A couple of years ago, an Australian reader wrote to say he was beginning to feel as Robert Frost did in "A Minor Bird":

I have wished a bird would fly away

And not sing by my house all day.

My correspondent's unceasingly cheeping bird was Islam. He was fed up waking every morning and reading of the latest offence taken by the more excitable Muhammadans. If memory serves, this exhaustion was prompted by a Muslim protest outside Westminster Cathedral demanding the execution of the Pope. It was organized by a fellow called Anjem Choudhary, who argued that "whoever insults the message of Muhammad is going to be subject to capital punishment." But then again it might have been some other provocation entirely — say, the chocolate swirl on the top of a Burger King dessert carton that an aggrieved customer complained bore too close a resemblance to the Arabic script for "Allah" (the offending menu item was subsequently withdrawn). If you're that eager to take offence, it's not difficult to find it. Or as President Bush said to me around the same time: "If it's not the Crusades, it's the cartoons."

Which would make a great bumper sticker. It encapsulates perfectly not only the inability of the perpetually aggrieved to move on, millennium-in millennium-out, but also the utter lack of proportion.

Anyway, my New York Times bestseller (and Canadian hate crime) America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It is released in paperback across the Dominion's bookstores this week, and, if a mere excerpt in Maclean's was enough to generate two "human rights" prosecutions, the softcover edition should be good for a full-blown show trial followed by a last cigarette and firing squad — although, this being Canada, there'll be no last cigarette. (To mark the paperback launch, I'll be in Toronto at the Bay and Bloor branch of Indigo on Wednesday May 7 with my old pal Heather Reisman. So do come along if you're interested in hearing what the book's about, or if you're an Ontario "Human Rights" commissar and you'd like to arrest me.) In any event, with a new round of promotional interviews looming, several readers wrote to ask if I ever felt like my Australian pal: don't you wish the Islamic bird would just fly away? Wouldn't it be nice not to be up to your neck in this issue 24/7?

I'm using "up to your neck" metaphorically, but a lot of chaps are more literal. Naeem Muhammad Khan, the unemployed Torontonian whose website urges that the "apostasy" of Maclean's contributor Tarek Fatah and other Muslim moderates be punished by death, says of one of his targets: "Behead her!!! And make a nice video and post it on YouTube." There is no point wishing Mr. Khan would fly away and not sing by our house all day. He's here to stay, and anyone who advocated, say, his deportation would find himself assailed by moderate reasonable Canadians horrified at such a betrayal of our multicultural values.

Which is the point. For as Robert Frost's poem continues:

The fault must partly have been in me.

The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong

In wanting to silence any song.

In the case of an enfeebled West at twilight, the fault is wholly in us. After Sept. 11, 2001, many agonized progressives looked at America and its allies' relations with the Muslim world and argued that we need to ask ourselves: why do they hate us? As Brian Dunn, a Michigan blogger, put it, a more relevant question is: why do we hate us? After all, if all our institutions, from grade school to public broadcasting to Hollywood movies to Canadian "human rights" commissars, operate from the basic assumption that Western civilization is the font of racism, imperialism, oppression, exploitation and all the other ills of the world, why be surprised that the rest of humanity takes us at our word?

"Multiculturalism" is a unicultural phenomenon. It exists only as a Western fetish, and we don't believe in it, not really. Most people, given the choice, want to live in an advanced Western society. That's why even impeccably PC lefties refer carelessly to other cultures as "developing nations": the phrase assumes they're "developing" into something closer to ours, because that's the direction of progress. Even hard-core multiculturalists only want to live in a Western society. For one thing, that's the only place you can make a living as a multiculturalist. The general thinking was summed up in an email I got the other day from a reader arguing that there was no point getting irked by the Archbishop of Canterbury's call for the introduction of sharia in the United Kingdom. We are, said my correspondent, "rich enough to afford to be stupid."

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