American Alone - 3

Before you read any further, I want to make a disclaimer that this might offend some people.  In my previous post on this book, I asked if a shrinking American-European population and growing Islamic population was a bad thing, but never elaborated.  So why is it a bad thing?  Mark Steyn elaborates in detail on this issue.  He says, "That's the lesson of September 11: the dragons are no longer on the edge of the map.  When you look at it that way, the biggest globalization success story of recent years is not McDonald's or Microsoft but Islamism: the Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to Jakarta and Singapore and Alma-Ata and Grozny and Sarajevo and Lyons and Bergen and Manchester and Ottawa and Dearborn and Fall Church...And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalized insurgency" (61).  What was once a small strain of Islam extremism has become prevalent and spread like wildfire within the past decade.  Everyone knows about the so-called "muslim extremists," but in an American society where if you say 'black,' it's racist, we completely keep them on the down low.  In fact, we seem to appease them with our "Coexist" and "Celebrate diversity" bumper stickers.  Heck, President Obama did it when he recently had a meeting in the White House with the Egypt Muslim Brotherhood.  Muslim extremists have a strong will and a strong hate for America, while most of us Americans are sheeple, accepting it and going with the flow.  To Mark Steyn and to me as well, this poses a problem for the future of America.

Thus, to Steyn, "...it's not merely that there's a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project - and, in fact, an imperial project - in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism are not.  Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith in which whatever's your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified.  And, yes, Christianity has had its blood-drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, which remains a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year" (62).  In other words, he believes that Islam is a political project masquerading as a religion, and it advocates totalitarian-esque policies.  Like I said before, this may offend some people, but so be it.  To be honest, I can't help but agree with Steyn on this statement.  There's only one inconsistency in what he says: compared to the Spanish Inquisition, the jihad is a modern entity in a modern population, one much larger than the population back then; thus, more people are likely to be killed by jihad because of the larger population.  That's it though; what Steyn says here is very compelling.  There's constantly something in the news about some American guy that converted into an extremist and blew himself up on some subway.  More and more people are converting to muslim extremism, and more and more are born into it; it's a fast growing population.  Then, normal muslims will complain that this branch of Islam is so small that it couldn't possibly take over, and that it isn't a representation of their religion as a whole.  Well, unfortunately, it is.  "A while back I took my little girl to a science exhibition in Vermont," Steyn says, "and we spent a fun half-hour flipping balls into one of those big mechanical contraptions full of levels and runways and elevators.  But no matter which corner of the table you tossed the ball in, eventually it dropped into a little bucket and was deposited in the hole in the center.  That's the way it is with the ideology du jour: you come at it from the Richard Reid or the John Walker Lindh or the Taliban end, but you all drop down the same big hole in the center" (68).  Take a look at some of what is said in the Koran and see for yourself.