Mark Steyn - America Alone

Simply as a matter of fact, every year more and more of the world lives under Islamic law: Pakistan adopted Islamic law in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. In the sixties, Nigeria lived under English Common Law; now, half of it’s in the grip of sharia, and the other half’s feeling the squeeze. Today, there are more Muslim nations, more radicalized Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more influential transnational institutions. Will these Muslims live by the laws of Singapore or Denmark or New Zealand or by the laws of Islam?

Or is their primary identity a new worldwide Islamic identity?

To ask the question is, in large part, to answer it. Even if a Muslim wanted to, how would he assimilate with, say, Canadian national identity? You can’t assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It’s much easier to dismantle a society than to put anything new and lasting in its place. And across much of the developed world that’s what’s going on right now. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen. In the absence of cultural confidence, demography will decide the future. Or in the unimprovable summation of James c. Bennett: “Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism. Pick any two.”

At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally “valid.” To accept that proposition means denying reality — the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, and global population movement. Multiculturalism is not the first ideology founded on the denial of truth. You’ll recall Hermann Goering’s memorable assertion that “two plus two makes five if the Führer wills it.” Likewise, we’re asked to accept that the United States Constitution was modeled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation — if a generation of multiculti theorists, the ethnic grievance lobby, and even a ludicrous resolution of the United States Congress so wills it.

Still, it’s harmless, isn’t it? What’s wrong with playing make-believe if it helps us all feel warm and fuzzy about each other?

Well, because it’s never helpful to put reality up for grabs. There may come a day when you need it.

Look at the photograph that appeared on the front of a Fleet Street tabloid shortly after the London Tube bombings: a quartet of young men enjoying a weekend’s whitewater rafting in Wales — a mini-vacation the killers took to prepare themselves for blowing the Underground to bits. Outwardly, these blokes were no different from any other Yorkshire lads of their age — weaned on chips, fond of cricket, garbed in revolting Brit leisurewear. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, almost perfectly assimilated — at least in respect to sports, fashion, and pop music. The only difference was inside: a willingness to slaughter dozens of their fellow Britons in the interests of the jihad. They’d adopted so many trees that nobody could see they lacked the big overarching forest — the essence of identity, of allegiance.

If Islamist extremism is the genie you’re trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn’t help to have smashed the bottle. At the core of multiculturalism is an assumption that a nonWestern culture is somehow primal and immutable but that an advanced nation is no more than the sum of its constituent parts. It’s a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome — a desperation to identify with anything that comes along other than your own. The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures — the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malaysia, who cares? That’s the stuff the old imperialist wallahs used to be well up on. But multiculturalism just involves feeling warm and fluffy about everyone, making bliss out of ignorance. If the guy’s rich vibrant cultural tradition involves standing over you with a scimitar shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” well, you can’t complain you’re not getting your share of cultural diversity. Given the growing Muslim populations in Europe and the remarkable success hitherto obscure Muslim lobby groups have had in constraining certain aspects of the war on terror, it seems almost certain that Islamist political parties will arise on the Continent within the next decade. And, given the very few degrees of separation between very prominent Western Muslims — ambassadors, princes, professors — and the terrorists, it seems likely that many prominent figures in these parties will be supportive of the terrorists’ ends. And given the governing principle of multicultural society — that Western man demonstrates his cultural sensitivity by preemptively surrendering — any smart Islamist, surveying the Madrid bombing and the aftermath, must be contemplating the benefits of a twin-track strategy. There are three possible resolutions to the present struggle:

1. Submit to Islam

2. Destroy Islam

3. Reform Islam

Because most of us don’t take number one as a serious possibility, we’re equally unserious about being forced to choose between two and three. But submission to Islam is very possible, and to many it will still seem ridiculous even as it happens; like John Kerry during the 2004 campaign, we’ll be spluttering that we can’t believe we’re losing to these idiots. But we can lose (as I’ve always believed) and (as I’ve come to believe) we might lose more easily than even the gloomiest of us thought.

By “we might lose,” I mean “the good guys” — and I define that term expansively. There are plenty of good guys in Australia and Poland and Iraq and even Pakistan. And I’m a little unnerved at the number of readers who seem to think the rest of the world can go hang but America will endure as a lonely candle of liberty in the new Dark Ages. Think that one through: a totalitarian China, a crumbling Russia, an insane Middle East, a disease-ridden Africa, a civil war-torn Eurabia — and a country that can’t even enforce its borders against two relatively benign states will somehow be able to hold the entire planet at bay? Dream on, “realists.”

As for option two, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Even if you regard Islam as essentially incompatible with free societies, the slaughter required to end it as a force in the world would change America beyond recognition. That doesn’t mean that, a few years down the line, if some kooks with nukes obliterate, say, Marseilles or Lyons that the French wouldn’t give it a go in some fairly spectacular way. But they’re unlikely to accomplish much by it, any more than the Russians have by their scorched-earth strategy in Chechnya. That leaves option three: Reform Islam-which is not ours to do.

Ultimately, only Muslims can reform Islam. All the free world can do is create conditions that increase the likelihood of Muslim reform, or at any rate do not actively impede it. We can:

1. Support women’s rights — real rights, not feminist pieties — in the Muslim world. This is the biggest vulnerability in Islam. Not every Muslim female wants to be Gloria Steinem or Paris Hilton. But nor do they want a life that starts with genital mutilation and ends with an honor killing at the hands of your brothers. The overwhelming majority of females in Continental battered women’s shelters are Muslim — which gives you some sense of what women in the Middle East might do if they had any women’s shelters to go to. When half the population of these societies is a potential source of dissent, we need to use it.

2. Roll back Wahhabi, Iranian, and other ideological exports that have radicalized Muslims on every continent. We have an ideological enemy and we need to wage ideological war.

3. Support economic and political liberty in the Muslim world, even if it means unsavory governments: an elected unsavory government is still better than a dictatorial unsavory government. It’s not necessary for Syria and Egypt to become Minnesota and New Zealand. All that’s necessary is for them to become something other than what they are now. And on the bumpy road to liberty, every Muslim regime that has to preoccupy itself with internal dissent has less time to foment trouble beyond its borders.