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I'd say right now the best bet for much of the world is a slow ongoing incremental defeat, the kind most folks don't notice until it's too late.

I do believe I've heard that before. Steyn is hardly what I'd categorize as a defeatist but this stuff was common currency during the darker days of the Cold War. It was with considerable resentment that its purveyors in France, for example, woke up one day to find the "inevitable" victors in ruins, and they've never really forgiven the real victors for it.

I don't think they're going to be given the luxury of riding this one out as they did the last one. That they were able to ride it out is the principal reason that multiculturalism has managed to gain cultural dominance essentially unopposed. That is the ideology of the intellectually lazy, a refusal to make a judgment, to take a stand, because they didn't have to before and why now? Well, because this isn't that and now isn't then, and it's time to drop the pretense and make some hard decisions. But why trouble to decide when one never had to before? Because now one must. And that's not going to be an easy sell.

That is the ideology of the intellectually lazy, a refusal to make a judgment, to take a stand, because they didn't have to before and why now?

Until it becomes painful NOT to take a stand, many of our citizens won't. It is very easy to simply immerse yourself in your job and family. Many people probably don't REALLY believe that America, as a whole, is vulnerable at all. After all, we've been on top a long time.

The West disdains controversy and real debate. Today, politicians are penalized for being too candid. Bush is hated not so much for his political views as for his unyielding stance and lack of self-doubt. That does not sit well in a culture that prizes evasion and self-introspection as its supreme values. Think back to why the Pope was condemned. Not for being a Catholic but for taking a stand on the question of right and wrong. Liberalism has succeeded in stifling debate over life's larger questions. This is why the West is incapable of confronting its enemy in the arena of ideas because its decided its afraid of giving offense. In our time, the greatest sin one can be guilty of is not saying the right thing but taking a stand at all in the first place. It is rigeur de jour to just agree with all sides of a question and take pride in the fact every one is on the same page.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus