"We may have to change the name of this column to ‘Unhappy Warrior’, or ‘Reluctant Conscript’, or ‘Impending Deserter’. The last few weeks have made me consider not the possibility that we might lose this thing (which I’ve always weighed) but that we might lose it more easily than even the gloomiest of us thought.
[…] By contrast, Europe is getting there from here in the one-way express lane, and it’s not going to like where it ends up. About six months after 9/11, I went on a grand tour of the Continent’s Muslim ghettoes, and then flew on to the Middle East. The Muslims I met in Europe were, almost to a man, more alienated and angrier than the ones back in Araby. Don’t take my word for it. It was a Hamburg cell that pulled off 9/11, a British subject who was the shoebomber, a Montreal welfare recipient who tried to blow up LAX, a London School of Economics graduate who had Daniel Pearl executed… At one level, that’s just plain operational sense: al-Qa’eda obviously has no shortage of crazy Waziristani goatherds it can recruit but they tend to stand out at the check-in counter at United. A western-educated engineering graduate doesn’t.
But that in itself doesn’t explain why quite so many European Muslims are hot for jihad. In the Muslim ghettoes of the Continent east meets west in a particularly malign form that fuses the worst aspects of both. You can see it in the tattoed pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering through the streets of northern England: into rap and drugs and all the rest, they’re observant Muslims mainly in their attitude to women and infidels. The college-educated jihadi who could be pulling down six-figure salaries instead of Manhattan skyscrapers are in some senses merely the middle-class variation on this phenomenon.
[…] "Whatever the virtues of multiculturalism, bicultural societies are the most unstable in the world, whether relatively benignly so (Fiji) or genocidally (Rwanda). The problem Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent. All those Bush Doctrine naysayers who argue that Iraq is an artificial entity that can never be a functioning state ought to take a look at the Netherlands. You think Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia are incompatible? What do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian secular gay potheads and anti-whoring anti-sodomites Islamists? If Kurdistan’s an awkward fit in Iraq, how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of Holland? Europe’s problems don’t nullify the Bush Doctrine so much as present a more urgent case for it. Indeed, given that the Palestinian Authority is funding-wise the largest EU welfare slum, even the Hamas victory can be seen as more typical of Euro-Muslim alienation than Arab psychoses."
Mark Steyn (HT: Relapsed Catholic)
Tags: Eurabia, Mark Steyn
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