Alone Again (Naturally)

"Alone Again (Naturally)" -- Gilbert O'Sullivan

So Mark Steyn has this new book out, America Alone. From the snippet I read yesterday, it looks pretty good - if documenting the lunacy of the majority of the world and the collapsing remnant within the States is what you call a good read.

As a bleary Dean Martin liked to say, in mock bewilderment, at the start of his stage act: "How did all these people get in my room?" How did all these jihadists get rooms in Miami and Portland and Montreal? How did we come to breed suicide bombers not just in Gaza but in Yorkshire?

IN the globalized pre-9/11 world, we in the West thought in terms of nations - the Americans, the French, the Chinese - and, insofar as we considered transnational groups, were obsessed mostly with race. Religion wasn't really on the radar.

So an insurgency that lurks within a religion automatically has a global network. And you don't need "deep cover": You can hang your shingle on Main Street and we won't even notice it. And when we do - as we did on 9/11 - we still won't do anything about it, because, well, it's a religion, and modern man is disinclined to go after any faith except perhaps his own.

But Islam is not just a religion. Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to provoke "the Muslim world" would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to "the Christian world." When such sensitive guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political sovereignty too. Thus, it's not merely that there's a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project - and, in fact, an imperial project - in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are not.

Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith, in which whatever's your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified. (Yes, Christianity has had its blood drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, still a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year.)

So we have a global terrorist movement, insulated within a global political project, insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world. The jihad thus has a very potent brand inside a highly dispersed and very decentralized network much more efficient than anything the CIA can muster. And these fellows can hide in plain sight.

Austin Bay writes today particularly on the fate of Eutopia (Steyn's term for Europe).

I'm just not sure whether I should read this book, preaching to the choir as it were. Were it to equip me to convince others, then perhaps I should read it. But my time is short these days - and best spent with my family.

So you do me a favor please and read the book - particularly if you are the errant liberal who has stumbled onto this post. It is said that no non-smoker is so militant a non-smoker as an ex-smoker. I've seen the same with ex-liberals. Shoot, I am one.

So go out and convert the masses, my soon to be ex-liberal friends!