IS DEMOGRAPHY DESTINY? Mark Steyn's America Alone suggests that it is, and he is not optimistic about Europe's future. His fear, which is summarized in a recent Chicago Sun-Times column (via Milt Rosenberg) is of a demographic time bomb in which alienated Islamist young people will find themselves with majority voting blocks in European countries and little ability to preserve the social and physical capital they will inherit. The central message of his book appears at p. 202.

But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century. It doesn't work like that, of course. An Islamic States of America, an Islamic Republic of France, an Islamic Kingdom of Belgium, an Islamic Dominion of Canada would all very quickly be societies in decline, living on the accumulated capital of their pre-Muslim past -- as, indeed, much of Islam did at its zenith. But do we really want to test that proposition?

For Book Review No. 48 I will argue that Mr Steyn might have had a more convincing book had he considered what that test would look like. I suspect the result would be a Malthusian trap along the lines of the early Dark Ages. (It might be one that could be simultaneously hurried along and contained by invention and innovation that would render oil exports even cheaper, but that gets us far afield.) The problem with America Alone is that it's a Regnery book, subjected to their usual editorial treatment of providing witticisms that will strengthen the prior beliefs of prior believers without changing many minds of people not yet convinced. For instance, Mr Steyn addresses the red-state, blue-state difference of opinion (p. 181) with

It's secular Europe that's living on faith. Uncowed by Islamists, undeferential to government, unshriveled in its birth rates, redneck America is a more reliable long-term bet.

That's really going to persuade blue-state DINKs and Italian professionals. Too bad, because there are numerous observations about the current state of the world that deserve more serious discussion. For instance, at p. 158 he's spot on.

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.

At least one Swedish intellectual ought to be advised of that observation.

Next door in Norway and Denmark, two thirds of all men arrested for rape are “of non-western ethnic origin”—the preferred euphemism for Middle Eastern and North African Muslims—although they account for under five percent of their residents. The number of rapes in Oslo in the summer of 2006 was twice that of the previous summer. All “gang rapes” in Denmark in 2004 were committed by immigrants and “refugees.”

The victims are overwhelmingly Scandinavian women, yet only one in twenty young Muslim men say they would marry one. Their reluctance is explained by an Islamic scholar, Mufti Shahid Mehdi, who told an audience in Copenhagen that European women who do not wear a headscarf were “asking to be raped.” His view is shared by Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and a self-described feminist; she holds that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and they must adapt themselves to it.”

(Also via Milt Rosenberg. I remember a judge in Madison, Wisconsin who was recalled for reducing the sentence of a rapist because his victim was dressed for the summer.)

And yes, I'd like to see Mr Steyn's smackdown of boutique multiculturalism (see p. 194) in a promotion dossier at a major university.