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HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review
The other day I got an email from a British reader passing on a low-key press release announcing that the Department of Work and Pensions had ruled that polygamous men were entitle to receive spousal welfare benefits for each of their wives. My correspondent then wondered whether I’d planted someone deep within Her Majesty’s Government “who comes out with this stuff just to boost sales of your book?”
Well, no, that would be pretty expensive. Still, to reprise the line of Canadian cynics apropos the CIA’s belief that Pierre Trudeau was on the Soviet payroll: why bother paying someone when he’s prepared to do it for free? Every day around the developed world, minor government bureaucrats get advice from minor government lawyers and make small incremental adjustments to western civilization. “Where there is a valid polygamous marriage the claimant and one spouse will be paid the couple rate,” read the new British guidelines. “The amount payable for each additional spouse is presently £33.65.”
You can’t (for the moment) marry multiple wives within the United Kingdom, but if you contract a polygamous marriage in a jurisdiction where polygamy is legal, such as certain, ahem, Muslim countries, your better halves (or better eighths?) are now recognized as eligible for British welfare payments. Thus, the concept of “each additional spouse” has been accepted both de facto and de jure.
These stories come along every couple of days, and usually involve some hitherto unforeseen intersection of Islamization and state entitlements. The other week it was the revelation that Muslim girls were getting free, ah, “hymen replacements” on the National Health Service. Apparently, some female members of the Islamic community have been, er, over-assimilating in the Britney-on-a-Saturday-night-bender sense and, while it’s heartening to find Muslim gals who are indistinguishable from any homegrown Brit slattern, it can cause them some problems later on. As one expert explained, “Fundamentalism is spreading and these girls are getting sent back to their countries of origin to marry. And they will be rejected if it is found out that they are not virgins.” Hence, “hymen replacement”.
When these issues come up, the spokespersons for the political class focus on the question of taxpayers’ money: Start handing it out to guys for third wives and to child brides for hymen replacement, and there goes any budgetary restraint. But they don’t seem willing to contemplate what it means for the broader society a decade down the road. When Islam is your major source of population growth, well, then your country is going to be more Muslim. That’s a given. Critics of my book think that I don’t take into account the assimilatory powers of western society, and it’s certainly true there’s an element of cultural cross-pollination going on: You can’t get polygamous welfare benefits in Waziristan, and you can’t get free hymen replacement in Saudi Arabia. East is east and west is west and, though the twain do meet, a polygamist on welfare and a teen who sleeps around before going back to the old country for her arranged marriage would seem to be almost parodic definitions of the worst of both worlds.
Other Steyn naysayers think I’m carelessly assuming Muslims are an homogeneous bloc. Not at all. But the running is made by the most determined elements of the community, and the rest string along. So relatively few British Muslims are polygamous in practice, but even fewer will object to it in principle. Muslims have lived in the west a long time but it’s only in recent years that they’ve demanded, say, foot-washing facilities in public buildings. And, on the whole, a multicultural society is happy to accommodate them, even to the point of pre-emptively giving up on stuff they haven’t yet objected to – like the British prize judges who recently nixed a new version of The Three Little Pigs on the grounds that it might offend Muslims.
Johann Hari, a Euroleftie who strongly objects to me, thinks there’s nothing to see here: sure, there are more Muslims around, but another decade or two and most of them will be conventional secular Euro-hedonists just like everybody else. Mr Hari is gay. After 9/11, he wrote a column for The Guardian boasting that he’d gone undercover at a radical London mosque and wound up seducing one of the radical young jihadist wannabees – “Mohammed, a rather cute 19-year old lad.” Things went well, at least for Johann. “Mo was fairly easily coaxed. Of course, he felt a bit hung up about it afterwards.” Still, if only Mr Hari could work his magic on all the other cute young Mohammeds out there, he might yet save the Europe he loves.
Alas, not everyone has Johann’s powers of seduction. Bruce Bawer, a gay American who moved to Europe because he found it more “tolerant” than the US, recounted recently an assault on his partner by two Muslim youths in Oslo. The editor of the gay newspaper The Washington Blade was beaten up in 2005 by a Muslim gang in Amsterdam, once the most “tolerant” city in Europe. Many of Europe’s once gay-friendly cities are approaching majority Muslim status. When that happens, the gay moment in Amsterdam and Oslo will be over.
So in the western world the day after tomorrow there will be more polygamists and fewer gays …oh, and fewer Jews, too. On Holocaust Memorial Day, a ceremony in a formerly Jewish neighborhood of London’s East End was abruptly terminated when the visiting Jews were pelted with stones by (in the current euphemism) “Asian” youths. And, whatever the respective charms of polygamists and gays, the chosen people are surely redundant. For, in one of history’s bleaker jests, on an ever more Muslim Continent, it’s the Europeans who are the new Jews.
from National Review
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