Authors: Mark Steyn
Consider the name given to the current conflict: "war on terror." Wait a minute. Aren't wars usually waged against named enemies? Yes, but, to the progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. In part, it's societal forgetfulness. In
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an electronic age, a present-tense culture, we assume that social progress is like technological progress: it can't be reversed. Just as you can't disinvent the internal combustion engine, so you can't disinvent women's rights. Just as the horse and buggy yielded to the steam train and the Ford Model T and the passenger jet, so the advanced social-democratic society will march onward to state day care and thirty-hour work weeks and gay marriage and ever greater ethnic diversity--and nothing can turn it back, certainly not a lot of seventh-century weird beards. Many of us figure the Islamist plan to re-establish the caliphate is the equivalent of that moment in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie when Plankton roars,
"I'm going to rule the world!" Towering over him, SpongeBob says, "Good luck with that." But you never know: it might be that we're the plankton. "Our enemies are small worms," Adolf Hitler told his generals in August 1939. I saw them at Munich." In Europe today, as in the thirties, the political class prostrates itself before an insatiable force that barely acknowledges the latest surrender before moving on to the next invented grievance. Indeed, a formal enemy is all but superfluous to requirements. Bomb us, and we agonize over the "root causes." Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that Islam is a religion of peace." Issue blood-curdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "healthy-lifestyle lo-fat granola bar." Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room. As French philosopher Jean-François Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." During the cartoon jihad, the New York Times gave a routinely pompous explanation of why it would not be showing us the representations of the Prophet: sensitive news organizations, the editors explained, had the duty to "refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols." The very next day the Times illustrated a story on the Danish controversy with a piece of New York "art" from a couple of seasons earlier showing the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung. Multiculturalism seems to operate on the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that "in my country everyone is free to criticize the president," and the Soviet guy replies, "Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your president." Under the rules as understood by the New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and, likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elites' loathing of their own.
Insurgencies, whether explicitly terrorist or more subtle, persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets. The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: they want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.
Granted, at a certain level that's preposterous. There's a contradiction at the heart of Islamist confidence, nicely caught in a story from New Zealand about female Muslims
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driving around in burqas. According to some police representatives, this mode of dress somewhat restricts the field of vision, and also offers opportunities for fleeing bank robbers to disguise themselves as Muslim women. However, nobody wants to be insensitive, do they? And, on the whole, the police were happy to take the Islamic lobby groups at their word that the burqa was a requirement of these women's faith. But as Greg O'Connor, president of the New Zealand Police Association, couldn't resist adding, "If one's belief system was so strong that you didn't want to show one's face then perhaps that belief system should extend to not driving."
Indeed. If your clothing can't evolve out of the camel-train era, maybe your mode of transportation shouldn't either. But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century. It doesn't work like that, of course. An Islamic States of America, an Islamic Republic of France, an Islamic Kingdom of Belgium, an Islamic Dominion of Canada would all very quickly be societies in decline, living on the accumulated capital of their pre-Muslim past--as, indeed, much of Islam did at its zenith. But do we really want to test that proposition?
Simply as a matter of fact, every year more and more of the world lives under Islamic law: Pakistan adopted Islamic law in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. In the sixties, Nigeria lived under English Common Law; now, half of it's in the grip of sharia, and the other half's feeling the squeeze. Today, there are more Muslim nations, more radicalized Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more influential transnational institutions. Will these Muslims live by the laws of Singapore or Denmark or New Zealand or by the laws of Islam?
Or is their primary identity a new worldwide Islamic identity?
To ask the question is, in large part, to answer it. Even if a Muslim wanted to, how would he assimilate with, say, Canadian national identity? You can't assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It's much easier to dismantle a society than to put anything new and lasting in its place. And across much of the developed world that's what's going on right now. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen. In the absence of cultural confidence, demography will decide the future. Or in the unimprovable summation of James c. Bennett: "Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism. Pick any two."
At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally "valid." To accept that proposition means denying reality--the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, and global population movement. Multiculturalism is not the first ideology founded on the denial of truth. You'll recall Hermann Goering's memorable assertion that "two plus two makes five if the Führer wills it." Likewise, we're asked to accept that the United States Constitution was modeled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation--if a generation of multiculti theorists, the ethnic grievance lobby, and even a ludicrous resolution of the United States Congress so wills it.
Still, it's harmless, isn't it? What's wrong with playing make-believe if it helps us all feel warm and fuzzy about each other?
Well, because it's never helpful to put reality up for grabs. There may come a day when you need it.
Look at the photograph that appeared on the front of a Fleet Street tabloid shortly after the London Tube bombings: a quartet of young men enjoying a weekend's whitewater rafting in Wales--a mini-vacation the killers took to prepare themselves for blowing the
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Underground to bits. Outwardly, these blokes were no different from any other Yorkshire lads of their age--weaned on chips, fond of cricket, garbed in revolting Brit leisurewear. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, almost perfectly assimilated--at least in respect to sports, fashion, and pop music. The only difference was inside: a willingness to slaughter dozens of their fellow Britons in the interests of the jihad. They'd adopted so many trees that nobody could see they lacked the big overarching forest--the essence of identity, of allegiance.
If Islamist extremism is the genie you're trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn't help to have smashed the bottle. At the core of multiculturalism is an assumption that a nonWestern culture is somehow primal and immutable but that an advanced nation is no more than the sum of its constituent parts. It's a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome--a desperation to identify with anything that comes along other than your own. The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malaysia, who cares? That's the stuff the old imperialist wallahs used to be well up on. But multiculturalism just involves feeling warm and fluffy about everyone, making bliss out of ignorance. If the guy's rich vibrant cultural tradition involves standing over you with a scimitar shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" well, you can't complain you're not getting your share of cultural diversity. Given the growing Muslim populations in Europe and the remarkable success hitherto obscure Muslim lobby groups have had in constraining certain aspects of the war on terror, it seems almost certain that Islamist political parties will arise on the Continent within the next decade. And, given the very few degrees of separation between very prominent Western Muslims--ambassadors, princes, professors--and the terrorists, it seems likely that many prominent figures in these parties will be supportive of the terrorists' ends. And given the governing principle of multicultural society--that Western man demonstrates his cultural sensitivity by preemptively surrendering--any smart Islamist, surveying the Madrid bombing and the aftermath, must be contemplating the benefits of a twin-track strategy. There are three possible resolutions to the present struggle:
1. Submit to Islam
2. Destroy Islam
3. Reform Islam
Because most of us don't take number one as a serious possibility, we're equally unserious about being forced to choose between two and three. But submission to Islam is very possible, and to many it will still seem ridiculous even as it happens; like John Kerry during the 2004 campaign, we'll be spluttering that we can't believe we're losing to these idiots. But we can lose (as I've always believed) and (as I've come to believe) we might lose more easily than even the gloomiest of us thought.
By "we might lose," I mean "the good guys"--and I define that term expansively. There are plenty of good guys in Australia and Poland and Iraq and even Pakistan. And I'm a little unnerved at the number of readers who seem to think the rest of the world can go hang but America will endure as a lonely candle of liberty in the new Dark Ages. Think that one through: a totalitarian China, a crumbling Russia, an insane Middle East, a disease-ridden Africa, a civil war-torn Eurabia--and a country that can't even enforce its borders against two relatively benign states will somehow be able to hold the entire planet at bay? Dream on,
"realists."
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As for option two, it doesn't bear thinking about. Even if you regard Islam as essentially incompatible with free societies, the slaughter required to end it as a force in the world would change America beyond recognition. That doesn't mean that, a few years down the line, if some kooks with nukes obliterate, say, Marseilles or Lyons that the French wouldn't give it a go in some fairly spectacular way. But they're unlikely to accomplish much by it, any more than the Russians have by their scorched-earth strategy in Chechnya. That leaves option three: Reform Islam-which is not ours to do.
Ultimately, only Muslims can reform Islam. All the free world can do is create conditions that increase the likelihood of Muslim reform, or at any rate do not actively impede it. We can:
1. Support women's rights--real rights, not feminist pieties--in the Muslim world. This is the biggest vulnerability in Islam. Not every Muslim female wants to be Gloria Steinem or Paris Hilton. But nor do they want a life that starts with genital mutilation and ends with an honor killing at the hands of your brothers. The overwhelming majority of females in Continental battered women's shelters are Muslim--which gives you some sense of what women in the Middle East might do if they had any women's shelters to go to. When half the population of these societies is a potential source of dissent, we need to use it. 2. Roll back Wahhabi, Iranian, and other ideological exports that have radicalized Muslims on every continent. We have an ideological enemy and we need to wage ideological war.
3. Support economic and political liberty in the Muslim world, even if it means unsavory governments: an elected unsavory government is still better than a dictatorial unsavory government. It's not necessary for Syria and Egypt to become Minnesota and New Zealand. All that's necessary is for them to become something other than what they are now. And on the bumpy road to liberty, every Muslim regime that has to preoccupy itself with internal dissent has less time to foment trouble beyond its borders.
4. Ensure that Islamic states that persecute non-Muslims are denied international legitimacy and excluded and marginalized in international bodies.
5. Throttle the funding of mosques, madrassas, think tanks, and other activities in America and elsewhere by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others.
6. Develop a strategy for countering Islamism on the ideological front. Create a civil corps to match America's warrior corps and use it to promote alternative institutions, structures, and values through a post-imperial equivalent to Britain's Colonial Office, albeit under whatever wussy name is deemed acceptable: Department of Global Community Outreach or whatever (this, by the way, is what Washington should have created instead of the bloated bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security).