pedestrian
social-democratic politician are for Steyn dual exemplars of his book’s
main concern: the general apathy and surrender
of the West in the face of
a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological
religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any
scruples about how to get it.
I might quibble about Steyn’s assessment—Amis has written brilliantly
about Mohammed Atta’s death cult, for example, while Jack Straw made
one of the best presentations to the UN of the case for liberating Iraq.
But it’s more useful to point out
two things that have happened between the writing of this admirably
tough-minded book and its publication. Jack Straw, now the leader of the
House of Commons, made a speech in his northern English constituency in
October, in which he said that he could no longer tolerate Muslim women
who came to his office wearing veils. The speech catalyzed a
long-postponed debate not just on the veil but on the refusal of
assimilation that it symbolizes. It seems to have swung the Labour Party
into a much firmer position against what I call one-way
multiculturalism. Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed the shift with a
December speech emphasizing the “duty” of
immigrants to assimilate to British values. And Martin Amis, speaking to
the London Times, had this to say:
There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The
Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.”
What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further
down the road.
Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re
from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until
it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their
children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take
drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
I know both of these men to be profoundly humanistic and open-minded.
Straw has defended the rights of immigrants all his life and loyally
represents a constituency with a large Asian population. Amis has
rebuked me several times in print for supporting the intervention in
Iraq, the casualties of which have become horrifying to him. Even five
years ago, it would have been unthinkable to picture either man making
critical comments about Islamic dress, let alone using terms such as
“deportation.” Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants
among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and
thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He need not pose as
if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.
The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam
Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe,
where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow
to address the looming problem
of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an
understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization
[emphasis mine].
As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt:
“What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in
other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but
additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have
heretofore seemed to underpin those values?
Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of
this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal
identification of
the Muslim religion with
the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what
we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in
the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian
until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and
in the amazing ignorance that most leftists
display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from
al-Qaida and its surrogates long before
the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism
“Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery
of special offenses associated with racism.
The second liberal disability concerns
numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and
non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of
eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the
liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size
to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously
self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human
“population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some
“Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human
reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the
fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same
goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of
an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The
Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.
Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an
immensely convincing case. He stations himself at the intersection of
two curves. The downward one is the population of developed Europe and
Japan, which has slipped or is slipping below what demographers call
“replacement,” rapidly producing a situation where the old will far
outnumber the young. The upward curve, or curves, represent the much
higher birthrate in the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrants to
Western societies. Anticipating Harris in a way, Steyn writes:
Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe
since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian
Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population,
while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a
democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The
Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if
you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces
is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire
continent.
This is a highly reductionist view of the origin and nature of the
Bosnian war—it would not account, for example, for Croatian irredentism.
But paranoia about population did mutate into Serbian xenophobia and
fascism, and a similar consciousness does animate movements like the
British National Party and Le Pen’s Front Nationale. (Demographic
considerations do not appear to explain the continued addiction of
these and similar parties to anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.)
Nor can there be much doubt that the awareness of demography as a
potential weapon originates with the Islamists themselves. Anybody who,
like me, has publicly criticized Islamism gets used to the accusation
that he has “insulted a billion Muslims.” A vague but definite threat
underlies this absurd charge, and in parts of Europe it already
intimidates politicians. Gilles Kepel, the French scholar of Islam, once
told me that when he lectures in North Africa his listeners often ask
how many Muslims live in France. If he replies that he believes the
official figures to be mostly correct, scornful laughter erupts. The
true figure, his listeners say, is much higher. France is on its way to
becoming part of the dar-al-Islam. It is leaving the dar-al-Harb
(“House of War”), but without a fight. Steyn has no difficulty
producing equally minatory public statements from Islamist
triumphalists. And, because his argument is exponential, it creates an
impression of something unstoppable.
Yet Steyn makes the same mistake as did the
late Oriana Fallaci: considering European Muslim populations as one.
Islam is as fissile as any other religion (as Iraq reminds us). Little
binds a Somali to a Turk or an Iranian or an Algerian, and considerable
friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European
countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the
advertised purposes—seeking asylum and to build a better life. A young
Afghan man, murdered in the assault on the London subway system in July
2005, had fled to England from the Taliban, which had murdered most of
his family. Muslim women often demand the protection of the authorities
against forced marriage and other cruelties. These are all points of
difference, and also of possible resistance to Euro-sharia.
The main problem in Europe in this context is that many deracinated
young Muslim men, inflamed by Internet propaganda from Chechnya or Iraq
and aware of their own distance from “the struggle,” now regard the
jihadist version of their religion as the “authentic” one. Compounding
the problem, Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare
agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as
the minority’s “real” spokesmen. As Kenan Malik and others have pointed
out in the case of Britain, this mind-set cuts the ground from under the
feet of secular Muslims, encouraging the sensation that many in
the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish.
Steyn cannot seem to make up his mind about the defense of secularism
in this struggle. He regards Christianity as a bulwark of civilization
and
a possible insurance against Islamism. But he cannot resist pointing out
that most of
the Christian churches have collapsed into compromise: choosing to speak
of Muslims as another “faith community,” agreeing with them on the need
for confessional-based schooling, and reserving their real condemnation
for American policies in the war against terrorism.
This is not to deny Steyn’s salient point
that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are
handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization. His gift for
the illustrative anecdote and the revealing quotation is evident, and if
more people have woken up to the Islamist menace since he began writing
about it, then the credit is partly his. Muslims in one part of England
demand the demolition of an ancient statue of a wild boar, and in
another part of England make plots to blow up airports, buses, and
subway trains. The two threats are not identical. But they are
connected, and Steyn attempts to tease out the filiations with the
saving tactic of wit.
I still think—or should I say hope?—that the sheer operatic insanity
of September 11 set back the Islamist project of
a “soft” conquest of host
countries, Muslim countries included. Up until 9/11, the Talibanization
of Pakistan—including the placement of al-Qaida sympathizers within its
nuclear program—proceeded fairly smoothly. Official
Pakistani support for Muslim gangsters operating in Afghanistan,
Kashmir, and India went relatively unpunished. Saudi funds discreetly
advanced the Wahhabist program, through madrassa-building and a network
of Islamic banking, across the globe. In the West, Muslim demands for
greater recognition and special treatment had become an accepted part of
the politically correct agenda. Some denounced me as cynical for saying
at the time that Osama bin Laden had done us a favor by disclosing the
nature and urgency of the Islamist threat, but I still think I was
right. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have had to trim their sails a
bit. The Taliban will at least never be able to retake power by stealth
or as a result of our inattention. Millions have become aware of the
danger—including millions of Shi’a Muslims who now see the ideology of
bin Laden and Zarqawi as a menace to their survival. Groups and cells
that might have gotten away with murder have wound up unmasked and shut
down, from Berlin to Casablanca.
Of course, these have not been the only consequences of September 11
and its aftermath. Islamist suicide-terrorism has mutated into new
shapes and adopted fresh grievances as a result of the mobilization
against it. Liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming
itself for the attack upon it. But at least the long period of
somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to
form against the infection.
Steyn ends his book with a somewhat slapdash
ten-point program for resistance to Islamism, which includes offhand
one-line items such as “End the Iranian regime”
and more elaborate proposals to get rid of the United Nations, the
International Atomic Energy Authority, and (for some reason) NATO. His
tenth point (“Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself”)
is barely even a makeweight to bring the figure up to ten.
Steyn is much more definite about the cultural side of his argument,
in other words, than about the counterterrorist dimension. If I wanted
to sharpen both prongs of his thesis, I would also propose the
following:
1. An end to one-way
multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The
Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and
until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of
punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices
find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have
begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam.
This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must
feel the full weight
of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We
should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the
U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian
and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison
system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.
2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the
military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural
exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great
multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely
enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas
from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.
3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe,
and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by
jihadists and are also the
location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could
help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from
dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the
Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a
further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim
forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern
Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or
abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as
with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and
micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we
cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did
seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.
5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the
Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated
widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all
matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of
assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that
seismologists
predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a
few moments,
and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret
underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of
Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so
impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s
neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear
underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal
affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of
the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement
within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.
6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN
resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.
7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the
profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such
time
as the country’s agriculture—
especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can
use the product in the interim for
the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our
own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up
interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less
scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know
that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make
trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind.
Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break
the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish
separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of
“Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces
to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story.
He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them
privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his
government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the
secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself.
Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.
When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible
remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to
myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish
to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational
in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be
crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that
will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all
responsible for doing our utmost
as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders.
1 comment:
Good read, rwm.
What you proposed..I am letting sink in.
#7 was thought provoking.
You also said something..I wish I could comment on but I can't-as it is related to a business connection I have. Maybe one day.
But it struck me like a 2x4 when you said it.... Wahhabist program.
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