Mark Steyn - America Alone

Eventually, after a word in Hamid Karzai’s ear from various Western prime ministers and Condi Rice and Co., the issue was finessed through back channels and poor Mr. Rahman was bundled onto a plane out of Kabul and dropped off in Rome. But Condi and Co. won’t be there for every Abdul Rahman, and so the question at the heart of his struggle remains unresolved: if Nazra Quraishi, quoted above, is correct that one “can embrace Islam but cannot get out,” that Islam is a religion one can only convert to, not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet. It cuts to the heart of what the multicultural state is, or believes itself to be. “Radical Islamism,” wrote Fouad Ajami, “has come to mock the very principle of nationality and citizenship.” But is that really so hard to do? Contemporary Canadian, British, Dutch, and Swedish nationality is to a large extent self-mocking. Alleged “conservatives” like the former prime minister Joe Clark spoke favorably of Canada being a “nation of nations,” meaning Indian nations, Inuit nations, the Quebec nation, the Ukrainian-Canadian nation, etc., with nary a thought for what other forces might set up shop in such a wasteland of a concept. The jihad is a functioning version of everything the multicultists have promoted for years. The Left talked up sappy Benetton-ad one-worldism, while the pan-Islamists got on with their own particular strain of one-world ism — strong, unyielding, and slipping across borders with ease. Anjem Choudary, a thirty-nine-year-old British Muslim leader, hailed September 11 as “magnificent” and its perpetrators “heroes”; he mocked the victims of the London Tube bombings, calls on Muslims to refuse to cooperate with the British police, and advocates sharia for the United Kingdom. He and his wife are welfare recipients, but nevertheless he’s able to rack up impressive frequent-flyer mileage jetting off to liaise with like-minded Muslims in other countries. On the BBC, he was asked why he didn’t simply move to a state that already has sharia. “Who says you own Britain, anyway?” he replied. “Britain belongs to Allah. The whole world belongs to Allah.” Warming to his theme, he added, “If, I go to the jungle, I’m not going to live like the animals, I’m going to propagate a superior way of life. Islam is a superior way of life.”

But Britain is a jungle of de-clawed lions, its leadership divided between outright appeasers and dismal fatalists. And those who call for a Muslim Reformation in the spirit of the Christian Reformation ignore the obvious flaw in the analogy — that Muslims have the advantage of knowing (unlike Luther and Calvin) where reform in Europe ultimately led: the banishment of God to the margins of society.

Muslims are less likely to fall for that than to exploit the obvious opportunities it presents. What will be the next phase of the Islamist advance in the West? If you’re a teenager in most European cities these days, you’ve a choice between two competing identities — a robust confident Islamic identity or a tentative post-nationalist cringingly apologetic European identity. It would be a mistake to assume the former is attractive only to Arabs and North Africans.

In the run-up to Christmas not so long ago, I was in a store in Vermont buying a lastminute gift when the owner’s, twenty-something daughter walked in. “Thanks for the sweater, Mom,” she said. “Kevin really liked his present too.”

“But it’s only the twenty-third,” said the bewildered lady.

“Mom,” sighed the kid, wearily. “How many times do I have to tell you? We always open our presents on the solstice.”

A couple of weeks later, a neighbor of mine in New Hampshire got married. He’s a biker and a tattooist, and he’s deeply spiritual. So he and his bride were married in the middle of a field in a service filled with imprecations to Odin, Thor, and sundry other Norse gods. The congregation of bikers rolled their eyes, which may or may not be a traditional Norse mark of respect.

It is, indeed, the case that when men cease to believe in God they’ll believe in anything. But the anything they’ll believe in is at least in part environmentally determined. In 2006, Alice Thomson of the Daily Telegraph was granted an interview with the Dalai Lama at Dharmsala, in northern India, where he lives in exile. En route to his pad, she encountered both a native Tibetan bearing the brutal marks of Chinese torture and, at one of the luxury hotels that have sprung up for moneyed pilgrims, a “rotund Austrian biscuit heiress” who turned to Buddhism after her stomach staple failed to take. Not all my North Country neighbors can afford air tickets and a suite in Dharmsala. So, given those constraints, solstice worship and Norse deities seem a reasonable fit with the landscape of northern New England. But they’d be a tougher sell in, say, Glasgow or Rotterdam. So what would work in the densely populated parts of Western Europe? At the risk of piling too many doomsday scenarios atop one another, it’s worth noting that throughout the Western world Islam is advancing not just by out-breeding but also by conversion.

Herbert Asquith is not the most famous British prime minister to American ears, but he’s the one who took his country into the Great War, which is the one that ended the Caliphate and delivered the Arab world into British hands. His great-granddaughter, Emma Clark, is now a Muslim. She’s a landscape artist and has designed an “Islamic garden” at the home of the Prince of Wales. The Honorable Jonathan Birt, son of Lord Birt, the former director-general of the BBC, is also a Muslim and is known as Yahya Birt. The Earl of Yarborough is a Muslim, and goes by the name Abdul Mateen, though whether he can get served in the House of Lords tea room under that moniker is unclear. The above “reverts” — as Islam calls converts (as they see it, everyone is born a Muslim, it’s just that some of us don’t know it yet) — are not merely the Muslim equivalents of the Richard Gere Buddhists and Tom Cruise Scientologists but the vanguard of something bigger. As English and Belgian and Scandinavian cities Islamify, their inhabitants will face a choice between living as a minority and joining the majority. Many will opt for the latter. At the very minimum, Islam will meet the same test as the hippy-dippy solstice worship does in Vermont: it will seem environmentally appropriate. For many young men, it already provides the sense of identity that the happy-face nothingness of multiculturalism declines to offer. In Britain, a white supremacist neo-Nazi whose writings inspired a 1999 Soho nail bombing that killed three people has since converted to Islam. David Myatt, a founder of the British National Socialist Movement, is now Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt. Formerly opposed to non-white immigration into the United Kingdom, he now says that “the pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognizes practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonor, the arrogance, the materialism of the West…. For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy.” It’s hard to imagine him ever changing back, and not just because he’s on record as supporting the killing of those who leave Islam: a lot of his fellow “white supremacists” will find it’s not the “white” but the “supremacist” bit they really like. Islam already has a certain cachet: another revert, Omar Brooks, marked the first anniversary of the Tube bombings by doing some Islamostandup at the Small Heath Youth and Community Centre in Birmingham. As the Times of London reported: “At one point he announces dramatically that the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center ‘changed many people’s lives.’ After a pause, he brings the house down by adding: ‘Especially those inside.’”