Mark Steyn asks the question "OK, so what would alarm you?"

Columnist of the world, Mark Steyn, just penned a perfect column to illustrate how asleep the West seems to be when it comes to the creeping hordes invading it's territories, and changing their society without ever firing a shot:

The question then arises: fair enough, guys, what would it take to alarm you? The other day, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of sharia — Islamic law — to the United Kingdom was "inevitable." No alarm bells going off yet? Can't say I blame you. After all, de facto creeping sharia is well established in the Western world. Last week, the British and Ontario governments confirmed within days of each other that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions receive welfare payments for each of their wives. Still no alarm bells? I see female Muslim medical students in British hospitals are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Would it be alarmist to bring that up — say, the day before your operation?

Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you'd suggested such things on Sept. 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn't seem such a big deal, and nor will the next concession, and the one after that. It's hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book "alarmist" accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada's Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few. The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to "hold the line"? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The bureaucrats at Ontario Social Services? The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: look at what they're conceding now and then try to figure out what they'll be conceding in five years' time.

The other night at dinner, I found myself sitting next to a Middle Eastern Muslim lady of a certain age. And the conversation went as it often does when you're with Muslim women who were at college in the sixties, seventies or eighties. In this case, my dining companion had just been at a conference on "women's issues," of which there are many in the Muslim world, and she was struck by the phrase used by the "moderate Muslim" chair of the meeting: "authentic women" — by which she meant women wearing hijabs. And my friend pointed out that when she and her unveiled pals had been in their 20s they were the "authentic women": the covering routine was for old village biddies, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. It would never have occurred to her that the assumptions of her generation would prove to be off by 180 degrees — that in middle age she would see young Muslim women wearing a garb largely alien to their tradition not just in the Middle East but in Brussels and London and Montreal. If you had said to her in 1968 that Westernized Muslim women working in British hospitals in the early 21st century would reject modern hygiene because it required them to bare their arms, she would have scoffed with the certainty of one who assumes that history moves in only one direction.

In another of those non-alarmist nothing-to-see-here stories, a British government minister tentatively raised the matter of severe birth defects among the children of Pakistani Muslims. Some 57 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, and this places their progeny at increased risk of certain health problems. This is the only way a culturally relativist West can even raise some of these topics: nothing against cousin marriage, old boy, but it places a bit of a strain on the old health care budget. It's not the polygamy, it's the four welfare cheques you're collecting for it.

But this is being penny-wise and pound-blasé. What does it mean when 57 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to first cousins and 70 per cent are married to relatives? At the very least, it tells you that this community is strongly resistant to traditional immigrant assimilation patterns. Of course, in any society, certain groups are self-segregating: the Amish, the Mennonites and whatnot. But when that group is not merely a curiosity on the fringe of the map but the principal source of population growth in all your major cities, the challenge posed by that self-segregation is of a different order. There are now towns in northern England where cousin marriage is the norm: Pakistanis aren't assimilating with "the host community"; the host community has assimilated with Pakistan. Again, if you had told a Yorkshireman in 1970 that by the early 21st century it would be entirely normal for half the kindergarten class to be the children of first cousins, he would have found it preposterous.

The point he is trying to make - not to "alarm" you, or anything - is that these people emigrated to countries like Canada and the UK, and they are adamantly opposed to assimilating at all. They don't want to follow the laws; they want their own laws. They don't want to abide by any system of government other than the one they left to journey to the West. And they're using every excuse int he book to change the way the West deals with society, in general.

The nurses, for example, is a prime point. Ignaz Semmelweis is credited as the father of modern surgical hygiene when he discovered that medical students working in an autopsy room could spread any sort of infection to the patiets they were treating. He proposed vigorous handwashing prior to any doctor treating a patient. Islamic women don't want to do that because it exposes their arms, which is a no-no in Islam. So, in essence, they are being given a fre pass to spread germs to other patients in honor of abiding by their religion. Sound preposterous? It should to any common sense individual. But it doesn't to them.

There is a problem with the West. It's apathetic and far too politically-corect to be dealing with this problem. They'd prefer to roll over and go back to bed, hoping that the Islamicists will just go away. Far from the truth as these people seem content to stay. And we had beter wake up to the fact that they have no intention of assimilating. Time for the West to start pressing the issue, or send them back to the countries they came from. We should be accomodating to them, but we shouldn't be appeasing them at the cost of our own societies.

Publius II