Barrel Strength

I have been reading Theodore Dalrymple for years, describing the moral decrepitude of the United Kingdom. I read Mark Steyn’s America Alone, which said that large parts of Europe would not be part of Europe in fifty years, because the inhabitants will have been replaced by Muslims. I am reading Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, by Christopher Caldwell, who describes the massive consequences on every aspect of public safety, allowable civil discourse, the upsetting of all accepted customs, and the demographic future of Europe caused by large scale Muslim immigration and subsequent reproductive growth. Likewise I have read Ayan Ali Hirsi and several books by Robert Spencer including the Truth about Mohammed

Caldwell’s book is the most comprehensive and calm, and for this reason the most frightening. Caldwell describes the Islamic takeover  as akin to the Irish Catholic takeover of the world’s most Protestant city, Boston, from the 1840s to the 1860s. Only the change is immeasurably greater, because what changes is the civilization to which the city belongs. We can and do still drive to Boston, because we want to and can. We will not be going to Duisberg and dozens of other European post-industrial blights soon or ever, he implies. They will not be part of European civilization and we will not be welcome.

I am listening to the Imam of a Toronto mosque as I write. He is a powerful and effective preacher. What is most impressive,  however, is how he manages to portray the current operation of Ontario society around him, such as billboards featuring women in swimsuits - as somehow a train of offences against the Muslim community, and how each refusal immediately to change our society to suit Islamic customs is a set of intolerable insults. His confidence that it is the imperative duty of Canada to adjust to Islamic social mores,  is the more impressive for his indifference to the virtues of the society in which he dwells, or the fact that it has had a separate evolution outside Islam. The separate existence of Canadian society and its particular virtues are invisible to him. He may be an intelligent bigot from our point of view. From his, he is merely bringing correction to a sinful society. There will be no adjustment of any kind from this Somali imam; it will be our bounden duty to adjust Canada to his faith.  Please watch Niqab not Nifaaq at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hkvzlhCzC4

But this was not my tipping point. It came a few weeks ago when I struck a conversation with a pleasant Dutchman in a restaurant in Europe. He was the chief financial officer for a welfare foundation in Rotterdam, and had been at various times a lawyer and a businessman. Things went smoothly for a while but at a certain point I could not take  it any longer. Every cliché of the smug leftie-atheist European was offered as the unchallengeable truth:

• Obama deserved his Peace Prize, Bush was stupid and a drunk;
• Islamic women are leading the Islamic men into integration in the European economy (and therefore Islam is not threat);
• We have as much to worry about from Christians as we do Muslims;
• Europeans see things in their complexity, North Americans see things too simplistically;

 ”We are not as naive as you might think,” he told me. Well, actually, my Dutch friend, you are more naive than you can possible conceive.

A combination of personal experience and a wide reading into Islam and the phenomenon of mass Islamic immigration has convinced me of the following: Multiculturalism, which is a code for the essential valuelessness of the European Christian heritage and the equal validity of all cultures, and Islam, are as HIV to AIDS.  The defences: mental, spiritual, and demographic are weakend to the state that the body politic is powerless to resist a foreign invader.

Europe is in a very sick state and we may not be  far behind.