Mark Steyn - America Alone

A while back, I found myself behind a car in Vermont that had a one-word bumper sticker containing the injunction “CO-EXIST.” It’s one of those sentiments beloved of Western progressives, one designed principally to flatter their sense of moral superiority, part of the multiculti mood music that makes lefty pieties one long soothing express elevator to cloud-cuckoo land. On this “CO-EXIST” sticker, the “C” was the Islamic crescent, the “0” was the hippy peace sign, the “X” was the Star of David and the “T” was the Christian cross. Very nice, hard to argue with. But the reality is that it’s the first of those symbols that has a problem with “co-existence.” Take the crescent out of the equation and you wouldn’t need a bumper sticker at all. Indeed, co-existence is what the Islamists are at war with — or, if you prefer, pluralism; the idea that different groups can rub along together within the same general neighborhood. And even those who nominally respect the idea tend, on closer examination, to mean by “pluralism” something closer to “subjugation.” Take one of those famous “moderate Muslims”: Imam Zaid Shakir, the subject of a flattering profile in the New York Times under the headline “U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground.” Good for them, but what does a “modern middle ground” mean? As Imam Shakir — who grew up as Ricky Mitchell in Georgia and Connecticut — says, “Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country. I think it would help people, and if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be a Muslim.” I think he’s right when he says honest Muslims want America to be a Muslim country. But they don’t mean it in quite the same sense Christians do when they speak of America as a Christian country. By a “Muslim country,” they don’t just foresee a country with a majority of Muslim inhabitants but a country whose civil institutions are Muslim. The Islamists incite jihad from American, Canadian, British, European, and Australian mosques, and they get away with it. The West’s elites lapse reflexively into twittering over insufficient “respect” and entirely fictional outbreaks of “Islamophobia.” The Mounties, the FBI, Scotland Yard, and others are reasonably efficient at breaking up cells and plots, but they’re the symptoms, not the disease. It’s the ideological pipeline that needs to be dismantled. Through their network of schools and mosques, the Saudis are attempting to make themselves into a Muslim Vatican — if not infallible, at any rate the most authoritative voice in the Islamic world. We might have responded to the Wahhabist challenge by distinguishing, as William Tayler did, between Sunni and Shia, Sufi and Salafi, and all the rest, and attempting to exploit the divisions. But, as proper Western multiculturalists, we celebrate diversity by lumping them all together as “Islam.”

So if the jihad has its war aims, maybe we should start thinking about ours. What would victory look like? As Fascism and Communism were in their day, Islamism is now the ideology of choice for the world’s grievance-mongers. That means we have to destroy the ideology, or at least its potency — not Islam per se, but at the very minimum the toxic strain of Wahhabism, which thanks to Saudi oil money has been transformed from a fetish of isolated desert derelicts into the most influential radicalizing force of our time. If the implausible mantra of Western politicians that Islam is a “religion of peace” had any strategic value against the head hackers and suicide bombers, it would be as a prelude to pointing out that, sadly, Wahhabism is an exception to this otherwise saintly character, that Wahhabism is a religion of pieces. But our lack of curiosity about which particular school of imam is setting up shop on Main Street is greatly facilitating the cause of pan-Islamism, a much better example of globalization than McDonald’s. In Bangladesh and Bosnia, it’s put indigenous localized Islams out of business and imposed a one-size-fits-all Wahhab-Mart version cooked up by some guy at head office in Riyadh. One way to reverse its gains would be with a kind of anti-trust approach designed to restore all the less threatening mom n’ pop Islams run out of town by the Saudis’ Burqa King version of global homogeneity. By contrast, the much reviled yet mostly mythical “American imperialism” is up on bricks and rusting in the back of the garage. Wearying of what he regards as the deluded idealism of the liberty-touting Bush doctrine, National Review’s John Derbyshire began promoting the slogan “Rubble Doesn’t Cause Trouble.” Cute, and I wish him well with the T-shirt sales. But, in arguing for a “realist” foreign policy of long-range bombing as necessary, he overlooks the very obvious point that rubble causes quite a lot of trouble: the rubble of Bosnia is directly responsible for radicalizing a generation of European Muslims, including Daniel Pearl’s executioner; the rubble of Afghanistan became an international terrorist training camp, whose alumni include the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, the millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam, and the September 11 plotters; the rubble of Grozny turned Chechen nationalists into pan-Islamist jihadi. Those correspondents of mine who send me e-mails headed “Nuke Mecca!” might like to ponder the bigger strategic impact on a billion Muslims from Indonesia to Yorkshire, for whom any fallout will be psychological rather than carcinogenic. Rubble is an insufficient solution, unless you’re also going to attend to the Muslim world’s real problem: its intellectual rubble.

Arab Muslims fought in Afghanistan, British Muslims took up arms in Bosnia, Pakistani Muslims have been killed in Chechnya. When you’re up against a globalized ideology, you need to globalize your own, not hunker down in Fortress America.

What’s the bigger threat? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers or a globalization that exports the harshest and most oppressive features of its culture? Far too many American conservatives still think the dragons are at the far fringes of the map — that in the twenty-first century the United States can be a nineteenth-century republic untroubled by the world’s pathogens because of its sheer distance from them. But, in an age of globalized proximity all of us in the modern multicultural West are like Lincoln on the steps of the Capitol that Saturday morning: the world is in the room with us. At the dawn of the twentyfirst century, Marshall McLuhan’s global village is finally within reach: the Yanks run the diner, the Chinese the health clinic, and the Saudis the church. From America’s point of view, that doesn’t seem the best deal.

What we still don’t know, as the years drift by since September 11, is how deep the psychoses of jihadism reach within Islam in general, and the West’s Muslim populations in particular. How many are revolted by the slaughter of those Beslan schoolchildren or the beheading of Daniel Pearl and other hostages, and how many are willing to rationalize it?