Mark Steyn - America Alone

The years roll by since September 11, and for the most part we’re none the wiser. Nonetheless, except for the willfully blind, the distinctions between Ms. Allison’s “Greeks and Italians and Vietnamese” and Muslim immigration are clear. Instead of a melting pot, there’s conversion: a Scot can marry a Greek or a Botswanan, but when a Scot marries a Yemeni it’s because the former has become a Muslim. In defiance of normal immigration patterns, the host country winds up assimilating with Islam: French municipal swimming baths introduce gender-segregated bathing sessions; Australian hospitals remove pork from the cafeteria menu.

It’s fair to point out that in much of the West “Western Civilization” has been only recently acquired. Until the 1970s, southern Europe was mostly dictatorships — Portugal, Spain, Greece. A generation earlier, Italy was a gangster state and Germany a genocidal one. The Muslim critique of the West — that we’re decadent vulgar narcissist fornicating sodomites — is not without more than a grain of truth. But when the fastest-breeding demographic group on the planet is also the one most resistant to the pieties of the socialdemocratic state, that presents a severe challenge, at least for the Left. In their bizarre prioritization of “a woman’s right to choose,” feminists have helped ensure that European women will end their days in a culture that doesn’t accord women the right to choose anything. Non-Muslim females in heavily Muslim neighborhoods in France now wear headscarves while out on the streets. Yes, yes, I know Islam is very varied, and Riyadh has a vibrant gay scene, and the Khartoum Feminist Publishing Collective now has so many members they’ve rented lavish new offices above the clitorectomy clinic. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, except when I’m being interviewed live on TV. But that’s better than pretending that there aren’t even any questions.

Forget the Jews and the gays and the women and reduce it to its most basic: in most Muslim jurisdictions, there is simply no culture of inquiry. No notion that challenging, questioning, testing the assumptions of that society has any value. This isn’t a recent development. For Islam’s first two or three centuries, scholars busied themselves figuring out what the divine revelations of the Koran actually meant for the daily routine of believers. But by the eleventh century all four schools of Islamic law had concluded they were pretty much on top of things and there was no need for any further interpretation or investigation. And from that point on Islam coasted, and then declined. The famous United Nations statistic from a 2002 report — more books are translated into Spanish in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand — suggests at the very minimum an extraordinarily closed world. What books are among the few they do translate? Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , both of which are prominently displayed bestsellers in even moderate Muslim countries — and, indeed, even in the Muslim stores on Edgware Road in the heart of London. No Islamic nation could have flown to the moon or invented the Internet, simply because for a millennium the culture has suppressed the curiosity necessary for such a venture.

You don’t have to subscribe to the view that every Muslim is a jihadist nutcake eager to hijack a 747 and head for the nearest tall building to acknowledge that at the very minimum these population trends put a large question mark over the future. Let me pluck two interesting numbers:

• In the fall of 2001, the Ottawa Citizen conducted a coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams and found all but two insistent that there was no Muslim involvement in September 11. Oh, well. It was just a few weeks after the attacks; everyone was still in shock. Perfectly understandable in its way.

• Five years later, in the summer of 2006, a poll in the United Kingdom found that only 17 percent of British Muslims believed there was any Arab involvement in September 11.

Anyone who’s traveled in the Middle East will recognize that moment — not with the wacky death-to-the-Great-Satan guys but with the hot-looking Westernized Bahraini lady doctor you’re enjoying a little incendiary flirting with. And then — ten, twenty, forty-five minutes into the conversation — she says something nutty. Often what’s nuttiest is that it’s completely illogical: in the spring of 2002, I met many Arabs who believed simultaneously that (a) September 11 was pulled off by the Mossad and (b) it was a great victory for the Muslim people.

What that British poll suggests is that the same syndrome is very advanced among Western Muslims. You can be perfectly assimilated when it comes to clothes, sports, pop music, the state of the economy, the need for transport infrastructure spending, and a million other issues, but on one of the central questions facing the world today 83 percent of the fastest-growing demographic in the United Kingdom does not accept the same reality as their fellow British subjects. And competing versions of reality is never a good recipe for social stability. Western Muslims are playing their own 24/7 version of the children’s game “Opposite Land.”

So if a population “at odds with the modern world” (in Philip Longman’s phrase) is the fastest-breeding group on the planet, how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?

The principal challenge to the United States in the years ahead is to avoid winding up the lonesomest gal in town. Given that most of its old allies — the ones John Kerry places so much stock in — are unlikely to conjure up the will to save themselves, it’s important that new allies are found among the emerging nations. I’m a supporter of the Bush Doctrine, of bringing liberty to the Middle East. It’s a long shot, but, whatever their problems, most Islamic countries have the advantage of beginning any evolution into free states from the starting point of relative societal cohesion. By contrast, European nations face the trickier task of trying to hold on to their freedom at a time of cultural disintegration. Many of them won’t make it. Watching the scenes of the anti-Danish protests on TV, as angry implacable crowds marched through the streets denouncing freedom as “Western terrorism” and pledging that “the enemies of Islam” would “drown in their own blood,” I thought back to those times I’ve been in the Arab world and rounded a corner and found something scary going on — excitable men prancing around the streets doing the old” Death to the Great Satan” dance. In the Middle East, you quickly learn the art of backing out of the room without catching the crazy guy’s eye. The problem for Europe is that it’s their room the crazy guys are now in.

A good way to look at what’s happening is via Shakespeare’s seven ages of man:

And right now some of us are a lot closer to the exits and some of us are still pouring through the entrances. Look at the Bard’s various “ages”:

They’re the foot soldiers of the jihad, the excitable young men you see on the news jumping up and down in the streets of Gaza and Islamabad torching the Stars and Stripes-and also (and more important) the ones who take flight training so they can plough jets into skyscrapers, who take whitewater rafting breaks in Wales so they’ll be at the peak of fitness when they self-detonate on the London Tube, the ones who define courage as the ability to look a seven-year-old Beslan schoolgirl in the eye and kill her: full of strange oaths, seeking the bubble reputation in the cannon’s mouth, or even the canon’s mouth — the incendiary imam urging them on to martyrdom. Over the next generation, that population of excitable young men will explode — demographically I mean, though very literally if the more severe mullahs have their way. By 2050, Muslim fertility rates will be in decline, as they already are in some of the more developed Islamic countries. But they’ll. be beginning their decline much later than Europe’s, or Canada’s, or Vermont’s, and so they will have a huge demographic advantage. And given that that’s the sole advantage they’ll have — the Middle East’s only other resource, oil, will be a fast-evaporating pool by mid-century — this is Islam’s demographic moment and they have to make the most of it. If they’re serious about the new caliphate and making the whole world part of the Dar al-Islam, they have to pull it off in the next quarter century.