Mark Steyn - Lights Out

That line echoes the headlines, too. Almost four years ago, a 23-year old Parisian disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbour Adel. Selam’s throat was slit twice, his face was ripped off with a fork, and his eyes were gouged out. And then Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, “I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven.”

Western Europe is undergoing a remarkable transformation, and it’s hardly surprising that Daniel Silva should want to novelize it. In my own more prosaic way, I published a book a year ago on the same theme which the executive honchos at Maclean’s were pleased to excerpt in these pages as a cover story called “The Future Belongs To Islam”. The title is not overstated: given the demographic wind behind Islam, insofar as Germany and France and Britain and the Low Countries and Scandinavia have a future, it will be principally determined by the mediation between a resurgent Islam and a declining ethnic European population, and also by the mediation between so-called “radical Islam” and so-called “moderate Muslims”. As the late Mr van Gogh and the late Mr Selam might tell you if they could, the cross-cultural exchange doesn’t always go as well as it might. But, even when it’s not homicidal, it’s still arresting, and transformative. Let me give you a small example, from last week’s London Evening Standard :

Women Get ‘Virginity Fix’ NHS Operations In Muslim-Driven Trend.

Sex, Islam and government health care, all in one convenient headline! According to one expert cited in the story, Muslim girls are “modern and they have adventures like other Europeans”. Which sounds good, doesn’t it? Soon they’ll be so assimilated they’ll be indistinguishable from any old homegrown Britneyfied teen slattern. Alas, as the expert continues, “But on the other hand, fundamentalism is spreading and these girls are getting sent back to their countries of origin to marry. And they will be rejected if it is found out that they are not virgins.”

Solution? Free “hymen replacement”. And, needless to say, all the politicians interviewed by the reporter see it mainly as a question of whether it’s appropriate for this procedure to be provided by Britain’s National Health Service. “What nobody would understand is if taxpayers’ money is being used to fund operations of this kind,” says Tory health spokesman Mike Penning. “I don’t think it should be available on the NHS,” agrees Labour MP Ann Cryer.

Heigh-ho. Best to see “hymen reconstruction” as purely a matter of budgetary overstretch. Long-term, incremental, remorseless, profound cultural change is the hardest for democratic legislators to address, especially when it requires them to march into areas where your average squeamish politician would rather not tiptoe. Yet the silence of the artistic lambs is more puzzling. The English novelist Martin Amis has found himself drawn to the subject and, for his pains, has been all but disowned by the London literary set. (Full disclosure: Mr Amis agrees with the premise of my book but thinks I’m a crap writer. Or, as he put it, Steyn’s “thoughts and themes are sane and serious – but he writes like a maniac.”) But, even if you disagree with Amis, wouldn’t you at least agree that something big and transformative is underway? Graham Greene, for one, would surely have had something to say. As he wrote in The Lawless Roads :

The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped and you find yourself speechless among the money-changers. The man seeking scenery imagines strange woods and unheard-of mountains; the romantic believes that the women over the border will be more beautiful and complaisant than those at home; the unhappy man imagines at least a different hell…

All true, when you see the border post ahead of you down the road, or when the customs inspector demands “Your papers, mein herr .” But what if instead the border comes to you? Not explicitly, but in a kind of demographic equivalent to the overlaid area codes of a North American metropolis. Amsterdam is the city of legalized pot and prostitution and a gay hedonist paradise. But it’s also a Muslim city, overlaid on the pothead playground. At what point does the nice Dutch gay couple realize they’ve crossed a border? That, without getting their passports stamped or changing their currency, they’re now strangers in a strange land. That’s something Greene would have been fascinated to write about.

So why don’t his successors? Well, for one answer we can turn to a recent panel convened at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London to discuss the topic “Is All Modern Art Left Wing?” The formal discussion was dreary and predictable but things turned livelier when it was opened to the floor, and the question of double standards was raised: “Courageous” artists seemed happy to mock Christianity but curiously reluctant to hurl equivalent jibes at Islam. Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize-winning transvestite artist who looks very fetching in his little Disney-princess frocks, reveals that he self-censors when it comes to Muslims because “I don’t want my throat cut.”

But that doesn’t entirely explain it, does it? Earlier this year, Channel 4 in London broadcast a documentary called “Undercover Mosque” in which various imams up and down the land were caught on tape urging men to beat their wives and toss homosexuals off cliffs. Viewers reported some of the statements to the local constabulary. The West Midlands Police then decided to investigate not the fire-breathing clerics but the TV producers. As the coppers saw it, insofar as any “hate crime” had been perpetrated, it lay not in the urgings and injunctions of the imams but in a TV production so culturally insensitive as to reveal the imams’ views to the general public. As The Spectator ’s James Forsyth put it, “The reaction of West Midlands Police revealed a mindset that views the exposure of a problem as more of a problem than the problem itself.”

Exactly. Did you see the latest remake of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers ? It sank without trace a couple of months back and not just because it had Nicole Kidman in the lead. The new version relocates the story from small-town America to Washington, and sees it as a metaphor for power: cue endless references to Iraq and glimpses of Bush on the TV screens. Yet Body Snatchers isn’t about power so much as conformity. [2]That’s what the West Midlands Police were attempting to enforce with Channel 4, and what the Rotterdam police managed to enforce rather more successfully when they destroyed a mural created to express disgust at Theo van Gogh’s murder. Chris Ripke’s painting showed an angel and bore the words “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. But his studio is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was “racist”, so the cops showed up, destroyed it, arrested the TV crew filming it, and wiped their tape. A “tolerant” society cannot tolerate any assaults on its most cherished myths.

Professor Rosner, Daniel Silva’s fictional murder victim, would have understood. At the scene of his ritual slaughter there are no protesters, just piles of tulips and the banner “ONE AMSTERDAM, ONE PEOPLE” – one mass delusion. It’s not just that you’ll get your throat cut, but that you’ll get it cut and they’ll still string the same sappy happy-face multiculti banner over the crime scene.

Perhaps the most conspicuous absence from the Canadian Islamic Congress dossier on Maclean’s “flagrant Islamophobia” is a column of mine from June 2006. At first glance it would appear to meet all the criteria used to establish the Islamophobia of the preceding exhibits. Like “The Future Belongs To Islam”, it could easily be said that this piece…