Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our regular Clubland Q&A taking questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm Greenwich Mean Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~Lou Aguilar writes in The American Spectator:
In 2006, the brilliant geopolitical scholar Mark Steyn wrote a depressively prescient book about the imminent fate of the Western world, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Steyn posited that Europe would collapse from three main causes: Islamic domination, an unsustainable welfare state, and anti-spiritual solipsism. He added that the United States would be the last nation standing as a majority united Christianist country with the will to power. And that America's very rejection of the leftist hive mentality would draw the ire of its diminishing allies across the pond...
It took almost 20 years for his assessment to be proven right.
The fortnight since JD Vance's Munich speech certainly seems to have restored an America Alone dynamic to transatlantic affairs. The United States, at least for the moment, is once again different; Europe remains mired in what I called eighteen years ago "ineffectual poseur multilateralism". See Starmer, Macron and Cruella von der Leyen at Lancaster House on Sunday. After being received by the King at Sandringham, Zelensky pledged that any end to the war "is still very very far away". Trump immediately paused all US military aid, which might make Sweater Girl's promise what the climate crowd call unsustainable. For good measure, the President added:
We should spend less time worrying about Putin, and more time worrying about migrant rape gangs, drug lords, murderers, and people from mental institutions entering our country — so that we don't end up like Europe!
He's not wrong. If you were not merely "ineffectual poseur multilaterists" and you believed your rhetoric about Putin, you would not remain dependent on Russian energy and thereby enrich him on a scale far beyond anything you give to Ukraine. The biggest threat to the stability of western Europe is not Tsar Vlad but ongoing, remorseless Islamisation. Which, as JD Vance noted in Munich, no European voted for, but which seems to have happened anyway.
~This year, for example, Central London's municipal illuminations are for the first time celebrating Ramadan [see picture at top right] - which would have seemed ridiculous had I proposed it in America Alone. In those days, I played Ramadan strictly for laughs:
"There was a line I used to use in the National Post. 'Is it just me or does Ramadan seem to come round earlier every year?"
At this point, my interlocutor feels obliged to insert a clarification:
In fact, it does, because its date is determined by cycles of the moon.
Then back to me:
"I'd always get all these stupid emails, 'You Islamophobe idiot, don't you know that the Muslim calendar..."
He laughs uproariously. "That's Bob Hope on the Orpheum circuit in 1924. That's my Ramadan vaudeville joke and I'm gonna keep doing it for as long as I live. So I do it for that reason, but I also do it because I think that whoever prowls through the rubble, the ruins of Western civilization, whether it's the Chinese Politburo, or Czar Putin, or the new caliphate, or it's aliens from the planet Zongo, will look at what we had and wonder why we did this to ourselves, and they will roar their heads off laughing."
When I started doing my "Ramadan vaudeville joke", the whole rigmarole started just before Christmas. Now it starts just after Valentine's Day, with not only crescent moons over Piccadilly and Regent Street but the King and Queen packing the Iftar boxes.
Me seven years ago on "The Surrender of the Public Square":
I see my old friend Boris Johnson is in trouble for comparing burqas to "letterboxes". Like letterboxes, the body bags on European streets are useful for delivering a message - and the message is getting through loud and clear:
'A few months ago, a global media tempest erupted after Polish Catholics held a mass public prayer event across the country. The BBC deemed it "controversial", due to "concerns it could be seen as endorsing the state's refusal to let in Muslim migrants".
'The same controversy, however, did not erupt in Britain when 140,000 Muslims prayed in Birmingham's Small Heath Park, in an event organized by the Green Lane Mosque to mark the end of Ramadan.'
Post-Ramadan beanos in municipal parks: who could object? Giulio Meotti runs the numbers:
'The annual Birmingham event began in 2012 with 12,000 faithful. Two years later, the number of the faithful rose to 40,000. In 2015, it was 70,000. In 2016, the number was 90,000. In 2017, it was 100,000. In 2018, the number was 140,000. Next year?'
Two hundred thousand? A quarter-million? You could ask them, as they do of Polish Catholics, to keep this stuff walled up in their houses of worship. But no matter how big you build the mosque, it's always too small:
'France is debating whether or not to block prayer on the street. "They will not have prayers on the street, we will prevent street praying" Interior Minister Gerard Collomb announced.
'"Public space cannot be taken over in this way", said the president of the Paris regional council, Valérie Pécresse, who led a protest by councilors and MPs.'
In fact, the annexation of the public space, early and often, is a conscious strategy on the part of Islamic supremacists that serves to accelerate demographic trends. While the Muslim population is not yet a majority, taking over parks and streets usefully gives the impression that your numbers are greater than they are, and thereby helps speed the process by which "multicultural" neighborhoods become uniculturally Islamic neighborhoods. Same with burqas. Notwithstanding the effusions of Guardiancolumnists and BBC commentators, most other people react to the Islamization of the streets by moving out (if they can). Thus the flight of Jews from Molenbeek and gays from London's East End. You can say a lot of things about Islam, but it acts with great strategic clarity.
Which is more relevant to Britain's and France's and Germany's future? The inviolability of Ukraine's borders? Or the wholesale surrender of their own?
Your own leaders are killing your countries. But you're worried about the Donbass.
~In Munich JD Vance touched on both the death of free speech in Britain and the European Union and the untrammelled mass migration. But he didn't really connect them up: More migrants means less speech. Islam attaches great importance to its control of the public space. And, if you look at those West End crescent moons today and ask yourself what it will be like in another decade, well, you know the answer to that, don't you? If you're JD or his boss, in what sense are American interests served by paying for the defence of a semi-Islamised continent with two nuclear powers?
Time for our regularly scheduled "As I wrote ten years ago..." spot. March 9th 2015:
After the Paris and Copenhagen attacks, I wrote:
'This is usually the point at which we're expected to do the not-all-Muslims-want-to-shoot-you-dead shtick. And that's true. But Islam itself has no feeling whatsoever for the spirit of free speech.'
And again:
'Most western Muslims are not willing themselves to open fire on synagogues or Lars Vilks, but they assiduously maintain the shriveled definition of acceptable expression that helps license the fanatics of Copenhagen and Paris. Muslims in Europe, North America and Australia will pay lip service to "free speech", and then promptly re-define it as excluding speech that "blasphemes" or "insults" their faith - which is to say them. Which is to say the great vulgar, brawling free-for-all of free societies does not apply to them. So, when, say, France's Muslim population reaches 20 per cent, you will need to have the support of three-quarters of the remaining 80 per cent to maintain even a bare popular majority in favor of free speech.
That prospect was confirmed by an ensuing opinion survey:
'A poll of British Muslims finds that 27 per cent "have some sympathy for the motives behind Charlie Hebdo attacks". That's over three-quarters of a million people - without adding in the two per cent who refused to answer and another eight per cent who "don't know". But don't worry, the good news is that 68 per cent of British Muslims agree that acts of violence against those who publish images of Mohammed can "never be justified".
'The other 32 per cent amount to a million people, all living in the United Kingdom.
'Eleven per cent of Muslims thought that magazines who publish pictures of the Prophet Mohammed "deserve to be attacked". Now that's what I call "otherized"!
'But relax, that's only about 310,000 British residents. And, if you're round the back of the Giant's Causeway in County Antrim or the remoter parts of the Shetlands, it may be a while before they get to you.'
Is it "racist" to impute to moderate Muslims the intimidatory character of that last sentence? Well, here's Douglas Murray at a post-Charlie demo in the UK:
'Yesterday in London a crowd of more than a thousand British Muslims (carefully divided between males and females) gathered outside Downing Street. The rally – organised by something calling itself 'The Muslim Action Forum' – was a protest against freedom of speech, specifically to cartoons of Mohammed in the French publication Charlie Hebdo. Among the banners carried by protestors were ones that read, 'I am a servant of holy prophet Muhammad (pbuh)', the sinister 'We love prophet Muhammad (pbuh) more than our lives', 'Jesus and Moses were prophets of Islam' and the even more presumptuous 'Learn some manners'. Among those holding a banner reading 'Charlie and the abuse factory' was a little boy. Others bore banners with the fantastically awful words spoken by the Pope last month: 'Insult my mum and I will punch you (Pope Francis).' A large banner hung beneath the stage from which speakers addressed the crowd carried the barely concealed threat: 'Be careful with Muhammad."
As I said, Islam itself has no feeling for free speech, and so the more Islamic a society gets the less free speech it will have. So all the above was to be expected. This, on the other hand, has an inspired audacious brio:
'Charlie Hebdo has been named 2015 International Islamophobe of the year, despite many of its staff having been killed by Jihadists in January. The annual 'award' was given by Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a British group that claims to campaign against terrorism.'
What did the late editor Stéphane Charbonnier and his deceased cartoonists and writers do to merit such an honor? Well, Charlie Hebdo won the Islamophobia Oscars for "its continual stoking of Islamophobic sentiment by caricaturing Muslims as terrorists".
So a group of Muslim terrorists killed them. Which you would think might lend sufficient credence to Charlie Hebdo's editorial line as to make the Islamic Human Rights Commission wary about giving them a posthumous award for their supposedly absurd, irrational phobia. If, say, I were to be killed by a deranged climate activist, I've no doubt Michael E Mann and his chums would be having a grand laugh about it, but I think a certain self-awareness would caution them from making me Climate Denier of the Year in absentia. So it's tempting to think that no one at the IHRC has sufficient sense of irony to understand what they're doing with their award to Charlie Hebdo.
But I think, au contraire, they do understand - and they're dancing in the blood of the dead because, like those hundreds of thousands of British Muslims, they think those attacks were "justified". And they want you to know that...
The problem is 'moderate Islam' - because 'moderate Islam' is largely indistinguishable from 'radical Islam' in its views on free speech, Jews, the role of women, apostasy, and the special privilege that must be accorded to Islam by everybody else. The difference between the savages who murdered Charb and his colleagues and the 'moderates' who pinned Islamophobe of the Year medals on their corpses is that the jihadists are killing a few individuals while the mods are killing the very spirit of a free society.
Could Putin do as much damage to western Europe as their own governments have?
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