Give it another twenty years, and the siren song of westernization will work its magic.” The argument wasn’t merely speculative, it had already been proved wrong by what had happened over the previous twenty years. I have a third photograph: the Cairo University class of 1959, with every woman in a blouse and skirt or summer frock, and hair styled no differently from suburban housewives in Westchester County.41 Cairo University in 1959 looked like London. Now London University looks like Cairo. But western liberals stuck with inevitablist theories of social evolution till the end, convinced that women’s rights and gay rights were like the wheel or the internal combustion engine—that once you’d invented them they can’t be un-invented. Instead, tides rise, and then ebb.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, major cities in the heart of the “free world” became less free, and then unfree. An American tourist—a 28-year-old blonde child-woman from Professor Nussbaum’s class at the University of Chicago—would not be able to walk through the streets of Amsterdam and Brussels without either being accompanied by men fit enough to ward off any predators or, alternatively, being “covered,” initially in the minimalist headscarf style once favored by Hillary Clinton making an official visit to a moderate Arab emirate but soon in something far more smothering. To do otherwise was to risk ending up like Samira Bellil. Western feminist groups, victors in the war against the stern patriarchy of 1950s sitcom dads, for the most part retreated silently—or persuaded themselves, like the Australian feminist Germaine Greer in her effusions about female genital mutilation, to applaud the new oppressor.42
And so the world after America celebrates less diversity. It had been fascinating to watch the strange men and women who led the western world in twilight pass off their groveling cowardice as debonair courage. As President Obama was making his now forgotten prostrations in Cairo, his Secretary of State was hectoring the Zionist Entity, regarding the West Bank, that there has to be “a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”43 No “natural growth”? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you’ve got to talk gran’ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn, or wherever? Consciously or not, Mrs. Clinton had endorsed “the Muslim world’s position on infidels who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: the Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Obama have been comfortable mandating “no natural growth” to Israel’s million-and-a-half Muslims? No. Yet the administration had no difficulty embracing the “the Muslim world’s confident belief in one-way multiculturalism, under which Islam expands in the West but Christianity and Judaism shrivel inexorably in the Middle East, Pakistan, and elsewhere. When General Maude’s British Indian Army took Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, they found a city whose population was 40 percent Jewish.44 By the end of the twentieth century, Iraq was just another spot on the map where the only Jews are in the cemetery. And why stop there? In 2003 President Bush’s “coalition of the willing” took Baghdad from Saddam Hussein. There were at that time an estimated million or so Christians in Iraq. By 2010, their numbers had fallen by half.45 In October that year, Muslim terrorists entered Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad and murdered two priests and over fifty congregants.46 That December only one Christian church in the city formally observed Christmas, but Christian families were still singled out for violence and death in their homes.47 This happened on America’s watch—while Iraq was a protectorate of the global hyperpower. Soon Baghdad’s Christians would join Baghdad’s Jews as an historical footnote, a community to be found only in weed-choked, garbage-strewn graveyards.
