After America - Mark Steyn [152]
As a headline in the impeccably non-far-right Spiegel wondered: “How Much Allah Can the Old Continent Bear?”56
In the interests of managing this transformation, Europe and Australia and Canada had enthusiastically constrained ancient liberties. At first, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance professed to be pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-whatever’s-your-bag secularists; the other half were homophobic, misogynist, anti-any-groove-you-dig theocrats. Even as the tatty bus’n’truck roadshow version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they had in common overrode their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoiled from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential. But there was a central difference: Islam meant it, and its sense of purpose would be of an entirely different order from the PC statists. And so, as some segments of American and western life sputtered and failed, others would strengthen, growing ever more fiercely self-segregating, demanding at least acquiescence from those they regard as inferior—and using PC institutions to advance their goals.
As Islam well understood, for an enfeebled West, incremental preemptive concession was the easiest option. To do anything else would have been asking too much. Appearing before Congress in 2010, the Attorney General of the United States denied repeatedly that the Times Square Bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and other wannabe jihadists were motivated by “radical Islam.”57 Listening to America’s chief law enforcement officer, one was tempted to modify Trotsky: You may not be interested in Islam, but Islam is interested in you. The Saudis, having already bought up everything they needed to buy in Christendom, had created a climate that would strangle free speech, even in America. And that was only the beginning. Just as the left had embarked on its long march through the institutions, so too had Islam. Its Gramscian subversion of transnational bodies, international finance, human rights institutions, and the academy would soon advance to such pillars of the American idea as the First Amendment. Liberty and pluralism do not fall in an instant, in America any more than in Nigeria. Nor does sharia triumph overnight. But Islam’s good cop was cannier than its bad: Millenarian Iran wanted to nuke us. Wahhabist Saudi Arabia wanted to own us. Stealth jihad and creeping sharia were to prove more effective.
AFTER MAN
What was left of the “developed” world thought it could live as a Greater Switzerland, albeit without the federalism and the gun ownership: like the Swiss, the West was prosperous but neutral, even about itself. Like Geneva, it was attracted to transnational institutions. As the Swiss had lived off banking and chocolates, so the West thought it could live off high finance and delicacies. Switzerland was a place where once one went to prolong life—in expensive sanatoria—but by the twenty-first century had diversified into a one-stop shop for state-of-the-art assisted suicide, both for the terminally ill and for any next of kin in robust physical health