I’m nearly finished with Mark Steyn’s excellent America Alone. The central question Steyn poses is whether Western civilization can withstand Al-Qaeda’s primitivist vision of a world Caliphate; given the West’s self-imposed demographic melt-down.
Except for the United States, western democracies are not breeding at even replacement rates. Europe has a huge, increasingly vocal and violent Islamic immigrant population combined with unsustainable social welfare. The EU is already toast.
Steyn recalls for me one Nazra Quraishi, a Lansing area Muslim who teaches kindergarten. Her letter to the editor of the Lansing State Journal provoked little local comment after its publication in July, 2006.
It was, well… read Quraishi’s letter before I comment:
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Emphasis mine. Le Roy Barnett was asking Muslims to disavow mandating butchery. “No dice,” says Quraishi, “the religion of peace demands you agree with it. Apostates are required to be killed, and by the way, Le Roy, infidels in general are fair game.”
Quraishi’s sentiments were so aligned with my expectations that I hardly gave her letter a thought. Of course there are some followers of Islam in my community who wish to destroy it.
I did expect a storm of protest letters to the LSJ from the majority Liberal population here. Quraishi proposed sharia as the law Americans should be bound by – meaning a complete integration of a brutal church with a totalitarian state. That no such protest materialized says much about the degree of political correctness of the citizens of Ingham County. They think every philosophy is as valuable and as ethical as any other – homophobic, misogynist, murderous – “we’ll justifiably kill you if you change your mind” – religions not excepted.
Quraishi advocates murdering anyone who changes their mind about Islam. She expects this death sentence to be accepted by her neighbors. I guess it is. The lack of outrage reveals a deep moral uncertainty, and a shared disrespect of Western values.