Mark Steyn silences the left: Ted Byfield lauds columnist's new book on Muslim takeover of Europe

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | 11/18/06 | Ted Byfield

[JohnHuang2]

Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist and columnist widely read in the United States and Great Britain, whose current book, "America Alone," is an alarming portrait of a rapidly rising Islamic Europe, has served his cause better than he could have hoped.

Not only does his book convincingly demonstrate the catastrophic demographic consequence of Europe's descending birth rate and ascending Muslim population, it did one thing more. The only review of it that I could find in Canada's largely liberal print media showed unmistakably that the liberal Western world has no solution to the problem. It is utterly baffled. It doesn't know what to do.

Steyn, of course, is not alone in sounding this warning. The renowned journalist, atheist and anti-clerical Oriana Fallaci, who died in September at New York (after, curiously, praising the thinking and approach of Pope Benedict), became so assertive in her warnings about Islam in Europe she was accused in her native Italy of vilipendio (vilification) of religion by an Italian anti-Catholic. She coined the term "Eurabia" and dedicated her last years to describing its alarming growth.

In Britain, London Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips this year produced the terrifying "Londonistan," focusing particularly on the seemingly irresistible Islamic menace in her country where superficially good British lads with unmistakable regional accents are in fact dedicated to the destruction of their neighbors.

Steyn, however, with his gift of devastating sarcasm and eye for absurdity in high places, has produced an entertaining, if frightening, read, making some obvious though rarely confronted points, such as:

Since a core objective of Islam is an autocratic theocracy, Muslims cannot embrace democratic government without fundamentally compromising their religion and thereby ceasing to be Muslims. Any working accommodation with Islam is therefore impossible, as France, Britain and Germany are painfully discovering.

However, Europe will not be defeated by Islam, but by its own failings, particularly by its failure to produce children. When the time comes for the great Muslim takeover, it won't face any serious resistance because practically no one under the age of 60 will be there to do the resisting. Steyn's book soared immediately to the Canadian best-seller list and was running No. 3 on Amazon. Canada., though the country's ultra-liberal biggest book retailer drastically under-stocked it, for reasons it found difficult to explain.

What intrigued me, however, was how the liberal media would respond to it. Typically, up to this date anyway, the Toronto Star and most of the old Southam chain have ignored it. The Globe and Mail, however, faced up to the challenge. The reviewer they chose was William Christian, a much-published professor of political science from Guelph, Ontario. He writes a very strange review. It consists of two elements – a ferocious denunciation of Steyn's book – "possibly the most crass and vulgar book about the West's relationship with the Islamic world I have ever encountered" – and a recitation without comment of some of the alarming demographic and theological facts that Steyn presents.

Now this is mystifying. Look at the awful things this man is writing, says the reviewer. How crass! How vulgar! But you want to take Dr. Christian by both shoulders and demand: "Yes, but are they true? And, if they are not true, why don't you say so? And if they are true, what do you suggest we do about them?"

In short, Dr. Christian's clear responsibility as a reviewer was to respond at least minimally to the validity of Steyn's assertions. In not one fragment of one sentence does he do so. The conclusion is inescapable: He doesn't say, because he doesn't know. He doesn't provide an answer, because he hasn't got one. His solution to the Muslim threat is to pretend it isn't there. His silence betrays his poverty. He is flummoxed, and he is furious with Steyn for having exposed this fact.

But this bewilderment is not confined to Christian. What's notable is that no one in the entire phantasmagorias realm of modern liberaldom is responding to it. The alarms are being sounded and the reigning authorities can do nothing more than denounce those who sound them. Which of course is Steyn's main point. Those in charge do not know what to do. They have built a society that doesn't work, and they hate people who point this out.

But realizing this is surely the first step in building one that does work, and that is what Steyn obviously seeks to do.

[George W. Bush]

I forgot that we also will have Australia and India. We may be able to hold Britain as well, especially Ireland and Scotland. And there is also a chance to hold some of the Scandinavian countries.

[wildbill]

Steyn's book isn't the first to demonstrate the demographic suicide of Europe--but he is the first to illustrate the probable outcome--Eurabia--since neither history or Nature will abide a vacuum.

And he does it with such perceptive wit that the book is enormously readable and popular.

[VOA]

Since a core objective of Islam is an autocratic theocracy, Muslims cannot
embrace democratic government without fundamentally compromising
their religion and thereby ceasing to be Muslims.

Any working accommodation with Islam is therefore impossible,
as France, Britain and Germany are painfully discovering.

Just bears repeating.

And might (regrettably) have something to do with the challenges of
making Iraq into a rational country.

[dufekin]

According to the CIA, the only two European countries not undergoing demographic implosion are Iceland and Turkey. Iceland should hold, and Turkey got the Muslim takeover in 1453.

[Billthedrill]

The reason the Left despises Steyn's book is that it lays the blame for cultural suicide directly at their doorstep. America Alone does not deal only with demographics, although those certainly are a major causative factor for the difficulties addressed therein, but more tellingly Steyn points out that there is very little assimilation among recent Muslim immigrants to Europe for two reasons that tend to reinforce one another - (1) radical Islam is by nature both aggressive and intensely insular, and (2) multiculturalism protects the radicals from the consequences of their behavior by asserting the primacy of the evils of Western culture.

One might suggest that the second of these messages is profoundly unwelcome in the self-regarding and doctrinaire circles that compose the intellectual left these days. Here we have a problem that they are accustomed to blaming, as they do everything else, on the wickedness of the imperialistic oppressive culture of the West, but that worn-out mold is cracked and crumbling in their hands and what is left is an unapolegetic theocratic fascism that refuses to fit into it. The fury and the fear emanating from the left are a direct result of its worldview being shattered by the rude buffets of real life. The message is unwelcome, but shooting the messenger won't make the meaning go away.

[CGVet58]

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[CGVet58]

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[Blind Eye Jones]

Just finished reading this witty, harrowing book. Steyn gives plenty of evidence that Islamofascism atrocities, political ambitions and demographics are on the rise world wide and explains that the public is bound to say, "of course... but this is the exception." I too hope that it is, though there is plenty of bleak evidence to suggest otherwise. If we take the lyrics of the REM song that says, "this is the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine"... you have the Lib stance.