After America - Mark Steyn [151]
Even as Christians were explicitly targeted from Nigeria to Egypt to Pakistan, Katie Couric, the stupefying purveyor of conventional wisdom on CBS News, proclaimed “Islamophobia” to be one of the year’s most unreported stories.48 Like the earlier coinage of “homophobia,” Islamophobia was a mental illness whose only symptom was the accusation of having it. Islam reviled homosexuality but not so much that it wasn’t above appropriating the tropes of identity-group victimhood for its own purposes. It worked. President Obama made fawning speeches boasting that “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”49 How brave of him! But what about the Muslim women who choose not to cover themselves and wind up beaten, brutalized, and the victims of “honor killing”? No, not just in Waziristan and Yemen, but in Germany and Scandinavia and Ontario—and in Buffalo and Peoria, too. Ah, but that would have required real courage, not audience flattery and rhetorical narcissism masquerading as such. When Matthew Shepard was hung out to die on a fence in Wyoming, he became instantly the poster child for an epidemic of “anti-gay” hate sweeping America: books, plays, films were produced about him. Frank Rich, the distinguished columnist of the New York Times, had to be restrained from writing about him every week. If there had been a Matthew Shepard murder every few months, Mr. Rich et al would have been going bananas about the “climate of hate.” Yet you could run over your daughter in Peoria (Noor Almaleki),50 decapitate your wife in Buffalo (Aasiya Hassan),51 drown your three teenage daughters and your first wife in Kingston, Ontario (the Shafia family),52 and progressive opinion and the press were entirely indifferent. Why were Miss Almaleki and Mrs. Hassan not as famous as Matthew Shepard? They weren’t living in up-country villages in the Pakistani tribal lands. They were Americans—and they died because they wanted to live as American women.
But, in an “Islamophobic” West, the new ground rules were quickly established: Islam trumped feminism, trumped homosexuality, trumped everything. In speeches around the globe, the 44th President of the United States affected a cool equidistance between his national interests and those of others. He was less “the leader of the Free World” than the Bystander-in-Chief, and thus the perfect emblem of a western world content to be spectators in their own fate.
The world after America is more violent. In 2011, Der Spiegel reported:
Young Muslim women are often forced to lead double lives in Europe. They have sex in public restrooms and stuff mobile phones in their bras to hide their secret existences from strict families. They are often forbidden from visiting gynecologists or receiving sex ed. In the worst cases, they undergo hymen reconstruction surgery, have late-term abortions or even commit suicide.53
This is “living”? Der Spiegel’s vignette suggests less a “double life” than a double non-life—westernized slut by day, body-bagged chattel by night. “Forgetfulness occurs,” Lee Harris wrote, “when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.”54 They would soon be reacquainted. Der Spiegel was fretting over the internal contradictions of sexual hedonism in a multicultural age: Can you have thousands of young men in northern England in loveless marriages to women they never previously knew from their families’ home villages back in Mirpur living alongside underdressed Brit slatterns staggering around in mini-skirts and fishnets?
Not without consequences, not for a while. As a culture of unbounded sexual