Neocons have made the key concession that dooms their ideology

In an interview on the Journal Editorial Report hosted by Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot, Mark Steyn states clearly that Muslim immigrants—not radical Muslims, not Wahhabi Muslims, not a handful of Muslim clerics, but the mass of ordinary Muslim immigrants into the West—want and expect the Western countries that are receiving them to turn into Islamic countries. Then Gigot asks Steyn what we need to do to prevent this from happening. His answer is a prime example of the Steyn Disconnect:

GIGOT: … Why is this conflict, in your view, different [from the Cold War]?

STEYN: Well, I think we understood then, anyone who meet Czech or Hungarians or Poles or any of these people on the other side of the Iran Curtain during the Cold War, understood that they actually had no dog in the fight. They weren’t interested. They weren’t interested in conquering the world.

And I think it is different now. I think the average Muslim does, in some basic sense, when he immigrates to the Netherlands, when he immigrates to the United Kingdom, when he immigrates to Canada or Michigan, wants eventually to live in a Muslim society in those places. And he expects effectively—I am not saying he wants to fly planes into buildings or any of that nonsense—but his expectation is that the host society will assimilate with him rather than the other way around.

And that’s a profound challenge in a way that communism wasn’t.

GIGOT: But other than more babies, more Western babies, how do you combat that in the United States?

STEYN: Well, I think you have to stand up and resist what I would call phenomenon of creeping Sharia. Because I think when you see things, like for example, England feeling that you can’t fly the English flag because the Cross of Saint George is offensive because of the crusades—I mean every time you concede a little inch of ground like that, you are basically surrendering piecemeal.

And Muslim leaders, not just terrorists, but Muslim governments draw the lesson from that, that the West is ideologically insecure. And not just Muslims, but all kinds of other fellows, from Chavez to Kim Jong-Il, actually see that too.

It’s bizarre beyond belief. Steyn plainly describes the mass importation of Muslims into the West as an existential threat to our civilization, yet he does not suggest—he does not even touch on the topic—that we stop this importation.

Indeed, in part two of his recent interview with Michelle Malkin, Steyn seemed to say that he welcomes all legal immigrants who do not have a criminal record or terrorist pedigree, i.e., he favors the continued immigration of the same Muslim masses who he has said are seeking to Islamize the West.

Still, Steyn’s exchange with Gigot definitely represent progress. Central to the neoconservative treatment of non-Western mass immigration has always been the axiom that the immigrants themselves do not pose a cultural threat; it is only factors extraneous to the immigrants themselves, such the multicultural ideology advocated by ethnic and leftist elites, that pose a cultural threat. But here Steyn is saying, and the open-borders commissar Paul Gigot does not challenge him, that Muslim immigrants pose a cultural threat. The neocons have thus made the key concession that dooms their open-borders ideology.

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A reader comments:

Yes, there is nothing from Gigot comparable to Wattenberg, who, when a guest on his show pointed out the Mexican atavism about reconquering the Southwest, said something like, “Do you think the average Hispanic maid working in a Los Angeles hotel is thinking that way?” In other words, it’s just the eruptions of a tiny elite and has no relation to the mass of immigrants. But here, Gigot doesn’t answer Steyn in that way because, one, Steyn has more or less said that it is just the average Muslim who thinks the West will adapt to him rather than vice versa; two, Gigot probably realizes that as well, and can’t muster up the energy to say, “But do you really think the average Muslim carpet distributor from Pakistan wants the West to become Muslim territory?”; and, three, Gigot is afraid to ask the question because—and here we come full circle—Steyn will say, YES, IN FACT I JUST SAID THAT.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 30, 2006 02:17 PM | Send