Mark Steyn - Lights Out

4. As a result of the Muslim takeover there will an oppressive religious police enforcing Islamic/Muslim norms on the population, important US icons [such as the USS Ronald Reagan] will be renamed after Osama bin Laden, no females will be allowed to be cheerleaders, and popular American radio and television talk show hosts will have been replaced by Muslim imams

5. The Muslim takeover of American will occur in a violent way through a nuclear attack on the US. A copy of the Quran that will survive the nuclear attack will be placed in a War Museum hat will be built by the Muslims. On the whole this Muslim takeover will be like that of Hitler’s and the Third Reich’s takeovers Europe; Jews will be accused of various false conspiracies and will be massacred by the Muslims

6. Muslims and Islam are taking over Europe and North America; Europe is becoming “Islamified”.

7. As a result of the Muslim takeover, the star basketball player for an iconic American basketball team will be a Muslim. Further, a popular American actress, while accepting an Academy award will announce her conversion to Islam and announce her marriage to the Muslim star basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers. Her conversion and announcement will inspire tens of Millions of Americans to do the same furthering the Muslim takeover.

8. A Muslim takeover is quite feasible – Islam will prove to be the “great seducer” and will takeover the West. The West needs to return to its Christian roots in order to resist the Islam/Muslim takeover.

THE ISLAMOPHOBE RESPONDS:

Er, no. I didn’t “assert” that any of the above will happen. They are aspects of the plot of Robert Ferrigno’s Prayers For The Assassin . A novel. A work of fiction. A creative art form. My column is a review of the novel. It is customary in reviewing novels to cite aspects of the plot, and usually without litigious Muslims taking you to court.

Or at least one had always assumed it was. Mr Ferrigno’s book is a “what if?” novel: What if America became Muslim? It’s an established genre: As I mentioned in the column, my columnar confrere on The Daily Telegraph , Robert Harris, wrote a novel on the premise “What if Hitler had won the war?” And no over-sensitive Germans took him to court over it.

Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani, Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard, the authors of this report, submitted it to the various “human rights” commissions on the grounds that Maclean’s exposed them to “hatred and contempt”. I certainly don’t hate them, but I do hold them in contempt. They don’t have the excuse, as many of the firebreathing imams of the west do, of being illiterate, at least in English and about anything other than the Koran. Yet Canada’s allegedly finest law school is turning out lawyers who believe that describing the plot of a novel should be actionable. I wonder how, say, Margaret Atwood feels about that. A few years back, she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale , her own dystopian theocratic fantasy about an America renamed the Republic of Gilead and under the thumb of a Falwell-Schlaflyesque Christian tyranny. What’s to stop a Christian group taking a doting Atwood reviewer – or maybe the author herself – to a Canadian “human rights” kangaroo court? C’mon, you leftie novelists, what do you think there’ll be left for you to write about once the plot of a work of fiction becomes a recognized “hate crime”?

OVER IN SWEDEN, they’ve been investigating the Grand Mosque of Stockholm. Apparently, it’s the one-stop shop for all your jihad needs: you can buy audio cassettes at the mosque encouraging you to become a martyr and sally forth to kill “the brothers of pigs and apes” – ie, Jews. So somebody filed a racial-incitement complaint and the coppers started looking into it, and then Sweden’s Chancellor of Justice, Goran Lambertz, stepped in. And Mr Lambertz decided to close down the investigation on the grounds that, even though the porcine-sibling stuff is “highly degrading”, this kind of chit-chat “should be judged differently – and therefore be regarded as permissible – because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict.”

In other words, if you threaten to kill people often enough, it will be seen as part of your vibrant cultural tradition – and, by definition, we’re all cool with that. Celebrate diversity, etc. Our tolerant multicultural society is so tolerant and multicultural we’ll tolerate your intolerant uniculturalism. Your antipathy to diversity is just another form of diversity for us to celebrate.

Diversity-wise, Europe is a very curious place – and I mean that even by Canadian standards. In her latest book, The Force Of Reason , the fearless Oriana Fallaci, Italy’s most-read and most-sued journalist, recounts some of her recent legal difficulties with the Continental diversity coercers. The Federal Office of Justice in Berne asked the Italian government to extradite her over her last book, The Rage and The Pride , so she could be charged under Article 261b of the Swiss Criminal Code. As she points out, Article 261b was promulgated in order to permit Muslims “to win any ideological or private lawsuit by invoking religious racism and racial discrimination. ‘He-didn’t-chase-me-because-I’m-a-thief-but-because-I’m-a-Muslim.’” She’s also been sued in France, where suits against writers are routine now. She has had cases brought against her in her native Italy and, because of the European Arrest Warrant, which includes charges of “xenophobia” as grounds for extradition from one EU nation to another, most of the Continent is now unsafe for her to set foot in. What’s impressive is the range of organized opposition: the Islamic Centre of Berne, the Somali Association of Geneva, the SOS Racism of Lausanne, and a group of Muslim immigrants in Neuchâtel, just to name a random sampling of her Swiss plaintiffs. After the London bombings and the French riots, the commentariat lined up to regret that European Muslims are insufficiently “assimilated”. But, in fact, at least in their mastery of legalisms and victimology, they’re superbly assimilated. One might say the same of the imam who took my chums at The Western Standard to the Alberta Human Rights Commission over their publication of the Danish cartoons.

Racked by cancer, Oriana Fallaci spends most of her time in one of the few jurisdictions in the western world where she is not in legal jeopardy – New York City, whence she pens magnificent screeds in the hope of rousing Europe to save itself. Good luck with that. She writes in Italian, of course, but she translates them into what she calls “the oddities of Fallaci’s English”, and the result is a bravura improvised aria, impassioned and somewhat unpredictable. It’s full of facts, starting with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Mehmet II celebrated with beheading and sodomizing, and some lucky lads found themselves on the receiving end of both. This section is a lively read in an age when most westerners, consciously or otherwise, adopt the blithe incuriosity of Jimmy Kennedy’s marvellous couplet in his 1950s pop hit “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”:

Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam – for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” and its helpful advice on romantic matters: “If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer.” I’ll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.” Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year-old wife, but the Ayatollah’s not clear on that.