| Mark Steyn's Back Door Racism |
| by Max Fawcett | |
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Max Fawcett pokes a few holes in Mark Steyn's natalist philosophy. *** It's no secret that we live in a world that is badly overpopulated. The recent outbreak of food riots in Haiti and Egypt, where the army was ordered to bake loaves of bread to stem further incidents of civil disobedience, only served to underscore that reality, to say nothing of the millions of people, mostly children, who starve to death each year and the millions more who live in a state of persistent malnutrition. The stress placed by ever-growing human populations on the environment has resulted in dropping water tables, disappearing fish stocks, and the daily disappearance of various species of animals across the world. Yet you'd have a hard time convincing Canadian polemicist Mark Steyn of the dangers of overpopulation, judging by what he said during his recent appearance at the Bay and Bloor Indigo location in support of his controversial book America Alone. According to Steyn, the solution to the threat of Muslim extremism isn't diplomacy, cultural engagement, or even military conflict. Instead, it's the delivery of non-Muslim babies and lots of them. In Canada, where the 2006 census counted 783,700 Muslims, or 2.5% of the overall population, the idea that Muslims could somehow overwhelm the rest of Canadian society by producing more children is self-evidently absurd. Research repeatedly demonstrates that the fertility rates of immigrant women, be they from Islamic countries or elsewhere, regresses to the national average within two generations. Similarly, a 2008 report from the Demographic and Social Statistics unit of the United Nations Statistical Division indicates that fertility rates throughout the Muslim world are falling rapidly, with countries like Tunisia, Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia, and Iran all at or near the replacement level of 2.1 children per family. Taken together, these are hardly the precursors of a demographic invasion. More importantly, though, Steyn's philosophy of natalism is a little more than poorly coded racism. That it glosses over the profound differences between and within different forms of Islam, which contains the same diversity of views, interpretations, and practises as Christianity, is bad enough, since over-simplifications like these are the natural precursor to more explicit forms of racism. But the linkage between Muslims and prolific rates of reproduction - one that, according to the United Nations, isn't even true any longer - is far worse. It is, in fact, frighteningly similar to the same comparisons that were drawn by Nazi propagandists over seventy years ago, in reference to the Jews of Germany. As Swedish journalist Eva Ekselius writes, "like the Jews were depicted as the foreign, the other, onto which one could project all the traits the culture wants to deny in themselves, so the ‘muslims' now get to take over the second-hand props of anti-semitism." In Steyn's defence, he didn't come up with this odious theory on his own. Instead, it's a re-branding of the Eurabia thesis that Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the late Orianna Falacci have been hawking for years now. They've done so with more success than Steyn has enjoyed in North America thus far, with many governments implementing explicitly anti-Muslim immigration and naturalization policies. Some have gone so far as to adopt the same repugnant policy with respect to Muslims as Canada did towards Jews in the Second World War, that even one is too many. This should alarm anyone who even vaguely remembers the outcome of that policy the last time it was deployed. So too should a recent announcement by INED, France's National Institute of Demographic Studies, which explicitly noted that the recent rise in France's birth rate and resulting population increase has little to do with Muslim immigrants and in so doing indicated just how deeply the Eurabia thesis has penetrated the Western European consciousness. According to the report, the fact that Muslim immigrants to France accounted for only 5% of the overall increase "is important in a country where the number of immigrants from traditionally Muslim countries and their French-born children and grandchildren is now reckoned to be more than 6 million from a total population of 60.7 million." The most interesting part of Steyn's Eurabia thesis is how little confidence it places in the western values it supposedly seeks to protect. Inherent in his argument is the notion that everything we supposedly cherish in the West, from basic freedoms of speech, movement, and association to the equality of all peoples regardless of race, gender, or sexuality, to liberal democracy itself, could be significantly modified or even destroyed altogether by the simple movement of people. Let's indulge in the more conspiratorial aspects of Steyn's argument and assume, just for the moment, that all Muslims, whether Shia, Sunni, or Kurd, old or young, from Afghanistan or Kenya or Lebanon, all of them are united in the desire to immigrate to the West and put us under the jackboot of fundamentalist Islam. Two questions immediately arise from such a thought experiment. First, isn't it still likely, given the natural inclination towards assimilation and integration that has defined immigration over the past century and beyond, that our values would survive this encounter with these millions of Muslims that are (theoretically) united in their desire to subvert them? Second, and far more importantly, if they didn't survive then what were they really worth in the first place? Mark Steyn doesn't deserve to be hauled in front of a human rights tribunal because of his decision to import Europe's anti-Muslim racism to Canada. He isn't, as the Canadian Islamic Congress argued in its two separate complaints to Human Rights Commissions in British Columbia and Ontario, espousing hate speech. He's espousing stupid speech, and the logical response to that isn't litigation or censorship but instead neglect. Seeds of ignorance like the ones he planted need attention to germinate, and putting him on trial serves that purpose only too well. Instead, let's just ignore Mark Steyn and his deliberate provocations. The values of western liberalism will stand up just fine to the influence of immigrants, regardless of how many they number or where they come from. After all, those values are why they're coming here in the first place. Toronto, June 2nd - 1,018 w. Only registered users can write comments. Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.6 |
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