After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (39 page)

North American wildlife seems to have figured that out. Why be surprised if other predators do? A soft Eloi culture will bend and accommodate and prostrate—and still be consumed as easily as Timothy Treadwell.

fall 265

At American airports, to avoid even the hint of a suggestion that people who want to blow up airplanes are more likely to have certain characteristics than others and to maintain the polite fiction that all seven billion inhabitants of the planet pose an equal security risk, the Government of the United States has decreed that federal officials are entitled to inspect your private parts and those of your children and your grandmother. All 300 million sets of American genitalia are up for grabs—without probable cause. God forbid you should be so insensitive as to use “enhanced patdown” techniques on any Guantanamo detainees, but you can use them on three-year-old girls and octogenarian nuns. Cougars, lambs, sharks, baby seals: we must not profile.

Think of Frances Frost vigorously objecting to any suggestion the predator cougar be tracked down. Al-Qaeda understand that mentality—which is why they advise captured jihadists always to claim they’ve been tortured, and let the Frances Frosts of the grievance industry help them get lawyered up. So do the armies of the Undocumented. That sends a message about U.S.

will, and not just to Latin-American peasants seeking economic betterment.

Picture Timothy Treadwell cooing love songs to his killers. You don’t have to go to the Arctic to see that. In Philadelphia, there is an organization called the BDS Coalition. BDS? As in “Bush Derangement Syndrome”? No.

It stands for “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions,” and it’s an alliance of groups committed to working for “social justice” in “Palestine.” So they staged a disruptive “flashdance” at a Philly supermarket to protest the store’s “policy”

of carrying brands of hummus made by companies perceived to have too close ties to Israel.103 Watching these young white twentysomething American students “dance into action” around the hapless grocery clerks, you couldn’t help noticing that (without wishing to stereotype from modes of dress and levels of hirsuteness) more than a few of the young ladies appeared to be stern feminists, if not, ah, persons of orientation. In America, so what?

But try it in Hamas-run Gaza.

There is a group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. When they march in Gay Pride parades, they chant:

266

after america

Butch, femme, bottom, top

Israeli apartheid has to stop.104

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid—now there’s a cause. When he spoke to Columbia University, President Ahmadinejad of Iran told his audience that there are no homosexuals in Iran.105 Not one. Where are they? On a weekend visit to Gaza to see the new production of
Mame
? Alas, there was no time for follow-up questions. In Mullah Omar’s Afghanistan, homosexual men were put to death by being crushed under a wall specifically built for that purpose.106 Under the Taliban, it was just about the only work you could get in the otherwise depressed Afghan construction industry. Have you tried being a lesbian in Yemen? Have you tried being a
woman
in Yemen?

A few years back, I thought even spaghetti-spined western liberals might draw the line at “Female Genital Mutilation”—or “FGM,” as it’s already known in far too many western hospitals from Virginia to Australia. After all, it’s a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don’t demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest. Yet already female genital “mutilation” has been replaced by the less judgmental term of “female genital cutting.” In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics floated the suggestion that, because certain, ahem,

“immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo “cutting,” in a spirit of multicultural compromise perhaps U.S.

pediatricians should amend their opposition to the practice, and provide a “ritual nick” to young girls.107

Nonetheless, at the Gay Pride parade they know their priorities: Butch, femme, bottom, top

Israeli apartheid has to stop.

Is there a Queers Against Sharia?

fall 267

Butch, femme, top, bottom

Gay bars in Riyadh?

Hard to spot ’em.

Bottom, top, femme, butch

Pride parade’s dull since the Taliban putsch.

Top, bottom, butch, femme

With complimentary FGM.

Top, bott, butch, femme, trans

Quit your chanting and read your Korans.

There is a moral frivolity to the Eloi’s generalized concerns for “the planet.”

But it quickly advances to the next stage—a moral decadence that expresses itself by venerating those who will gladly kill them when they have served their purpose as useful idiots. Listen to Sheikh Muhammad al-Gamei’a, an Egyptian Muslim of such exemplary moderation that he was the head imam at the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque in New York at the time of 9/11’s, er, “controlled explosion.” Shortly thereafter, he explained why he agrees with Philadelphia BDS Coalition and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid that it’s all the fault of the Jews: “You see these people all the time, everywhere, disseminating corruption, heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs.

Because of the Jews there are strip clubs, homosexuals, and lesbians everywhere. They do this to impose their hegemony and colonialism on the world. . . . ”108

So Jews are to blame for lesbians? Do the prancing sapphists in that Philly supermarket know they’re just tools of the International Jewish Conspiracy?

Fortunately for them, they’re taking their courageous stand for Palestinian “social justice” in Pennsylvania. Not everyone keeps such a discreet distance. In 2008, the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca set off to hitch-hike from Milan to the Palestinian Territories to promote “world peace.”

She was dressed as a bride, and the purpose of her trip was to show that if only you put your trust in our common humanity then all will be well.

268

after america

A month later, her naked body was found in the bushes near Gebze in Turkey. She had been gang-raped and then killed. Like Timothy Treadwell’s, her illusions met reality.109

Most of us as individuals retain enough of a survival instinct that, if we find ourselves on a rough city block in a foreign land late at night, we moth-ball the PC pieties until we get back to the lobby of the Grand Hyatt. But what happens when Pippa Bacca’s illusions become the dominant political discourse of a free society? And how many Timothy Treadwells crooning to their killers does a society have to have before it loses even the very idea of a survival instinct?

Eloi passivity offers a template not only to a resurgent Islam. In Europe, we can already see what happens when the ruling class is obliged to tell a citizenry mired in dependence that there’s no more money. In France, the government announced the retirement age would be raised from 60 to 62

by 2018, and there were protests. In Britain, the government raised the cost of university education, and the elderly “students” rioted. En route to the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium, the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales, and his consort the Duchess of Cornwall became separated from their police escort and had their Rolls besieged and battered by a mob chanting “Off with their heads!” That’s a portent of America’s future—except that for a failed and discredited elite there will be no pampered princes to serve as a focused target. After economic ruin, the Eloi will retreat from an unenforceable border and other areas of the country, not out of choice but from necessity. As the years go by, they will find it ever harder to insulate themselves from the pathologies they have fed. The collapse of the dollar as the global currency and the end of cheap imports will cause shortages in much of the land. But beyond that the abandonment of America’s animating ideas will leave a large porous continent with insufficient social glue to make it governable. And then, as H. G. Wells’ Eloi discovered, the Morlocks will take their opportunity, and in their “feeble prettiness” the elites will no longer even know how to rouse themselves.

fall 269

An America that abandons the American idea will be a turbulent society. The present de facto segregation—in Maywood, California, and elsewhere—will decay into tribalism, both cultural and economic. The United States will quietly retreat from the southern borderlands and other redoubts of the Undocumented, in the way that the Government of France has retreated from those banlieues that Muslims regard as part of the Dar al-Islam. Other neighborhoods will opt for de facto secession, and still functioning states will opt for de jure secession, anxious to escape being buried by federal debt. Balkanization will cease to be a pejorative and become the least worst hope: united we’re done for, but divided a few corners of the map might stand a chance. The Eloi elites who did this to America will hunker down within protected enclaves while outside life grows increasingly savage and violent. But eventually they will come for the elite communities, too—as the cougar came for Frances Frost, and the bear for Timothy Treadwell.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

In this chapter, Steyn talks about the problem of illegal immigration.

How do you think we should handle illegal immigrants?

Click here to tweet us (@Regnery, #AfterAmerica)

Click here to post your answer on our Facebook wall (Face-

book.com/RegneryBooks)

ChaPter

Seven

the new

JeruSaLem

the city Besieged

I have a premonition that will not leave me. As it goes with Israel
so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will
be upon us.

—Eric Hoffer,
Los Angeles Times
(May 26, 1968)
in 2009 Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, took to the podium of the UN General Assembly and observed that he was speaking just a few days after the president of Iran had claimed that the Holocaust was a lie. Mr. Netanyahu then explained that he’d recently visited a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, and been shown the minutes of a meeting held there on January 20, 1942, at which senior German officials formulated precisely their plan for the extermination of the Jews. “Here is a copy of those minutes,” the Prime Minister told the UN. “Is this a lie?”1

The day before, he’d been given another photocopy—this time of the original construction plans, signed by Heinrich Himmler, for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, wherein one million Jews would be killed.

“Here is a copy of the plans,” Mr. Netanyahu said to the assembled ranks of world leaders. “Is this too a lie?”

And so at the dawn of the twenty-first century, one head of government holds up the documents for the “Final Solution” to “the Jewish problem”

271

272

after america

because another head of government insists, repeatedly, that no such event ever took place. This is the state to which the United Nations has fallen after six decades posing as Lord Tennyson’s Parliament of Man: a sane man is obliged to prove to lunatics that the Holocaust actually happened.

One sympathizes with the Israeli Prime Minister, reduced, seventy years after Neville Chamberlain, to standing before the world waving pieces of paper from Herr Hitler. But he’s missing the point. Ahmadinejad & Company aren’t Holocaust deniers because of the dearth of historical documentation. They deny it because they can, and because it suits their own interests to do so, and because, in the regimes they represent, the state lies to its people as a matter of course and to such a degree that there is no longer an objective reality, only a self-constructed one.

And once you’re in the business of constructing your own reality, even internal logic is not required. In Iran, many of the same people who deny the first Holocaust are planning the second one. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, I’ve run into folks who simultaneously believe (a) that there was no Muslim involvement in the attacks of September 11, and (b) it was a tre-mendous victory for the Muslim people. Incidentally, by “the Muslim world,” I don’t just mean the Middle East: according to one poll, only 17

percent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11, and a majority of British Muslims—56 percent—believe there was no Arab involvement.2 And yet many British Muslims have marched in the streets under posters hailing the “Magnificent Nineteen” who carried out the attacks.

So we already live in a world in which there is insufficient agreed reality.

After America, there will be even less. To be sure, whatever the president of Iran might believe, there are plenty of fellows, even at the UN General Assembly, who understand that, yes, Auschwitz was built and, yes, many Jews died there. EU prime ministers ostentatiously participating in the annual Holocaust Memorial Day observances are certainly aware. Yet even they felt it was not, in diplomatic-speak, helpful for Mr. Netanyahu to belabor the point with President Ahmadinejad. The
New York Times
offered the new Jerusalem 273