In a globalized economy, the anti-glob mob and the eco-warriors want us to worry about rapacious First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. But globalization cuts both ways, and the pecularities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the metropolis just because someone got on a plane. The African mosquito who hitched a ride on a U.S.-bound flight and all by himself introduced West Nile virus to North America is merely the high-altitude heir to those flea-bitten rats on the Italian ships homebound from the Orient who brought the Black Death to Europe in the 1340s. That too was a globalization quid pro quo: the Continent's success in opening up trade with the East also opened it up to disease from the East.
That's the lesson of September 11: the dragons are no longer on the edge of the map. When you look at it that way, the biggest globalization success story of recent years is not McDonald's or Microsoft but Islamism: the Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles fron anywhere and successfully exported it to Jakarta and Singapore and Alma-Alta and Grozny and Sarajevo and Lyons and Bergen and Manchester and Ottawa and Dearborn and Falls Church. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalized insurgency. In 2006, Danes reeling from the Muslim world's cartoon-provoked commercial boycott could only dream of boycotting Islam's products half so effectively.
- Mark Steyn in America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
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