A Growing Consensus (Hopefully)

After much meandering, there is, finally, signs of a growing consensus among conservatives regarding the West's true vulnerability and the means that will need to be taken to deal with it. These are ideas that run so contrary to the currently dominant Western group think that only a few voices are willing to adress them openly. But their logic is so sound and unassailable - and the opposing argument so weak and continually exposed as false - that more and more people are realizing the truth, and willing to voice it. Reviewing Robert Spencer's latest book on Islam at PajamasMedia, John Derbyshire lays it out in full.

... it can hardly be disputed that we have got into the mess we are in with Islam today not so much because of the letter of Islamic theology, or the failure of enough of us to knuckle down to our citizenly duty and read the Koran (personally, I would rather undergo radical dentistry), as because we have executed policies of staggering idiocy.

There are now tens of millions of Muslims living in Christian nations; and this is the case because our nations allowed the tens of millions to enter. We need not have done so. Wise men as long as forty years ago were sounding the alarm about the gross folly of opening our territories to such numbers of strangers with whom we had nothing in common. If Islamia has sunk into the grip of a poisonous ideology—the ideology of jihadism—the Christian West (Spencer actually says “Judeo-Christian,” but that is just a lagniappe) has been seized by an even more destructive ideology: globalization.
The second ideology has in fact been the great enabler of the first. And, very uncomfortably for a Christian apologist like Robert Spencer (so uncomfortably he has not confronted it in this book, nor in any of the other writings of his I have perused; nor have I ever seen it mentioned in the rest of the burgeoning literature of Islamophobia), a great enabler of globalization has been the Christian tradition. If all men are brothers, heathens only a little less enlightened than Christians, they why should not a Pakistani, or a Somali, or for that matter a Mexican, come to live in the U.S.A.? Why should not ten million of each do so? Would it not in fact be un-Christian to refuse entry to those tens of millions? It beggars belief that anyone should hold such a civilizationally-suicidal view, but many Christians do—the current President of the United States, for example.

This applies not merely in the case of Muslims - a significant fraction of whom specifically state that they wish to destroy Western Civilization - but to the millions of other immigrants, many from semi-Christian nations, who are currently invading the United States and Western Europe. Those immigrants may come to the West seeking mere economic opportunity for themselves, but in their numbers, and with their substantially higher birthrates, their simple presence will transform Western culture, erasing what is was and bringing it closer to that of their home nations. In the case of the U.S., that means that 30 million Mexican immigrants - legal and illegal - will ultimately make America more like Mexico. Given the drastic differences between the two neighboring nations, few Americans would consider that a good thing.

Returning to the Muslim issue, Derbyshire pronounces a simple, if legally delicate, solution:

If what he has told us is true—and so far as the present state if Islam is concerned, I think it is—then the West should proscribe Islam, and the sooner the better. We should not allow Muslims into our countries, other than for necessary diplomatic or scholarly purposes. We should revoke the visas and permits of resident aliens who are Muslims, and ensure their departure. We should offer to purchase the citizenship of Muslim citizens, and bribe them to leave. Those who will not leave should be carefully watched by the police, and subjected to social disabilities—they should not, for example, be admitted to the armed forces, or allowed to proselytize in prisons. (Take a religion addled with violence and infused with a hatred of our society, and teach it in prisons to the most violent and antisocial of our people? Have we gone stark raving mad?) Mosques and madrassahs should be closed, or at the least punitively taxed.

For the U.S.A. there would be some constitutional niceties to be sorted out, but I am not speaking of any grave injustices here, still less of any cruelty or harm, which no civilized person wishes to a fellow human being who has done nothing wrong. Millions of harmless, peaceful Muslims will of course be inconvenienced, but life comes with no guarantee of uninterrupted convenience, and moving from one country to another is not especially arduous—I have done it myself several times. Nothing in such a program of “separationism” is immoral or improper, unless the first word in the phrase “sovereign nation” has lost all meaning.

Derbyshire notes that this is politically impossible at the moment in any Western nation, and will likely remain so for the forseeable future - a forecast that would seem to doom the West. But here Derbyshire may be wrong. The public fury evident over President Bush's recent attempt to grant amnesty to millions of illegals has not died down with the apparent death of the measure. Indeed, the anti-immigrant backlash appears to be building, taking root at a local and state level and pressuring political candidates for national office. Immigration will be a major issue in the 2008 president race, no matter how much the politicians wish otherwise. Likewise the kowtowing to Muslim advocacy groups and constant threats from Muslim militants are wearing thin the tolerance of most Westerners. Another major act of Islamic terror in the West could prompt an irresistible popular move for radical change.

The West has allowed itself to be threatened by incredibly bad ideas, but hope is not yet lost. What is needed is for more voices to join the call for immigration (legal and illegal) restriction and the separation between the Islamic world and the West.