Mark Steyn: Preaching to the reverted

Western Standard ^ | 2006-07-31 | Mark Steyn

[Clive]

Preaching to the reverted

Non-Muslims everywhere are ditching multicultural nullity and making the jump to jihad

Mark Steyn - July 31, 2006

In May 2005, a reader in Asia sent me an e-mail link: "Canadian Converts To Islam Being Recruited By Al-Qaeda." It was from the Press Trust of India. If it appeared in any Canadian paper, I didn't see it. But lo and behold, a year later there were "Canadian converts to Islam" among the 17 Toronto arrests. They're not the only "converts to Islam" in the news--or "reverts," as Muslims call them, taking the view that everyone is born a Muslim but some of us don't yet know it. Here are some notable reverts from the last half-decade:

- The Miami cell plotting to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago.

- The shoebomber, Richard Reid.

- The July 7th London tube bomber, Germaine Lindsay.

- The Washington sniper, John Allan Muhammad.

- The Belgian lady, Muriel Degauque, who blew herself up in a suicide attack on U.S. troops in Baghdad.

- The Australian factory worker, Jack Roche, sentenced in Perth for plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra.

- The founder and members of the Rajah Solaiman Movement, a Filipino Muslim group believed to be responsible for a ferry bombing that killed over a hundred people in 2004.

And on, and on. It would seem obvious that the use of reverts is a conscious strategy. The only question I have over that Press Trust of India headline--"Canadian Converts To Islam Being Recruited By Al-Qaeda"--is the implication that their Muslim conversion predates and is separate from their jihadist recruitment. It would seem more likely that the two processes are simultaneous--that they are converted precisely in order to be jihadists. That's just plain operational good sense: the most gung-ho Pushtun yakherd may be hot for martyrdom but he's going to stand out at the US Air check-in in a way that a third-generation Canadian Muslim isn't or--better yet--a revert of non-Arab appearance and a name that isn't going to set off any flags in the computer--"Steven Chand," "Richard Reid," "Jack Roche." By some accounts, 80 per cent of the imams in Canadian mosques are said to be "extreme." So what kind of converts would they be looking for and what kind would be likely to respond to their rhetoric?

At this point it's customary to throw in the usual "of courses": "Of course" most Canadian Muslims aren't terrorists and "of course" most have no desire to be terrorists. One gathers anecdotally that they're secure enough in their Muslim identity to dismiss the firebreathing imam down the street as a kind of vulgar novelty act for the kids--in the same way that middle-class suburban white parents sigh and roll their eyes when Junior comes home with "Slap Up My Bitch" or "I'm Gonna Shoot That Cop Right After I F-- His Ho" or whatever the latest popular vocal ditty is. But, insofar as there are moderate Muslims, they seem to be in a state of denial. A couple of weeks back, a poll in the United Kingdom found that only 17 per cent of British Muslims are prepared to believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11--just as, in the fall of 2001, the Ottawa Citizen's coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams found all but two insistent that there was no Muslim involvement in 9/11. To put it at its most charitable, these are not fellows one can reliably expect to identify extremists in their own midst.

So the broader society needs to understand the phenomenon of "conversion to Islam." How many Canadian newspaper columns have you seen on that subject lately? Me neither. In response to plots to behead the prime minister or demolish the Sears Tower, the media are wont to scoff: What a bunch of joke losers, how pathetic that the authorities need to ballyhoo them into some awesome conspiracy in order to maintain the Bush neocon reign of fear. But, if you'd nabbed the July 7th bombers while they were still conducting their peroxide experiments in Yorkshire, they would have seemed a joke, too. So would half the 9/11 crowd, whooping it up in lap-dance clubs but too stingy to tip the gals. The scoffers have a point: these fellows are losers and a generation or two back they'd have had to make do with a local gang. But today, thanks to the Internet and the Saudi-funded international mosque-and-madrasah network, the coolest gang is global. Steven Chand may be a schmucko no-hoper on welfare but the plot he was a part of had conspirators in Atlanta and in Dewsbury, a Yorkshire town in the tube bombers' neighbourhood. To get a quote from a pal of Chand's, another Canadian convert called Muhammad Robert Heft, Maclean's had to track him down by phone in Mecca. For a bunch of losers, these fellows get around the planet.

In 2002, I asked a Muslim in Paris why Islam was the fastest-growing religion in the West and he said four out of five converts in Europe were women, positing therefrom that, aside from spousal conversions, significant numbers of western females found the feminist notion of womanhood degrading and unworthy. But, whether or not that's true, it doesn't seem to be the whole story. In Britain, there are high-profile celebrity conversions--star footballers, Asquith's great-granddaughter, the son of the BBC director-general, and the Earl of Yarborough, who now goes by the name Abdul Mateen, though whether Burke's Peerage will list him as such remains to be seen. This makes Islam sound like the Brit equivalent of Richard Gere Buddhism. It's not. It's bigger. Over on the other side of the world, about 200,000 Filipinos in the Manila area are estimated to have converted to Islam. This is in addition to the four million Filipino Muslims in the south of the country. The raw math is quite impressive: aside from its surging birthrate, Islam has managed to increase its population by five per cent just through conversion.

I wonder what the equivalent numbers would look like for Norway or Belgium--or Ontario. Taking the prize for chutzpah (if they'll forgive the expression), the Canadian Islamic Congress has conceded some young Muslim men may have assimilation issues but feels the best solution is if the government hands over a big pile of cash so it can run some research on "integration." I think that money could be better spent identifying the types of imams these young chaps are attracted to. But the problem goes beyond the Muslim community and cuts to the heart of what Canada is, or believes itself to be: "Radical Islamism," wrote Fouad Ajami recently, "has come to mock the very principle of nationality and citizenship." But is that really so hard to do? Contemporary Canadian, British, Dutch and Swedish nationality is to a large extent self-mocking. In 1997, you may recall, the federal government marked the 50th anniversary of Canadian citizenship with the usual maple boosterism, in this case posters showing people of every conceivable hue with their hands circled around the globe. That's Canadian citizenship as the state sees it: there are no Canadian people, only whatever people from whichever spot on the planet happen to be in Canada at any particular moment. Alleged "conservatives" like Joe Clark spoke favourably of a "nation of nations," meaning First Nations, the Quebec nation, the Ukrainian-Canadian nation, et cetera, with nary a thought for what other forces might set up shop in such a dead husk of a concept.

The jihad is everything the multiculti left's flopped at. The left talked up sappy Benetton-ad one-worldism, while the pan-Islamists got on with their own particular strain of one-worldism, fierce, implacable and slipping across borders with ease.

Meanwhile, the UCC and other post-Christian churches long ago decided the Gospel was a bore and if they could no longer convert the unbelieving to Christ, they could at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political clichés. Yet if the purpose of the modern church is to be a cutting-edge political pacesetter, it's Islam that's doing the better job. The contemporary mosque or madrasah is not the place to go for spiritual contemplation so much as political motivation. The Muslim identity of those gold-toothed Punjabi yobs in northern England or Berber pseudo-rappers in French suburbs may seem spiritually vestigial but it's politically potent. Pre-modern Islam beats postmodern Christianity--and, for young men in search of an identity, transnational jihad beats multicultural nullity. There's no amount of taxpayer money you could throw at the Canadian Islamic Congress that would satisfactorily explain just what it is in contemporary Canada Steven Chand is supposed to identify with.

[TAdams8591]

"Liberalism, ultimately, is a path to nothing."

You're kidding. I had no idea the above was true until good conservatives on the internet taught me so...../sarcasm

[justanotherfreeper]

Islam merely entices men to feel greedy without guilt and violent without remorse. It allows women to be passive and powerless cattle, but without shame.

Absolutely agree. It's repulsive to me, but if the only choice most people see is Islam or a passive liberal nihilism, Islam wins hands down.

[petercooper]

bttt

[kellynch]

I think a lot of Western feminism is degrading too, but that doesn't mean I'd rather wear a burkha, be a baby factory and have a husband who's allowed to do anything he wants to me.

There has to be more to it than that.

[Sam Gamgee]

Agree completely. Islam is nothing more than a vehicle to rob the resources and lives of other peoples.

[Sam Gamgee]

Loved Steyn's swipe at the UCC!