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[Jew Steyn we particularly detest, but he’s got some good thumbnails of Europe today. The jews and muslims both hate Europeans, and the hatred is implacable, will not go away, must be stopped.]

Getting There From Here

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. The “Cartoon Jihad� might have been explicitly devised as a scientific experiment to provoke the greatest degree of infidel capitulation for the most footling pretext.

By “we might lose�, I mean “the good guys� – and I define that term expansively. There are plenty of good guys in Australia and Poland and Iraq and even Pakistan. And I’m a little unnerved at the number of readers who seem to think the rest of the world can go hang but America will endure as a lonely candle of liberty in the new dark ages. Think that one through: a totalitarian China, a crumbling Russia, an insane Middle East, a disease-ridden Africa, a civil war-torn Eurabia – and a country that can’t even enforce its borders against two relatively benign states will somehow be able to hold the entire planet at bay? Dream on, “realists�.

Still, in the wake of the cartoon crisis and the Hamas victory, several correspondents have argued to me that the Bush Doctrine is a crock: How can liberty save the Muslim world when Muslims are jeopardizing liberty in Europe?

Well, they’re not contradictory positions. In the Middle East, it may well be that, as the gnarled old Yankees tell tourists, you can’t get there from here. But I’d argue there’s a sporting chance of being able to get at least part-way there from the here and now of the present Muslim world.

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.

Europe’s ability to solve the problem is hampered by the fact that its professed “multiculturalism� is in reality mostly bicultural. You have hitherto homogeneous Scandinavian societies whose cities have become 40% Muslim in the space of a generation. Imagine colonial New England when it was still the Mayflower crowd and one day they woke up and noticed that all the Aldens and Allertons, Billingtons and Bradfords were in their 50s and 60s and all the young guys were called Ahmed and Mohammed. That’s what’s happened in Rotterdam and Malmo.

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.

The hyperpower has to be engaged with the world, if only because splendid isolation is rarely seen as such by others. What was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of young British Muslims? The then Conservative Government’s conclusion in the 1990s that it had no dog in the Balkans junkyard. As Osama bin Laden put it, “The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that two million Muslims were killed.�

How’d a list of imperial interventions wind up with that bit of non-imperial non-intervention? The point is that for great powers detachment from the affairs of the world is not an option: even-handedness by Washington will be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt in Wackistan or Basketkhazia. In other words, isolation doesn’t travel.
National Review, March 13th 2006