Before we come to the threat that my native Qatar poses to the West, I think it is helpful to understand how Western culture opened the door to its enemies.
Lionel Shriver, the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, has written A Better Life, the controversial novel of the year, about how Westerners fail to defend a privilege that they feel they haven’t earned, thus becoming all giving of their cultural inheritance to foreign cultures, which are all taking. The New York Times and others are enraged and doing their best to dismiss A Better Life as a mean, racist, and bigoted tirade about immigration. It is not.
A Better Life focuses on a wealthy Brooklyn divorcee, Gloria Bonaventura, who preens her social virtues by going on serial street protests in defence of human rights, which she believes is the obligation of wealthy societies to uphold. Gloria takes the side of Palestinians in the Middle East and lashes out in wrath against nebulous figures of oppression (ICE, Trump, the patriarchy, Israel etc.). Her compassion does not, however, extend to her own family, whom she holds to the standards of the harsh Protestant work ethic that built the wealthy societies in the first place.
In lieu of balancing the score for what she perceives as her own gross privilege, Gloria takes a Honduran ‘refugee’ into her home, and the problems that unfold from this simple act of charity (if ‘charity’ is really what it is) are, depending upon the reader, either totally predictable or a hideous distortion of human nature which left-wing reviews of the novel attempt to dismiss as “satire.” It is not satire. The results of Gloria’s behaviour are writ large in Western politics, academia, media, and even the ability to respond to serious military threats.
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