After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (44 page)

The Netherlands—“the most tolerant country in Europe,” to revive the long obsolete cliché—proved an especially instructive example. In a peculiarly enthusiastic form of prostration, the Dutch state adopted

“shoot the messenger” as a universal cure-all for “Islamophobia.” To some, Holland had once meant tulips, clogs, windmills, fingers in the dike. To others, it meant marijuana cafés, long-haired soldiers, legalized hookers, fingers in the dyke. But by the second decade of the twenty-first century it was an increasingly incoherent polity where gays were bashed, uncovered women got jeered in the streets, and you couldn’t do
The Diary of Anne
Frank
as your school play lest the Gestapo walk-ons be greeted by audience cries of “She’s in the attic!” There was, of course, some pushback from extreme right-wing racist extremists, if by “extreme right-wing racists” you mean the gay hedonist Pim Fortuyn, the anti-monarchist coke-snorting 300

after america

nihilist Theo van Gogh, and the secular liberal black feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. If they objected to the “extreme” labeling, it wasn’t for long: in the Low Countries Islam’s critics tended to wind up either banned (Belgium’s Vlaams Blok), forced into exile (Miss Ali), or dead (Fortuyn and van Gogh).

It was not “ironic” that the most liberal country in western Europe should be so eager to descend into a revoltingly illiberal servitude. It was entirely foreseeable. Justifying extraordinary levels of mass immigration first as narrowly defined economic self-interest and then as moral vanity, Europe made its principal source of new Europeans a population whose primal identity derived from a belief system that claimed total jurisdiction over every aspect of their lives. They were then amazed to discover that that same population of new “Europeans” assumed that all European social, cultural, and political life should realign itself with that belief system. Perhaps they should have considered that possibility earlier. Geert Wilders, a Member of Parliament, was prosecuted, ostensibly for “Islamophobia” but essentially because he was an apostate, a dissenter from the state religion of multiculturalism.32 It was a heresy trial, the first of many. And, in that sense at least, the European establishment unwittingly eased the transition from

“multicultural tolerance” to the more explicitly unicultural and intolerant regimes that followed.

To state the obvious again, the world after America is less Jewish. “Sixty percent of Amsterdam’s orthodox community intends to emigrate from Holland,”33 said Benzion Evers, the son of the city’s chief rabbi, five of whose children had already left by 2010. When he walked the streets of his home-town, the young Mr. Evers hid his skullcap under a baseball cap. Seemed like old times. “Jews with a conscience should leave Holland, where they and their children have no future, leave for the U.S. or Israel,” advised Frits Bolkestein, former EU Commissioner and head of the Dutch Liberal Party.

“Anti-Semitism will continue to exist, because the Moroccan and Turkish youngsters don’t care about efforts for reconciliation.” Minheer Bolkestein was not (yet) asking what else those “youngsters” didn’t care for, but like after 301

many other secular Dutchmen with no interest in Jews one way or the other, he soon found out.

The droller Saudi princes and other bankrollers of the new Caliphate occasionally marveled at posterity’s jest: as paradoxical as it might sound, the Holocaust had enabled the Islamization of Europe. Without post-war guilt, and the revulsion against nationalism, and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, the Continent would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Dublin to Dusseldorf and the accommodation of Muslim sensitivities on everything from the design of British nursing uniforms to Brussels police doughnut consumption during Ramadan. The principal beneficiaries of European Holocaust guilt turned out to be not the Jews but the Muslims.

It took the West some time to accept another obvious truth—that a society that becomes more Muslim will have fewer homosexuals. In 2009, the Rainbow Palace, formerly Amsterdam’s most popular
homo-hotel
(in the Dutch vernacular), had announced it was renaming itself the Sharm and reorienting itself to Islamic tourism. Or as the felicitously named website allah.eu put it: “Gay Hotel Turns Muslim.”34

If you were a nice young couple from San Francisco planning a honey-moon in “the most tolerant city in Europe,” it was helpful to make sure your travel brochure was up to date. Within a decade, many of the Continent’s once gay-friendly cities were on the brink of majority-Muslim status. But, long before that statistical milestone was reached, the gay moment in Amsterdam, Oslo, and elsewhere was over.

As for the Jews and gays, so for the feminists. In the Muslim housing projects of France, according to the official statistics, the number of rapes rose by an annual 15 to 20 percent throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century.35 One victim of routine rape in
les banlieues
, the late Samira Bellil, had published an autobiography called
Dans l’enfer des tournantes
—“In the hell of the take-your-turns,” the
tournante
being the slang term used by Muslim youths for gang-rape.36 “There are only two kinds of girls,” wrote Mlle. Bellil, who was gang-raped all night at the age of fourteen.

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“Good girls stay home, clean the house, take care of their brothers and sisters, and only go out to go to school.” Whereas those who “wear make-up, to go out, to smoke, quickly earn the reputation as ‘easy’ or as ‘little whores.’”

Lest Muslim girls find themselves in a moment of weakness tempted toward the Paris Hilton side of the tracks, the British National Health Service began offering “hymen reconstruction” surgery in order not to diminish their value to prospective husbands.37

When Miss Bellil published her book, her parents threw her out and her community disowned her. But her story discomforted those far beyond the Muslim ghettoes. These facts were too cold and plain to be expressed in a multicultural society which had told itself that, thanks to the joys of diversity, a nice gay couple and a polygamous Muslim with three wives in identical niqabs can live side by side at 27 and 29 Elm Street. In the
New
York Times
, the eminent philosopher Martha Nussbaum explained why she objected to moves to ban the burqa in European cities: “My judgment about Turkey in the past,” Nussbaum wrote, “was that the ban on veiling was justified, in those days, by a compelling state interest—derived from the belief that women were at risk of physical violence if they went unveiled, unless the government intervened to make the veil illegal for all. Today in Europe the situation is utterly different, and no physical violence will greet the woman who wears even scanty clothing.”38

How absurd those lazy assumptions read today. But why did they not seem so to Ms. Nussbaum and her editors back in 2010? Even then, no young girl could safely walk in “scanty clothing” through Clichy-sous-Bois or Rosengard. In La Courneuve in France, 77 percent of covered women said they wore the veil to “avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols,” as the writer Claire Berlinski put it. She added: “We are talking about France, not Iran.”39

As a young man, long ago, I would often find myself at dinner sitting next to a Middle Eastern lady of a certain age. And the conversation went as it often does when you’re with Muslim women who were at college in the Sixties, Seventies, or Eighties. In one case, my dining companion had after 303

just been at a conference on “women’s issues,” of which there were many in the Muslim world, and she was struck by the phrase used by the “moderate Muslim” chair of the meeting: “authentic women”—by which the chair meant women wearing hijabs. And my friend pointed out that when she and her unveiled girlfriends had been in their twenties
they
were the

“authentic women”: “covering” was for old village biddies, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. It would never have occurred to her that the assumptions of her generation would prove to be off by 180

degrees—that in middle age she would see young Muslim women wearing a garb largely alien to their tradition not just in the Middle East but in Brussels and London and Montreal.

I have before me two photographs—first, the Cairo University class of 1978, with every woman bare-headed; second, the Cairo University class of 2004, with every woman hijabed to the hilt.40

Even as late as 2020, you would still hear some or other complacenik shrug, “Oh, but they haven’t had time to westernize. Just you wait and see.

Give it another twenty years, and the siren song of westernization will work its magic.” The argument wasn’t merely speculative, it had already been proved wrong by what had happened over the previous twenty years. I have a third photograph: the Cairo University class of 1959, with every woman in a blouse and skirt or summer frock, and hair styled no differently from suburban housewives in Westchester County.41 Cairo University in 1959

looked like London. Now London University looks like Cairo. But western liberals stuck with inevitablist theories of social evolution till the end, convinced that women’s rights and gay rights were like the wheel or the internal combustion engine—that once you’d invented them they can’t be un-invented. Instead, tides rise, and then ebb.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, major cities in the heart of the “free world” became less free, and then unfree. An American tourist—

a 28-year-old blonde child-woman from Professor Nussbaum’s class at the University of Chicago—would not be able to walk through the streets of Amsterdam and Brussels without either being accompanied by men fit 304

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enough to ward off any predators or, alternatively, being “covered,” initially in the minimalist headscarf style once favored by Hillary Clinton making an official visit to a moderate Arab emirate but soon in something far more smothering. To do otherwise was to risk ending up like Samira Bellil. Western feminist groups, victors in the war against the stern patriarchy of 1950s sitcom dads, for the most part retreated silently—or persuaded themselves, like the Australian feminist Germaine Greer in her effusions about female genital mutilation, to applaud the new oppressor.42

And so the world after America celebrates less diversity. It had been fascinating to watch the strange men and women who led the western world in twilight pass off their groveling cowardice as debonair courage. As President Obama was making his now forgotten prostrations in Cairo, his Secretary of State was hectoring the Zionist Entity, regarding the West Bank, that there has to be “a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”43 No “natural growth”? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you’ve got to talk gran’ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn, or wherever? Consciously or not, Mrs. Clinton had endorsed “the Muslim world’s position on infidels who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: the Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Obama have been comfortable mandating “no natural growth” to Israel’s million-and-a-half Muslims? No. Yet the administration had no difficulty embracing the “the Muslim world’s confident belief in one-way multiculturalism, under which Islam expands in the West but Christianity and Judaism shrivel inexorably in the Middle East, Pakistan, and elsewhere. When General Maude’s British Indian Army took Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, they found a city whose population was 40 percent Jewish.44 By the end of the twentieth century, Iraq was just another spot on the map where the only Jews are in the cemetery. And why stop there? In 2003 President Bush’s “coalition of the willing” took Baghdad from Saddam Hussein. There were at that time an estimated million or so Christians in Iraq. By 2010, their numbers had fallen by half.45 In October that year, after 305

Muslim terrorists entered Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad and murdered two priests and over fifty congregants.46 That December only one Christian church in the city formally observed Christmas, but Christian families were still singled out for violence and death in their homes.47 This happened on America’s watch—while Iraq was a protectorate of the global hyperpower. Soon Baghdad’s Christians would join Baghdad’s Jews as an historical footnote, a community to be found only in weed-choked,

garbage-strewn graveyards.

Even as Christians were explicitly targeted from Nigeria to Egypt to Pakistan, Katie Couric, the stupefying purveyor of conventional wisdom on CBS News, proclaimed “Islamophobia” to be one of the year’s most unreported stories.48 Like the earlier coinage of “homophobia,” Islamophobia was a mental illness whose only symptom was the accusation of having it. Islam reviled homosexuality but not so much that it wasn’t above appropriating the tropes of identity-group victimhood for its own purposes. It worked. President Obama made fawning speeches boasting that “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”49 How brave of him! But what about the Muslim women who choose not to cover themselves and wind up beaten, brutalized, and the victims of “honor killing”? No, not just in Waziristan and Yemen, but in Germany and Scandinavia and Ontario—and in Buffalo and Peoria, too. Ah, but that would have required real courage, not audience flattery and rhetorical narcissism masquerading as such. When Matthew Shepard was hung out to die on a fence in Wyoming, he became instantly the poster child for an epidemic of “anti-gay” hate sweeping America: books, plays, films were produced about him. Frank Rich, the distinguished columnist of the
New York Times
, had to be restrained from writing about him every week. If there had been a Matthew Shepard murder every few months, Mr. Rich et al would have been going bananas about the “climate of hate.”

Yet you could run over your daughter in Peoria (Noor Almaleki),50 decapitate your wife in Buffalo (Aasiya Hassan),51 drown your three teenage daughters and your first wife in Kingston, Ontario (the Shafia family),52