Johann Hari

'America Alone' is a guidebook to a continent called Eurabia in the year 2020. Its old European shell looks familiar; "most of" the old Cathedrals and boulevards "still stand" in Rome and London and Paris. But the Islamic National Republican Coalition has just won the French elections - only the latest nation-sized domino to fall to the Islamists. Alcohol is already banned in the Netherlands and Denmark. The continent's women are veiled. The gay clubs are long since shut and shuttered, "relocated to San Francisco."

The "mass evacuations" of white people began five years ago, as the "supposedly Greater France" began "remorselessly evolving month by month into Greater Bosnia." As they flee, the last Europeans curse the memory of mass immigration and multiculturalism. They now realise that 7/7 and France's 2006 car-burning banlieues were merely "the first stage of the Eurabian civil war." The continent that defined modernity is condemned to "societal collapse, fascist revivalism" and a descent into "the long Eurabian night." America is left alone, the last country to resist being "reprimitivized".

This is not presented as satirical sci-fi, nor as fanatical fodder for a party political broadcast fronted by Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is the straight-faced prediction of a book that has slithered onto the New York Times best-seller list and captured the imagination of the American right. Mark Steyn - an uneducated former Disk Jockey turned pundit - is today being greeted as a sage by Dick Cheney and Joe "I'm-a-Democrat-honest" Lieberman, and as a seer by the National Review. Even former Democratic candidate for Vice-President, Joe Lieberman, is touting its "wisdom".

Steyn's story is - very loosely - based on demographics. His argument is simple. Europe's "white" population (a label he initially shies away from, but later embraces) is having fewer and fewer children. So to keep their social democratic economies spinning, these Europeans are importing Muslim immigrants - who are breeding rapidly. Although he offers no statistics on the European Muslim birthrate, he warns ominously that the most popular baby's name in Rotterdam is now Mohammed. This generation of young Muslims will represent "a literal baby boom". He asks sceptically, "Can the developed world get more Muslim in its demographic character without becoming more Muslim in its political character?" No. Because the "European races too self-absorbed to breed," they are unwittingly catalysing the "the recolonization of Europe by Islam."

From this reading of the demography - "it doesn't explain everything, but it accounts for a good 90 percent" - the rest of the narrative flows. An unassimilated, culturally confident Muslim mass will slowly become the majority, and demand the demoralised multicultural "natives" integrate with them. At times, Steyn implies this shift is the result of a conscious political conspiracy. Orianna Fallacci - whose "bravery" he praises - said that Muslims "have been told to come here and breed like rats." Steyn skirts close to his, warning: "Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman... There are three strategies Islam deploys against a dying West: first, demography; second, conversion; and third, the murky 'intertwining' of modern technology and ancient hatreds."

All Steyn's major tropes are there in this short snippet: 'Islam', acting as one homogenous sharia-seeking bloc, is consciously and deliberately taking over. He scrambles to find a Muslim who has leaked the conspiracy, finally stumbling across that famous demographer Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who has said: "There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe - without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe [sic] will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades."

For the remainder of the book, Steyn weaves everything else he loathes about Europe - primarily its social democracy and its distaste for religion - into a mesh of blame. How is social democracy preparing the way for an Islamic takeover? "The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood - healthcare, childcare, care of the elderly - the point that it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct." How is secularism to blame for Islamism? "The continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one."

Steyn's prose has a jangling musicality that may, for his less discerning Talk Radio-addicted readers, gloss over the outright distortions in his work. He is genuinely funny, at one point noting he would consel his readers to run for the hills "except they're full of terrorist training camps." Every delusional statement is sweetened with such a screwball one-liner; like Ann Coulter, Steyn writes in a demonic demotic that makes you chuckle even as you retch.

But this cannot hide the gaping holes of logic and fact in his argument. To fulfil his headline predictions, Steyn needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 200 million European Muslims - in just 13 years. Only Fallacci's rats could reproduce so rapidly. Steyn even admits that the history of demographic predictions is hysterically inept, noting that "most twenty-year projections... are laughably speculative, and thus most doomsday scenarios are too" - before offering his own.

Europe's real demographics are described in a similar book by a slightly more scupulous author. Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the Washington Times and DC grande dame, last year wrote 'The West's Last Chance' predicting an enfeebled Europe would collapse before the Muslim hoardes. But after studying the figures, he admitted: “For almost every Western European country, their populations do not even begin to decline until at least 2025... In fact, for the next few decades, they continue to go up, even without any new immigration… The numbers only begin to move decidedly down about fifty years from now.” So for Steyn's predictions to hold true, the current Muslim birthrate needs to hold steady through five decades of life in the West, all Muslims have to become communitarian Islamists bent on sharia law, and there must be no natalist policies from European governments in the meanwhile.

Perhaps sensing this groaning crack in the foundation of his argument, Steyn adds hastily: "It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the eighth century, the 'Islamic world' stretched from Spain to India yet its population was only minority Muslim." But they were - a fairly obvious difference - not electoral democracies, where any group has to command a majority to rule.

When the figures fail him, Steyn falls back on urban mythology. After the 9/11 massacres, in his Daily Telegraph column he repeated as fact preposterous claims that Muslim children all over New York had warned their favourite teachers not to go to the World Trade Centre that day. Here, he says, "On the night of September 11th Muslim youths in northern England rampaged through the streets cheering Islam's glorious victory over the Great Satan. They pounded on the hoods of the cars, hammered the doors and demanded the drivers join them in the chants of 'Osama Bin Laden is a great man.'" There is no record of these events on Lexis-Nexis; Steyn has not replied to a request for the source. He says variously that "the old flag" of St George is now "unflyable" in England, and - with shades of Enoch Powell's untraceable "grinning picanninies" - claims he knows "an English lady" who wears a headscarf every time she steps outside to stop Muslims harrassing her. As somebody who lives in a Muslim area, everybody I know who lives here finds this preposterous. But this is Steyn's way with evidence: the extremely atypical is presented as universal, and the urban myth is presented as damning fact.

So Steyn's current predictions will prove as powerful as... well, Steyn's previous predictions. Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently summarised them in the Guardian: "Apart from predicting that George Bush would win the 2000 presidential election in a landslide, Steyn said at regular intervals that Osama bin Laden "will remain dead". Weeks after the invasion of Iraq he assured his readers that there would be "no widespread resentment at or resistance of the western military presence"; in December 2003 he wrote that "another six weeks of insurgency sounds about right, after which it will peter out"; and the following March he insisted that: "I don't think it's possible for anyone who looks at Iraq honestly to see it as anything other than a success story."

But number-crunching and mockery are not a sufficient response; it is hard to comment on Steyn's work without noting its raw racism. Throughout his work he uses openly racialized language, albeit with a post-ironic smirk. He talks about "the Yellow Peril" and "gooks". He notes nostalgically that "in the old days, the white man settled the Indian [sic] territory" whereas now the savages are settling us. He describes as "correct" a friend who talks about "beturbanned prophet-monkeys." Of course, Steyn denies this is connected to race, writing, "To agitate about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not about race; it's about culture."

Yet it quickly becomes clear that for him, culture is merely a thinly veiled homologue for race - and then the mask slips entirely. He writes: "Those who pooh-pooh the the United States' comparatively robust demographics say they reflect nothing more than the fecundity of Hispanic immigration... In fact, white women in America still breed at a greater rate - 1.85 or so - than white women in Europe or Canda." So after saying it is "grotesque" to count out "white" babies, he does just that. "White" is not a culture; it is a skin colour, and there Steyn is, relieved that more babies have his pigmentation than the brown and black varieties. Indeed, if Steyn's 'warnings' have a historical precedent, it is the hysteria among even liberal Americans like Jack London in the early twentieth century that anticipated Chinese immigrants would outbreed white Americans and take over the US. London's solution was extremination; what is Steyn's?

The real problems within European Islam get lost in the endless rhetorical inflation, racism and fictionalizing of Steyn's work. Islamism (distinct from Islam) is indeed a fascistic menace, and it is horrifying that a significant minority of European Muslims adhere to its dictates. Some 37 percent of young British Muslims, for example, view British Jews are "a legitimate target", according to a Populus poll for the Times, and 7 percent believe suicide-murder can be justified within their own country. This gay-hating, women-enslaving far-right fanaticism must be honestly described, and steadily dissolved.

Steyn is right to say that multiculturalism is an obstacle to doing this. "At the core of multiculturalism is an assumption that a non-Western culture is somehow primal and immutable, but that an advanced nation is no more than the sum of its constituent parts," he notes, and it is correct to say that European elites have spent too long "being sensitive to the insensitive, tolerant of the intolerant, and impeccably multicultural about the avowedly unicultural." A multicultural state finds it hard to offer long-term integration to its new subjects, since it feels squeamish about articulating any over-arching identity: "You can't assimilate with a nullity... The modern multiculturalism state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of inmigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship."

But Steyn offers a masterclass in how not to fight against that strange twin-set of the Islamists and the multiculturalists who treat them as the authentic spokespeople for "their" communities. By far the best way to unpick Islamism is to hold open the institutions of a free society - rather than lock them down in the name of a bogus 'respect' - so moderate Muslims, and especially Muslim women, can rise. No ideology built upon the savage oppression of half of 55 percent of its adherents (let's throw in the gays) can survive in a society where it can be debated and disputed without fear of violence. Islam in the open air will not be fundamentalist for long; indeed, European Islam can offer a starting-point for the Islamic Enlightenment.

In his final chapter Steyn pays lip-service to some of these sentiments, but he has spent the book undercutting his ability to make these claims. He calls for Muslim moderation - after concluding that Muslim moderation is a contradiction in terms. He warns early in the book that "the religion [of Islam] itself is a political project - and in fact an imperial project," a species of superstition wholly different to Catholicism, Judaism or anything else. Islam is imperialism, he reckons, and its irreducible core is to seek shariah law. So the best we can hope for, it seems, is a moderate Muslim imperialism - not something Steyn, surely, could happily co-exist with (nor any sincere democrat). Indeed, at one point he says moderate Islam functions as a "good cop" in the "good cop/bad cop" routine squeezing democracies.

The problem is that Steyn is himself a religious follower, so he cannot see a basic atheist truth: in reality, superstition is elastic. There is no divine essence underpinning it all and providing thematic coherence. There are indeed parts of the Koran that mandate savage imperialism, just as there are parts of the Torah and Bible where 'God' commits and demands genocide. Most Christians and Jews have managed to relativise away these passages, and in time most Muslims will too. But he has already declared Islam incompatible with democracy - so any moderate Muslim must be, by definition, a false Muslim. This argument is not just false. It is a weapon in the jihadists' hands.

'America Alone' becomes even more problematic when Steyn tries half-heartedly to call for Muslim women's rights. He is intelligent enough to realise the surest way to reduce the disharmony between Muslim birth-rates and those of other communities - if this was judged to be a problem requiring a solution - would be to spread Islamic feminism. Throw money at Muslim women's refuges, introduce positive discrimination at universities and in the workplace, crack down ferociously on fathers who try to keep their daughters effectively imprisoned in their homes. Very few women want to have seven children, given a free choice, proper education and access to a menu of contraceptives and, yes, abortion.

But Steyn cannot promote this, because he opposes these freedoms for Western women. Indeed, he has spent the book chiding white women for failing to breed and for aborting ("killing") a generation of white children. Worse, he seems to actively agree with the Islamist critique of women's sexual freedom, claiming in passing that Islam provides women with "a refuge from the slatternly image of post-feminist Western womanhood." He does not really believe the solution is to roll out feminism to Muslims; he thinks it is to gut feminism among those women who already enjoy it - an impossibility as well as an abhorrence. So his solution simply sits limply like a deflated souffle, with his dark hints that if this fails "unthinkable solutions" will become necessary and "neonationalist strongmen" will rise.

This is only one of several places where Steyn's proposed solutions would make the 'problems' he wants to solve even worse. He argues for dissolving Europe's welfare state which, in some strange alchemical sense, will reawaken the continent's "survival instinct" and rejuvenate its "civilisational will." (There is a lot of cod-Nietzschean talk about "will" here). But which country in Europe has the healthiest demographics? Sweden, with 1.64 births per woman. Why? Because it offers the most generous childcare provision in Europe, making it less stressful and less expensive to have kids than for their British or Greek cousins. Steyn would abolish this overnight - and bring his beloved birthrates crashing down.

Steyn's wider response to Islamism is to make democratic societies more like the one the Islamists want to build. He sees democratic debate and concern for human rights as unforgivable signs of weakness, mocking those who oppose torture and saying the war in Iraq has been fought "with kid gloves". He has suggested debate about the war should be confined to a war cabinet of five people, and that anybody who disputed their decisions would be "disgusting". "The Muslim critique of the West - that we're decadent vulgar narcissist fornicating sodomites - is not without more than a grain of truth," he writes, saying that the destruction of Europe's feminist and gay rights advances wouldn't especially bother him. He agrees that secular Europe is spiritually barren, decadent, depraved. At times, it's hard to see why he opposes Islamism at all, except because of a Schmittian hatred of the Absolute Enemy and a distaste for Islamist symbols.

Europe cannot defeat the far-right poison of Islamic fundamentalism by turning to a parallel far-right mythology of its own. Once before we logged the race of babies. Once before we invented conspiracies like the Protocols of the Elders of Mohammed peddled by Steyn. It is a startling indictment of the intellectual standards of the American right that they have welcomed this Eurabian fiction with anything other than cheap, repulsed laughter.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the New Statesman to letters@newstatesman.co.uk or just for me to johann@johannhari.com

Some pro-Steyn e-mailers have picked up on the 'uneducated' comment, saying I am being condescending. I replied: "There's nothing inherently wrong with being uneducated; both my parents left school at 15, I'm obviously not jeering at people like them. There are plenty of people (like my mother) who leave school but become self-educated. Steyn clearly hasn't done that. Steyn's lack of a rigorous education - either at a university, or in his own home - shows in the book, and leads him into serious errors. He doesn't know how to use statistics, for example, and chronically misuses them throughout the book."

Reader John Hille makes a good point: "I spied just one minor error in your article. Sweden does not have Europe's highest fertility rate: Iceland has, at 1.99, followed by Norway at 1.84 and Denmark at 1.80. Of course these examples only confirm the point about social democracies being supportive of childbearing. I informed Steyn that all of these countries also belong to the most irreligious on Earth - with regular church attendance rates of about 2 % - that they all have liberal abortion laws and that they were the first to recognize gay civil unions. All things he apparently suspects of discouraging childbearing.

Since Steyn made a big point of fertility rates in exceptional countries such as Niger (around 6) I also pointed out that all but one of the five most populous Muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey) have rates of around 3 or below, and that they are falling rapidly in all five, with Iran (at 2.1) about to drop below replacement rate and to be overtaken by Iceland.

I have yet publish the sequel to Steyn's book, "Niger alone", set in 2120, when the mosques of Isfahan and Istanbul are still standing, but the countries have otherwise been overrun by us heathen Vikings from Scandinavia."

Another reader writes: A letter to the journal Science pointed out in mid-2003 that humanity, without noticing it, had just quietly passed a very important milestone: for the first time, more than half the human race lives in countries where the birthrate is below the replacement rate. Paul Ehrlich's dreaded Population Bomb is definitely being defused, thanks to the fact that poor Third Worlders are tremendously more willing to use birth control voluntarily than he assumed they would be -- although, given our remaining resource-shortage problems, it's still a race against time. The only reason that the human population as a whole is still increasing moderately fast is that a majority of the other part of humanity lives in two regions where the birth rate is still appallingly high because women are denied access to contraception: sub-Saharan Africa, and the more unenlightened sector of the Moslem world, running roughly from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia (but skipping Iran). The Moslem countries of Saharan Africa seem to do a lot better, and at the time of the letter Tunisia and Lebanon had also dropped below the replacement rate."

There's more analysis of Steyn's junk statistics at http://thecrossedpond.com/?p=139

If you want a taster of the mentality of Steyn's fan-base, here's a typical pro-Steyn e-mail from sfkdpdp@metrocast.net :

"The only appeal you have in the US is to the left wing crazies. But that is the plan right? The self-important un-washed doped up eliteist (that means you and your ilk) will be the first to lose your heads if the Jihadist you coddle get thier way. Dont you know that YOU are the INFIDEL so hated. MORON!! TERRORIST!!! A HOLE!!"

Over at the New Statesman website - http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120047#reader-comments - Steyn's followers are defending him from charges of racism by writing things like this:

"Oh and while I'm at it...to say there are no 'White' cultures is utterly absurd.

White itself may not 'be' a culture...But Europe is basically made up of totally White cultures with a White history.

To say White has nothing to do with culture is laughable. As in Europe we live in cultures with a White bedrock.

It may not be trendy to say that the hated White Westerner has any culture (after all it seems the trend to spit on and ultimately try to destroy as much of those WhiteWestern cultures as possible , while all along the Asian, Arab andf Black cultures are there to be cherished, respected and whereever possible expanded), but that does not mean there aren't any.

---Islamism (distinct from Islam)----

Distinct from? How?

Quite frankly any Muslim who is not an Islamist is practicing a watered down verison of Islam.

Impure Islam.

Tainted by evolution Islam.

But seeing as PURE radical islam is increasing so much I don't hold out much hope for the future of this watered down evolved version.

In fact given the Islamic love of butchering it's own followers I expect it will be even more dangerous than it is already to even practice such diluted forms of Islam. Even in the UK."

Oh, and this piece is also being attacked from another direction. The disgusting website 'Islamophobia Watch' - which has told gay people to stop making such a fuss about sharia law, since it's hard to gather the necessary four witnesses required to execute us - is complaining. You can read their bleat at http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/2007/3/12/johann-hari-reviews-mark-steyn.html