That’s certainly a shocking statement. Here’s the American commentator Jim Henley:
The excerpt from Mark Steyn’s America Alone that ran in Maclean’s last year is far more blatantly racist than I figured it would be when I began reading it. I knew Steyn was a bigot, with a 1920s obsession with demographic decline. (cf Tom Buchanan in Gatsby, who can’t stop talking about Rise Of The Colored Empires, ‘by this man Goddard’.) But I imagined Steyn was more adroit in his use of code words and deniability feints. No! ‘Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes’ is merely the most spectacular example of – not code words. I’m not completely shocked that Steyn would write with such frank bigotry, or that Regnery would publish it. I’m somewhat surprised that an establishment organ like Maclean’s would run it.
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… Mark Steyn is a racist douchebag in addition to being a ridiculous figure…
Etc. The words that so offend him are, indeed “frank bigotry”. However, had Mr Henley actually read my racist diatribe, he would have seen that the bigotry is not mine but that of a bigshot Scandinavian Muslim:
‘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.’
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.