(( This book is popular among RWers and fuels their hatred for Muslims, their fear of Muslims. If this is what they, and Michelle Malkin evidently, think, then they really are from another reality than we are. Scary.))
This is not presented as satirical sci-fi, nor as fanatical fodder for a party political broadcast fronted by Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is the straight-faced prediction of a book that has slithered onto the New York Times best-seller list and captured the imagination of the American right. Mark Steyn - an uneducated former Disk Jockey turned pundit - is today being greeted as a sage by Dick Cheney and Joe "I'm-a-Democrat-honest" Lieberman, and as a seer by the National Review. Even former Democratic candidate for Vice-President, Joe Lieberman, is touting its "wisdom".
'America Alone' is a guidebook to a continent called Eurabia in the year 2020. Its old European shell looks familiar; "most of" the old Cathedrals and boulevards "still stand" in Rome and London and Paris. But the Islamic National Republican Coalition has just won the French elections - only the latest nation-sized domino to fall to the Islamists. Alcohol is already banned in the Netherlands and Denmark. The continent's women are veiled. The gay clubs are long since shut and shuttered, "relocated to San Francisco."
The "mass evacuations" of white people began five years ago, as the "supposedly Greater France" began "remorselessly evolving month by month into Greater Bosnia." As they flee, the last Europeans curse the memory of mass immigration and multiculturalism. They now realise that 7/7 and France's 2006 car-burning banlieues were merely "the first stage of the Eurabian civil war." The continent that defined modernity is condemned to "societal collapse, fascist revivalism" and a descent into "the long Eurabian night." America is left alone, the last country to resist being "reprimitivized".
Steyn's story is - very loosely - based on demographics. His argument is simple. Europe's "white" population (a label he initially shies away from, but later embraces) is having fewer and fewer children. So to keep their social democratic economies spinning, these Europeans are importing Muslim immigrants - who are breeding rapidly. Although he offers no statistics on the European Muslim birthrate, he warns ominously that the most popular baby's name in Rotterdam is now Mohammed. This generation of young Muslims will represent "a literal baby boom". He asks sceptically, "Can the developed world get more Muslim in its demographic character without becoming more Muslim in its political character?" No. Because the "European races too self-absorbed to breed," they are unwittingly catalysing the "the recolonization of Europe by Islam."
When the figures fail him, Steyn falls back on urban mythology. After the 9/11 massacres, in his Daily Telegraph column he repeated as fact preposterous claims that Muslim children all over New York had warned their favourite teachers not to go to the World Trade Centre that day. Here, he says, "On the night of September 11th Muslim youths in northern England rampaged through the streets cheering Islam's glorious victory over the Great Satan. They pounded on the hoods of the cars, hammered the doors and demanded the drivers join them in the chants of 'Osama Bin Laden is a great man.'" There is no record of these events on Lexis-Nexis; Steyn has not replied to a request for the source. He says variously that "the old flag" of St George is now "unflyable" in England, and - with shades of Enoch Powell's untraceable "grinning picanninies" - claims he knows "an English lady" who wears a headscarf every time she steps outside to stop Muslims harrassing her. As somebody who lives in a Muslim area, everybody I know who lives here finds this preposterous. But this is Steyn's way with evidence: the extremely atypical is presented as universal, and the urban myth is presented as damning fact.
Alot of snips in the above...if you want to read the whole thing, go to:
http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1082