STEYN'S YEAR part three
Here's the third part of my annual stroll down memory lane: The highpoint of the summer of '06 for yours truly was my Australian tour. Not a bad place to be when Israel and Hezbollah are at war, Iran's going nuclear, and the US Supreme Court, the EU and the UN are doing their best to upgrade every terrorist group to the status of a sovereign power. But before we get to such trivia as that, let's start with the critical event of the summer: Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon's hunger strike. Are they dead yet?
JULY
Penn, Sarandon, novelist Alice Walker and actor Danny Glover will join a ‘rolling’ fast, a relay in which 2,700 activists pledge to refuse food for at least 24 hours, and then hand over to a comrade.
So Sean Penn is starving himself to death, but just for a day? Brilliant! If Gandhi had been that smart, he’d still have a movie career. Willie Nelson and Michael Moore are also among those participating in the “rolling fast”, which in Michael’s case will involve going without the roll. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his lunch for his friends.
“We have been continually sheltered from the actual cost of war from the beginning,” says human rights activist Meredith Dearborn. “Now it is time to bring the pain and suffering of war home. We are putting our bodies on the line for peace.” And nothing brings home the pain and suffering of war like a Hollywood celebrity forgoing the soup du jour. All over the country, horrified Americans will be staring at Susan Sarandon and going, “Darling, you look fabulous! Did you lose five pounds..?” Winona Ryder is telling waiters, “Hold the haunch of venison.” Keira Knightley is saying, “Hey, I’ll just go with the short stack this morning. And the lo-fat simulated-maple syrup substitute…” Willie Nelson is said to be gaunt and sounding croaky. Michael Moore, hovering dangerously at 300 pounds, has told friends, “You can never be too rich but you can be too thin.” Molly Ringwald’s press agent has announced his client is starving for publicity. Tom Cruise was reported as looking physically shrunken, but then put his elevator shoes back on. Demonstrating yet again his strong personal commitment to political activism, George Clooney has delegated his rolling fast to his stunt double for insurance reasons. Yoko Ono has released a new all-star charity single of “Give Peas A Chance”. In the forthcoming Bond movie, 007 is tossed into a tank of ravenous sharks, but they refuse to eat him and, in a savage indictment of Bush foreign policy, sip their mineral water in a desultory fashion for 20 minutes before calling for the check. America’s greatest living war hero and simultaneous anti-war hero, John Kerry, pledged his own passionate support for the crusade of his celebrity friends: “I ordered the banana cream pie before I sent it back.”
The Chicago Sun-Times, July 9th
“Radical Islamism,” wrote Fouad Ajami recently, “has come to mock the very principle of nationality and citizenship”. But is that really so hard to do? Contemporary Canadian, British, Dutch and Swedish nationality is to a large extent self-mocking… The left talked up sappy Benetton-ad one-worldism, while the pan-Islamists got on with their own particular strain of one-worldism, fierce, implacable and slipping across borders with ease.
The Western Standard, July 2nd
John Updike gets stuck into his protagonist from the opening sentence:
Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God. All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is there to see?
What else, indeed? It’s doubtful anyone could write “the” novel about Islam today – it is a faith, after all, that can seduce everyone from Ontario welfare deadbeats like Steven Chand to the Prince of Wales. Yet it seems to me Updike has gone awry from the very first word. If Muslims were simply super-devout loners, this whole clash-of-civilizations rigmarole would be a lot easier. But the London Tube bombers were perfectly assimilated… Updike’s absurdly alienated misfit is a lot less shocking than the video that aired recently on British television of July 7th jihadist Shehzad Tanweer: He’s spouting all the usual suicide-bomber claptrap, but in a Yorkshire accent. Imagine threatening “Death to the Great Satan!” in Cockney or Brooklynese. Or Canadian: “Death to the Great Satan, eh?” That’s far creepier and novelistic than Updike’s opening: it’s someone who appears perfectly normal until he gets in the subway car and self-detonates.
Maclean’s, July 27th
I was interested to read Wade’s book after a month in which men raised in suburban Ontario were charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime Minister, and the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River. The Mexican drug gangs weren’t Muslim last time I checked but evidently decapitation isn’t just for jihadists any more: if you want to get ahead, get a head. A couple of years back, I came across a column in The East African by Charles Onyango-Obbo musing on the return of cannibalism to the Dark Continent. Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo (four million dead but, as they haven’t found a way to pin it on Bush, nobody cares) had been making victims’ relatives eat the body parts of their loved ones. You’ll recall that, when Samuel Doe was toppled as Liberia’s leader, he was served a last meal of his own ears. His killers kept his genitals for themselves, under the belief that if you eat a man’s penis you acquire his powers. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, of course, but I wonder sometimes if we’re not heading toward a long night of re-primitivization.
Maclean’s, July 20th
A few years back, when folks talked airily about “the Middle East peace process” and “a two-state solution”, I used to say that the trouble was the Palestinians saw a two-state solution as an interim stage en route to a one-state solution. I underestimated Islamist depravity. As we now see in Gaza and southern Lebanon, any two-state solution would be an interim stage en route to a no-state solution.
The Chicago Sun-Times, July 23rd
I was on the road the other night and so found myself watching CNN’s coverage of Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, etc. It was “Larry King Live” and it was one of those shows where Larry interviews great men about what needs to be done and the great men all agree that what needs to be done is that the President needs to get other great men involved to “broker” a “deal”. Senator Chuck Hagel proposed that Bush appoint Colin Powell or Jim Baker as his Special Envoy, Senator Barbara Boxer proposed that Bush appoint Madeleine Albright as his Even More Special Envoy. Senator George Mitchell, who himself served as Extra-Special Super-Duper Envoy a few years back, proposed that Bush involve the European Union. And someone else proposed the G8. And Larry suggested Putin. Oh, and some smooth-talking apologist in Savile Row pinstripes proposed Chirac, because he and Bush had agreed a UN resolution on something or other a year or two back.
Aside from Larry’s closing tribute to Red Buttons, I’ve never heard more rubbish in a single hour since …well, come to think of it, since the last time I saw “Larry King Live”.
The Chicago Sun-Times, July 16th
There are several ways to fight a war. On the one hand, you can put on a uniform, climb into a tank, rumble across a field and fire on the other fellows’ tank. On the other, you can find a 12-year old girl, persuade her to try on your new suicide-bomber belt and send her waddling off into the nearest pizza parlor...
The United States Supreme Court has now blown a hole in the animating principle behind the Geneva Conventions by choosing to elevate an enemy that disdains the laws of war in order to facilitate the bombing of civilian targets and the beheading of individuals. The argument made by Justice John Paul Stevens is an Alice-In-Jihadland ruling that stands the Conventions on their head in order to give words the precise opposite of their plain meaning and intent. The same kind of inspired jurisprudence conjuring trick that detected in the emanations of the penumbra how the Framers of the US Constitution cannily anticipated a need for partial-birth abortion and gay marriage has now effectively found a Right to Jihad – or, if you’re a female suicide bomber about to board an Israeli bus, a woman’s right to Jews.
The Chicago Sun-Times, July 2nd
If you try to avoid confronting Iran now, you’ll only have to confront them under worse circumstances later. Jimmy Carter, who embodied the west as a smiling eunuch, wanted to avoid confronting the newborn Islamic Republic three decades ago and now it’s a nuclear power. As I always say, there is no “stability”: behind the polite façade of the UN peacekeepers patrolling the stalemate, history is always on the move; the bad guys get new weapons, new rockets – and, as we’ve seen in Haifa, these bad guys use what they have to their full extent. So what will they have in five years’ time?
National Review, July 31st
Nations go to war, not armies. Or, to be more precise, nations, not armies, win wars. America has a military that cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but so what? The first President Bush assembled the biggest coalition in history for Gulf War One, and the bigger and more notionally powerful it got the better Saddam Hussein’s chances of surviving it became. Because the bigger it got the less likely it was to be driven by a coherent set of war aims… You can have the best fastest state-of-the-art car on the road, but, if you don’t know where you’re going, the fellow in the rusting ’73 Oldsmobile will get there and you won’t. It’s the ideas that drive a war and the support they command in the broader society that determine whether you’ll see it through to real victory. After Korea and Vietnam and Gulf War One, it shouldn’t be necessary to have to state that.
The Chicago Sun-Times, July 30th
AUGUST
When an army goes to war against a terrorist organization, it’s like watching the Red Sox play Andre Agassi: each side is being held to its own set of rules. When Hezbollah launch rockets into Israeli residential neighborhoods with the intention of killing random civilians, that’s fine because, after all, they’re terrorists and that’s what terrorists do. But when, in the course of trying to resist the terrorists, Israel unintentionally kills civilians, that’s an appalling act of savagery… The meta-narrative, as they say, is consistent through the media’s Hez-one-they-made-earlier coverage, and the recent Supreme Court judgment, and EU-UN efforts to play “honest broker” between a sovereign state and a genocidal global terror conglomerate: all these things enhance the status of Islamist terror and thus will lead to more of it, and ever more “disproportionately”.
The Chicago Sun-Times, August 6th
Here’s one of my favourite numbers: 50,000 – as in “50,000 Canadians”, as in “As many as 50,000 Canadians are believed to be in Lebanon” (CBC News), and “There were an estimated 50,000 Canadians in Lebanon when fighting broke out” (Canadian Press), and “There were some 50,000 Canadians in harm’s way, trapped in a country that Israel was relentlessly bombing” (The Toronto Star).
The question is: Why are they “in harm’s way”? How did “50,000 Canadians” come to be in Lebanon? Is it one of our major trading partners? Have Bombardier opened up a Skidoo plant there? Is Beirut where the Quebec Nordiques wound up..? Despite significantly smaller populations than our G7 colleagues, we have more citizens in Lebanon than the Americans, British and Germans. Combined.
France is the former colonial power in Lebanon and the western country with which it maintains the closest ties, yet even the French can only muster 30,000 citizens in the country. Formerly known as “the Paris of the Middle East”, these days Beirut would appear to be the Saskatoon of the Middle East. Another decade or two and Lebanon will boast more Canadians than most of the Maritimes… Broadway producers, accustomed to going to parties and hearing doctors, bond traders and orthodontists tell them what’s wrong with their plays, like to say that show business is everybody’s second business. Canada would seem to be everybody’s second nationality. The question is whether it’s still anybody’s first.
Maclean’s, August 7th
An unnamed very senior mega-important super-duper government official (as The New York Times says when it’s leaking details of US national security programs) told me that, after untold meetings during the Chretien-Martin years, he’d concluded that Canada, like New Zealand, saw itself not as a country but as an NGO. That’s not just a very funny but also a very shrewd characterization.
The Western Standard, August 28th
At some point soon, we’re going to be asking: Who lost Britain? In the weeks after last year’s Tube bombing, I doubted that the clarion call for a reassertion of “British identity” would last, and so it proved. By the first anniversary, Britain was back in its peculiarly resistant multiculti mush in which the proper reaction to such unfortunate events is to prostrate oneself ever more abjectly before the gods of cultural relativism. What matters after mass slaughter on the Underground is not the wound to the nation but the potential for hurt feelings of certain minorities.
The Western Standard, August 14th
The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are – so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they’re hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they’re hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist Entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they’d be hated for that, too. The only difference now is that Jew-hatred is resurgent despite the full knowledge of where it ended up 60 years ago. Today, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad openly urge the destruction of the Jews, and moderate Muslim leaders sit silently alongside them, and European media commentators take the side of the genocide-inciters, and UN bigwigs insist we negotiate with them.
National Review, August 21st
The energy expended by the “international community” in denying this particular regional crisis the traditional settlement is unique and perverse, except insofar as by ensuring that the “Palestinian question” is never resolved one is also ensuring that Israel’s sovereignty is also never really settled: it, too, is conditional. Israel is tolerated as a current leaseholder but, like Anthony Hope’s Jew, it can never truly own the land. The Jews are still rootless transients, though, in one of history’s blacker jests, they’re now bemoaned in the salons of London and Paris as an outrageous imposition of an alien European population on the Middle East. Which would have given Aaron Lazarus a laugh. The Jews spent millennia on the Continent without ever being accepted as European. But no sooner are the Continent’s Jewry all but extinct than suddenly every Jew left on the planet is a European.
Maclean’s, August 14th
There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that Islam will soon be able to enforce submission-conversion at the point of a nuke. The good news is that any religion that needs to do that is, by definition, a weak one. More than that, the fierce faith of the 8th century Muslim warrior has been mostly replaced by a lot of hastily cobbled-together flimflam bought wholesale from clapped out European totalitarian pathologies… In today’s mosques and madrassahs there is almost as little contemplation of the divine as there is in the typical Anglican sermon. The great Canadian columnist David Warren argues that Islam has been “idiotized” by these obsolescent imports of mid-20th century Fascism. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but, if Washington had half the psy-ops spooks the movies like to think they have, the spiritual neglect in latterday Islam is a big Achilles’ heel just ripe for exploiting.
The New York Sun, August 28th
If Judge Taylor’s ruling stands, if the US government intercepts a call from Islamabad to London about a plot to blow up Big Ben, it can alert the Brits. But, if the US government intercepts a call from Islamabad to New York about a plot to blow up the Chrysler Building, that’s entirely unconstitutional and all record of it should be erased. And, given that cell phones with American area codes can be used all around the planet, all the guy in Islamabad would have to do is get one with a 202 or 212 number and he can plot jihad on every continent to his heart’s content. One notes that earlier this month five Muslim Americans were arrested in Ohio and Michigan earlier this month after hundreds of cell phones were found in their cars.
The Chicago Sun-Times, August 27th
If you go back to September 2001, it’s amazing how much the Administration made happen in just a short space of time… Five years on, the US seems to be back in the quagmire of perpetual interminable UN-brokered EU-led multilateral dithering, on Iran and much else. The Administration that turned Musharraf in nothing flat now offers carrots to Ahmadinejad. After the Taliban fell, the region’s autocrats and dictators wondered: Who’s next? Now they figure it’s a pretty safe bet that nobody is.
What’s the difference between September 2001 and now? It’s not that anyone “liked” America or that, as the Democrats like to suggest, the country had the world’s “sympathy”. Pakistani generals and the Kremlin don’t cave to your demands because they “sympathize”. They go along because you’ve succeeded in impressing upon them that they’ve no choice. Musharraf and co weren’t scared by America’s power but by the fact that America, in the rubble of 9/11, had belatedly found the will to use that power.
The Chicago Sun-Times, August 20th
SEPTEMBER
A lot of the 9/11 anniversary coverage struck me as distastefully tasteful. On the morning of September 12th, I was pumping gas just off I-91 in Vermont and picked up The Valley News. Its lead headline covered the annual roll call of the dead – or, as the alliterative editor put it, “Litany Of The Lost”. That would be a grand entry for Litany Of The Lame, an anthology of all-time worst headlines. 9/11 wasn’t a shipwreck: the dead weren’t “lost”, they were murdered.
The Chicago Sun-Times, September 17th
Anyone who’s mooched about the Muslim world for even brief amounts of time is struck by what David Pryce-Jones calls its “intellectual poverty”: it has a remarkable lack of curiosity about anything beyond its horizons. That hobbled it for centuries in its wars against the west. But our multicultural mindset is its mirror image: For isn’t the principle characteristic of “multiculturalism” its almost total lack of curiosity about other cultures? The multicultis make bliss of ignorance: you don’t need to know anything about Islam, you just have to feel warm and fluffy about it, and slap that “CO-EXIST” bumper sticker on your Subaru. If you want to know how little changed on 9/11, look at how it’s being observed in the nation’s schools.
National Review, September 11th
I’m sure most of my colleagues at The Western Standard have found themselves in this situation on call-in shows or at public meetings. You point out, for example, that there are very few “free” Muslim societies. And your questioner retorts: “Well, that’s just your opinion.” And so you pull up a few facts about GDP per capita, freedom of religion, life expectancy, women’s rights, etc. And she says: “Well, you’re just imposing your values on them.” And you realize that the great advantage of cultural relativism is that it renders argument impossible. There is no longer enough agreed reality. It’s like playing tennis with an opponent who thinks your ace is a social construct.
The Western Standard, September 11th
When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that’s one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the Federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:
I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don’t think I could still live here. I’m not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?
The sad reality is that never before has an enemy hidden in such plain sight. Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against America in 1998. Iran’s nuclear President vows to wipe Israel off the map. A year before the Tube bombings, radical Brit imam Omar Bakri announced that a group of London Islamists are “ready to launch a big operation” on British soil. “We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents,” he added, clarifying the ground rules. “Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value.”
Our enemies hang their shingles on Main Street, and University of Waterloo professors put it down to a carefully planned substitution of transponder codes.
Maclean’s, September 4th
The “modern world” and the “primitive world” are more like those overlaid area codes the phone company’s so partial to. So a man can roar “Allahu Akhbar!” as he ploughs his jet into an office building. Even the most primitive parts of the map aren’t that “sealed off” these days… We think of the badlands of the Afghan-Pakistani border as a remote region of isolated peoples whose rituals have been unchanged for centuries. Yet the truth is that these village tribal cultures have been wholly subverted by Saudi money and ideology. The House of Saud’s toxic kingdom, a land where the beheading schedule is computerized, may be a more apt emblem of the way an “interconnected” world is heading than we like to think.
The Chicago Sun-Times, September 10th
Why would gazillions of American radio listeners appreciate a line from John Howard? Because he says things that none of their own leaders ever quite say. Last week it was the stuff about Muslim immigrants needing to learn English and making sure they’re cool with this equal-rights-for-women business. The soi-disant arrogant Texas cowboy rarely shoots from the lip like that. Instead, he says things like “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.”
Look, I’m a supporter of the Bush Doctrine to spread liberty throughout the Muslim world but I support it on hard-headed grounds of national security. You only have to watch a couple of minutes of the lads in Gaza and southern Lebanon on the telly every night to realize freedom comes pretty low down on the list of their hearts’ desires. So, when the President insists on reprising the line week in week out, he begins to sound utopian if not utterly deluded. American conservatives would appreciate a rationale less hermetically sealed from reality.
The Australian, September 5th
On the ground America has allowed its enemies to subvert Iraq with impunity. My model here would be the so-called “Confrontation” in Indonesia 40 years ago, a conflict so obscure I’ll bet most readers have never heard of it. The Indonesians were convinced that the British had set up the new Federation of Malaysia as a neo-colonial puppet regime and so sent “insurgents” across the borders to subvert it and foment coups, secessions, etc. British and Commonwealth forces decided to return the favor and sent troops on lethally effective raids into Indonesia, keeping Jakarta on the defensive and dramatically reducing the amount of mischief they were able to make. The Brits and Aussies and Malays won that one with barely a word of it making the papers. This is exactly what the Americans should be doing with Syria and Iran. Instead, we accept the same de facto one-way traffic flow as applies on the US-Mexican border. This is one reason why we wound up hunkered down in the “Green Zone”. In future, it should be the other fellow who has to have a Green Zone.
National Review, September 4th
This week Jacques Chirac dropped the threat of sanctions against Iran. A few months ago, he briefly mused about nuking the Persians, but he’s now folded like …well, not like the Arabs and their tents: they’re busily pitching them all over Europe with no plans to fold at all. Anyone who thinks the UN is the body to mediate Iran’s nuclearization or anything else is crazier than Ahmadinejad. At this rate, the Twelfth Imam will be the next Secretary-General.
The Chicago Sun-Times, September 24th
I don’t take “climate change” lightly. When Tirman warns of “the freezing effects of northern Europe resulting from the loss of the gulf stream”, he’s right to alert us to impending catastrophe: many of Amsterdam’s alienated Muslims might find it too chilly to go out gay-bashing; in the Paris suburbs, it will be impossible to keep warm, as they burnt all the cars last fall.
Maclean’s, September 11th
In America, the Democrats have turned national security into a shell game: whichever war you’re fighting is never the right one. Whenever they’re mocked as soft on jihad, they say, oh no, that’s not true, we think Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan. They demand 200,000 troops in the Hindu Kush to go cave-to-cave to find Osama’s remains. So they’re not soft on the war. It’s just that the pea isn’t under the Iraq cup, it’s under the Afghanistan cup. You get the distinct feeling, though, that if you took them at their word and said okay, 200,000 troops go in next Thursday, you’d suddenly discover that the pea was no longer under the Afghanistan cup but under the Sudanese one… No matter how frantically the left scramble the thimbles, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shriveled pea of The Military Intervention We’re Willing To Support.
The Western Standard, September 25th
I never regarded “Let’s roll!” as a partisan line, but five years on it is. And, when you’re a famously sleepy giant, “Let’s roll over and doze off again!” is the most potent rallying cry of all.
“A war for civilization” will by definition be a long one. I never thought quite so many people would check out quite so soon.
National Review, September 18th
What was so awful about Sayyid Qutb’s experience in America that led him to regard modernity as an abomination? Well, he went to a dance in Greeley, Colorado: “The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips…”
In 1949, Greeley, Colorado was dry. The dance was a church social. The feverish music was Frank Loesser’s charm song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. But it was enough to start a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri in Egypt to bin Laden in Saudi Arabia to the mullahs in Iran… And it’s a useful reminder of how much we could give up and still be found decadent and disgusting by the Islamists. A world without “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” will be very cold indeed.
Maclean’s, September 25th
Hot off the presses!
Mark's new book
Mark's new book
America Alone:
The End Of The World As We Know It
To order your autographed copy,
click here