Human Rights

Over the years I have developed a strong repugnance for human rights organizations. First, they are too whiny and self righteous; second, they are usually agenda-driven; and third, they highly selective in whose rights they are concerned about. They always seem to want to protect some so called "right" of a minority by limiting the freedoms of the majority. This is done by forcing the majority to accept something that is, at best, repugnant, or at the worst, destructive to the interests of the majority.

Nothing illustrates this clearer than the actions of the Canadian Islamic Congress in filing three lawsuits against a Canadian current affairs magazine and its editor-in-chief, Kenneth Whyte, for publishing sections of a book that analyzes the growth of Islam. The book, "The Future Belongs to Islam", was authored by conservative columnist Mark Steyn. Excerpts from it appeared in the October 23, 2007, edition of Maclean's.

The future belongs to Islam
The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. An excerpt from 'America Alone'.
MARK STEYN Oct 20, 2006

Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

This is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.

Steyn goes on to point out some very disturbing comparative demographics that show that western civilization, as we know it, is "running out of babies."

Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we're piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.

You might formulate it like this:

Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;
Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.

Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.

We are witnessing the end of the late 20th-century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital.

Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim's pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.

The point is: Steyn is not mocking or criticizing their precious child molesting prophet. He is commenting about demographic forces shaping the future of Europe. And even this is too much for the mad imams of the ROP because Steyn hammers home some some incredibly salient points:

We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the "war on terror" for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little." This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.

Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestly suggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply his mind to the conundrum the Crown faced:

Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20000 a head... During the same time, 60000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and the expense necessary to kill us all.

Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After the revolution, there were massive population displacements: as United Empire Loyalists well know, large numbers of New Yorkers left the colony to resettle in what's now Ontario. Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects of King George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. For these people, their primary identity was not as American colonists but as British subjects. For others, their new identity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegiance to the Crown. The question for today's Europe is whether the primary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French.

The Canadian Islamic Congress and its counterpart in the States, CAIR, would have us remain ignorant of these considerations, for it involves the very future of civilization as we know it.

Our future will not be determined by technology, war, famine, plague or any other factors. It will will be determined by God, first and foremost. Those who cherish the Christian roots of America have made their contribution to the future through their children and grandchildren. As we have abandoned the precepts that forged our nation, we have also abandoned the socio-political adhesive that binds us. Europe is finding this out as did Israel thousands of years ago. As the Israelites turned to other gods, they became enslaved by surrounding nations.

Who or what do we worship? For many Americans it certainly is not the Creator as revealed in Scripture. We can see the same effect in Europe as they abandoned their faith, for if all faiths are the same, then you believe in nothing. And you will pass on to your children exactly what you believe: snail darters and kangaroo rats and being inoffensive are more important than families to grow a nation.

[...]In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant's counsel argued he couldn't get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country's patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he's too "militaristic" and "offensive to Muslims." They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George's cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban's cross as a thin yellow streak.

In a modern twist, Europe will become enslaved not from without, but from within. And the same fate awaits us if we don't wake up.