Читаем After America полностью

The collective “European” consciousness promoted by the European Union shimmered and dissolved like a desert mirage, unlike the collective Islamic consciousness of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. When push came to shove, when bailout came to bankruptcy, there was no “Europe” beyond the official fictions of the Eurocrat elite. But, notwithstanding Sunni loathing for Shia, and Turk for Arab, and Arab for Persian, and Persian for Pakistani, Pakistani for black, Wahhabi for “moderate,” and fervent jihadist for non-observant semi-apostate, most Muslims were nevertheless happy to identify themselves as part of what the author Christopher Caldwell called “Team Islam.”

By 2010, the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation was already the largest single voting bloc at the UN, and controlled among other bodies the Human Rights Council. Which is why it quickly became an anti-human rights council, fiercely opposed to free speech, freedom of religion, women’s rights, and much more. The international institutions built by an un-imperial America after the Second World War were effortlessly co-opted by nations and alliances that barely existed then. The OIC’s conception of human rights came from their Cairo Declaration. Article 24: “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a.”¹¹

Quite so. The OIC took the view that Islam, in both its theological and political components, should be beyond question, and its members supported the UN’s rapid progress toward the planet-wide imposition of a law against “defaming” religion—which meant in effect a global apostasy law that removed Islam from public discourse. Imagine if someone had proposed an “Organization of the Christian Conference” that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, by the twenty-first century there was a “Muslim world” (as presidential speechwriters and New York Times headline editors casually acknowledged) but no “Christian world” (heaven forfend!): Europe was militantly post-Christian, Russia had applied for observer membership of the OIC, and, as the 44th president—Obama—bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer, America was “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.”¹²

And, if there was a “Muslim world,” what were its boundaries? The OIC was formed in 1969 with mainly Middle Eastern members plus Indonesia and a couple more. By the Nineties, former Soviet Central Asia had signed on, plus Albania, Mozambique, Guyana, and various others. By the time the EU applied for observer status in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it seemed a mere formality.

And America? In 2007, the 43rd president had announced the appointment of the first U.S. Ambassador to the OIC.¹³ There was little fuss when Michigan applied for membership.

And so it went. You didn’t need to go to “the Muslim world” to see “Team Islam” in action, only to what we used to call Christendom. When the subject of a fast Islamizing Europe first arose in the Oughts, sophisticates protested that one shouldn’t “generalize” about Muslims. And it was true that, if you took a stamp collector’s approach to immigration issues, there were many fascinating differences: the French blamed difficulties with their Muslim population on the bitter legacy of colonialism; whereas Germans blamed theirs on a lack of colonial experience at dealing with these exotic chappies. And, if you were a small densely populated nation like the Netherlands, the difficulties of Islam were just the usual urban/rural frictions that occur when people from the countryside—in this case, the Moroccan countryside—move to the cities. It was the consequence of your urban planning, or your colonialism, or your wealth, or just plain you. But, if you were in some decrepit housing project on the edge of almost any Continental city from Malmö to Marseilles, it made little difference in practice. “If you understand how immigration, Islam, and native European culture interact in any western European country,” wrote Christopher Caldwell, “you can predict roughly how they will interact in any other—no matter what its national character, no matter whether it conquered an empire, no matter what its role in World War II, and no matter what the provenance of its Muslim immigrants.”¹⁴ European Islam turned out to be less divided than Greeks from Germans, Swedes from Portuguese. Many ethnic Continentals only discovered the post-nationalist identity they’d been long promised after they converted to Islam: when the mirage of the “European Union” faded, the Eurabian Union was the desert beyond.