By JONATHAN KAY

October 29, 2006 -- AMERICA ALONE:
THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
BY MARK STEYN
REGNERY, 256 PAGES, $27.95

BEING funny is hard. Being funny while writing about suicide bombings, apocalyptic fatwas, beheadings and all the other calling cards of murderous Islamists is just about impossible. In fact, there is only one columnist on the face of the planet who can do it.

His name is Mark Steyn, and he lives in New Hampshire. Steyn's usual stock-in-trade is the breezy skewering of Jacques Chirac, Kofi Annan, Ted Kennedy or whomever else the news cycle serves up as the liberal jackass-de-jour. But as he shows in "America Alone," Steyn is also capable of sustaining a serious, original argument at book length, complete with statistics and even a chart or two.

Steyn's thesis is that the military war we're fighting against militant Islam is ultimately less important than the underlying cultural struggle. And that's a problem: As backward and impotent as Muslim societies may be, their foot soldiers are fired up by a bracing mix of ginned-up historical grievance and Koranically inspired triumphalism.

Here in the Godless West, on the other hand, our fighting spirit has been sapped by cultural relativism and nanny-state paternalism, making us easy prey. "Bomb us, and we agonize over the 'root causes,' " writes Steyn in a typical flourish. "Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that 'Islam is a religion of peace.' Issue blood-curdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash . . . The more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room."

As the title of the book suggests, Steyn doesn't hold much hope that Europe can help America stem the tide: The European Union is awash in aimless materialism, indolence and pacifism. Moreover, European birthrates have plunged so precipitously that Muslim immigrants are set to inherit much of the continent within a generation or two anyway. (In Belgium, for instance, 17 percent of ethnic Belgians are under 18. Among Turkish and Moroccan immigrants, the figure is 35 percent.)

Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing have decided there's more profit to be made by sucking up to the likes of Iran than by sticking with the West. In the bleakest scenario forecast by Steyn, the United States will eventually become a besieged island of freedom amid a re-primitivized world ruled by sharia. The question is: Will America follow suit? It could happen.

"One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the remains of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was," writes Steyn. "You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers . . . If you frame the issue in terms of multicultural 'sensitivity,' the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want - including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers." Don't know whether to laugh or cry? Welcome to Mark Steyn's world.

Jonathan Kay is managing editor for Comment of Canada's National Post.

jkay@nationalpost.com