Monday, August 21, 2006
Another insightful, if also gloomy, piece by Mark Steyn
Money quote to me:
September 11th 2001 was not “the day everything changed”, but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On September 10th, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their rolodexes? If you’d said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century’s principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.
But it’s important to remember: radical Islam is only the top-eighth of that iceberg – it’s an opportunist enemy taking advantage of a demographically declining and spiritually decayed west. The real issue is the seven-eighths below the surface – the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are:
i) Demographic decline;
ii) The unsustainability of the social democratic state;
iii) Civilizational exhaustion.
None of these is Islam’s fault. They’re self-inflicted.
It's a great point to remember. A lot of the problems we face aren't Islam's fault per se. It's a product of the West's own decadence (i.e. not being proud of our culture) that has created this vacuum that Islam is seeking to fill. A proud West that knew what it stood for wouldn't have let oilfields developed by western companies be nationalized for starters. Read the whole thing.
Money quote to me:
September 11th 2001 was not “the day everything changed”, but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On September 10th, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their rolodexes? If you’d said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century’s principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.
But it’s important to remember: radical Islam is only the top-eighth of that iceberg – it’s an opportunist enemy taking advantage of a demographically declining and spiritually decayed west. The real issue is the seven-eighths below the surface – the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are:
i) Demographic decline;
ii) The unsustainability of the social democratic state;
iii) Civilizational exhaustion.
None of these is Islam’s fault. They’re self-inflicted.
It's a great point to remember. A lot of the problems we face aren't Islam's fault per se. It's a product of the West's own decadence (i.e. not being proud of our culture) that has created this vacuum that Islam is seeking to fill. A proud West that knew what it stood for wouldn't have let oilfields developed by western companies be nationalized for starters. Read the whole thing.
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