Mark Steyn - America Alone

So March 11 proved not to be a day that will live in infamy. Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity. That’s the true equivalent to September 11, in the sense of a day that defines a people, a day to be remembered as we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster inevitable. At least in the two and a half years between September 11 and March 11, there was always the possibility of Europe stiffening itself. Now America lives with the certainty that it won’t, and can’t, until it’s too late. All those umbrellas in the rain at those demonstrations of defiance proved to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish knowingly made polling day a victory for appeasement and dishonored their own dead.

Why would the Spanish do what they did? Well, why wouldn’t they?

Who needs to show resolve when you’re a country with a fertility rate of 1.1 percent?

Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment. To fight for king and country is to fight for the future. But a barren society has no future, and so what’s to fight for? The terrorists would have their work cut out killing the Spanish people as fast as the Spanish are killing themselves. How can you “decimate” a population that’s already halving with every generation?

On September 11, 2001, the American mainland was attacked for the first time since the War of 1812. The perpetrators were foreign-Saudis and Egyptians. Since September 11, Europe has seen the London Tube bombings, the French riots, Dutch murders of nationalist politicians. The perpetrators are their own citizens — British subjects, citoyens de la Republique française. That’s the difference: America is fighting a foreign war, Eurabia is in the early stages of an undeclared civil war.

Who’ll win it? In Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that all female teachers, believers or infidels, wear headscarves in class. The Muslim Council of Britain wants Holocaust Day abolished because it focuses “only” on the Nazis’ (alleged) Holocaust of the Jews and not the Israelis’ ongoing Holocaust of the Palestinians.

And how does the state react? In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims; In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant’s counsel argued he couldn’t get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country’s patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he’s too “militaristic” and “offensive to Muslims.” They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George’s cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban’s cross as a thin yellow streak. That’s a joke most satirists would reject as too crudely implausible.

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering its voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but — as have parts of Nigeria-they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the “tolerance” of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending.

Madrid and London — along with other events such as the murder of Theo van Gogh-were the opening shots of that European civil war. You can laugh at that if you wish, but the Islamists’ most oft-stated goal is not infidel withdrawal from Iraq but the re-establishment of a Muslim caliphate, living under sharia, that extends to Europe. There’s a lot to be said for taking these chaps at their word and then seeing whether their behavior comports. Furthermore, given that a lot more of the world lives under sharia than did in the early seventies, as a political project radical Islam has made some headway, and continues to do so almost every day of the week: early in 2005, some 10 percent of southern Thailand’s Buddhist population abandoned their homes because of Islamist violence — a far bigger disruption than the tsunami, yet, all but unreported in the world press. And wherever one’s sympathies lie on Islam’s multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

In 1903, in The Riddle of the Sands, the first great English spy novel, Erskine Childers has his yachtsman, Davies, try to persuade the Foreign Office wallah Carruthers to take seriously the possibility of German naval marauders in the Fresian Islands: Follow the parallel of a war on land. People your mountains with a daring and resourceful race, who possess an intimate knowledge of every track and bridlepath, who operate in small bands, travel light, and move rapidly. See what an immense advantage such guerrillas possess over an enemy which clings to beaten tracks, moves in large bodies, slowly, and does not “know the country.” Davies wants Carruthers to apply the old principles to new forms of warfare. The Islamists are doing that. Their most effective guerrillas aren’t in the Hindu Kush, where it’s the work of moments to drop a daisy cutter on the mighty Pashtun warrior. They’re traveling light on the bridle paths of Europe — the small cells, the opportunist imams, the ambitious lobby groups that operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society — while politicians cling to the beaten tracks of old ideas, multicultural pieties, and a general hope that things will turn out for the best.

“We’re the ones who will change you,” Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.” As he summed it up: “Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours.”

How did today’s demographic disaster happen? How did the wealthiest civilization in human history, the engine of global progress, opt for self-liquidation in favor of the modern world’s most technologically impoverished and backward culture? Today, the typical advanced society trumpets its defects as virtues. Immigration certainly has its blessings; the provincial restaurant scene in England would be a lot duller without curry houses, etc. But it’s very silly to boast about it as proof of one’s moral superiority. A dependence on immigration from very limited and particular sources is not a strength but a weakness. The Continent’s imams can certainly see that: they understand that Europe is the colony now. John O’Sullivan, a former editor of National Review, once observed that postwar Canadian history is summed up by an old Monty Python song. “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m Okay” begins as a robust paean to the manly virtues of a rugged life in the north woods — as the intro goes, “Leaping from tree to tree! As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia!” — but ends with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into some sort of transvestite pick-up who sings that he likes to “wear high heels, suspenders, and a bra” and “dress in women’s clothing and hang around in bars.”