Over the past few months, I’ve shared some insights from Mark Steyn’s indispensable book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Let me wrap up that sharing with some thoughts from his concluding chapter.

Steyn’s main thesis is that the West is losing its culture and is bowing before an ascendant Islam, which will destroy the West if it’s not challenged. At the root of the problem is the new devotion to multiculturalism. While it may sound nice on the surface, one need only peer just beneath that surface to see the rot on which this philosophy is built. Consider this historical example:

In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee”—the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

Steyn declares that “non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud,” and he is correct. From a Biblical understanding of the world, one must make moral judgments. If we don’t, we will face disaster:

But if you think you genuinely believe that suttee is just an example of the rich, vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your pleasant suburb would be like if 25, 30, 48 percent of the people around you really believed in it too. Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.

How does this apply to the Islamic threat? Steyn explains:

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. Pearl Harbor’s been attacked? Quick, order some sushi and get me into a matinee of Madam Butterfly! Seeking to reassure the co-religionists of those who attack you that you do not regard them all as the enemy is a worthy aim but a curious first priority. And, given that more than a few of the imams in those mosque photo-ops turned out to be at best equivocal on the matter of Islamic terrorism and at worst somewhat enthusiastic supporters of it, it involved way too much self-deception on our part.

Although the following comments are not Steyn’s final ones in the book, they serve admirably as final ones for this blog:

At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally “valid.” To accept that proposition means denying reality—the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, and global population movement. Multiculturalism is not the first ideology founded on the denial of truth. You’ll recall Hermann Goering’s memorable assertion that “two plus two makes five if the Fuhrer wills it.” Likewise, we’re asked to accept that the United States Constitution was modeled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation—if a generation of multiculti-theorists, the ethnic grievance lobby, and even a ludicrous resolution of the United States Congress so wills it.

Still, it’s harmless, isn’t it? What’s wrong with playing make-believe if it helps us all feel warm and fuzzy about each other?

Well, because it’s never helpful to put reality up for grabs. There may come a day when you need it.

If you haven’t read this book yet, you need to do so.

Some scandals are pure joy for the mainstream media, while others are too embarrassing to spend much time investigating and reporting. Two of the latter have to do with education and the justice department. Let’s begin with education.

People have been amazed over the past decade at just how well the Atlanta public schools have progressed. Scores kept rising as they zeroed in on No Child Left Behind funding. Now we discover why they’ve been doing so well—they’ve been cheating.  As noted by Mark Steyn,

Not the students, but the superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers—whoops, pardon me, “educators”—and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for “No Child Left Behind” federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let’s face it, it’s easier than teaching, right?

The superintendent, Beverly Hall, on the strength of these bogus scores, won the National Superintendent of the Year award, the Administrator of the Year Award, “and a zillion other phoney-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.” Yet, despite all this deception and fraud, it remains to be seen if there will be any genuine consequences. In my opinion, this is to be expected when government tries to “help” education.

Incidentally, this scandal has stayed so far beneath the radar that I can’t even find a political cartoon to help illustrate it. How sad is that? Stay tuned for more on this one.

Then there’s “Operation Fast and Furious.” I hope by now the word has gotten out about this one. What’s this one all about? It’s your stimulus money at work. Steyn again:

The official explanation is that the federal government used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels. As I said, that’s the official explanation: As soon as your head stops spinning, we’ll resume the narrative. Supposedly, United States taxpayers were picking up the tab for Mexican drug lords’ weaponry in order that the ATF could identify high-up gun-traffickers. But, as it turns out, these high-up gun-traffickers were already known to other agencies—FBI, DEA, and other big-spending acronyms in the great fetid ooze of federal alphabet soup in which this republic is drowning. And, indeed, some of those high-ups are said to have been paid informants for those various federal agencies. So, in case you’re wondering why Obama’s second annual Recovery Summer is a wee bit sluggish at your end, relax: Stimulus dollars went to fund one federal agency to buy guns for the paid informants of another federal agency to funnel to foreign criminals in order that the first federal agency might identify the paid informants of the second federal agency.

Got it? If that seems a trifle confusing, here’s the bottom line: those guns made their way to Mexico as planned, where they were used to kill numerous Mexican civilians and at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry. And here’s where it gets somewhat speculative, but not outlandish:

If, by this stage, you’re wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners—that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control.

Meanwhile, as Republicans ramp up an investigation of Operation Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder is playing dumb about it, hoping to find other scapegoats.

This is the same Eric Holder who has been quite selective in deciding who deserves prosecution and who does not:

Excuse me if I don’t feel like we’re in good hands.

Over the past few months, I’ve periodically quoted from Mark Steyn’s America Alone because it so cogently expresses what has gone wrong with the Western world’s view of reality. Most of his critique has centered on Europe, which is further down the road toward delusion than America. Of course, he wrote the book before we elected Barack Obama as president; we’ve been trying to catch up to Europe ever since.

Yet there is still, even in the age of Obama, an undercurrent within America that rises up against that delusion—to a large extent, that’s what the 2010 elections were all about. Regardless of the political and cultural developments since he wrote the book, Steyn’s insights and warnings continue to ring true.

For instance, here’s his take on the nature of America’s so-called imperialism:

Most Americans are familiar with their stereotype abroad: the ugly American, loud, brash, ignorant, arrogant. It is, in most respects, the inversion of reality: America may be the most modest and retiring hegemon in history. “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”? Most of America’s European “allies” checked the Neither of the Above box and most Middle Eastern “allies” checked the Both of the Above box. Belgium isn’t exactly with the terrorists but it isn’t with us in any meaningful sense. Saudi Arabia is with us but also funding the terrorists in every corner of the world. And both countries get away with it.

We may talk big, but we don’t follow through on the tough talk all too often. Another illusion we live under is that most of the world shares our “values,” whatever that means:

“Common values” and “universal values” are not all that common and universal, and the willingness to defend those values is even rarer. They’ve been sustained over the long haul by a very small group of countries. In the years ahead, America has to take the American moment seriously—in part, to ensure that the allies of tomorrow don’t make the mistakes Western Europe did. That means at the very minimum something beyond cheeseburger imperialism. In the end, the world can do without American rap and American cheeseburgers. American ideas on individual liberty, federalism, capitalism, and freedom of speech would be far more helpful.

At the end of his chapter “The Importance of Being Exceptional: Citizens vs. Dependents,” Steyn issues this warning:

If America is to avoid the Continent’s fate, she needs to talk up self-reliance and individual innovation instead of being sheepish (as Democrats often sound) that their Neanderthal citizenry aren’t more enlightened and European. Free citizens have a shot at winning this existential struggle; nanny-state charges don’t.

The current administration has attempted to increase that nanny-state mentality. We need to fight against the culture of dependency if we mean to survive as a free people.

The Arab Spring, so beloved by the media, is closer to the Islamist Ascendancy. Western blindness, as I’ve noted before, keeps us from recognizing the reality. In Egypt, the crowds listen to an imam who calls for the killing of all Jews. The streets erupt with jubilant agreement. Where are the reports of this? What is taking place in the Islamic world is the rise of the jihadists who want to kill us all. If you don’t think that’s the case, you’re not paying attention.

That’s why I’ve written so many posts with quotes from Mark Steyn’s America Alone. He gets it. Steyn comments,

If this were World War One, with their fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western Civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

What’s the nub of the problem?

Meanwhile, we fight the symptoms—the terror plots—but not the cause: the ideology. The self-imposed constraints of this war—legalistic, multilateral, politically correct—are clearer every day. “Know your enemy,” they say. They know us very well. Do we know them at all?

Steyn wrote those words in 2005, back when we had an administration that had a better handle on the problem [although Bush also gave too much credit to Islam as a "religion of peace"]. What do we face today with Barack Obama in the White House?

He may have made the final decision to take out Osama bin Laden, but that was merely one action against an individual responsible for running a terror network. Does he really understand the immensity of this network? Does he understand and not care? Where are his sympathies? Take a poll of the Israeli people, and you have your answer.

Blindness is one thing; empathy for those who seek to commit genocide is something else.

In 2005, Britain finally took one of the most incendiary imams in the country to court. Abu Hamza was well known in the UK due to stories about him in the tabloid newspapers. They called him “Hooky” because he had lost his hands in an “accident” while in Afghanistan in 1991. As Mark Steyn relates in America Alone,

On trial in London for nine counts of soliciting to murder plus various other charges, he retained the services of a prestigious Queen’s Counsel, who certainly came up with an ingenious legal strategy: “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? SIAC, the United Kingdom’s anti-terrorist court, found in 2003 that a thirty-five-year-old Algerian male had “actively assisted terrorists who have links to Al Qaeda.” But he was released from Belmarsh Prison the following year because jail cases him to suffer a “depressive illness.”

By Western standards, every Islamic terrorist is “depressive”—for a start, as suicide bombers, they’re suicidal. What’s impressive about these “unassimilated” Islamists is the way the pick up on our weaknesses so quickly—the legalisms, the ethnic squeamishness, the bureaucratic inertia. The courtroom evens the playing field to the enemy’s advantage.

Is this what we’ve come to in our quest to make everyone feel good? Are we being multicultured to death—literally?

As commentators flail around in their attempt to explain what’s happening, most, even from the conservative side, miss the key ingredient in our demise: the loss of a Biblical Christian worldview to inform us of eternal right and wrong, of the distinction between righteousness and evil.

As a society, we are generally blind to the real problem; therefore, we don’t know the real solution. Only the reestablishment [not by the government, but by earnest persuasion/argumentation] of a Biblical foundation for our thinking can set us back on the path to genuine knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.

Last Monday, I shared more from Mark Steyn’s brilliant book America Alone, which dissects the radical Islamist problem. I didn’t know as I was writing the post on Sunday that before it appeared on Monday, we would get the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. Does that then make Steyn’s book irrelevant? Only if you believe, against all evidence, that the death of one terrorist leader will be so dispiriting to his followers that they’ll all go back to their caves to meditate for the rest of their lives.

That’s not going to happen. They are energized not by a single man, but by an ideology of hatred. What Steyn has written has continuing relevance, particularly because he clearly identifies the weaknesses of the West. Yes, we acted boldly last week and won a battle in this war on terror; but there is an underlying worldview in this current administration that threatens to turn that victory into a blip on the radar screen of the ongoing war.

Steyn, in his eighth chapter, “The Unipole Apart,” focuses on one aspect of that worldview that is ripping the heart out of the war on terror: the tendency to see this as not a war, but rather a judicial problem. We don’t treat the terrorists as terrorists, this worldview declares, but simply as lawbreakers who can be put through our judicial system.

Steyn reminds us that Zacarias Moussaoui, the man who would have been the twentieth hijacker on 9/11, and who did go through the system and got life imprisonment, famously commented after receiving his sentence: “America, you lose.” How could he say that? Steyn says it’s hard to disagree with Moussaoui’s perspective:

On the day Mr. Moussaoui was led out of court to begin his sentence, some pompous member of the ghastly 9-11 Commission turned up on one of the cable shows to declare proudly that jihadists around the world were marveling at the fairness of the U.S. justice system. The leisurely legal process Mr. Moussaoui  enjoyed had lasted longer than America’s participation in World War Two. Around the world, everybody was having a grand old laugh at the U.S. justice system.

The wheels of justice seem to turn very slowly, and there is the fear that they may not turn at all if some legal technicality can dismiss a case. When Eric Holder, our current attorney general, wanted to try Gitmo detainees—remember, these were enemy combatants captured on the battlefield—in New York City courts, he faced such a firestorm of resistance, he finally had to back down. Common sense won that round, but there’s no guarantee it will in the future.

Steyn notes further,

It’s a very worn cliché to say America is over-lawyered but the extent of that truism only becomes clear when you realize how overwhelming is our culture’s reflex to cover war as just another potential miscarriage-of-justice story. In the Moussaaoui case, the first instinct of the news shows to the verdict was to book some relative of the September 11 families and ask whether they were satisfied with the result, as if the prosecution of the war on terror is some kind of national-security Megan’s Law on which they have inviolable proprietary rights. Sorry, but that’s not what happened that Tuesday morning. The thousands who died were not targeted as individuals: they were killed because they were American, not because somebody in a cave far away decided to murder Mrs. Smith. Their families have a unique claim to our sympathy and a grief we can never truly share, but they’re not plaintiffs and war isn’t a suit. It’s not about “closure” for the victims; it’s about victory for the nation.

Unless we take seriously what Steyn says here, we will be going down a self-destructive path. War is war; it is not the equivalent either of breaking-and-entering or the revenge killing of a particular individual. Radical Islamists want to wipe out Western civilization. Let’s not help them by minimizing their actions as mere lawbreaking.

How about a little more commentary on Western blindness today? On this subject, I always like to allow experts to speak. Mark Steyn, in America Alone, provides enough ammunition to carry the day. As many of you know, I’ve been chronicling Steyn’s book over the last few weeks. We’re now up to chapter eight, “The State of the Art Primitive: The Known Unknowns vs. the Knowingly Unknowing.” If that title puzzles you a little, let me—or rather Steyn—shed some light.

Steyn quotes Edward Said, “the New York-based America disparager and author of the bestselling Orientalism,” as deploring what he calls “the tendency of commentators to separate cultures into … ‘sealed-off entities,’ when in reality Western Civilization and the Muslim world are so ‘intertwined’ that it was impossible to ‘draw the line’ between them.” In other words, Westerners have this bad habit of saying there is a clear distinction between the cultures when none really exists.

Steyn responds,

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, wasn’t impressed by this notion. “The line seems pretty clear,” he said. “Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the West’s idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam’s idea.”

We are neglecting one startling fact: they hate us.

Take the example of the strife between Israel and the Palestinians:

For one side, there is no common humanity, even with people they know well, who provide them with jobs, and much else: Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a twenty-one-year-old woman who has received kind and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, packs herself with explosives and sets off to blow apart that hospital and the doctors and nurses who’ve treated her.

We in the West are always looking for the “root causes” of the outrage in the Islamic world. Steyn says there are no root causes to seek, or at least not in the ordinary sense. He notes,

Five days before the slaughter in Bali in 2005, nine Islamists were arrested in Paris for reportedly plotting to attack the Metro. Must be all those French troops in Iraq, right? So much for the sterling efforts of President Chirac and his prime minister, the two chief obstructionists to Bush-Blair-neocon-Zionist warmongering since 2001.

The French continually criticized the United States after 9/11, “yet the jihadists still blew up a French oil tanker. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would surely be it.” When asked later, the spokesman for the radical jihadists explained, “‘We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.’”

Now we get down to what might be considered the root cause of all root causes, one that escapes the Western illuminati: they attack us because we are not them. Steyn continues,

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.

The Soviet Union and other totalitarian states at least played a game of pretending they weren’t what they were—they would refer to themselves as “People’s Republics,” which was a way to try to paper over their true nature. Radical Islamists don’t bother to pretend.

They say what they mean and they mean what they say—and we choose to stay in ignorance. Blow up the London Underground during a G-8 summit and the world’s leaders twitter about how “tragic” and “ironic” it is that this should have happened just as they’re taking steps to deal with the issues—as though the terrorists are upset about poverty in Africa and global warming. Even in a great blinding flash of clarity, we can’t wait to switch the lights off and go back to fumbling around on the darkling plain.

We continue to pretend that we are all the same, and that we can work together, even when the “other side” clearly states its goals. We wait around for cooperation and wonder why it’s not forthcoming.

We are blind because we have a foundation of spiritual blindness, and spiritual blindness begets all other types of blindness. The radicals condemn the West because it is “Christian civilization.” If only that were the case.