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January 24, 2007
Hitchens on Steyn
From Christopher Hitchens' review of America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, the bestseller by Mark Steyn:
The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization [italics mine].
[...]
Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation.
First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.
Hitchens, an unrecontructed Socialist who has had something of a post-9/11 conversion to finding much in the West worth defending, also agrees that Steyn's take on demography as destiny has merit -- "[Steyn] makes an immensely convincing case ..." -- as the population of Europe craters and Muslim immigrants appear on track to more than make up for the absence of their dhimmi neighbors.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 24, 2007 07:33 AM
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