Yet another reason why Muslims hate us

Mark Steyn’s reach is so universal that even William Norman Grigg of The New American, the magazine of the John Birth Society, agrees with him, or at least with his widely touted thesis that low Western birthrates are the decisive factor leading to the Islamization of Europe. And Grigg does Steyn one better: he says that the West’s promotion of low birthrates is the very reason why Muslims resent us:

Whatever one thinks of the Muslim world, the inescapable fact is that Muslims, like people everywhere, will fight to the death if they believe that their families are threatened. This holds true as well when the perceived threat comes in the form of US efforts to evangelize on behalf of the gospel according to Planned Parenthood.

Talk about a two-fer. Our low birthrates not only make the Muslims fear us and want to destroy us, they enable them to do so.

Grigg’s theory of what it is about us that sparks the anti-American or anti-Western jihad supplements a long list of such explanations that have been proferred since 9/11, including our toxic pop culture, our rejection of the Kyoto Accords, and our failure to address hunger in the Muslim world. I don’t mean to sound insouciant. There are certainly many things about America and the West that annoy, frighten, and infuriate Muslims. And we, out of enlightened self-interest, should not unnecessarily do things that will stir them up against us. But it is wrong, and objectively anti-Western, to discuss any such supposed Western sins against Islam without reference to the nature of Islam itself, namely the fact that Islam can never accept the West no matter what the West does.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 17, 2006 01:50 AM | Send