Mark Steyn - America Alone

He didn’t literally bring the house down. He leaves that to Mohammed Atta. Nonetheless, even an Islamist lounge act is doing his part to provide a bigger pool for the jihadists to swim in.

In 2005, a reader in Asia sent me an e-mail link: “Canadian Converts to Islam Being Recruited by al Qaeda.” It was from the Press Trust of India. If it appeared in any Canadian paper, I didn’t see it. But 10 and behold, a year later there were “Canadian converts to Islam” among the seventeen Torontonians arrested for plotting to blow up the Stock Exchange. They’re not the only reverts in the news in the post-September 11 period:

• The Miami cell plotting to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago

• The shoe-bomber, Richard Reid

• The July 7 London Tube bomber, Germaine Lindsay

• The Washington sniper, John Allen Muhammad

• The Belgian lady Muriel Degauque, who blew herself up in a suicide attack on U.S. troops in Baghdad

• The Australian factory worker Jack Roche, sentenced in Perth for plotting to blow up the Israeli embassy in Canberra

• The founder and members of the Rajah Solaiman Movement, a Filipino Muslim group believed to be responsible for a ferry bombing that killed more than a hundred people in 2004

• Abdul Wahid, born Don Stewart-Whyte, son of a British Conservative Party official, half-brother of a top model, and former brother-in-law of French tennis star Yannick Noah, who was arrested in August 2006 for planning to blow himself up on a flight from Heathrow to New York

And on, and on. It would seem obvious that the use of reverts is a conscious strategy. The only question I have about that Press Trust of India headline — “Canadian Converts to Islam Being Recruited by al Qaeda” — is the implication that their Muslim conversion predates and is separate from their jihadist recruitment. It’s more likely that the two processes are simultaneous — that they are converted precisely in order to be jihadists. That’s just plain operational good sense: the most gung-ho Pushtun yakherd may be hot for martyrdom but he’s going to stand out at the U.S. Air check-in in a way that a thirdgeneration Canadian Muslim isn’t — or better yet — a revert of non-Arab appearance and a name that isn’t going to set off any flags in the computer — “Steven Chand,” “Richard Reid,”

“Jack Roche.” By some accounts, 80 percent of the imams in Canadian mosques are said to be “extreme.” So what kind of converts would they be looking for, and what kind would be likely to respond to their rhetoric?

In 2002, I asked a Muslim in Paris why Islam was the fastest-growing religion in the West. He said four out of five converts in Europe were women, positing therefrom that, aside from spousal conversions, significant numbers of Western females found the feminist notion of womanhood degrading and unworthy. Whether or not that’s true, I was startled in successive weeks to hear from Dutch and English acquaintances that they’ve begun going out “covered.” The Dutch lady lives in a rough part of Amsterdam and says when you’re on the street in Islamic garb, the Muslim men smile at you respectfully instead of jeering at you as an infidel whore. The English lady lives in a swank part of London but says pretty much the same thing. Both felt there was not just a physical but a psychological security in being dressed Muslim. They’re not “reverts,” but, at least for the purposes of padding the public space, they’re passing for Muslim. And as more of the public space becomes Muslim it will seem more and more comfortable to do that.

How quickly will that happen? In late 2005, the Observer ran the following story:

“Olympic Costs Set to Double: Londoners Face Huge Tax Rise.” Oh, come on. Only double? Surely you can do better than that. Well, it was early days for 2012 Olympic overspend, and proud Britons were no doubt certain that by the time the Queen opens the Games there’ll be a few more zeroes added to their tax bills. Meanwhile, the same week as that Observer story, Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic missionary group, announced plans to build a mosque in the East End — right next door to the new Olympic stadium. The London Markaz will be the biggest house of worship in the United Kingdom: it will hold 70,000 people — only 10,000 fewer than the Olympic stadium, and 67,000 more than the largest Christian facility (Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral). Tablighi Jamaat plans to raise the necessary £100 million through donations from Britain and “abroad.” And I’ll bet they do. Tablighi Jamaat is an openly Islamist organization of global reach and, according to the FBI, an al Qaeda recruiting front for terrorists. But, watching these two construction projects go up side by side in Newham, I don’t think there’ll be any doubt which has the tighter grip on fiscal sanity. A tax bill or two down the line and Londoners may be wishing they could subcontract the entire Olympics to Tablighi Jamaat. No doubt it would have been heartening if the archbishop of Canterbury had announced plans to mark the 2012 Olympics by constructing a 70,000-seat state-of-the-art Anglican cathedral, but what would you put in it? Even an all-star double bill comprising a joint Service of Apology to Saddam Hussein followed by Ordination of Multiple Gay Bishops in Long-Term Committed Relationships (Non-Practicing or Otherwise, According to Taste) seems unlikely to fill the pews. Whatever one feels about it, the London Markaz will be a more accurate symbol of Britain in 2012 than Her Majesty pulling up next door with the Household Cavalry.

The Saddam Apology is not a joke, by the way. In 2005, a “working group” of Anglican bishops produced a 101-page document called (with no discernible sense of irony) Countering Terrorism. Its central proposal was that Western Christians should show “institutional repentance” for the Iraq war by having their bishops and cardinals make a formal apology for the wrong they did at a gathering of “mainly Muslim” leaders. Aside from its comedic value, the mooted prostration would in itself have provided confirmation to Muslims of the widespread belief that Christianity has embarked on a new Crusade: why would these bishops be apologizing for the war if they weren’t the ones who’d launched it?

If only. The last thing any Muslim needs to worry about is an Anglican bishop coming after him. The bishop of Lichfield, at Evensong, on the night of the London Tube bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants that “just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths.” Father Paul Hawkins of St. Pancras parish church, a few hundred yards from the scene of the atrocities, told his own congregation that Sunday, “There are no Muslim terrorists. There are terrorists.”

It’s not the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the meta-message it conveys: we’re the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we’ll apologize to you. Even in America, the interim pastor at my local church in New Hampshire on the Sunday morning of September 16, 2001, was principally concerned to warn us not to attack any Muslims, even though in that notably undiverse corner of America finding any Muslims to attack would have involved a threehour drive. That’s why the Church of England and the Episcopal Church and the Congregational Church and the United Church of Canada and many others are sinking beneath the bog of their own relativist mush, while Islam is the West’s fastest-growing religion. There’s no market for a faith that has no faith in itself. One reason why the developed world has a difficult job grappling with the Islamist threat is that it doesn’t take religion seriously. It condescends to it. In Europe’s wholly secularized environment, the enduring religiosity of America is not just odd, but primitive. It puts Americans in the same category as remote tribes in Africa or cargo culters in the Pacific — anthropologically fascinating, but nonetheless backward. Hence, British novelist Martin Amis on the eve of the Iraq war: