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Muslim Shock and Awe in Europe
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 4, 2014 @ 10:22 am In The Point | 12 Comments
At Steyn Online, Mark Steyn discusses the muted response to the inevitable Islamization of Birmingham.
The other day, for example, The Daily Mail reported that Birmingham, England (where I chanced to be recently, and where Cameron’s Tories have just wrapped up their party conference) now has more Muslim than Christian children. That means that, absent any countervailing dynamic, its future is Muslim. This is not a small thing: Birmingham is Britain’s second city, and, in a democratic age, its structures will reflect its people. The constabulary, the school system, the hospitals will have a de facto sharia-compliant character. If you’re a Muslim girl, the authorities will systematically turn a blind eye to forced marriages and honor violence, and, if you’re a lower-class infidel girl, to “grooming”. If you’re boorish enough to draw attention to such unpleasantness, you’ll be committing a hate crime, and Cameron’s even squishier successors will explain why there’s “no right to shout fire in a crowded theatre”, which is a polite way of saying we can’t afford this freedom-of-expression stuff…
It’s a bit dispiriting to write a wake-up call only to find everyone you wrote it for simply doubles the strength of their sleeping pills.
Steyn was right then and he’s right now. And the UK represents a fascinating and disturbing example of how moments of shock are smoothed over.
1,400 girls are molested. There is a de facto Muslim majority in Birmingham. A soldier is beheaded.
Those are moments of shock. They might wake some people up. They do wake up some. But the process is really about how the human mind processes a shock event or fact that disturbs its sense of equilibrium.
Most seek a stable state. They want to be reassured that things can go back to the way they were before. Even when they fight, they fight to restore the order of things. This is the base on which conservative parties draw.
As Lauri Regan mentions…
Within hours of the Boston Marathon bombing, I sent an email to my newsletter distribution list with speculation about the perpetrators being of Muslim descent. One self-proclaimed “moderate” on my list told me that he was “done,” accused me of being an extremist, and ordered me to remove him from my list.
The pattern of events is that the right accurately predicts the outcome of the left’s policies, is ridiculed for it, is proven right, and is then told that the outcome is ideal and only reactionaries would oppose it.
R: If you go with socialized medicine, there will be death panels
L: Ha ha death panels. How ridiculous
R: See we told you. There are death panels
L: Only a cruel unfeeling person would want to dismantle our wonderful mandatory free health care system by preventing the system from cutting costs. You probably want to go to the bad old days when everyone was dying in the streets.
The “Shock” though has great potential. It’s the moment that frightens the left, which expects the peasants to rise up. It’s the moment that the right rarely exploits properly because its leaders are not of the right.
A moment of shock can tear away illusions. The left has to transition from one consensus to the other over that moment of shock.
“Yes, there are death panels, and here’s why we need them.” “The UK will be majority Muslim and this is why it’s a good thing.” “Majority Muslim means Sharia law and here’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of it.”
The response of the center-right is invariably, “We don’t want to be alarmist but…” when the thing to do is be alarmist because there is a great deal to be alarmed about.
The left is never shy about being alarmist or claiming that the sky is falling. The sky isn’t falling, but civilization is.
“America Alone is not “alarmist”: If anything, it was insufficiently alarmist. What’s underway is happening far faster than I suggested eight years ago.”
Crises always sneak up on us even when we know they’re coming. The left never wastes them. The right always does.
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