Mark Steyn - After America

As a young man, long ago, I would often find myself at dinner sitting next to a Middle Eastern lady of a certain age. And the conversation went as it often does when you’re with Muslim women who were at college in the Sixties, Seventies, or Eighties. In one case, my dining companion had just been at a conference on “women’s issues,” of which there were many in the Muslim world, and she was struck by the phrase used by the “moderate Muslim” chair of the meeting: “authentic women”—by which the chair meant women wearing hijabs. And my friend pointed out that when she and her unveiled girlfriends had been in their twenties they were the “authentic women”: “covering” was for old village biddies, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. It would never have occurred to her that the assumptions of her generation would prove to be off by 180 degrees—that in middle age she would see young Muslim women wearing a garb largely alien to their tradition not just in the Middle East but in Brussels and London and Montreal.

I have before me two photographs—first, the Cairo University class of 1978, with every woman bare-headed; second, the Cairo University class of 2004, with every woman hijabed to the hilt. 40

Even as late as 2020, you would still hear some or other complacenik shrug, “Oh, but they haven’t had time to westernize. Just you wait and see. Give it another twenty years, and the siren song of westernization will work its magic.” The argument wasn’t merely speculative, it had already been proved wrong by what had happened over the previous twenty years. I have a third photograph: the Cairo University class of 1959, with every woman in a blouse and skirt or summer frock, and hair styled no differently from suburban housewives in Westchester County. 41Cairo University in 1959 looked like London. Now London University looks like Cairo. But western liberals stuck with inevitablist theories of social evolution till the end, convinced that women’s rights and gay rights were like the wheel or the internal combustion engine—that once you’d invented them they can’t be un-invented. Instead, tides rise, and then ebb.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, major cities in the heart of the “free world” became less free, and then unfree. An American tourist—a 28-year-old blonde child-woman from Professor Nussbaum’s class at the University of Chicago—would not be able to walk through the streets of Amsterdam and Brussels without either being accompanied by men fit enough to ward off any predators or, alternatively, being “covered,” initially in the minimalist headscarf style once favored by Hillary Clinton making an official visit to a moderate Arab emirate but soon in something far more smothering. To do otherwise was to risk ending up like Samira Bellil. Western feminist groups, victors in the war against the stern patriarchy of 1950s sitcom dads, for the most part retreated silently—or persuaded themselves, like the Australian feminist Germaine Greer in her effusions about female genital mutilation, to applaud the new oppressor. 42

And so the world after America celebrates less diversity. It had been fascinating to watch the strange men and women who led the western world in twilight pass off their groveling cowardice as debonair courage. As President Obama was making his now forgotten prostrations in Cairo, his Secretary of State was hectoring the Zionist Entity, regarding the West Bank, that there has to be “a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.” 43No “natural growth”? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you’ve got to talk gran’ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn, or wherever? Consciously or not, Mrs. Clinton had endorsed “the Muslim world’s” position on infidels who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: the Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Obama have been comfortable mandating “no natural growth” to Israel’s million-and-a-half Muslims? No. Yet the administration had no difficulty embracing the “the Muslim world’s” confident belief in one-way multiculturalism, under which Islam expands in the West but Christianity and Judaism shrivel inexorably in the Middle East, Pakistan, and elsewhere. When General Maude’s British Indian Army took Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, they found a city whose population was 40 percent Jewish. 44By the end of the twentieth century, Iraq was just another spot on the map where the only Jews are in the cemetery. And why stop there? In 2003 President Bush’s “coalition of the willing” took Baghdad from Saddam Hussein. There were at that time an estimated million or so Christians in Iraq. By 2010, their numbers had fallen by half. 45In October that year, Muslim terrorists entered Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad and murdered two priests and over fifty congregants. 46That December only one Christian church in the city formally observed Christmas, but Christian families were still singled out for violence and death in their homes. 47This happened on America’s watch—while Iraq was a protectorate of the global hyperpower. Soon Baghdad’s Christians would join Baghdad’s Jews as an historical footnote, a community to be found only in weed-choked, garbage-strewn graveyards.

Even as Christians were explicitly targeted from Nigeria to Egypt to Pakistan, Katie Couric, the stupefying purveyor of conventional wisdom on CBS News, proclaimed “Islamophobia” to be one of the year’s most unreported stories. 48Like the earlier coinage of “homophobia,” Islamophobia was a mental illness whose only symptom was the accusation of having it. Islam reviled homosexuality but not so much that it wasn’t above appropriating the tropes of identity-group victimhood for its own purposes. It worked. President Obama made fawning speeches boasting that “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.” 49How brave of him! But what about the Muslim women who choose not to cover themselves and wind up beaten, brutalized, and the victims of “honor killing”? No, not just in Waziristan and Yemen, but in Germany and Scandinavia and Ontario—and in Buffalo and Peoria, too. Ah, but that would have required real courage, not audience flattery and rhetorical narcissism masquerading as such. When Matthew Shepard was hung out to die on a fence in Wyoming, he became instantly the poster child for an epidemic of “anti-gay” hate sweeping America: books, plays, films were produced about him. Frank Rich, the distinguished columnist of the New York Times , had to be restrained from writing about him every week. If there had been a Matthew Shepard murder every few months, Mr. Rich et al would have been going bananas about the “climate of hate.”

Yet you could run over your daughter in Peoria (Noor Almaleki), 50decapitate your wife in Buffalo (Aasiya Hassan), 51drown your three teenage daughters and your first wife in Kingston, Ontario (the Shafia family), 52and progressive opinion and the press were entirely indifferent. Why were Miss Almaleki and Mrs. Hassan not as famous as Matthew Shepard? They weren’t living in up-country villages in the Pakistani tribal lands. They were Americans—and they died because they wanted to live as American women.

But, in an “Islamophobic” West, the new ground rules were quickly established: Islam trumped feminism, trumped homosexuality, trumped everything. In speeches around the globe, the 44th President of the United States affected a cool equidistance between his national interests and those of others. He was less “the leader of the Free World” than the Bystander-in-Chief, and thus the perfect emblem of a western world content to be spectators in their own fate.