Steyn’s inadequate response to Islam, part XIV

As I’ve said before, Mark Steyn’s columns consist of running riffs, not conceptual speech, and when it comes to substance, he often is on the other side, as when he accepted without a hint of demur (and even with a touch of Schadenfreude) the prospect of Europe’s becoming Islamized over the course of this century. One could perhaps find evidence of a shift toward greater seriousness in his latest article in the Spectator, in which he calls on the still-sleepy British public not to go on dealing with terrorism as a criminal and bureaucratic matter, but as war. A call for “warlike measures” appears in the article’s title and is repeated in the text. But what this war should consist of, says Steyn, is destroying the “ideology” of “Islamism.” So this “war” is nothing new. He also suggests that the British:

stop funding the intifada, reclaim lost sovereignty from Europe, imprison and/or expel treasonous imams, end the education system’s psychologically unhealthy and ahistorical disparagement of the Britannic inheritance in your schools.

In saying these things, Steyn fancies himself the hard-liner, and, compared to Britain’s dhimmified masses and elites, he certainly is one. But in reality he is still playing at the edge of the issue. Since he declines to identify the real enemy, his “war” to destroy the “ideology of Islamism” is both too ambitious and not nearly ambitious enough, as when he talks about changing curriculum and expelling a handful of troublesome clerics. A war to destroy the ideology of Islamism is too ambitious because the ideology of Islamism is identical with Islam itself. The attempt to destroy the belief system of millions of European Muslims (not to mention of 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide) would involve endless propaganda, endless outreach efforts to “moderates,” and endless scrutiny of Muslims’ statements in an attempt to verify that they have really given up their belief in jihad. This is not war, it is ethnic and religious engineering on a global scale, a ridiculous fantasy, leading, at best, to endless disappointment.

At the same time, as I said, a war to destroy Islamist ideology is not ambitious enough. In World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill, whom all the Bush and Blair supporters love to quote, did not say, “We’re waging a war to destroy the Nazi ideology.” No, they waged a war to destroy the military power and the regime of Nazi Germany, so that it could no longer threaten Europe. Uprooting the Nazi ideology came afterward and, compared to the rigors of the war itself, was a mere clean-up operation. So, what would a real war to destroy the power of Islamism to threaten Europe consist of? It would consist of removing all jihadist Muslims from Europe, not just a few radical imams, as necessary as that is. Similarly, while reclaiming Britain’s lost sovereignty from the EU and junking the anti-British educational system are, in addition to being vitally important goals in themselves, indispensable adjuncts of such a war effort, they are not the war itself. We must not wage a chimerical war. Reforming the schools does not accomplish the task, and destroying Islamism is beyond our power. We cannot destroy Islamism, because we cannot destroy Islam, short of the nuclear destruction of a billion people. What is within our power is to defeat Islam in the West, by removing Islam from the West.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 28, 2005 02:29 PM | Send