Conservative: Steyn’s view of Islam logically requires cessation of Muslim immigration

In a review of Mark Steyn’s America Alone published last November, Steven Warshawsky dissects Steyn’s argument in terms that, except for his polite and respectful tone, could have come right from VFR. He sees Steyn’s recommendations as wholly inadequate to help us face the Islamic threat that Steyn describes. Without a call to stop Muslim immigration, Warshawsky writes, Steyn’s warnings about Islam are an exercise in inconsequentiality. And this was at the neocon website The American Thinker (the editor of which is known in these parts as the American Thuggee). Here are a couple of excerpts, but the whole review is recommended.

Yet after spending page after page highlighting the demographic disaster that awaits Europe (and to a much lesser extent the United States), Steyn fails to state the logical conclusion, which is that Muslim immigration must be stopped. Period.

If one believes, as Steyn clearly does (with strong support from the evidence), that Muslims as a group not only are not assimilating into Western culture but are actively hostile toward the very principles upon which our societies are built, then it is “suicidal” (a term frequently used by Steyn) to permit millions of Muslims to take up residence within our countries.

Of course, such a blanket policy would be unfair towards the many individual Muslims who do not share the militant worldview of their co—religionists. Nevertheless, if 80 percent of Muslims cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of the Western nations in which they live (to use the British poll numbers cited above), then the only rational policy is to exclude Muslims altogether. However, nowhere in America Alone does Steyn dare utter this obvious, if uncomfortable, truth….

Warshawsky also catches out Steyn on the vacancy of his constant call for a renewal of Western “confidence.” As I’ve asked a hundred times, once the West regains its confidence, what do Steyn and his fellow “renewal of confidence” promoters actually want us to do? Steyn never answers, because what a newly confident West would do is suppress Islam in the West:

With any significant resurgence of nationalism, however, will come, inevitably, ethnic and religious chauvinism. While such chauvinism does not have to devolve into murderous fascism, it will result in a less tolerant and accommodating attitude towards foreigners. For many Americans and Europeans, schooled for decades in the self—denying pieties of multiculturalism, this will be seen as something very bad, worse even than Islamic domination.

But ethnic and religious chauvinism is at the heart of the “civilizational confidence” that Steyn rightly ascribes to the Muslim world. Recall the Muslim protesters in London last year boldly holding signs that read “Behead Those Who Insult Islam” and “Europe You Will Pay” (all because of a few “blasphemous” cartoons in a Dutch newspaper). Without a similar sense of “civilizational confidence,” the West—including the United States—will be unable to preserve its distinctive way of life. It’s as simple as that.

While it’s unfortunate that Warshawsky places the hope of renewed Western civilzational confidence in the same context as “confident” Muslims calling for beheadings of infidels, his main point is clear and correct: a return of Western civilizational confidence would mean a rejection of the liberal and neoconservative belief in total openness toward non-Westerners. And since Steyn doesn’t even mention immigration restrictions, his calls for renewed Western confidence are as empty and fake as his warnings about the dangers of Islam.

On another issue, Warshawsky is also outside neoconservative orthodoxy on Iraq, writing at The American Thinker last September that President Bush made a terrible mistake by fighting a war to spread democracy instead of a war to protect our national interests. Here is his article and his response to critics.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 19, 2007 04:40 PM | Send