America's Mortal Danger: in his new book In Mortal Danger, Congressman Tom Tancredo warns that multiculturalism, immigration, and terrorism threaten to destroy America and the West as a whole.(Book review)

In Mortal Danger, by Congressman Tom Tancredo, Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House Publishing, 2006, 224 pages, hardcover. (For ordering information, see the ad on the inside back cover.)

Nothing grabs headlines like rockets raining on cities, and so the Hezbollah attack on Israel and the resulting Israeli reaction have monopolized news reports and programming over the past few weeks. Hezbollah leaders, backed by Iran and Syria and bent on the destruction of Israel, have 13,000 Katyusha rockets and thousands of troops to employ in an all-out effort to destabilize Israel and the region. It is a frightening situation that could escalate into a wider conflict. Moreover, it may be an apocalyptic vision of the future of the American Southwest if we cannot gain control of our own borders. On its face, such a conclusion seems almost absurd. That is, unless one reads In Mortal Danger, the frightening new book by Congressman Tom Tancredo. The book is both an invaluable summary of the uniquely important role America plays in preserving Western Civilization and a warning of the incredible dangers the nation now faces from the twin and related evils of terrorism and illegal immigration.

Western Civilization

Perhaps uniquely among politicians, Tancredo realizes that the United States is the sole remaining exemplar and defender of Western Civilization. This is a difficult concept to understand, especially because the concept of one civilization as different from another is no longer clear. To begin to make sense of why Tancredo and others like him worry about the security of Western Civilization, it is necessary to recover the meaning and definition of the word "civilization."

Essentially, civilization is the larger structure that ties together otherwise disparate cultures. In its broadest sense, therefore, Western Civilization is formed by two related and intertwined historical commonalities: Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman culture. These provide otherwise unrelated peoples with a common cultural framework and background, regardless of language or ethnicity. In the West, this means that people in cultures as varied as English and German and Italian and French and American all share certain common ancestors in their religious, artistic, and political structures. The same can be seen to be operative in Islamic culture, where disparate nations and peoples share a common ancestor in the civilizing force of Mohammedanism that unifies Islamic art, law, and religious practice.

For many people, and Tancredo is one of them, Western Civilization is uniquely beneficial. It has, for instance, allowed for the development of the concept of individual freedom. It also uniquely allowed for the development of science and commerce, and through these made possible the comfortable, advanced lifestyle enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world today. But as never before, Western Civilization has come under fire.

For Tancredo, multiculturalism is one of the engines of destruction. As a former educator, the author is well placed to make observations about how far the multiculturalist cancer has progressed, and the book is full of vignettes on the subject. Tancredo, for instance, notes that the textbook American Odyssey, by McGraw-Hill, only "devotes as much space to James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution ... as is given to [Marxist labor agitator] Cesar Chavez" In another example, Tancredo cites a Los Angeles teacher who wrote to him to complain that "the middle school in which he taught had scheduled five 'cultural celebrations' during the 2005 school year but did not plan any observances to mark traditional American events. Emphasis was placed on the Latino Heritage Celebration, Dia de la Muertos ('Day of the Dead,' an Aztec ritual), an Underground Railroad play, ... Hawaiian Day, and the 'Unity Festival,' which was formerly known officially as Multicultural Day." Is it any wonder that people educated this way have no understanding of and complete disdain for Western Civilization?