Mark Steyn - America Alone

An incautious people may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrecoverably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries small in themselves, may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them; especially if they are persisted in. And, with respect to such injuries, we should ever act upon that ancient maxim of prudence; obsta principiis. The first unjust demands of an encroaching power should be firmly withstood, when there appears a disposition to repeat and encrease such demands. And oftentimes it may be both the right and duty of a people to engage in war, rather than give up to the demands of such a power, what they could, without any incoveniency, spare in the way of charity. War, though a great evil, is ever preferable to such concessions, as are likely to be fatal to public liberty.

After the Madrid bombing, the Spectator , the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language, ran an editorial headlined “We Are Not at War.” They wished to assure Britons that the jihad would not be taking possession of Buckingham Palace: “Osama bin Laden is no more likely to march triumphantly down the Mall than is a little green man from Mars. Al Qaeda has means but no end.”

Well, no, Osama won’t be going down the Mall and through the Palace gates, unless it’s his surviving granules of DNA on a gun carriage. But it doesn’t have to be that dramatic: the al Qaeda air force won’t be having dogfights with the RAF over the White Cliffs of Dover before the Queen signs the instrument of abdication in the presence of the Acting First Ayatollah of the Islamic Republic of Britain. Yet you can reach the same point of surrender very gradually, almost imperceptibly. In that respect, the editors of the Spectator have it exactly backward: al Qaeda haven’t the means, but their end — the Islamification of the West-is shared by millions of law-abiding Muslims. Recall one of the most famous images of terror, from Joseph Conrad’s great novel The Secret Agent (1907) and its signature scene of the lone terrorist padding the streets of London with a bomb strapped to his chest: He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable — and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.

The power of the image lies in the bomber’s isolation from the tide of Londoners all around him, all blissfully unaware. But, as became clear very quickly after the 2005 Tube bombings, that’s not quite the world we live in. It’s not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there’s a lot of murky shades of gray in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young male co-religionists gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of “moderates” who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting treason against the state, and around them another mesh of religious and community leaders who serve as apologists for the inciters, and around them a network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they’re the real victims, and around them a vast mass of elite opinion in the media and elsewhere too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a few new laws and a bit of community outreach. It’s these insulating circles of gray — the imams, lobby groups, media, bishops, politicians-that bulk up the loser death-cult and make it a potent force. And way out at the end of this chain of shades of gray is the general population. And sometimes enough of them bleed into the gray blur of passivity and defeatism, as in Spain. Sometimes they don’t, yet, as in America. And sometimes, as in the United Kingdom, they talk about defiance and the old Blitz spirit, but they make a thousand trivial concessions day by day. That’s how great nations die — not by war or conquest, but bit by bit, until one day you wake up and you don’t need to sign a formal instrument of surrender because you did it piecemeal over the last ten years.

So, unlike Conrad’s lone bomber, this enemy is able to hide in plain sight — a pest in a street full of pests, in an America where half the political establishment wants to upgrade enemies into defendants with their day in court and full legal rights, in a Europe paralyzed by fear of its own immigrant populations, in a Western world whose media dignify our killers as “militants,” “activists,” and “insurgents.” “Why do they hate us?” was never the right question. “Why do they despise us?” is a better one.

After the carnage in Spain, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed told Lisbon’s Publica magazine that a group of London Islamists were “ready to launch a big operation” on British soil. “We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and noninnocents,” he said, clarifying the ground rules. “Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value.” The cleric added he expected to see the banner of Islam flying in Downing Street. “I believe one day that is going to happen. Because this is my country, I like living here,” he said. “If they believe in democracy, who are they afraid of? Let Omar Bakri benefit from democracy!”

You think that sounds ridiculous? The Islamic crescent flying over 10 Downing Street?

You’d be surprised how quickly the question of what flag should fly over government buildings can become an issue. In 2005, Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, banned the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and so is offensive to Muslims. The Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency has also banned the English flag from its offices. So has Heathrow Airport.

So Britain’s already crept a little way toward the Spectator’s allegedly as-kooky-as-menfrom-Mars scenario: the old flag’s unflyable, de facto if not quite de jure, and it’s just a matter of what new and appropriate multicultural swatch is selected to fly in its place. If it were just terrorists bombing buildings and public transit, it would be easier: even the feeblest Eurowimp jurisdiction is obliged to act when the street is piled with corpses. But there’s an old technique well understood by the smarter bullies. If you want to break a man, don’t attack him head on, don’t brutalize him: pain and torture can awaken a stubborn resistance in all but the weakest. But just make him slightly uncomfortable, disrupt his life at the margin, and he’ll look for the easiest path to re-normalization. There are fellows rampaging through the streets because of some cartoons? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed not to publish such cartoons.

Fast-moving demographic changes provide immense challenges for any society. In the wake of the No Mexican Left Behind illegal-immigration come-on-down bonanza passed by the Senate and cheered by the president in 2006, National Review’s John Derbyshire noted the enrollment statistics for his school district on suburban Long Island, 1,400 miles from the southern border:

High school: 17 percent Hispanic

Intermediate: 28 percent Hispanic

Elementary: 31 percent Hispanic

There’s no jihad, no honor killings, no polygamy issues with Latinos. But transformative demographic trends at the very minimum impose huge costs even for quiet communities far from the political front lines. Derbyshire’s numbers suggest that at some point every school board in America will have to factor in ever-swelling bilingual and other related education programs. That’s aside from the bigger cultural shifts less easy to quantify in budgetary line items.