Author: Mark Steyn
Publication: National Review Online
Date: February 21, 2009
URL: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmVhYzRmOGYzYmQ3ODRhYjBiMzllYzc2NDNhZmZjMzU=
Degrees of accommodation.
'It is hard to understand this deal,"
said Richard Holbrooke, President Obama's special envoy. And, if the special
envoy of the so-called smartest and most impressive administration in living
memory can't understand it, what chance do the rest of us have?
Nevertheless, let's try. In the Swat Valley, where a young Winston Churchill
once served with the Malakand Field Force battling Muslim insurgents, his
successors have concluded the game isn't worth the candle. In return for a
temporary ceasefire, the Pakistani government agreed to let the local franchise
of the Taliban impose its industrial strength version of sharia across the
whole of Malakand Region. If "region" sounds a bit of an imprecise
term, Malakand has over five million people, all of whom are now living under
a murderous theocracy. Still, peace rallies have broken out all over the Swat
Valley, and, at a Swat peace rally, it helps to stand well back: As one headline
put it, "Journalist Killed While Covering Peace Rally."
But don't worry about Pakistani nukes falling
into the hands of "extremists": The Swat Valley is a good hundred
miles from the "nation"'s capital, Islamabad - or about as far as
Northern Vermont is from Southern Vermont. And, of course, Islamabad is safely
under the control of the famously moderate Ali Zardari. A few days before
the Swat deal, Mr. Zardari marked the dawn of the Obama era by releasing from
house arrest A. Q. Khan, the celebrated scientist and one-stop shop for all
your Islamic nuclear needs, for whose generosity North Korea and Iran are
especially grateful.
From Islamabad, let us zip a world away to
London. Actually, it's nearer than you think. The flight routes between Pakistan
and the United Kingdom are some of the busiest in the world. Can you get a
direct flight from your local airport to, say, Bradford?
Where?
Bradford, Yorkshire. There are four flights
a week from Islamabad to Bradford, a town where 75 percent of Pakistani Britons
are married to their first cousins. But don't worry, in the country as a whole,
only 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to first cousins.
Among that growing population of Yorkshire
Pakistanis is a fellow called Lord Ahmed, a Muslim member of Parliament. He
was in the news the other day for threatening (as the columnist Melanie Phillips
put it) "to bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the House
of Lords" if it went ahead with an event at which the Dutch parliamentarian
Geert Wilders would have introduced a screening of his controversial film
Fitna. Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, reacted to this by declaring
Minheer Wilders persona non grata and having him arrested at Heathrow and
returned to the Netherlands.
The Home Secretary is best known for an inspired
change of terminology: Last year she announced that henceforth Muslim terrorism
(an unhelpful phrase) would be reclassified as "anti-Islamic activity."
Seriously. The logic being that Muslims blowing stuff up tends not to do much
for Islam's reputation - i.e., it's an "anti-Islamic activity" in
the same sense that Pearl Harbor was an anti-Japanese activity.
Anyway, Geert Wilders's short film is basically
a compilation video of footage from various recent Muslim terrorist atrocities
- whoops, sorry, "anti-Islamic activities" - accompanied by the
relevant chapter and verse from the Koran. Jacqui Smith banned the filmmaker
on "public order" grounds - in other words, the government's fear
that Lord Ahmed meant what he said about a 10,000-strong mob besieging the
Palace of Westminster. You might conceivably get the impression from Wilders's
movie that many Muslims are irrational and violent types it's best to steer
well clear of. But, if you didn't, Jacqui Smith pretty much confirmed it:
We can't have chaps walking around saying Muslims are violent because they'll
go bananas and smash the place up.
So, confronted by blackmail, the British government
caved. So did the Pakistani government in Swat. But, in fairness to Islamabad,
they waited until the shooting was well underway before throwing in the towel.
In London, you no longer have to go that far. You just give the impression
your more excitable chums might not be able to restrain themselves. "Nice
little G7 advanced western democracy you got here. Shame if anything were
to happen to it." Twenty years ago this month, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative
ministry defended the right of a left-wing author Salman Rushdie to publish
a book in the face of Muslim riots and the Ayatollah Khomeini's attempted
mob hit. Two decades on, a supposedly progressive government surrenders to
the mob before it's even taken to the streets.
In his first TV interview as president, Barack
Obama told viewers of al-Arabiya TV that he wanted to restore the "same
respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently
as 20 or 30 years ago." I'm not sure quite what golden age he's looking
back to there - the Beirut barracks slaughter? the embassy hostages? - but
the point is, it's very hard to turn back the clock. Because the facts on
the ground change, and change remorselessly. Even in 30 years. Between 1970
and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the global
population to just over 20 percent, while the Muslim world increased from
15 percent to 20 percent. And in 2030, it won't even be possible to re-take
that survey, because by that point half the "developed world" will
itself be Muslim: In Bradford - as in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and almost
every other western European city from Malmo to Marseilles - the principal
population growth comes from Islam. Thirty years ago, in the Obama golden
age, a British documentary-maker was so horrified by the "honor killing"
of a teenage member of the House of Saud at the behest of her father, the
king's brother, that he made a famous TV film about it, Death Of A Princess.
The furious Saudis threatened a trade boycott with Britain over this unwanted
exposure. Today, we have honor killings not just in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan,
but in Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, Toronto, Dallas, and Buffalo. And they
barely raise an eyebrow.
Along with the demographic growth has come
radicalization: It's not just that there are more Muslims, but that, within
that growing population, moderate Islam is on the decline - in Singapore,
in the Balkans, in northern England - and radicalized, Arabized, Wahhabized
Islam is on the rise. So we have degrees of accommodation: surrender in Islamabad,
appeasement in London, acceptance in Toronto and Buffalo.
According to ABC News, a team of UCLA professors
have used biogeographic theories to locate Osama bin Laden's hideout as one
of three possible houses in the small town of Parachinar, and have suggested
to the Pentagon they keep an eye on these buildings. But the problem isn't
confined to three buildings. It ripples ever outwards, to the new hardcore
sharia state in Malakand, up the road to nuclear Islamabad, over to Bradford
on that jet-speed conveyor-belt of child brides, down to the House of Lords
and beyond.
Meanwhile, President Obama has removed Winston
Churchill's bust from the Oval Office and returned it to the British. Given
what Sir Winston had to say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign,
the bust will almost certainly be arrested at Heathrow and deported as a threat
to public order.
- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist,
is author of America Alone.
