Mark Steyn - After America

But they could not have foreseen how eager western leaders would be to serve as their enablers. There was the Swedish minister of integration, Jens Orback, who said we must be nice to Muslims now so that when they’re in the majority they’ll be nice to us, 30and the Dutch justice minister, Piet Hien Donner, who said he would have no problem with Sharia if a majority of people voted for it, 31and of course all those American eminences from President Obama down eager to proclaim that a mosque at Ground Zero would be the living embodiment of the First Amendment. As the more cynical Islamic imperialists occasionally reflected, how quickly the supposed defenders of liberal, pluralist, western values came to sound as if they were competing to be Islam’s lead prison bitch.

The Netherlands—“the most tolerant country in Europe,” to revive the long obsolete cliché—proved an especially instructive example. In a peculiarly enthusiastic form of prostration, the Dutch state adopted “shoot the messenger” as a universal cure-all for “Islamophobia.” To some, Holland had once meant tulips, clogs, windmills, fingers in the dike. To others, it meant marijuana cafés, long-haired soldiers, legalized hookers, fingers in the dyke. But by the second decade of the twenty-first century it was an increasingly incoherent polity where gays were bashed, uncovered women got jeered in the streets, and you couldn’t do The Diary of Anne Frank as your school play lest the Gestapo walk-ons be greeted by audience cries of “She’s in the attic!” There was, of course, some pushback from extreme right-wing racist extremists, if by “extreme right-wing racists” you mean the gay hedonist Pim Fortuyn, the anti-monarchist coke-snorting nihilist Theo van Gogh, and the secular liberal black feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. If they objected to the “extreme” labeling, it wasn’t for long: in the Low Countries Islam’s critics tended to wind up either banned (Belgium’s Vlaams Blok), forced into exile (Miss Ali), or dead (Fortuyn and van Gogh).

It was not “ironic” that the most liberal country in western Europe should be so eager to descend into a revoltingly illiberal servitude. It was entirely foreseeable. Justifying extraordinary levels of mass immigration first as narrowly defined economic self-interest and then as moral vanity, Europe made its principal source of new Europeans a population whose primal identity derived from a belief system that claimed total jurisdiction over every aspect of their lives. They were then amazed to discover that that same population of new “Europeans” assumed that all European social, cultural, and political life should realign itself with that belief system. Perhaps they should have considered that possibility earlier. Geert Wilders, a Member of Parliament, was prosecuted, ostensibly for “Islamophobia” but essentially because he was an apostate, a dissenter from the state religion of multiculturalism. 32It was a heresy trial, the first of many. And, in that sense at least, the European establishment unwittingly eased the transition from “multicultural tolerance” to the more explicitly unicultural and intolerant regimes that followed.

To state the obvious again, the world after America is less Jewish. “Sixty percent of Amsterdam’s orthodox community intends to emigrate from Holland,” 33said Benzion Evers, the son of the city’s chief rabbi, five of whose children had already left by 2010. When he walked the streets of his home-town, the young Mr. Evers hid his skullcap under a baseball cap. Seemed like old times. “Jews with a conscience should leave Holland, where they and their children have no future, leave for the U.S. or Israel,” advised Frits Bolkestein, former EU Commissioner and head of the Dutch Liberal Party.

“Anti-Semitism will continue to exist, because the Moroccan and Turkish youngsters don’t care about efforts for reconciliation.” Minheer Bolkestein was not (yet) asking what else those “youngsters” didn’t care for, but like after many other secular Dutchmen with no interest in Jews one way or the other, he soon found out.

The droller Saudi princes and other bankrollers of the new Caliphate occasionally marveled at posterity’s jest: as paradoxical as it might sound, the Holocaust had enabled the Islamization of Europe. Without post-war guilt, and the revulsion against nationalism, and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, the Continent would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Dublin to Dusseldorf and the accommodation of Muslim sensitivities on everything from the design of British nursing uniforms to Brussels police doughnut consumption during Ramadan. The principal beneficiaries of European Holocaust guilt turned out to be not the Jews but the Muslims.

It took the West some time to accept another obvious truth—that a society that becomes more Muslim will have fewer homosexuals. In 2009, the Rainbow Palace, formerly Amsterdam’s most popular homo-hotel (in the Dutch vernacular), had announced it was renaming itself the Sharm and reorienting itself to Islamic tourism. Or as the felicitously named website allah.eu put it: “Gay Hotel Turns Muslim.” 34

If you were a nice young couple from San Francisco planning a honey-moon in “the most tolerant city in Europe,” it was helpful to make sure your travel brochure was up to date. Within a decade, many of the Continent’s once gay-friendly cities were on the brink of majority-Muslim status. But, long before that statistical milestone was reached, the gay moment in Amsterdam, Oslo, and elsewhere was over.

As for the Jews and gays, so for the feminists. In the Muslim housing projects of France, according to the official statistics, the number of rapes rose by an annual 15 to 20 percent throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century. 35One victim of routine rape in les banlieues , the late Samira Bellil, had published an autobiography called Dans l’enfer des tournantes —“In the hell of the take-your-turns,” the tournante being the slang term used by Muslim youths for gang-rape. 36“There are only two kinds of girls,” wrote Mlle. Bellil, who was gang-raped all night at the age of fourteen. “Good girls stay home, clean the house, take care of their brothers and sisters, and only go out to go to school.” Whereas those who “wear make-up, to go out, to smoke, quickly earn the reputation as ‘easy’ or as ‘little whores.’”

Lest Muslim girls find themselves in a moment of weakness tempted toward the Paris Hilton side of the tracks, the British National Health Service began offering “hymen reconstruction” surgery in order not to diminish their value to prospective husbands. 37

When Miss Bellil published her book, her parents threw her out and her community disowned her. But her story discomforted those far beyond the Muslim ghettoes. These facts were too cold and plain to be expressed in a multicultural society which had told itself that, thanks to the joys of diversity, a nice gay couple and a polygamous Muslim with three wives in identical niqabs can live side by side at 27 and 29 Elm Street. In the New York Times , the eminent philosopher Martha Nussbaum explained why she objected to moves to ban the burqa in European cities: “My judgment about Turkey in the past,” Nussbaum wrote, “was that the ban on veiling was justified, in those days, by a compelling state interest—derived from the belief that women were at risk of physical violence if they went unveiled, unless the government intervened to make the veil illegal for all. Today in Europe the situation is utterly different, and no physical violence will greet the woman who wears even scanty clothing.” 38

How absurd those lazy assumptions read today. But why did they not seem so to Ms. Nussbaum and her editors back in 2010? Even then, no young girl could safely walk in “scanty clothing” through Clichy-sous-Bois or Rosengard. In La Courneuve in France, 77 percent of covered women said they wore the veil to “avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols,” as the writer Claire Berlinski put it. She added: “We are talking about France, not Iran.” 39