Peter Grant considers Mark Steyn’s words in the aftermath of Manchester:
Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam. France and Germany and Belgium admit more and more Islam, and thus more and more terrorism. Yet the subject of immigration has been all but entirely absent from the current UK election campaign. Thirty years ago, in the interests of stopping IRA terrorism, the British state was not above preventing the internal movement within its borders of unconvicted, uncharged, unarrested Republican sympathizers seeking to take a ferry from Belfast to Liverpool. Today it declares it can do nothing to prevent the movement of large numbers of the Muslim world from thousands of miles away to the heart of the United Kingdom. It’s just a fact of life – like being blown up when you go to a pop concert.
All of us have gotten things wrong since 9/11. But few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither – and, for the sake of the dead of last night’s carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly. Theresa May’s statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be “defiant”, but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality.There’s much more at the link. Recommended reading.
I want to disagree with Mr. Steyn, but I can’t. I disagree profoundly that Islam as a whole is the source of our terrorism problem; but the fact that the terrorists are overwhelmingly fundamentalist Muslims undermines my argument, because it’s almost impossible to tell them apart from Muslims who are not terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. If you can’t distinguish the dangerous from the harmless, you’re left with only one alternative to ensure your safety. You have to regard all of them as dangerous until proven otherwise.
This is a tragedy of monumental proportions – and it’s one that until recently simply was not a factor. I was discussing this with Lawdog last night. He and I can recall many encounters with Muslims in Africa back in the 1970’s and 1980’s, he in the west of that continent, I in the south and east. Almost universally, the Muslims we knew then were not radicalized, were perfectly happy to coexist in peace with their neighbors, and were not interested in terrorism as a tool to promote their beliefs.
If there was a single, seminal event that changed everything, it was the war against Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. So-called ‘mujahideen’ flocked there from every corner of the world to resist the invaders – and the survivors took back home with them the newly radicalized Islam they had learned there. Now, in the aftermath of Afghanistan, things are radically different in Africa, to the point where Lawdog and I can no longer recognize the socio-political-cultural landscape we once knew. From Boko Haram in West Africa to Al-Shabaab in East Africa, from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in North Africa to Qibla and PAGAD in South Africa, radicals attempted (with varying degrees of success) to subvert and take over more moderate Muslim organizations and activities. Their efforts have been beaten back, but continue to this day. The same is true all over the world.
I don’t see why so many people are having so much trouble grasping the fact that groups go through quiescent and expansionist stages. 200 years ago, the English were imperialist. 60 years ago the Germans were imperialist. Now the Islamic world is imperialist. It is meaningless to observe that a group was once what it now is not, or that it once was not what it now is. We have to deal with the situation that presents itself today, not 500 years ago or even five years ago.
Either the natives resist the imperialist invaders are they will be ruled by them. This isn’t rocket science. It is just history in action.