Muslims in a vacuum

Mark Steyn has written an about-to-be-released book: American Alone : The End of the World as We Know It. NRO runs him through some questions about the book and about his world view. Since it’s Mark Steyn, even the interview is interesting. A lot of what he says is familiar to groupies (and I’m one), but here was an interesting point that I haven’t heard him make before:

Lopez: You talk a lot about demographics and Muslims. What’s so wrong with more Muslims in the West?

Steyn: The short answer is: in theory, nothing. But we’re talking about immigrants with a strong sense of identity emigrating to countries with virtually no sense of their own identity. And the history of the last few decades in Europe is that, when you’re raised in the nullity of cultural relativism and invited to despise the inheritance of the land whose citizenship you hold, you look elsewhere for identity: The modern multicultural identity is too weak to have any purchase on most people, and so some of them look elsewhere and find the jihad. Not all of them, but enough. The man behind the Daniel Pearl beheading, the Tube bombers, the Torontonians plotting to behead the Canadian prime minister: these are all citizens of the west — British subjects born and bred, second- and third-generation — but their primary identity is not British or French or Belgian. My book argues that Islamism is merely the first of many post-nationalist identities to threaten the nation state.

In other words, there are abhorent vacuums in Europe, and that the academics are busily working to foist on America. Islam, with a strong sense of itself, stands perfectly poised to fill those blank cultural spaces.