Jihadists Against Mark Steyn

My “Blogger Buddy,” Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs (she just passed 2,000,000 visitors in less than two years, I’m coming up on 20,000 in a year), alerted her readers that some Canadian Muslims are protesting an article in Maclean’s Magazine by Mark Steyn, “The future belongs to Islam.”

I have read some of Mr. Steyn’s articles, and consider him an extremely good writer, very thoughtful and logical. Mr. Steyn didn’t strike me as the sort of inflammatory polemicist that would inspire reasoning people to protest. He did impress as a writer that Islamists and Leftists would like to shut up or muzzle, because he is frankly damn good.

For example, Mr. Steyn wonders: "(H)ow many pontificators on the ‘Middle East peace process’ ever run this number:

"The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.

"Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a ‘moderate Palestinian’ leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation -- or pseudo-nation -- of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the ‘Palestinian problem’ that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.”

I no longer wonder why it is futile in Gaza to attempt to follow Lyndon Johnson’s approach, “Let us reason together.” It never worked for Lyndon in more reasonable times, and it assuredly won’t now.

About the prospects for the future of Europe, Mr. Steyn observes: “Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.”

If you were betting on the future of European culture, how would you place your bet? Mr. Steyn clearly shows why you don’t want to bet on the Europeans.

According to Mr. Steyn, “(T)he critical difference between the ‘war on terror’ for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as ‘a faraway country of which we know little.’ This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.”

Mr. Steyn discusses the future of Japan, where last year, probably for the first time without warfare, a nation had more deaths than births. When he described a world of grandparents without grandchildren, where toymakers make dolls for adults starved for contact with children, my eyes teared up.

“It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.”

A final excerpt, hopefully one you will find provocative to the point you will read Mr. Steyn’s article in its entirety: “Europe, like Japan, has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.”

A fellow I once thought so nutty I called him “Gadhafi Duck,” may yet have the last word:

There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe -- without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.