G. writes:
I have made this argument myself many times, most recently just five days ago, when I wrote:
In reality, a Christian West that believed in itself and rejected Islam, as Rushdie would like it to do, would also be a Christian West that would never have allowed Salman Rushdie and millions of non-Western immigrants into the West in the first place.
I didn’t think Steyn ever read me, but now I suspect that he is reading me and that he picked up on this when responding to the Gates of Vienna article, which was posted yesterday, November 21. (Warning: when clicking on a link to that website, be prepared to wait for a long time for it to load.)
As for John’s question whether the argument is a tautology, I don’t think so, at least not in the way I use it.
Steyn and other neocons keep saying, “We have these problems with multiculturalism and Islamization because we’ve lost belief in our ideas, in our culture. If we believed in our ideas, our culture, we wouldn’t have these problems.”
My reply to this statement is that that a country that believed in itself would not have admitted all those non-Western immigrants in the first place. But the neocons want it both ways. They want to imagine that we could let all those people in, and then, by some magical operation of “believing in our ideas,” we could also assimilate them all. Going back to 1990, the neocon position is to oppose multiculturalism while fanatically supporting the mass non-Western immigration that is the main force driving multiculturalism.
This leads to the question, is Steyn’s comment serious? Is he saying that if the British regained their self-confidence, he would like to see them deport their Muslims? Such a notion is so far out of step with anything he has ever written,—he has never before even touched on the question of reducing the immigration of Muslims, let alone of deporting Muslim populations—that I can’t believe he means it, especially as he’s making this comment in an offhand aside underneath an ad for his book. Instead, he’s playing games, trying to throw his critics off balance. In my view, nothing Steyn says is truly serious. He’s a postmodern performance artist who has discovered to his amazement, delight, and profit that the conservative reading public is endlessly gullible to his tricksterism. Lately, he has found that talking about birthrates adds the image of “serious thinker” to his reputation as a brilliant mocker of leftist idiocies, and so that has now become his major scam.
Also, Gates of Vienna writes:
Critics would claim that Mr. Steyn isn’t contributing to maintaining Western willpower by suggesting that we’ve already lost. Still, I shouldn’t be too hard on him. The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations denounced his article as “Islamophobic, inflammatory and offensive.” If CAIR dislikes you, you know you must be doing something right.
I don’t agree. If it is your purpose to eliminate the possibility of effective Western resistance to Islam, what better device than to make arguments that would actually lead to Western surrender to Islam, while making the world think that you are a major enemy of Islam? Having Muslims attack him as an Islamophobe is Steyn’s perfect cover.
This le Carré-esque technique is part and parcel of the entire Bush/neoconservatve agenda. Bush and the neocons gain a reputation as right-wing reactionaries for pursuing the utopian project of promoting democracy in Muslim lands, while they continue to support the immigration policies leading to the actual Islamization of Western lands. Yet people on the right are loathe to criticize Bush and the neocons for this, since, after all, the Muslims regard them them as Islamophobes, and, as Gates of Vienna puts it, if CAIR dislikes you, you must be doing something right.