Huh?

As far as I can tell, step two is supposed to be a democgraphic shift. Muslims living in Western societies will multiply like rabbits, outbreed truly civilized native Westerners and thus take over in a couple of decades by sheer force of numbers. Needless to say, this is one of the perennial classics of racist thought.

The usual suggestion is:

(i) Craven multicultural liberals allow hordes of darkies Muslim immigrants into Western Europe and the USA, all of whom are religious fanatics who want a World Caliphate.

(ii) Muslim immigrants are able to breed hugely more rapidly than craven multicultural liberals because they keep their women barefoot and pregnant while Western liberal uppity bitches career women won’t do their duty to shag Mark Steyn breed for the White Race Western Culture.

(iii) Muslim immigrants’ descendants outnumber the craven multicultural liberals and vote in the Islamofascist Party who abolish democracy and establish a World Caliphate.

Maybe they’ve been watching too much Southpark

Step one: Collect underpants.
Step two:
Step three: Profit!

The argument from high birth rate seems to be inarguably true to me. I don’t know how people like gr can have somehow missed the fact that Western nations are currently client-states of the Pan-African Hegemony.

Belle,

Most people with that specific worry are crazy enough that it’s not very coherent; however, there is a somewhat coherent projection, IF you accept its starting points.

In that projection, step 2 is a combination of demographic change and public-acceptability change. The Muslim population becomes large enough to have significant influence on the things it is acceptable to say in public, as the secular, feminist, and civil rights movements have. (Note that the movements cited have had a significant effect on public discourse–this holds whether you like or dislike that influence.) Over time, that influence will spread–from “you can’t do that in a classroom” to “you can’t work in government if you do that” to “you can’t get a job anywhere if you do that.” (Think of the changing employment opportunities over the last 40 years of someone who uses racist terms for blacks.)

This scenario seems to me unlikely, but it seems very plausible to some people. Those people tend to have a history of others actively destroying their culture (American redneck culture makes a lot more sense if you remember the 1745 rising and the reprisals), and have seen their culture forced out of the public sphere within the last 50 years–so the idea that that Muslim culture could force other cultures out of the public sphere seems plausible.

Belle, I’m glad you see that it all started with the oppressed Danish cartoonists. Mark Steyn, one of the Orwells of our time (there is now a collectible set of Orwells of our time which is available now, for a limited time only, for $9.99 plus postage), has devised a James Bondian response to the rising Islamic threat: bombing Iran.

Steyn is a man of immense courage, the kind of man the Euston Manifesto signatories are looking for in the black night of appeasement leftism, and he has made his position ringingly clear, as in this excerpt from his Iran article quoted by Yglesias:

“There can be no “surgical” strike in any meaningful sense: Iran’s clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country’s allegedly “pro-American” youth. This shouldn’t be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment—and incarceration. It’s up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime—but no occupation.

The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.”

So, you don’t have to worry about the dhimmitude thing. It is all being taken care of. Plus, revenge for the cartoonists!

The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Steyn via Yglesias/Roger

On the other hand, once you allow images of your prophet, it’s a slippery slope to a world where people line up to worship potato chips, grilled cheese sandwiches, and bathtub stains. At which point your religion runs the risk of no longer being taken seriously.

On the other hand, once you allow images of your prophet, it’s a slippery slope to a world where people line up to worship potato chips, grilled cheese sandwiches, and bathtub stains. At which point your religion runs the risk of no longer being taken seriously.

You forgot tomatoes.

yeah, I mean it’s so friggin crazy to think that the west would bend over backwards to accomodate islamic fundamentalist frames on the world.

i mean, it’s not like we’re looking out for the sensitivities of Al Qaeda members or anything!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4913866.stm

A senior police officer has apologised for a remark he made about young suicide bombers while addressing lawyers at a gala dinner.

it’s not like major politicians have gone into hiding in Western Europe to escape retaliation from violent Islamic fundamentalists!

http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=19&story_id=27385&name=Wilders+gets+death+threats+over+Mohammed+caricatures

A leading critic of aspects of Islam and immigration in the Netherlands, Wilders went into hiding after the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004…

Supporters of the radical Islamic organisation ‘Hizb ut Tahrir’ handed out pamphlets containing a warning to Wilders at various locations in the Netherlands at the weekend.

i mean, for god’s sake, it’s not like tens of thousands of Muslims decided to riot and burn cars for weeks on end in a European country!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4407688.stm

Nearly 900 cars were burnt on the ninth consecutive night of unrest in immigrant-dominated areas near Paris, despite a heavy police presence.

It’s not like we are entering a “Stage 2” where there are murderous attacks on politicians and random civilians who criticize Islam.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4670535.stm

The man charged with the murder of the controversial Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh has refused to offer a defence at the start of his trial in Amsterdam.
Mohammed Bouyeri, 27, said he did not recognise the authority of the court and spoke only to confirm his name and utter a prayer in Arabic.

Prosecutors say Mr Bouyeri killed Mr Van Gogh in a ritualistic murder committed in the name of radical Islam.

Silly paranoid right wingers.

I’d like to amplify my remarks about simple lying. When you hear the warbloggers talking, just do this experiment – substitue letters for the countries and groups involved. See how the result sounds like standard propaganda, designed to support aggression. I would say with total lack of concern for the facts, but I fear that it might be closer to a real joy in lying.

“if you remember the 1745 rising and the reprisals”

Shame on me, but I am of Irish descent. Is this Scotland?

Different thing from pressure groups like the PETA terrorizing the population into submission.

Which is not a good example in itself. PETA have not “terrorized the population” into refraining from eating meat, but getting people to stop eating meat is one of their main goals. I don’t think “terrorised” is an accurate description of the effect of PETA activities on those who witness them.

sebastian writes: “Considering the aftermath of that, and the fact of the recent Islam-motivated artist murders in Europe, it wouldn’t be completely crazy to imagine a world in which people technically have rights but in practice are too scared to exercise them. ”

Kind of like abortion being legal, but unavailable due to intimidation by pro-lifers?

Bob,

Yes–the 1745 Rising was in Scotland–it was led by Bonnie Prince Charlie. It ended at the battle of Culloden. The English decided they were not going to have any more problems with Scotland, and set out to destroy Scottish culture. The legal powers of the clan chiefs were reduced, the whole country was pillaged, and wearing tartan and owning bagpipes were made criminal. It worked–Scotland never again tried to secede from England. But the cultural memory hangs on, IMO, in Appalachia in particular–that “they” destroyed our culture once, and so it could happen again.

Multiplying like rabbits or multiplying like RABBITS?

“But the cultural memory hangs on, IMO, in Appalachia in particular—that “they” destroyed our culture once, and so it could happen again.”
Posted by SamChevre ·

I’d really like to see some proof of that, considering that (a) it’s 2 1/2 centuries ago,
(b) on the other side of the Atlantic, and (c) there’s been at least one rather massive, destructive war within the US since then.

Just to clarify, Roger: Are you suggesting that the claims re: fear of Islamist violence is unreasonable?
If so, I propose a simple test, easily performed by crooked timberites academics & co.

What was that test again? Something about cross-posting a defence of Palestinians along with full contact information on LGF or Free Republic and counting the hate mail? Smart test. Really smart test. Almost as smart as crossposting “Ajax Rules” to an FC Feyenoord website along with your full contact info.

Barry,
I’d really like to see some proof of that

I can’t provide any–it’s amateur historical sociology, not really something I can prove. Here’s the evidence that makes me think that the Appalachian/redneck fear of “them” destroying “our” culture is based in part on Scottish history.

1) The demographic differences between the Tidewater and the hill country were marked by the mid-1700’s, with the hill country much more Scottish and Irish and the Tidewater much more English.

2) The reprisals for the ’45 happened, and were followed by the Highland Clearances; traditional Highland clan culture was effectively wiped out in Scotland. Many of the Scots fled to America and settled Appalachia.

3) The tendency to see others as a particular threat to “our” culture has been fairly common in hill country culture since at least the early 1800’s. This is furthered by frequent losses to elites and other outsiders.

But the cultural memory hangs on, IMO, in Appalachia in particular—that “they” destroyed our culture once, and so it could happen again.

The Scots-Irish populating Applachia are descendants of lowland Scots who were shipped off to the Ulster Plantation in the 1600s, then migrating to America in the mid-to-late 1700s. So were long gone by 1745 and no strong affinity for the highland Clans either. So whatever cultural memory hangs on, it’s not about that war.

And to followup on Sam’s #36, while highland Scots emigrated to the US post-1745, the Appalachian/”Red Neck” culture is predominately a lowland-Scot cultural thread. If you want to find people with a cultural memory of the Highland clearances you would have better luck in Nova Scotia rather than Pittsburgh or Chattanooga.

PS – I do love the idea that blowing up abortion clinics and shooting doctors is less threatening than those Moslem terrorists in Denmark. I am not sure if Sebastian is making this comment in sorrow, bemoaning the poor state of anti-abortion violence, or whether he has to get to work in the U.S. always conscious, as many a war blogger has put it, that we ‘are all signed up for the war since 9/11.’ All of us are under combat in this war, this long, long war. Perhaps this has distracted the anti-abortion folks from the poaching of more doctors — I’m not sure.

Fear of violence is a terrible thing, of course, but what about fear of causing untimely and violent death to your career, as it happened to that NZ cartoonist?

“I do love the idea that blowing up abortion clinics and shooting doctors is less threatening than those Moslem terrorists in Denmark.”

Actually I was trying to draw a parallel between shooting doctors and stabbing Theo Van Gogh, between threatening doctors and threatening to kill Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie, blowing up clinics over abortion and setting fire to embassies over free speech. Sorry I wasn’t clearer.

More precisely:
Jaybird – Fear doesn’t need justification, actions taken in response to fear do.
This is why some of us admire courage. Because it forgoes the careful analysis of cost-benefit, and proceeds despite the odds.

.

Belle – burkas.
See also here.

I think the dhimmitude talk refers mainly to the prospects for Europe in the near term — meaning over the next two or three decades. The U.S. will be more of a long-term Islamic conquest, perhaps over the next century.

Dhimmitude will not necessarily come about through demographics in either the U.S. or Europe It could come about through a combination of mass terrorism and cowardice: The idea is that feckless, weak-minded liberal pussies will kneel to Allah rather than fight long-term against a brutal enemy threatening their comfortable suburban lives. A couple of suicide bombers in faculty lounges and malls might do the trick. Islam believes in conversion by the sword, after all.

But until the Muslims try, please, by all means, laugh at the monstrous conservatives and ridicule them. Have your fun, and may you be right.

An immigrant takeover is one of those paradoxes – it can’t possibly happen if people are worried about it, so sane people shouldn’t be worried about it (unless noone else is).

It is true that, as the pre-USA and pre-Israel demonstrated, sufficient levels of immigration can ‘take over’ a society and replace it with something more to the taste of the immigrants.

However, given that most of the locals weren’t particularly pleased about that, it is never going to happen unless the will of the locals is overridden by military force, as it was in palestine and the americas. And that is something no democracy or sane dictatorship is likely to apply to themselves.

y81, link please?

In any case, the fact that some on the left harbor overheated fantasies about a Bush-installed police state has, as far as I can tell, zero bearing on the question at hand: Is “the West” in danger of being subjugated by Islamists? (Answer: no.)

The ‘us vs. them’ phenomenon seems the function of a cultural identity crisis; the antagonist creates the identity of the antagonised in an attempt to concretise notions of self. This is not knowledge, but a fetishism of the Other through a fear that creates it’s own spectres. Does anyone really think that we would agree with radical Islam’s interpretation of our culture? How could they possibly agree with our interpretation of them? How valid, therefore, are our interpretations of Islam? Moreover, there is no morally acceptable reason for using ‘free-speech’, particularly from a position of dominance, as provocation . Say what you will, but to provoke a predictable outrage, and then generalize it to encompass an entire cultural identity, merely radicalises all discourses and is pure machivellian manipulation. There is a kind of symbolic violence at work here and I, for the simple reason that it restricts the breadth and depth of possible responses, would prefer to not be co-opted by its discourse. Deliberately provoking extreme responses merely creates a relation of antagonism that only increases the epistemological difference and dialogical distance. My point is that we can’t really understand radical Islam as radical Islam understands itself (and even this assumes a fictional ‘we‘ vs. one of ‘radical Islam‘). We ought to be suspicious of any provided interpretations. Whose interests does the perpetration of fear serve? If we must do symbolic violence to Islam through the imposition of identity, ought we not impose a moderate one? NBOBS

lemuel, I don’t know how to do links and I don’t want to learn. Brian Leiter’s website is on Belle’s blogroll last I checked. Try searching for “fascist theocracy”–then post here about how plausible you think that threat is.

jroth, I think you’re proving sebastian’s point. The combination of threats of violence with social obloquy has dramatically reduced the geographic availability of abortion in America (under Clinton and Bush–I don’t think there is any measurable between the two eras in this respect). There isn’t any reason why similar measures couldn’t produce a society in which public criticisms of Islam, and female immodesty of the type common today, were dramatically reduced. A society, for example, in which it was accepted at universities that free speech did not extend to textual criticism of the Quran, just as it doesn’t extend to, say, the n-word.

I am not sure if Sebastian is making this comment in sorrow, bemoaning the poor state of anti-abortion violence, or whether he has to get to work in the U.S.

“Those people tend to have a history of others actively destroying their culture (American redneck culture makes a lot more sense if you remember the 1745 rising and the reprisals)….” Samchevre

Their Scottish ancestors were mostly Lowlanders; I believe it was Highlanders who suffered that defeat and those reprisals. And some of their ancestry was Ulster Scots — who tended to be on the other end of the cultural destruction process.

Also, rednecks are rather less likely to have Scottish ancestry than hillbillies are.

Both groups also have a fair amount of ancestry from England, Wales, and various German-speaking areas of Europe.

For much, much, much more information, read the volumes which have appeared so far of Bernard Bailyn’s “The Peopling of British North America.”

BTW, I don’t think I’ve made it very clear that I don’t actually buy the “dhimmitude” argument any more than I think that the US is on an inevitable decline to police state status. At the moment I think the biggest risk of a wimpy response to terrorism is encouraging more terrorism. It seems to me that once that happens a few iterations it could go a sad dhimmitude route or a sad racist fury route–neither likely reaction really appeals to me. Which why I think that keeping the ugly feedback spiral from starting is very important. Like the Iran nuke issue, I would rather deal with it now than the ugly version of it later.

The fact that the same people who cheered the burning of Dixie Chick CDs and laughed off the threatening phone calls against them are making a cause celebre of some Danish cartoonists’ right to self-exression makes me laugh so hard I wet my pants.

The solution is simple. The people howling about “dhimmitude” are full-on batshit insane.

Frankly, the idea of a Communist takeover was far more plausible than the prospect of an “Islamofascist” (presumably the mouth-breathers mean Wahhabist or something like it) takeover. Communism, after all, had basic ideological premises that were fundamentally in accord with Western values. It was intellectually very attractive to many people in the West. The problems with Communism could often be dismissed as the fault of individual bad leaders. It takes a rather sophisticated analysis to understand why it doesn’t work on a fundamental level.

Extremist Islam has none of these virtues. It’s an alien social and religious system that almost no one in the West likes. Communism promised workers material benefits in this world. Islamic extremism promises paradise in the afterlife, but then so does the Christian religion already predominant in the West, and modern Christianity (except for the most batshit groups) makes far more reasonable demands of its followers. Islamic extremism would require that people give up many of the freedoms they enjoy on a daily basis; Communism in theory (as opposed to practice) did not.

Islamic extremism is simply not a credible ideological threat to the Western world.

As an aside, while Communism was a terrible system to actually have to live under, I maintain that the external presence of Communism was actually good for the working class in the Western nations. Pressure from Communist ideology meant that Western business and government leaders – in the First World, at any rate – were forced to create a strong middle class and treat workers decently. After all, workers had to be convinced not to go Red. I think it’s no coincidence that brutal inequality in the US took off in the 1980s as the USSR was collapsing.

Two points – one minor, one major.
First, the ’45 wasn’t an attempt by Scotland to secede from England. It was a bid by the House of Stuart to regain the British throne. Scots fought on both sides of the rebellion, but predominantly on the government side. Essentially, the question was: should Britain be a Catholic country, allied to France and ruled by an absolute monarch, or a Protestant country ruled by a monarch with limited powers?

Second point: extremist Islam is demonstrably attractive to a large number of people in the West, for various reasons. (Nation of Islam, for example.) I still don’t think it’s a credible ideological threat, but it’s worth not dismissing it as completely as firebug does.

Purpose of religion itself can be analyzied in socio-economic terms, but the practitioners, customers are offered spiritual fulfillment, sense of purpose, nice things like that. If you aren’t buying, you have to figure these things out on your own.

…presumably the mouth-breathers mean Wahhabist or something like it…

Sometimes. But then, when the next Existential Threat to Western Civilization happens to be a Shi’ite nation, the Shi’ites as well as Salafis are part of “Islamofascism.” But then, only some Shi’ites are part of Islamofascism. Iraqi Shi’ites are good democrats just like us, except for the ones who vote for or participate in Sadr’s orgainization.

Sadr, even though he comes from a family of Shi’ites who spent the Iran/Iraq war denouncing Iran is not only an Islamofascist, but a tool of Iran. The organization that was headquartered in Iran for twenty years, though, is neither Islamofascist nor a tool of Iran. Unless, of course, they denounce the U.S. presence in Iraq and call for a withdrawal timetable. Then they might be a little bit Islamofascist. But still fighting The Terrorists. Unless…

And so round and round it goes.

To be fair, I think the word did once have a legitimate purpose in describing those, including in my view bin Laden, who used Islamic language and footsoldiers primarily in support of a campaign for a Greater, and no longer Saudi, Arabia.

Pretty much a lost cause now though.

At the moment I think the biggest risk of a wimpy response to terrorism is encouraging more terrorism. It seems to me that once that happens a few iterations it could go a sad dhimmitude route or a sad racist fury route—neither likely reaction really appeals to me. Which why I think that keeping the ugly feedback spiral from starting is very important. Like the Iran nuke issue, I would rather deal with it now than the ugly version of it later.

For a graphical representation of Sebastian’s argument, see LibertarianHawk’s State Diagram of the War. (contents of link: sincere, not snark.)

Well, modesto kid, et al., are you telling me that if every time your wife left the house with a skirt above her knee, several men spat at her and called her a whore, it wouldn’t affect her clothing choice? Your wife is that much braver than the president of NYU?

Agghhh – sorry, Tim, I misread your post.

Well Bad Jim I get three points.

Russia still has its nukes and its communists. Did you miss the viva la rasa chants at the immigrant demonstrations and isn’t dhimmitude just the difference in Iran from 1978 to 1980?

How can anyone look at the history of the world and not see that bat-shit insane always has its day.

If there’s going to be an end of the world, don’t you want to see it?

But it is clear in your modelling of the argument that the ‘threat’ of ‘B’ is a contested fact amongst the ‘A’ set. The problem is that the ‘A’ set is not a single set with respect to ‘threat’, the contested phenomenon, but is instead a set containing two subsets: ‘A threatened’ and ‘A not threatened’. Clearly ‘B’ is a threat to ‘A threatened’, but no to ‘A not threatened’. The conclusion reached, that it is wrong to say that ‘B’ IS a threat, does follow from the propositions presented thus refined because the fact of ‘B’s threat cannot be generalised for the un-differentiated ‘A’ set.