Mark Steyn - America Alone

More to the point, of those Muslims who are affronted by what is done in the name of their religion, what percentage are prepared to do anything about it? How many Western Muslims have formed “Not In Our Name” groups and marched to protest the bombings of their fellow citizens in New York, Madrid, and London? How many have joined “Islam Against Suicide Bombing” or banded together to force jihadist imams out of their mosques? How many are prepared to stand up and say they didn’t come to America or Europe to raise their children as Saudis?

Hello? Anyone out there?

We — the befuddled infidels — talk airily about “reforming” Islam. But what if the reform has already taken place and jihadism is it? What if the long percolation of Islam through Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian revolution, and contemporary Westernpromoted whining over grievances such as “colonialism” is the reform?

We chatter breezily about “assimilating” Western Muslims. But compare a gathering of mainstream Muslim politicians and religious leaders in Baghdad with any similar get-together in London or Detroit or Sydney, and you realize the Iraqis sound a lot more reasonable and amenable than most Western Muslim lobby groups. What if the problem is not that Muslims in the West are unfamiliar with the customs of their new land but rather that they are all too familiar with them — and explicitly reject them? And that the result is a mutated form of Islam uniquely well informed in its hostility to the infidel — and one furthermore in which ancient tribal hostilities between Sunni and Shia, Arab and non-Arab have been subsumed within a new pan-Islamic identity.

Muslims have assimilated brilliantly, at least when it comes to mastering the principal discourse of the advanced democratic state — the legalisms, victimology, and entitlement culture. Here are two small foot-of-the-page news items: first, a decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court as reported by the Boston Herald: “The state’s highest court has ruled that the state prison system has failed to justify denying a Muslim inmate special feast-day meats, such as oxen and camel.”

The Third Infantry Division has to make do with MREs, but a Muslim prisoner can sue because they’re not serving him camel. Meanwhile, in Britain they’re rebuilding half the bathrooms in Her Majesty’s prisons because Muslim inmates have complained that the toilets face Mecca and that therefore they’re obliged to ride sidesaddle, which can be very uncomfortable.

And, if you’re looking for “root causes” of terrorism, why not start with Euro-Canadian welfare systems? While it’s not true that every immigrant on welfare is an Islamic terrorist, the vast majority of Islamic terrorists in Europe are on welfare, living in radicalized ghetto cultures with nothing to do but sit around the flat plotting the jihad all day at taxpayers’ expense. Muhammed Metin Kaplan used his time on welfare in Germany to set up his Islamist group, Caliphate State; the so-called “caliph of Cologne” was subsequently extradited to Turkey for planning to fly a plane into the mausoleum of Kemal Ataturk. Ahmed Ressam, arrested in Washington state en route to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, hatched his plot while on welfare in Montreal. Abdul Nacer Benbrika, leader of a group of Australian Islamists, lived in Melbourne for ten years and never did a day’s work; now he’s been jailed for terrorism-related activities, and taxpayers are ponying up $50,000 a year in benefits to his wife. Abu Hamza became Britain’s most famous fire-breathing imam while on welfare in London and, after being charged with incitement to murder and sent to jail, sued the government for extra benefits on top of the £1,000 a week his family already received. Abu Qatada, a leading al Qaeda recruiter, became an Islamist big shot while on welfare in Britain, and only when he was discovered to have £150,000 in his bank account did the Department for Work and Pensions turn off the spigot. Oh, and here’s another Welfare Megabucks bonanza, from the Times of London:

“Police are investigating allegations that the four suspected July 21 bombers collected more than £500,000 in benefits payments in Britain.”

No-hoper jihadists in their twenties have a quarter-million dollars in welfare cash in their checking accounts. I’m not saying every benefit recipient is a terrorist welfare queen, only that the best hope of reforming bloated European welfare systems is if America declares them a national security threat.

A terrorist wakes up in Baghdad early Monday morning, straps on the old explosives, and toddles off to blow up some infidels at the gate to the Green Zone, dreaming of getting at least a couple of the virgins in before lunch. But the belt jams and U.S. troops arrest him and he’s stuck on a plane to Gitmo and forty-eight hours later he’s whining to his D.C. lawyer about the quality of the chicken chasseur and plotting his Supreme Court case. When they want to, Islamists can assimilate at impressive speed. So we have fire-breathing imams milking Euro-welfare and litigious lobby groups with high-rent legal teams. Neither of these are features of Arab life. Rather, they illustrate how adept Islam is at picking and choosing what aspects of Westernization are useful to it. Whatever the arguments for and against “gay marriage,” there are never going to be many takers for it. But the justifications for same-sex marriage are already being used to advance the cause of polygamy, and there are far more takers for that. It’s already practiced de facto if not de jure in France, Ontario, and many other Western jurisdictions, and government agencies, such as the United Kingdom’s pensions ministry, have already begun according polygamy piecemeal legal recognition for the purposes of inheritance law. Neither feminists nor homosexuals seem obvious allies for Islam, but lobby groups have effortlessly mastered the lingo, techniques, and pseudogrievances of both. For example, Iqbal Sacranie is a Muslim of such exemplary “moderation” he’s been knighted by the Queen. Around the time Brokeback Mountain opened, Sir Iqbal, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, was on the BBC and expressed the view that homosexuality was “immoral,” “not acceptable,” “spreads disease,” and “damaged the very foundations of society.” A gay group complained and Sir Iqbal was investigated by Scotland Yard’s “community safety unit” which deals with “hate crimes” and “homophobia.” Independently but simultaneously, the magazine of GALHA (the Gay And Lesbian Humanist Association) called Islam a “barmy doctrine” growing “like a canker” and deeply “homophobic.” In return, the London Race Hate Crime Forum asked Scotland Yard to investigate GALHA for “Islamophobia.”

Got that? If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for Islamophobia.

As someone who’s called Islamophobic and homophobic every day of the week, I can’t help marveling at the speed and skill with which Muslim lobby groups have mastered the language of victimhood so adroitly used by the gay lobby. If I were the latter, I’d be a little miffed at these Ahmed-come-latelys. “Homophobia” was always absurd: people who are antipathetic to gays are not afraid of them in any real sense. The invention of a phonybaloney “phobia” was a way of casting opposition to the gay political agenda as a kind of mental illness: don’t worry, you’re not really against same-sex marriage; with a bit of treatment and some medication, you’ll soon be feeling okay.

On the other hand, “Islamophobia” is not phony or even psychological but very literal-if you’re a Dutch member of parliament or British novelist or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death or a French schoolgirl in certain suburbs getting jeered at as an infidel whore, your Islamophobia is highly justified. But Islam’s appropriation of the gay lobby’s framing of the debate is very artful. It’s the most explicit example of how Islam uses politically correct self-indulgent victimology as a cover. You’ll recall that most Western media outlets declined to publish those Danish cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed. Thus, even as they were piously warning of a rise in bogus “Islamophobia” — i.e., entirely justified concerns over Islamic terrorism and related issues — they were themselves suffering from genuine Islamophobia — i.e., a very real fear that, if they published those cartoons, an angry mob would storm their offices. It was a fine example of how the progressive mind’s invented psychoses leave it without any words to describe real dangers.