Mark Steyn's "America Alone"

Mark Steyn’s new book, “America Alone:  The End of the World as We Know It” (Regnery) (No. 10 on Amazon’s best seller list as of yesterday, with a 4.5 out of 5 rating from 53 reviewers) takes many of his previous articles and transforms them into a cohesive book-length treatment of themes he has been expounding in The Atlantic Monthly, The Australian, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Sun, the Washington Times, the Orange County Register, National Review, the New Criterion, the Jerusalem Post, and other publications. 

He may be the most prolific political columnist of our generation, and certainly one of the most important.  Yesterday he was at the White House as one of eight journalists meeting with George W. Bush.  Today he was on a bloggers’ conference call organized by One Jerusalem.

Beneath the humor in his book is a sustained defense of American civilization -- and a warning that it needs defending not only militarily, but intellectually as well (which reminds me of the incisive slogan at the top of this blog).  Here is a brief excerpt:

After September 11, the first reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque:  President Bush did, so did the Prince of Wales, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, the prime minister of Canada and many more.  And, when the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died away, you couldn’t help feeling that this would strike almost any previous society as, well, bizarre. . . .

But it set the tone for all that followed, to the point where with each bomb or plot -- from September 11 to London to Toronto -- the protestations of Islam’s good faith grew ever more fulsome.  “Minority rights doctrine,” wrote British author Melanie Phillips, “has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a ‘victim’ group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the ‘oppressive’ majority. . . .  It is impossible to overstate the importance . . . to the global struggle against Islamist extremism of properly understanding and publicly challenging this moral, intellectual, and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa.”

In Europe today, as in the thirties, the political class prostrates itself before an insatiable force . . . .  Bomb us, and we agonize over the “root causes.”  Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that “Islam is a religion of peace.”  Issue blood-curdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims.  Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can’t wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair.  Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the “vast majority” of Muslims “jihad” is a harmless concept meaning “healthy-lifestyle lo-fat granola bar.”

As French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel wrote, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.” . . .

I’m a little unnerved at the number of readers who seem to think the rest of the world can go hand but America will endure as a lonely candle of liberty in a new Dark Ages.  Think that one through:  a totalitarian China, a crumbling Russia, an insane Middle East, a disease-ridden Africa, a civil war-torn Eurabia -- and a country that can’t even enforce its borders against two relatively benign states will somehow be able to hold the entire planet at bay?  Dream on, “realists.” . . .

We have been shirking too long, and that’s unworthy of a great civilization.  To see off the new Dark Ages will be tough and demanding.  The alternative will be worse.

In the bloggers’ call today, Tigerhawk characterized Steyn’s book as a warning to the West comparable to Melanie Phillips’ “Londonistan” -- which is about as high praise as any book can receive.  Steyn’s is more fun to read, but it is just as serious.

UPDATE: The audio of the conference call is here; it runs over an hour but it seemed like 10 minutes. It is worth listening to in its entirety. There are excellent posts on the call by Omri Ceren of Mere Rhetoric, Pamela Geller Oshry of Atlas Shrugs, Anne Lieberman of Boker tov, Boulder! and Kim Priestap at Wizbang.