Mark Steyn - America Alone

Nor, incidentally, was Miss Begum “preserving” any identity: she’s of Bangladeshi origin, and her belated adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabization of South Asian (and African and European and North American) Islam that’s at the root of so many current problems. Even as an honored Arab tradition, it dates all the way back to the seventies. Not the 1070s or 1570s but the 1970s. There is no evidence that any Muslim woman anywhere ever wore the jilbab before the disco era, when it was taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood and others in the Arab world. It is no more ancient and traditional than platform shoes, bell bottoms, and cheesecloth shirts. It’s no more part of Shabina Begum’s inherited identity than my little boy dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth Vader costume, to which at a casual glance it’s not dissimilar. So it’s a wholly invented and consciously chosen identity. It’s not part of her Bangladeshi heritage, it’s not part of British custom. It is equally alien in both the Indian subcontinent and the British Isles, and its appearance in both places is, in point of fact, political rather than spiritual: it’s part of a movement explicitly hostile to what Tony Blair calls “our way of life.” If it’s too unreasonable to expect young Shabina Begum to choose a British identity, couldn’t Mr. and Mrs. Blair at least encourage her to preserve her authentic Bangladeshi one?

During the cartoon jihad, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto spelled it out: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”

Or as Kofi Annan framed it, rather more soothingly, “The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.” If you’ve also “recently acquired” a significant Muslim population and you’re not sure how to “adjust” to it, well, here’s the difference: back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated with the host country. As Kofi and Co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate with the immigrants. But it goes beyond that — because the immigrant populations themselves are adjusting, developing an Islamic identity far more intense than anything practiced by their forbears. Take Nada Farooq, a student at Meadowvale Secondary School in Mississauga, Ontario. In 2004 she started an Internet forum for Muslim teens in the area. One poster thought it would be fun if they had a thread explaining what made Canada unique, but Nada nixed that one in nothing flat: “Who cares? We hate Canada.”

So what does grab her interest? Well, she wasn’t too thrilled to hear that Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, a Hamas honcho, had been killed by an Israeli missile. “May Allah crush these jews,” she declared, “bring them down to their knees, humiliate them. Ya Allah make their women widows and their children orphans.” But she and her fellow Meadowvale students were extremely partial to a very bloody video showing the beheading of an American hostage in Iraq.

Oh, well. Excitable teens often pass through a somewhat turbulent phase. But two years later Miss Farooq’s husband and sixteen other men were arrested in a terrorist plot that included wide-ranging plans to blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange, seize Parliament in Ottawa, and kidnap and behead the prime minister.

I’m often damned as a “self-loathing Canadian” because I’m opposed to socialized health care and government-funded multiculturalism and whatnot. But in the self-loathing stakes I’ve got nothing on Nada Farooq. “We hate Canada.” Yet no one calls her a self-loathing Canadian. Perhaps that’s because she’s not a gal you’d want to tangle with; when she married, she gave serious thought to getting a prenup that would dissolve the union if her husband failed to partake in jihad. Or perhaps it’s because, at heart, no one expects her to feel “Canadian,” whatever that means these days. Miss Farooq’s father is a pharmacist who fills prescriptions at a military base in Wainwright, Alberta, and says he supports the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry on their mission in Afghanistan. After the terror cell was cracked, Mohammed Umer Farooq told the press that his daughter’s views — hating Canada, in favor of shipping homosexuals to Saudi Arabia to be executed or crushed, etc. — were new to him, but that she’s always been “more religious” than he is. He described her as “100 percent religious” and himself as “30 percent religious.” Nada Farooq is typical of a significant minority of young Muslims: raised in the West by “moderate Muslim” parents, she is, unlike them, ferociously Muslim, Islamist, jihadist. Her father’s generation brought to the West the Indian subcontinent’s traditional moderate Sufi Islam. In Pakistan, Britain, and Canada, that Sufism is yielding to a hard-line strain of Deobandi Islam — essentially a local subsidiary of Wahhabism. Unlike her parents, Nada Farooq has no natural Pakistani identity and she rejects her thin, reedy multicultural Canadian identity, choosing instead a pan-Islamic consciousness that transcends nationality: she planned to name her son Khattab, after the Chechen mujahadeen commander killed in 2002. ‘Growing up in a Toronto suburb, she found recent Chechen history more inspiring than Canadian history, assuming she was taught any.’

How many Nada Farooqs are there? On the first anniversary of the July 7, 2005, Tube bombings, the Times of London commissioned a poll of British Muslims. Among the findings:

• 16 percent say that while the attacks may have been wrong, the cause was right.

• 13 percent think that the four men who carried out the bombings should be regarded as “martyrs.”

• 7 percent agree that suicide attacks on civilians in the United Kingdom can be justified in some circumstances, rising to 16 percent for a military target.

• 2 percent would be proud if a family member decided to join al Qaeda.

• 16 percent would be “indifferent.”

If this is a war, then that is a substantial fifth column. There are, officially, one million Muslims in London, half of them under twenty-five. If 7 percent think suicide attacks on civilians are justified, that’s 70,000 potential supporters in Britain’s capital city. Most of them will never bomb a bus or even provide shelter or a bank account to someone who does. But some of them will. As September 11 demonstrated, you only have to find nineteen stouthearted men, and from a talent pool of 70,000 that’s not bad odds. Besides, a large majority of Western Muslims support almost all the terrorists’ strategic goals: according to one poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom.

Another poll places the percentage favoring “hard-line” sharia at a mere 40 percent. So there’s one definition of a “moderate Muslim”: he’s a Muslim who wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he’s a “moderate” because he can’t be bothered flying a plane into a skyscraper to get it. Another poll found that 20 percent of British Muslims sympathized with the “feelings and motives” of the July 7 London Tube bombers. Or, more accurately, 20 percent were prepared to admit to a pollster they felt sympathy, which suggests the real figure might be somewhat higher. Huge numbers of Muslims — many of them British subjects born and bred — see their fellow Britons blown apart on trains and buses and are willing to rationalize the actions of the mass murderers. The Islamic lobby groups pressure governments to make concessions to them rather than to the terrorists — even though both share the same aims. In fact, sharing the same aims as the terrorists is what gives the Islamic lobby groups their credibility. If there were a “moderate Muslim” lobby — one that, say, believed that suicide bombing is always wrong, even against Israelis, or that supported the liberation of Iraq on the grounds that the Iraqi people are in favor of it — your average Western government would immediately be suspicious that such a group was not “authentically” Muslim. Whereas, if you oppose the occupation of Iraq and seek to justify the depravity of Hamas, you have instant credibility. And so government ministers in Western nations spend most of their time taking advice on the jihad from men who agree with its aims. You can pluck out news items at random: in London, a religious “hate crimes” law that makes honest discussion of Islam even more difficult; in Ottawa, a government report that recommends legalizing polygamy; in Seattle, the introduction of gender-separate Muslim-only swimming sessions in municipal pools…. The September 11 terrorists were in favor of all these ends. The disagreement is only on the means.