Mark Steyn - Lights Out

Hello, Mr Henley? Anybody home in there? Those are quotation marks, because they’re someone else’s words – not the blatant racism of the racist douchebag Steyn but of a prominent imam. It’s tempting to say to Jim Henley, “Douchebag, douche thyself”, and leave it at that. However, I’m curious to know, in light of his carelessness, what is it precisely about this statement that makes it “blatantly racist”? That a Euro-Muslim imam uttered the words? Or that an “Anglo American” (if I can be said to count as such) was culturally insensitive enough to reveal the mullah’s words to a wider audience? If the problem is the “frank bigotry” of the statement itself, he (and “actual existing Muslim Canadians”) should take it up with Mullah Krekar. Or is the real problem “Anglo Americans” boorish enough to quote statements made routinely by prominent Muslims around the western world? Are Mullah Krekar’s words themselves Islamophobic? Or do they only become so when a non-Muslim quotes them? As my year in “human rights” hell proceeded, the answer to that question became all too obvious.

The complainants want a world in which an imam is free to make what statements he wants, but if an infidel quotes him, it’s a “hate crime”. It’s striking to examine the Canadian Islamic Congress’ complaints and see how many of their objections are to facts, statistics, quotations – not to their accuracy but merely to the citing thereof. But, of course, they picked the correct forum: before Canada’s “human rights” commissions, truth is no defense. If I’m charged with holding up a liquor store, I enjoy the right to the presumption of innocence and to defend myself in court. But when it comes to the crime of “Islamophobia” all the centuries-old safeguards of English Common Law go out the window.

In the Maclean’s excerpt from my book, I wrote:

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but – as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the ‘tolerance’ of pluralist societies.

Abe Greenwald of Commentary responded:

So, is that ‘flagrant Islamophobia’ or a tragically prescient summation of the predicament in which Steyn now finds himself (sooner than ‘in a few years’ I may add)?

Indeed. The Islamo-PC alliance attempting to criminalize my book excerpt is the best proof of its thesis.

Am I an “Islamophobe”? If it helps, my colleague at The Washington Times , Diana West, thinks I’m a bit of a pusillanimous nancy boy because of the periodic glimpse in my prose of the word “Islamist”. She dislikes the obfuscatory suffix of “Islamism”. She regards it as a linguistic dodge that attempts to draw a false distinction between Islam in general and a, er, few bad apples.

It’s true I do use what she regards as the weasel word “Islamism”, but I generally reserve it for a particular strand of hyper-Islam – say, a speech by Osama bin Laden. Islam itself is a profound challenge to any free society, for reasons I explain in America Alone , and it’s true that in many ways Islam and Islamism function as a good cop/bad cop routine in the pressures they exert on western nations. Unlike Miss West, I find it useful to have a word that distinguishes depraved death-cultists from the generality of Muslims leaning on wimp western governments to advance creeping sharia, Islamic banking, de facto polygamy, etc. They are the phenomena that interest me most, and they’re rooted in the very heart of Islam. No suffix.

That makes it difficult to discuss in an age of multiculti relativism. But discuss it we must.

Not if the Canadian Islamic Congress gets its way. Six months after publication, they decided belatedly that they didn’t care for the excerpt from my book, and their objections to it formed the basis of the Case Study Of Media-Propagated Islamophobia they submitted to the various “human rights” commissions. The authors were five Osgoode Hall law students: Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Sheikh and Naseem Mithoowani (of whom more later), and Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard (of whom surprisingly little later). Here’s what they had to say:

Adopting a fear mongering tone, this article focuses on the influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe and North America. It explicitly and implicitly states that this influx poses a threat to the fabric of Western society, to democracy, and to human rights due to the religious identity and beliefs of Muslims in general. Another significant theme contained in the article is that there is allegedly an ongoing war between Muslims and Non-Muslims, that Muslims are part of a global conspiracy to take over Western societies, and that Muslims in the West need to be viewed through this lens as the enemy.

Several of the CIC’s objections I don’t particularly disagree with:

2. A ‘substantial number’ of Muslims living in the West share the basic goals of terrorists; one of these objectives is the imposition of an oppressive branch of Shariah Law on Western societies.

I did say that. Because it’s true. In America Alone , I cite one poll showing 60 per cent of British Muslims want to live under sharia – in the United Kingdom. If you find that a bit unsettling, don’t worry: another poll says the percentage favoring the introduction of “hardline” sharia is a mere 40 per cent. But, either way, that’s a big chunk of British Muslims who share the principal goal of Osama bin Laden. The difference is that for the most part they don’t want to fly planes into skyscrapers to achieve it: A disagreement about means rather than the end.

3. Muslims looking to commit terrorist acts have a support network within mosques in general, that encourage them to commit such acts.

I’ll stand by that, too. Whenever they turn up in court and we get to hear their stories, where invariably were these young western Muslim terrorists “radicalized”? At the local mosque. The objection of Dr Elmasry’s sock puppets is not that these assertions are false but that I shouldn’t be making them because they offend their tender sensibilities.

However, when they get specific, their “case study” turns plain wacky:

16. Muslims are attempting to colonize the West in a manner similar to that in which the “white man” colonized “Indian territory”, implying that Muslims could potentially do to Westerners what the “white man” did to the Aboriginal peoples.

Is that really what I said? For a start the “Indian Territory” comparison is not mine, but the impeccably mainstream analyst Robert Kaplan’s. Here’s the passage in full:

In Thomas P M Barnett’s book Blueprint For Action , Robert D Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as ‘Indian territory’. It’s a droll joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATM card, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart of the metropolis within hours.

Here’s another difference: in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland’s radical imams settle the metropolis.

And another difference: technology. In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today’s Indian territory, countries that can’t feed their own people have nuclear weapons.

But beyond that the very phrase ‘Indian territory’ presumes that inevitably these badlands will be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today’s ‘Indian territory’ was relatively ordered a generation or two back — West Africa, Pakistan, Bosnia. Though Eastern Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer now than they were in the Seventies, other swaths of the map have spiraled backwards. Which is more likely? That the parts of the world under pressure will turn into post-Communist Poland or post-Communist Yugoslavia? In Europe, the demographic pressures favor the latter.