Half of the families in my apartment building are Muslims. I don’t interact with them much, but occasionally we run into each other. I remember the night in 2012 when President Obama accepted his nomination as the Democratic candidate for president. Ordinarily, I try to stay clear of all that political partisan stuff, but I was out for a walk, and one of the Muslim men decided to play Obama’s acceptance speech on his car radio loud enough for the rest of us to hear. Obama was going on about a sinister cabal of rich men who are scheming to decide “whether you can have birth control” and “who you can marry”, etc, with Obama assuring us that he’s going to fight these miscreants. And there’s this Muslim guy with his long beard and funny non-Western clothes grinning and nodding along. Our eyes met, and he smiled, and went on listening.

Here’s the funny thing. I haven’t talked to them, but the other American family in the apartment building has, and they’ve learned some things about our Muslim neighbors. These guys are from Saudi Arabia. The guy’s wife goes around completely covered except for her eyes, and she’s actually not supposed to be out at all if men might be present. And there they are, seemingly as happy as can be with the Democrats’ feminist jihad, as if there’s no tension there. I know this would make a better story if I would have gone up and asked him if it didn’t make him a little bit uncomfortable that the President was advocating contraception and sodomy, but I don’t know him, and I didn’t want to start an argument. I suppose it’s possible that he was laughing to himself about what a bunch of degenerates Americans are, but I can’t help suspecting that he was just nodding with approval at the thought that his candidate was going to stick it to those white Christians. Consistently applied principles are for suckers. What one thinks of Muslims in America depends a lot on how one reads those grins.

Let me tell you how I think about Muslims in the West. They’re liberals, married for life to the Left, just like Jews and American blacks. Individuals among these groups might make common cause with us, and such are welcome, but their identities are too tied with the sense of opposition to Christian Europe for us to expect more than that. Terrorism is a nuisance, much less dangerous to our civilization than blasphemy. In the end, Muslims will only matter as communist voters.