We are less than a week away from the commencement of my trial in the District of Columbia Superior Court. Oddly enough, it seems to be a little more difficult than it once was to procure accommodations in that benighted dump of a capital city. I am beginning to wonder whether that's because of pressure caused by the district government's lease of lower-end hotels to house "migrants". (I'll be there for the best part of a month, which I guess puts me somewhere between a short-stay tourist and a long-term welfare recipient.)
Our headline today is a bleak modification of a famous line by Matthew Arnold. If you prefer the original, you can see me read the full poem here - it was the very first entry in my anthology of video poetry. Because, as I always say, video poetry is where the big bucks are - although, after contemplating Washington hotel rates, I wonder if that's as true as I'd always assumed.
At any rate, I first appended my modification to a brief round-up of the biggest story of our time - the demographic transformation of the western world into something other. What that "other" will be remains an unsettled question - although, from Harvard University to Sydney Opera House, its contours are beginning to form. Denmark today:
Islamized Denmark...
In a show of power, Muslims seized control of City Hall Square in Copenhagen! Islamic "prayers" echoed throughout the city...
Muslims constantly hijacking public property for so-called "prayer" is not about prayer; it's a display of Islam's imperialistic... pic.twitter.com/b0WKRSiNgW
— Amy Mek (@AmyMek) October 24, 2023
And across the Øresund in Sweden:
GD, it's like Mark Steyn knew what he was talking about 20 years ago. https://t.co/DexwZrInlW
— IgneousAndroid (@IgneousAndroid) October 24, 2023
I understand Ms Mek's point - that "so-called 'prayer' is not about prayer" - but in a certain sense it is. It is one of the reasons that the United Kingdom now has more Muslims than Welshmen. Ten years ago - October 25th 2013 - I wrote the following at National Review's website:
Re what Benjamin Weinthal refers to as the "fight for faith" by persecuted Christians in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, one reason why it's not getting much play in the western media is that in the heart of what we used to call Christendom they've pretty much given up the fight. The great Giulio Meotti reports on France:
In Quai Malakoff, Nantes, the old Church of St. Christopher became the Mosque of Forqane... The National Federation of the Great Mosque of Paris, the Council of Democratic Muslims of France and the Collectif Banlieues asked the Catholic Church, in a spirit of "inter-religious solidarity", to rent the empty churches to the Muslims for their Friday prayers.
And Germany:
According to a report in the weekly magazine Spirit, in the next two years 15,000 of the 45,000 existing churches in Germany, a third of the total, will be demolished or sold...
The church of the Holy Family in Barmstedt has been demolished... In Hamburg, a Lutheran church was purchased by the Muslim community... In Spandau, the church of St. Raphael is now a grocery store, while in Karl Marx's town the churches are turned into gyms. In Cologne, a church has been transformed into a luxurious residence with a private pool.
And the Netherlands:
In Helmond, a town south of Bilthoven, a supermarket has moved in a former church. A library was opened in a Dominican church in Maastricht, while two churches in Utrecht and Amsterdam have recently been converted into mosques.
And the United Kingdom:
A Catholic church in the UK has been sold to the Muslim community. St Peter's Catholic church in Cobridge will become the Madina Mosque.
It is hard not to admire those brave Christians in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, their churches firebombed, their congregants attacked, but their hearts full and their faith strong. Post-Christian Europe has a hole at its heart – and a hole will eventually be filled by something.
~from The Corner, National Review, October 25th 2013
The years dwindle down to a precious few. Despite the scenes on the streets in American cities, Karine Jean-Pierre and whoever's waggling the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet that is Joe Biden are relaxed about "the potential rise of antisemitism":
So, a couple of things. Look, we have not seen any credible threats. I know there's been always questions about credible threats. And so, just want to make sure that that's out there.
But, look, Muslim and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks. And certainly President Biden understands that many of our Muslim, Arab — Arab — Arab Americans and Palestinian American loved ones and neighbors are worried about the hate being directed at their communities.
So she sloughs off the Jews and goes straight to "Islamophobia". America's suicidally Democrat Jewry should get used to a lot more of this. Most people want to be like most people - and, for the young across the west, a pledge of solidarity with Palestine is simply a pledge of solidarity with your own future.
Every year or two, I re-read Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission. It's about the Islamisation of France, but its most profound scene is the narrator's inability, even though he knows it is necessary, to recover his own lost faith.
Five years ago, and five years after the above - October 23rd 2018 - I said the following on Mark's Mailbox:
Dan writes: "Hi Mark. Do you think Angela Merkel was hardwired to believe in a supranational philosophy, now defunct..." I think you mean communism there. "...and has therefore chosen Islam as the way ahead for German hegemony? Or even that one must always have an overarching, non-national, non-cultural narrative, always. An earlier German leader thought so," says Dan.
Well, if you're referring to the late Herr Hitler, he wanted Germany to expand its borders because it needed Lebensraum - living room - because he wanted all these nice young German Fräuleins to find some nice young lad in the Lederhosen and have tons of nice little Aryan boys so they could sing, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me", as in the famous scene in Cabaret. And that was the idea: you needed Lebensraum because there were going to be lots of Germans so they needed to expand the borders of their country.
No nation in the developed world except possibly Japan is in less need of Lebensraum than Germany right now. It's got absolutely collapsed birthrates and so Angela Merkel, as you know, let in all the strapping young Muslim men to be the children Germany couldn't be bothered having themselves.
And I think that's actually the more interesting point of this. It's not the supranational thing. I think there's a general antipathy towards the idea of the nation state at the highest levels of the European Union, but there's also an antipathy to what you might call Christendom, or traditional values, and traditional models, demographic models. They talk about post-Christian Europe... It was striking to me, about fifteen years ago. I was at a meeting with a lot of the European Union bigshots and they started using the term post-Christian Europe. And I'd actually used that term, post-Christian Europe, and I've used it in a rather mordant, ironic way. And this was at the time of the European Union talks about the European Constitution, so-called. And all these guys were using "post-Christian Europe" as if it was a good thing and everyone should instantly recognise it was a good thing.
Well, one consequence of that is that birthrates have collapsed in Germany and elsewhere, and Angela Merkel is in fact importing Islam to be the future that Germany would not otherwise have. And it's sad that, it's pathetic. And yet if you were to ask Angela Merkel or even those Germans opposed to Angela Merkel what exactly is wrong with Germany extinguishing itself and essentially becoming just a bit of real estate with great infrastructure that an entirely different society will be moving into, people wouldn't be able to articulate why it is they actually object to that.
~from Mark's Mailbox, October 23rd 2018
And so it remains. Diversity is where nations go to die.
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