After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (43 page)

international legal regime. So, as a Defense Ministry spokesman explained, they “released” them. The Russians supposedly put them in a boat and pointed it in the general direction of Somalia. “They could not reach the coast and apparently have all died,” said the official, poker-faced.

Oh.

Bad cop or metrosexual Euro-cop? On the high seas of reality, it was not a tough call.

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fiVe BiLLion GuyS named mo

To state the obvious, the world after America is a lot more Muslim.

Between 2010 and 2030, the
ummah
—the worldwide Muslim community—was predicted to increase from somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the global population to one third of humanity.18 By the time we got there, they wound up with a little more than that, the demographers having failed to take into account such icing on the
ummah
’s cake as the accelerating Muslim conversion rates on the Continent. But one third of humanity turned out to be a good ballpark figure, give or take. Non-Muslims did most of the giving, and Islam did the taking, especially of Europe. According to the UN, global population is supposed to peak at about nine billion in 2050, then level off and start to decline.19 If you were one of those now mostly extinct eco-fetishists who thought of humanity as a species, then that nine billion was the number to watch, up from six billion at the turn of the century. But, if you didn’t think of the world as one unified global parking lot, you were less interested in the big number and more in its constituent parts: on the road to that nine billion, almost all the increase in global population came from Islam and sub-Saharan Africa. Muslims would represent a third of the world’s population, yet, 294

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aside from a handful of rapacious emirs and a few thousand layabout Saudi princes gambling and whoring in Mayfair and Macau, enjoy almost none of its wealth.

That would come as no surprise if you recall that statistic about Egypt’s economic decline relative to South Korea. And Mubarak’s thug state was considerably less decayed than Sudan and other Islamic hinterlands where by the dawn of the third millennium they had done a cracking job of killing almost all human progress of the modern age. Nevertheless, they are one in three of the global citizenry. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Niger, which is over 90 percent Muslim, increased its population by almost half—from just over 10 million to just over 15 million.20 In 2000, half a million of its children were estimated to be starving, but that was no reason not to add a few million more.21 Its population is predicted to hit just under 100

million by the end of this century—in a country that can’t feed a people one-tenth that size. Was it ever likely that an extra 90 million people would choose to stay within Niger? Samuel Huntington, in
The Clash of Civilizations
(now banned in Europe, following a “human rights” complaint), wrote vividly about “Islam’s bloody borders”—“the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims” and provided so many of the horror stories on the nightly news.22 But by 2020 you could no longer delineate with any clarity that looping boundary: the border was a blur. By 2010, there were more Muslims in Germany than in Lebanon.23

Within a few years, Germany would be semi-Muslim in its political character. That doesn’t mean a majority of the population is Muslim, but the prevailing culture is. Recently, I saw an old film called
Cabaret
, with a memorable scene in a beer garden, in which an Aryan youth sings “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and everybody joins in. It is a long time since I have been to a German beer garden. Tomorrow would belong to chaps less into draining their steins.

Though less bibulous, the new Europe is an unhealthier continent. I am not speaking metaphorically. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the city of Bradford, 75 percent of Pakistani Britons were married to their first cousins.24 Even the Neanderthal racists warning against the horrors of after 295

mass immigration in the late 1960s never thought to predict that in the Yorkshire grade-school classes of the early twenty-first century a majority of the pupils would be the children of first cousins. Yet it happened.

The western elites stuck till the end to their view of man as homo eco-nomicus, no matter how obvious it was that cultural identity is a primal indicator that mere economic liberty cannot easily trump. If a man is a Muslim mill worker, which is more central to his identity—that he is a Muslim or that he works in a mill? So the mill closed down, and the Muslim remained, and arranged for his British-born sons to marry cousins imported from the old country, and so a short-term need for manual labor in the mid-twentieth century led to Yorkshire adopting Mirpuri marriage customs. Beyond Bradford, in the nation as a whole, 57 percent of British Pakistanis were married to their first cousins by the turn of the twenty-first century.25 If, like most of the experts, you were insouciant about that number and assumed that the seductive charms of assimilation would soon work their magic, well, in 1970 the percentage was half that. But back then there were a lot fewer cousins to marry.

Many non-Pakistani Britons were a little queasy about the marital preferences of their neighbors but no longer knew quite on what basis to object to it. “The ethos of relativism,” wrote the novelist Martin Amis, “finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.”26 That was why, even though the marital customs of the Pakistani community of New York were little different, you heard not a peep on the subject from brave American urban liberals still cheerfully making sneering cracks about inbred fundamentalist redneck southern hillbillies.

British Pakistanis were then officially less than 2 percent of the population, yet accounted for a third of all children born with rare recessive genetic diseases—such as Mucolipidosis Type IV, which affects brain function and prevents the body expelling waste.27 Native Scots families aborted healthy babies at such a rate they’re now all but extinct; Pakistani first-cousin families had two, three, four children born deaf, or blind, or requiring spoon-feeding and dressing their entire lives. Learning disabilities among this community cost the education system over $100,000 per child. They 296

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cost the government health system millions of pounds a year. And this was the only way a culturally relativist West could even broach the topic: nothing against cousin marriage, old boy, but it places a bit of a strain on the jolly old health-care budget. Likewise, don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against the polygamy, it’s just the four welfare checks you’re collecting for it. An attempt to confine spousal benefits to no more than two wives was struck down as discriminatory by the European Court of Human Rights.

But this was being penny-wise and pound-blasé. When 57 percent of Pakistani Britons were married to first cousins, and another 15 percent were married to relatives, and a fair number of those cousin couples were themselves the children of cousins, it surely signaled that at the very minimum this community was strongly resistant to traditional immigrant assimilation patterns. Of course, in any society, certain groups are self-segregating: the Amish, the Mennonites, and so on. But when that group is not merely a curiosity on the fringe of the map but the principal source of population growth in all your major cities, the challenge posed by that self-segregation is of a different order.

A combination of entitlements and demography would cripple much of the developed world both fiscally and physically. The new Europe is sickly, and its already unsustainable health systems have buckled under the strain.

Unless you are in the government nomenklatura, or a member of an approved identity group with an effective lobbying organization, or a celebrity, “universal access to quality health care” means universal access to an ever lengthier, ever more bureaucratically chaotic waiting list.

As for the aging native populations, they were the ones who found it increasingly difficult to self-segregate. There was an entertaining Swedish public health professor called Hans Rosling who liked to use his “Trendalyzer” software to present zippy four-minute demographic computeriza-tions of how the world had progressed over the last two centuries.28 He used to pop up on YouTube back before the “gatekeeping” or whatever euphemism the Chinese owners now use for their “family-friendly filtering.”

Professor Rosling produced fun stuff, showing how Botswana by 2010 had after 297

advanced, on major socioeconomic indicators, to where Portugal once was, and how Singapore had overtaken Scandinavia. But it would have been interesting to see him apply his Trendalyzer to parts of his own country.

Founded as a dock for the Archbishop of Lund, Malmö was one of the first Christian cities in Denmark. In our time it would become the first Muslim city in Sweden. In the old days, around 2011, 2012, I sat and had a coffee in a nice little place in a beautiful medieval square in the heart of town. Aside from a few modernist excrescences, it would not have looked so different in the early days of the Lutheran church. I got lucky, and fell into conversation with a couple of young Swedes. Fine-looking ladies. They’re not entirely extinct, not quite, but already I miss Nordic blondes. At dusk, and against their advice, I took a 20-minute walk to Rosengard. As one strolled the sidewalk, the gaps between blondes grew longer, and the gaps between fierce, bearded Muslim men grew shorter. And then eventually you were in the housing projects, and all the young boys kicking a soccer ball around were Muslim, and every single woman was covered—including many who came from “moderate” Muslim countries and did not adopt the headscarf or hijab until they emigrated to Sweden, where it was de rigeur, initially in Rosengard but increasingly throughout. Even then, ambulances and fire trucks did not respond to emergency calls without police escort. What was the rationalization Israel used at the Oslo Accords? “Land for peace”? In Sweden, about as far as you can get from Gaza and the West Bank, they would also trade land for peace, and wound up with neither. The Jews were the first to flee Malmö: soon it was just another town with a weed-strewn, decaying “old Jewish cemetery.” Nevertheless, it was not merely the Jewish graveyard that was destined to be abandoned, but the Lutheran ones, too.

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darkneSS faLLS

In 2006, Ezra Levant was the only publisher in Canada to allow his readers to see the so-called “Mohammed cartoons,” originally printed in 298

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the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
. As a result he was investigated by the Government of Alberta and subjected to three long years of judicial harassment. Halfway through his ordeal, Mr. Levant observed that one day the Danish cartoons crisis would be seen as a more critical event than the attacks of September 11, 2001.29 Not, obviously, in terms of the comparative death tolls, but in what each revealed about the state of western civilization in the twenty-first century.

After the slaughter of 9/11, the civilized world fought back, hit hard, went on the attack, rolled up the Afghan terrorist camps, toppled the Taliban. In the battle cry of a soon forgotten man called Todd Beamer, “Let’s roll!”

After the Danish cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and apologized, and signaled that we were willing to trade core western values for a quiet life.
Let’s roll
over!
It’s a lot less effort.

For the shrewder strategists of the new Caliphate, it wasn’t hard to figure out which was the more telling event about the resolve of the West.

Terrorism was useful as a distraction. Terror attacks so obsessed the national security state that it poured billions—trillions—into living per-petually at Code Orange alert, creating gargantuan bureaucracies that never caught a single terrorist yet managed to persuade the citizenry to accept the right of government officials to insert their latex-gloved fingers into your underwear and fondle your scrotum in the interests of “security.” Even today, when America is no longer worth blowing up, when the United States has to all intents blown itself up, it still takes longer than anywhere on the planet to board a plane, thanks to ancient security kabuki ever more removed from reality. The more alert the security state was to shoe-bombers, panty-bombers, implant-bombers, and suppository-bombers, the more indulgent it grew of any Islamic initiative that stopped short of self-detonation. Which suited the savvier imams just fine. They had no desire to be holed up in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush sharing a latrine with a dozen halfwitted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Why fly jets into luxury skyscrapers? The real estate would be theirs soon enough. Eschewing the means, Islam’s after 299

shrewder strategists nevertheless shared the same end as the cave dwell-ers—the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world.” Why impose Islamic law by the sword and get the infidels all riled up? Mothball your Semtex belt, and western liberals will volunteer for dhimmitude in order to demonstrate their multicultural bona fides.

In the Middle East, Islam had always been beyond criticism. It was only natural that, as their numbers grew in Europe, North America, and Australia, observant Muslims would seek the same protections in their new lands.

But they could not have foreseen how eager western leaders would be to serve as their enablers. There was the Swedish minister of integration, Jens Orback, who said we must be nice to Muslims now so that when they’re in the majority they’ll be nice to us,30 and the Dutch justice minister, Piet Hien Donner, who said he would have no problem with Sharia if a majority of people voted for it,31 and of course all those American eminences from President Obama down eager to proclaim that a mosque at Ground Zero would be the living embodiment of the First Amendment. As the more cynical Islamic imperialists occasionally reflected, how quickly the supposed defenders of liberal, pluralist, western values came to sound as if they were competing to be Islam’s lead prison bitch.