“America Alone” by Mark Steyn

This is an article I will continually update. For now it consists only of a list of quotations from this book:

“”Racist!” is now no more than the cry of a western liberal who can’t stand his illusions being disturbed.”

- pg xxi

“Whenever I make [my] point, lefties always respond, “Oh well, that’s typical right-wing racism”. In fact, it ought to be the Left’s issue. I’m a “social conservative”. When the mullahs take over I’ll grow my beard a little fuller, get a couple extra wives and keep my head down. It’s the feminists and gays who’ll have a tougher time. If, say, three of the five judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court are Muslim, what are the chances of them approving “gay marriage”? That’s the scenario Europe’s looking at a few years down the road.”

- pg xliii

“You can argue about what these trends mean, but surely not that they mean absolutely nothing, which is what the complaceniks assure us.

On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic.

Time for the obligatory “of courses”: of course, not all Muslims are terrorists – though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists – though enough of them share their basic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwise as the “good cop” end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine.

But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in.”

- pg 33

“[Due to youth and political correctness] it is not necessary for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one.”

[But it will become a statistical majority in Europe anyway on present trends]

- pg 34

“We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe – without swords, without guns, without conquests. The 50 million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

- words of Colonel Gaddafi, pg 35

“Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment. To fight for king and country is to fight for the future. But a barren society has no future, and so what’s to fight for? The terrorists would would have their work cut out killing the Spanish people as fast as they’re killing themselves. How can you “decimate” a population that’s already halving with every generation?”

- pg 37

“We’re the ones who will change you. Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.

Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours.”

- words of Norweigian imam Mullah Krekar, pg 39

“Islam is not just a religion… It’s not merely that there’s global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project – and, in fact, an imperial project – in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism are not.

Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith in which whatever’s your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified. And yes, Christianity has had its blood-drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, which remains a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year.”

- pg 62

“Contemporary multiculturalism absolves one of knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them. After all, if it’s grossly judgemental to say one’s culture is better than another, why bother learning about the differences?”

- pg 71

“Islam is not only a religion, it is a complete way of life. Islam guides Muslims from birth to grave. The Quran and prophet Muhammad’s words and practical application of Quran in life cannot be changed.

Islam is a guide for humanity, for all times, until the day of judgment. It is forbidden in Islam to convert to any other religion. The penalty is death. There is no disagreement about it.

Islam is being embraced by people of other faiths all the time. They should know they can embrace Islam, but cannot get out. This rule is not made by Muslims; it is the supreme law of God.

Please do not ask us Muslims to pick some rules and disregard other rules. Muslims are supposed to embrace Islam in its totality.”

- words of Nazra Quraishi, Kindergarten teacher, East Lansing, pg 81

“How many Western Muslims have formed “Not In Our Name” groups and marched to protest the bombing of their fellow citizens in New York, Madrid and London? How many have joined “Islam Against Suicide Bombing” or banded together to force jihadist imams out of their mosques? How many are prepared to stand up and say that they didn’t come to America or Europe to raise their children as Saudis?

Hello? Anyone out there?”

- pg 81/82

“We chatter breezily about “assimilating” Western Muslims… What if the problem is not that Muslims in the West are unfamiliar with the customs of their new land but rather that they are all too familiar with them – and explicitly reject them?

Muslims have assimilated brilliantly, at least when it comes to mastering the principal discourse of the advanced democratic state -the legalisms, victimology, and entitlement culture.”

- pg 82

“‘Islamophobia’ is not phony or even psychological but very literal – if you’re a Dutch member of parliament or British novelist or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death or a French schoolgirl in certain suburbs getting jeered at as an infidel whore, your Islamophobia is highly justified.”

- pg 84

“The “moderate Muslim” is not entirely fictional. But it would be more accurate to call them quiescent Muslims. In the 1930s, there were plenty of “moderate Germans,” and a fat lot of good they did us or them. Today, the “moderate Muslim” is a unique contributor to cultural diversity: unlike all the visible minorities, he’s a non-visible one -or, at any rate, non-audible.”

- pg 86

“What will be the next phase of the Islamist advance in the West? If you’re a teenager in most European cities these days, you’ve a choice between two competing identities – a robust confident Islamic identity or a tentative post-nationalist cringingly apologetic European identity. It would be a mistake to assume the former is attractive only to Arabs and North Africans.”

- pg 90

“Everyone’s for a free Tibet, but no one’s for freeing Tibet. So Tibet will stay unfree – as unfree now as it was when the first Free Tibet campaigner slapped the very first “FREE TIBET” sticker onto the back of his Edsel. Idealism as inertia is the hallmark of the movement. Well, not entirely inert: it must be a pain in the neck when you trade in the Volvo for a Subaru and have to bend down and paste on a new “FREE TIBET” sticker.

For a while, my otherwise not terribly political wife got extremely irritated by the Free Tibet shtick, demanding to know at a pancake breakfast at the local church what precisely some harmless hippy-dippy old neighbor of ours meant by the sticker he’d been proudly displaying decade in, decade out: “But what exactly are you ‘doing to free Tibet?” she insisted. “You’re not doing anything, are you?”

“Give the guy a break,” I said when we got back home. “He’s advertising his moral superiority, not calling for action. If Rumsfeld were to say, ‘Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,’ the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. They’d have to bend down and peel off the ‘FREE TIBET’ stickers and replace them with ‘WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.’”

- pg 93

“The perfect summation of Europe: welfare addiction over demographic reality.”

- pg 113

“In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld made a much quoted rumination. “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me,” the defense secretary began, “because, as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns–the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

A lot of people jeered at Rummy. The witless twits at Britain’s Plain English Campaign gave him that year’s award for the worst use of English. But Rumsfeld is perhaps the best speaker of Plain English in English-speaking politics, and it would be a less despised profession if there were more like him. His little riff about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns is in fact a brilliant distillation of the dangers we face.”

- pg 147

“When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”

The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they’re happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali. No problem. We are all infidels. You can be a hippy-dippy hey-man-I-love-everybody Dutch stoner hanging out in a bar in Bali, and they’ll blow you up’ with as much enthusiasm as if you were Dick Cheney.”

- pg 151

“Do you remember when that statue of Saddam came down? It proved to be hollow. The Islamists think Western Civilization’s like that: tough exterior, but empty inside; protected by a layer of hard steel–the U.S. military–there’s nothing underneath.

Why would they get that idea? Well, from a million and one little things–itsy-bitsy foot-of-page-thirty-seven news items, none too important in itself but cumulatively an avalanche. Take one trivial example: just before Christmas 2003, Muslim community leaders in California applauded the decision of the Catholic high school in San Juan Capistrano to change the name of its football team from the Crusaders to the less culturally insensitive Lions.

Meanwhile, twenty miles up the road in Irvine, the schedule for the Muslim Football League’s New Year tournament promised to bring together some of the most exciting Muslim football teams in Orange County: the Intifada, the Mujahideen, the Saracens, and the Sword of Allah.

That’s the spirit. I can’t wait for the California sporting calendar circa 2015: the San Diego Jihadi vs. the Oakland Culturally Sensitives, the Malibu Hezbollah vs. the Santa Monica Inoffensives, the Pasadena Sword of the Infidel Slayer vs. the Bakersfield Self-Deprecators, the San Jose Decapitators vs. the Berkeley Mutually Respectfuls.

I suppose the rationale, conscious or not, behind such trivial concessions as school sports team names is that a big powerful wealthy culture can afford to be generous to a weaker culture. Unfortunately, magnanimity is often seen as weakness by those on the receiving end. It’s easy to be sensitive, tolerant, and multicultural–it’s the default mode of the age—yet, when you persist in being sensitive to the insensitive, tolerant of the intolerant, and impeccably multicultural about the avowedly unicultural, don’t be surprised if they take it for weakness.”

- pg 157-158

“Edward Fitzgerald, QC, for the defence, said that Abu Hamza’s interpretation of the Koran was that it imposed an obligation on Muslims to do jihad and fight in the defence of their religion. He said that the Crown case against the former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque was ’simplistic in the extreme.’ He added: ‘It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran itself.’

If the Koran permit, you must acquit? Brilliant. To convict would be multiculturally disrespectful: if the holy book of the religion of peace recommends killing infidels, who are we to judge?”

- pg 161