I wish I’d read Mark Steyn’s excellent article titled “The future belongs to Islam” when it was originally published last year. Doing so would have saved me the trouble of working out for myself the answer to troubling questions about demographics and the disintegration of western culture that ultimately led me to write this article 8 months back.
Abdul Raheem Green says that one way to spread the “good news” of Islam to western democracies is to out-breed us.
“So don’t you think, Muslim brothers and sisters, we’ve got a bit of an opportunity here? They’re not having babies any more. So what if, instead, we have the babies?
“In Canada one in three or one in four children being born is a Muslim. What does that do to the demographic shift of a Muslim population in 20 years’ time?
“To say I’m going to have two or three children and that’s it — that’s not allowed. The way we overcome the people is through our numbers.”
I’d love to refute the sheik but unfortunately he is quite correct. Worse, the impact of a Muslim baby boom in the U.S., Canada, and Europe could be quite disastrous if the pattern for France’s troubles with Islamic immigrants is any indication. Indeed, some Jewish citizens have already begun to flee France as a result of Muslim-led violence.
Is it deja vu all over again with Muslim mullahs wearing the swastikas? Not yet at least.
This notion of Green’s, that Islam can be spread by the old sperm-and-egg trick as well as by the sword is actually rather frightening.
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For the terrorists a baby boom is a double win. Not only would the Muslim population at-large be increased, the number of teen-aged malconents would swell over the next two decades and provide the mullahs with their favorite weapon – the smartest bomb of all. Even if they change their strategy away from violence the strategy is still a winner so long as the religious zealots are in charge of Islam.
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If these are the new and future terms of engagement then America is in trouble. It seems unlikely to me that we can abandon our sad little me-first pathos and engage the enemy at their own level.
In a perfect world murderous terrorists and despots would receive their just reward and we wouldn’t have to do that. But in this one greater and demonstrably better and more civilized societies have been brought low by violent vandals with disturbing regularity.
It’s a fact of civilized capitalism that a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel for the rest of us. The question is – and always has been – what are we prepared to do to stop them?
Mark’s article should be mandatory reading for all Americans, even if most of us would be unwilling or unable to understand what he is telling us. For those who can and do his words cut to the bone.
We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the “war on terror” for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it’s a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as “a faraway country of which we know little.” This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.
Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a good sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower. The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it’s a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By “demographic,” I mean the Muslim world’s high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By “economic,” I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their post-Christian birth rates. By “geopolitical,” I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
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On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic. Time for the obligatory “of courses”: of course, not all Muslims are terrorists — though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists — though enough of them share their basic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwise as the “good cop” end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in. And in a more profound way it rationalizes what would otherwise be the nuttiness of the terrorists’ demands.
Since 9/11, Europe has seen the London Tube bombings, the French riots, Dutch murders of nationalist politicians. The perpetrators are their own citizens — British subjects, citoyens de la République française. In Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that all female teachers, believers or infidels, wear head scarves in class. The Muslim Council of Britain wants Holocaust Day abolished because it focuses “only” on the Nazis’ (alleged) Holocaust of the Jews and not the Israelis’ ongoing Holocaust of the Palestinians.
How does the state react? In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant’s counsel argued he couldn’t get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country’s patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he’s too “militaristic” and “offensive to Muslims.” They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George’s cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban’s cross as a thin yellow streak.
Indeed, western cultures have allowed themselves to become so diluted that they are unable to maintain a coherent sense of what it means to be Spanish, French, or, to a lesser extent thus far, American.
More:
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.
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“We’re the ones who will change you,” the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.” As he summed it up: “Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours.”
Not true. But the jihadists’ ways of fighting may very well do so.
It seems that Steyn’s year-old article is back on memeorandum because of this unpleasant bit of name calling that has received an unfortunate – and undeserved – number of links and readers today.
Nor am I surprised actual existing Muslim Canadians would take offense at the article. The article can’t touch me, an Anglo American, in the same way it can hit the emotions of a Canadian Muslim – it can’t feel as personal to me as it can to them.
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Mark Steyn is a racist douchebag in addition to being a ridiculous figure, which in a way is good, because the case for free speech can’t rest on the idea that speech is harmless or misunderstood or otherwise inconsequential.
What is ridiculous is the idea that Jim Henley could accidentally manage to influence people.
Whether you like Steyn’s take on 21st century demographics or not – I do not like it one but, though I agree with it completely – the issue that should be of utmost concern is whether or not what he’s written is correct or not.
To that question, all I can say is, “‘Fraid so, Jim.”
If the truth offends, so be it.