Three years ago, October 2006, America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It was officially published in the US and Canada, and I spent most of that first week from 5am onwards sitting in an hotel room in New York doing back-to-back radio interviews punctuated by occasional sallies forth into midtown TV studios for appearances with Hannity & Colmes et al. It's been an eventful three years, leading not just to paperback and foreign editions but three investigations for "flagrant Islamophobia" and (just this very month) an appearance before the Canadian Parliament. Sometimes in all the ructions, the main thrust of my thesis get lost, but I believe the central points hold up better than ever - and are borne out by news stories on an almost daily basis: a) This demographic transformation is happening very fast; and b) In the end, it's not about "them", it's about "us". Are there characteristics particular to western civilization that are worth defending? If we don't think there are, why would anybody else?
If these chaps at "The Official" are anything to go by, complacency remains the order of the day. I'm flattered they thought the third anniversary of my hate crime was worth observing, but honestly, it's very boring to trudge the same old nothing-to-see-here bromides. For example:
As if shoddy sourcing isn’t enough, what can be said about an article based on current demographic trends, and using those trends to make extrapolations of what the world will look like more than thirty years later?
Actually, demography isn't really about prediction. For example, we know how many ethnic Italian 20-year olds will be available to enter the workforce in 2029 because every single one of them is in the nursery right now. And if, as in Italy and Germany and elsewhere, you need a certain number to prevent the total collapse of your entitlement system, you have to recruit them from elsewhere. Which will entail certain consequences. Perhaps good, perhaps bad. But the notion that nothing will change when (as in the next five-to-ten years) Amsterdam, Brussels et al become majority Muslim cities is ridiculous. Furthermore, once you reach a certain level of weakness, demographic recovery is very difficult, if not impossible. That stage, according to demographers, is a TFR of 1.3, from which no society has ever recovered. Seventeen European nations are at or below that. Maybe those populations will recover to some degree, but by then their societies will be very Muslim in their sociocultural character.
Maybe things'll work out swell. But at this end of month, purely by coincidence, I'll be in London for the so-called "Sharia March" on Trafalgar Square. It will be interesting to see how many Muslims march, how many dissociate themselves from the demands for Islamic law - and how many just stay silent. In the meantime, scroll down for a third-birthday selection of critiques and interviews - but, before the various raves and pans, I thought it would be appropriate to include something of a mixed review, from The Claremont Review Of Books, penned by my old Spectator colleague, Theodore Dalrymple:
The gelded age
Steyn's jokes are often brilliant, not only because they are verbally inventive, but because they make a serious point. (Not all quite hit the mark, but that is because he makes so many.) Quoting the Imam al-Qaradawi, for example, to the effect that "Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these bombs must continue until liberation," Steyn comments, "Thank heaven for little girls; they blow up in the most delightful way." This captures perfectly — much better than any mere fulmination could — the depraved moral frivolity of the imam's statement. Steyn's brilliance as a columnist, however, does not transfer perfectly to book length...
I said early on to interviewers that I would be interested to see a great left-wing takedown of the book. The New York Times passed, and The Globe And Mail signed a guy for the task only to have him pronounce the book utterly vulgar and leave it at that. So a lot of lefties got very excited back in March last year when The New Statesman published the following demolition job by Johann Hari:
Apocalypse now?
This is not presented as fanatical fodder for a party political broadcast fronted by Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is the straight-faced prediction of a book that has slithered on to the New York Times bestseller list and captured the imagination of the American right. Mark Steyn, an uneducated former disc jockey turned pundit, is today being greeted as a sage by the likes of Dick Cheney....
Several readers wanted me to respond to Mr Hari but I felt the comments below the review did a pretty good job. America Alone does not give a date for when Muslims become the "majority" in Europe, because that depends on a combination of factors that only a fool would attempt to predict precisely - not just birthrates, but accelerating immigration, and accelerating emigration such as we're already seeing from France and the Netherlands, and accelerating conversion: a senior British copper told me a few weeks ago that in the last year 100,000 people converted to Islam in the UK, which, if true, is staggering.
However, as I say in the book, it is not necessary for Islam to become a statistical majority: Of countries with a Muslim population of 20-50 per cent, only three are ranked as "free" - Serbia, Suriname and Benin. So what matters is the point at which mediation between Islam and the rest of the community becomes the dominant political narrative. And for Mr Hari to think predictions of Euro-Muslim electoral success are preposterous ignores the fact that already, right now, in the governing Socialist Party of the capital city of the European Union, ten of the 18 council members are Muslim. So what does he think Brussels will be like in another ten years? One can argue about what this transformation means, or even about the rate of transformation, but to deny there's anything going on involves a profound suspension of disbelief. This next piece, by a refugee from an earlier division of Europe, is more persuasive. I was very chuffed (as they say in Mr Hari's country) to be commended by the great George Jonas, Canada's leading intellectual, if that doesn't sound like damning with faint praise:
Epic battles, worthy scribes
One of the most gifted writer-commentators writing in English today, or indeed in any language, Steyn combines the tone and tradition of several illustrious predecessors, from H. L. Mencken to Auberon Waugh, in a style that ultimately doesn't resemble anyone else's...
Unlike the Canadian thinker, The American Thinker reckoned I wimped out:
Will Islam dominate the future?
Unfortunately, like so many other conservative commentators who take a hard line in the present 'war on terror,' Steyn does not come out and say what he surely must mean — which is that Islam itself is the enemy...
Well, suppose the western world attempted (as John Derbyshire argues it should) to ring-fence itself from Islam. Even if not another Muslim immigrant set foot in Europe, the Continent would still Islamify just through those already there (plus conversion). If 90 per cent of the population have 1.3 kids per couple (the Euro-average) and 10 per cent have 3.5 kids per couple (the Euro-Muslim estimate), the 10 per cent catch up to the 90 per cent within two generations. According to the official British government statistics agency, British Muslims are breeding ten times faster than the general population. In other words, it's a bit late to pull up the drawbridge - even if the political will to do so existed.
And, in a broader sense, declaring somebody "the enemy" is a waste of time unless you're prepared to declare yourself the good guy, and too many western nations no longer believe in their own cultures. And, on that gloomy note, here's one of the first TV interviews I did for the book, with Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Report:
Doomsday scenario
The Muslims understand that Europe is the next colony now...
As I said, one of the disappointments of those early days was the lack of a really good liberal takedown. The book hit the New York Times bestseller list that first week, and Number Six at Amazon.com, and Number One at Amazon.ca, and was still Number One on several Canadian lists as late as the following February. But the Times, as it often does with "surprise" conservative bestsellers (there's apparently no other kind), ignored the book, and its Canadian equivalent, Toronto's Globe And Mail, assigned it to William Christian, who pronounced magisterially:
Conservatives: radical and ...well ...conservative
America Alone is quite possibly the most crass and vulgar book about the West's relationship with the Islamic world I have ever encountered.
Now that's what I call a money quote! Mr Christian states the book's thesis, but he doesn't actually say what's wrong with it. He sniffs that it's "crass and vulgar" and recoils from it aesthetically, but declines to say what, if anything, is the flaw in the argument. Oh, well. (He then goes on to rave about Andrew Sullivan's paean to the "conservatism of doubt" - a book for which, alas, there was no market.) Around that time, my old pal Natasha Hassan would call me up every few weeks to dangle enticing offers to come to The Globe And Mail, but I'd always refer her to Mr Christian's pan of the book. "Oh, come on," said Natasha. "You're bigger than that." "No, I'm not," I'd say. "I don't mind the bad review, but I think your editors should have made the guy explain why it's so bad. I can't possibly consider an offer from a paper with such loose editing standards." Here, by way of contrast, is John Weidner's post from Random Jottings:
Avoiding the real problems...
We are witnessing a great bonfire of failures of everything we hate...
If The New York Times ignored it and The Globe And Mail found it distasteful, The Times of London, The Australian and various European newspapers took it seriously enough. More surprising was the reaction from the political class. Presidents and Prime Ministers on three continents have invited me in to talk about the book's thesis. Senator Jon Kyl gave copies to all 99 of his colleagues, and Senator Joe Lieberman enjoyed the read so much that he started citing it in interviews, which pretty much was the final confirmation to the Daily Kos crowd that the guy had flown the coop. It's been recommended by Congressmen, too. My columnar confrere Kathleen Parker gave the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a copy, and at least one of last season's Presidential candidates read it. A handful of movie and TV stars wrote to say how much they'd enjoyed it, but please not to tell anyone as they wanted to keep working. The book also cropped up in several big-picture essays, including this one by Orson Scott Card that looks back to Rome and then uses America Alone for its thesis on our own prospects:
How our civilization can fall
Steyn is a gun-totin' anti-big-government conservative, and especially toward the end, he tries to tie his whole belief system into the argument. Ignore that...
Here's one of the earliest interviews I did about the book, with Linda Frum from Canada's National Post:
The man who likes to poke the world in the eye
One of your best qualities is that you're so insensitive...
It reads a little differently in the wake of the subsequent "human rights" suits. Here's another early interview I gave about the book, to Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review:
If you only read one book this year...
Now you mention it I’m furious they didn’t say the most compelling and important book since Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire at least. What kind of cheeseparing publicity department damns their own author with faint praise about the most compelling book merely of the last decade? It’s hardly my place to do the big butch “If you only read one book this year” commercial, and if I did I’d probably make do with “If you only read one book this year make it …the new Harry Potter. But if you read three a week you might consider getting to this one round about the eighth month.”
And don't forget, you can still order your personally autographed copy. If you were foolish enough not to give it last Christmas, it still makes a great gift this holiday season - in English, in French, in hardback, in paperback, on CD or on cassette.
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