After America

by Mark Steyn

  The droller Saudi princes and other bankrollers of the new Caliphate occasionally marveled at posterity’s jest: as paradoxical as it might sound, the Holocaust had enabled the Islamization of Europe. Without post-war guilt, and the revulsion against nationalism, and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, the Continent would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Dublin to Dusseldorf and the accommodation of Muslim sensitivities on everything from the design of British nursing uniforms to Brussels police doughnut consumption during Ramadan. The principal beneficiaries of European Holocaust guilt turned out to be not the Jews but the Muslims.

  It took the West some time to accept another obvious truth—that a society that becomes more Muslim will have fewer homosexuals. In 2009, the Rainbow Palace, formerly Amsterdam’s most popular homo-hotel (in the Dutch vernacular), had announced it was renaming itself the Sharm and reorienting itself to Islamic tourism. Or as the felicitously named website allah.eu put it: “Gay Hotel Turns Muslim.”34

  If you were a nice young couple from San Francisco planning a honeymoon in “the most tolerant city in Europe,” it was helpful to make sure your travel brochure was up to date. Within a decade, many of the Continent’s once gay-friendly cities were on the brink of majority-Muslim status. But, long before that statistical milestone was reached, the gay moment in Amsterdam, Oslo, and elsewhere was over.

  As for the Jews and gays, so for the feminists. In the Muslim housing projects of France, according to the official statistics, the number of rapes rose by an annual 15 to 20 percent throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century.35 One victim of routine rape in les banlieues, the late Samira Bellil, had published an autobiography called Dans l’enfer des tournantes —“In the hell of the take-your-turns,” the tournante being the slang term used by Muslim youths for gang-rape.36 “There are only two kinds of girls,” wrote Mlle. Bellil, who was gang-raped all night at the age of fourteen. 37

  When Miss Bellil published her book, her parents threw her out and her community disowned her. But her story discomforted those far beyond the Muslim ghettoes. These facts were too cold and plain to be expressed in a multicultural society which had told itself that, thanks to the joys of diversity, a nice gay couple and a polygamous Muslim with three wives in identical niqabs can live side by side at 27 and 29 Elm Street. In the New York Times, the eminent philosopher Martha Nussbaum explained why she objected to moves to ban the burqa in European cities: “My judgment about Turkey in the past,” Nussbaum wrote, “was that the ban on veiling was justified, in those days, by a compelling state interest—derived from the belief that women were at risk of physical violence if they went unveiled, unless the government intervened to make the veil illegal for all. Today in Europe the situation is utterly different, and no physical violence will greet the woman who wears even scanty clothing.”38

  How absurd those lazy assumptions read today. But why did they not seem so to Ms. Nussbaum and her editors back in 2010? Even then, no young girl could safely walk in “scanty clothing” through Clichy-sous-Bois or Rosengard. In La Courneuve in France, 77 percent of covered women said they wore the veil to “avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols,” as the writer Claire Berlinski put it. She added: “We are talking about France, not Iran.”39

  As a young man, long ago, I would often find myself at dinner sitting next to a Middle Eastern lady of a certain age. And the conversation went as it often does when you’re with Muslim women who were at college in the Sixties, Seventies, or Eighties. In one case, my dining companion had they were the “authentic women”: “covering” was for old village biddies, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. It would never have occurred to her that the assumptions of her generation would prove to be off by 180 degrees—that in middle age she would see young Muslim women wearing a garb largely alien to their tradition not just in the Middle East but in Brussels and London and Montreal.

  I have before me two photographs—first, the Cairo University class of 1978, with every woman bare-headed; second, the Cairo University class of 2004, with every woman hijabed to the hilt.40

  Even as late as 2020, you would still hear some or other complacenik shrug, “Oh, but they haven’t had time to westernize. Just you wait and see. Give it another twenty years, and the siren song of westernization will work its magic.” The argument wasn’t merely speculative, it had already been proved wrong by what had happened over the previous twenty years. I have a third photograph: the Cairo University class of 1959, with every woman in a blouse and skirt or summer frock, and hair styled no differently from suburban housewives in Westchester County.41 Cairo University in 1959 looked like London. Now London University looks like Cairo. But western liberals stuck with inevitablist theories of social evolution till the end, convinced that women’s rights and gay rights were like the wheel or the internal combustion engine—that once you’d invented them they can’t be un-invented. Instead, tides rise, and then ebb.

  In the second decade of the twenty-first century, major cities in the heart of the “free world” became less free, and then unfree. An American tourist—a 28-year-old blonde child-woman from Professor Nussbaum’s class at the University of Chicago—would not be able to walk through the streets of Amsterdam and Brussels without either being accompanied by men fit 42

  And so the world after America celebrates less diversity. It had been fascinating to watch the strange men and women who led the western world in twilight pass off their groveling cowardice as debonair courage. As President Obama was making his now forgotten prostrations in Cairo, his Secretary of State was hectoring the Zionist Entity, regarding the West Bank, that there has to be “a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”43 No “natural growth”? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you’ve got to talk gran’ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn, or wherever? Consciously or not, Mrs. Clinton had endorsed “the Muslim world’s position on infidels who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: the Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Obama have been comfortable mandating “no natural growth” to Israel’s million-and-a-half Muslims? No. Yet the administration had no difficulty embracing the “the Muslim world’s confident belief in one-way multiculturalism, under which Islam expands in the West but Christianity and Judaism shrivel inexorably in the Middle East, Pakistan, and elsewhere. When General Maude’s British Indian Army took Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, they found a city whose population was 40 percent Jewish.44 By the end of the twentieth century, Iraq was just another spot on the map where the only Jews are in the cemetery. And why stop there? In 2003 President Bush’s “coalition of the willing” took Baghdad from Saddam Hussein. There were at that time an estimated million or so Christians in Iraq. By 2010, their numbers had fallen by half.45 In October that year, 46 That December only one Christian church in the city formally observed Christmas, but Christian families were still singled out for violence and death in their homes.47 This happened on America’s watch—while Iraq was a protectorate of the global hyperpower. Soon Baghdad’s Christians would join Baghdad’s Jews as an historical footnote, a community to be found only in weed-choked, garbage-strewn graveyards.

  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 them
selves 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

  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

  Not without consequences, not for a while. As a culture of unbounded sexual license for women surrendered to one of greater constraints, the sex ed and restroom copulation and hymen reconstruction faded from the scene in Berlin and Amsterdam and Yorkshire. But a world full of male frustrations will always find a market for sex slavery. As the western cities where once they’d procured their blonde “escorts” became Islamized and as erotically enticing as Riyadh, Saudi princes proved a rich market for “European companions,” voluntary or conscripted.55 In China, there would be millions of young men for whom (as a consequence of the government’s “one-child” policy) there were no women, and to whom even the sad, deadeyed trollops of northern England looked good. We were returning to an age where crops are stolen and children enslaved.

  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

  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

  As Africa and the Muslim world got younger, the West got older. Once America fell apart and it became clear that there was no longer a U.S. cavalry to ride to the rescue, many around the world slumped into fatalism. In the new Europe, death was a living, and euthanasia clinics (the “dignified departure” lounges) boomed. For those less despondent, the trickle of Muslim “reversions” became a flood, as the middle class did what was necessary to get by. One day the office in which you work installs a Muslim prayer room, and a few of your colleagues head off at the designated times, while the rest of you get on with what passes for work in the EU. A couple of years go by, and it’s now a few more folks scooting off to the prayer room. Then it’s a majority. And the ones who don’t are beginning to feel a bit awkward about being left behind. What do you do? The future showed up a lot sooner than you thought. If you were a fundamentalist Christian like those wackjob Yanks, signing on to Islam might cause you some discomfort. But, if you’re the average post-Christian Eurosecularist, what does it matter? Who wants to be the last guy sitting in the office sharpening his pencil during morning prayers?

  The rowdier remnants of the old working class clutched at new political straws, variously neo-nationalist, quasi-fascist, and downright thuggish. The death-cult left plowed on, insisting that the world was overpopulating and the best thing you could do to save “the planet” was tie your tubes and abort your babies—or kill yourself. Nobody believes the planet-saving bit anymore, but they still abort their babies, out of a more general malaise. Even if you’re not suicidal, hospitals are prone to sudden power failures, tragic but economically beneficial: if you thought seniors were expensive at the turn of the century, wait until they’re demanding replacement organs grown by nanotechnology.

  Untroubled by immigrants, unburdened by grandchildren, dying alone and unloved, the aging Japanese were the first to take a flyer on the 58

  A few years earlier, Japan Logic Machine had developed the Yurina—not
the most appealing name, especially for a robot that spreads your legs and changes your diaper.59 But it was a huge success with the elderly and bedridden. It could turn down your bed, run your tub, and then lift you up and carry you over to it for an assisted bath. It wasn’t like the old robots of early sci-fi, with cold metallic claws pinching your aged, withered flesh. The Yurina’s hands were soft, softer than the calloused digits of the harassed human nurse one saw less and less of.

  Saitama University developed an advanced model—a robot that could anticipate your wishes by reading your face.60 It could tell you were looking at it, and knew enough about you to understand whether a particular facial expression meant you’d like a cup of tea or a tuna sashimi. Professor Yoshinori Kobayashi said this new“humanoid” (his term) was not just for senior centers, but for Tokyo restaurants, too. After all, an aging society has plenty of seniors who like to eat out on wedding anniversaries, but a smaller and smaller pool of potential waitresses. Professor Kobayashi’s prototype dressed like a French maid with white pinafore, cap and gloves, and black dress. A full wig of hair framed her wide-eyed Manga features. There are worse ways to end your days than as the surviving human element in an anime/live-action feature.

  The Japanese called these humanoids “welfare robots.” And I suppose, if you look at it like that, it was a more cost-effective welfare operation than the ugly bruisers of America’s public sector unions with their unaffordable benefits and pensions. But it was a melancholy comment on the fin de civilisation West that even this most futuristic innovation was driven by the fact that there were too many members of the dependent class and not enough people for them to depend on.