Category Archives: Mark Steyn

The Absurd Trial of Geert Wilders.

Posted on by

I would like to thank Snaphanen.dk for bringing this to my attention, as well as at last one major Canadian publication, Macleans, for actually noticing the most important trial going on in the world today. Something the rest of the Canadian media managed to avoid.

The absurd trial of Geert Wilders

by Mark Steyn on Thursday, February 18, 2010 7:00am – 22 Comments

There’s no shortage of volunteers. In the Low Countries, whenever anyone seeks to discuss Islam outside the very narrow bounds of multicultural political discourse, they wind up either banned (Belgium’s Vlaams Blok), forced into exile (Ayaan Hirsi Ali) or killed (Pim Fortuyn).

It’s remarkable how speedily “the most tolerant country in Europe,” in a peculiarly repellent strain of coercive appeasement, has adopted “shoot the messenger” as an all-purpose cure-all for “Islamophobia.” To some of us, the Netherlands means tulips, clogs, windmills, fingers in the dike. To others, it means marijuana cafés, long-haired soldiers, legalized hookers, fingers in the dike. But the contemporary reality is an increasingly incoherent polity where gays are bashed, uncovered women get jeered at, and you can’t do The Diary of Anne Frank as your school play lest the Gestapo walk-ons are greeted by audience cries of “She’s in the attic!” Speaking as a bona fide far-right nutcase, I rather resent the label’s export to Holland: Pim Fortuyn wasn’t “right-wing,” he was a gay hedonist; Theo van Gogh was an anti-monarchist coke-snorting nihilist; Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a secular liberal feminist; Geert Wilders says he’s opposed to Islam because of its hostility to gay equality, whereas the usual rap against us far-right extremists is that we want the godless sodomites to roast in hell.

It’s not “ironic” that the most liberal country in western Europe should be the most advanced in its descent into a profoundly illiberal hell. It was entirely foreseeable. Geert Wilders is stating the obvious: a society that becomes more Muslim will have fewer gays. Last year, the Rainbow Palace, formerly Amsterdam’s most popular homo-hotel (relax, that’s the Dutch word for it), announced it was renaming itself the Sharm and reorienting itself to Islamic tourism. Or as the website allah.eu put it: “Gay Hotel Turns Muslim.” As a headline in the impeccably non-far-right Spiegel wondered: “How much Allah can the Old Continent bear?” It’s an interesting question, albeit if an increasingly verboten one. The Wilders show trial is important because it will determine whether the subject can be discussed openly by mainstream politicians and public figures, or whether it will be forced underground and manifest itself in more violent ways.

Yet, despite its significance, the trial has received relatively little coverage in the Western media, in part because, for those of a multiculti bent, there’s no easy way to blur the reality—that this is a political prosecution by a thought police so stupid they don’t realize they’re delegitimizing the very institutions of the state. Still, the BBC gave it their best shot, concluding their report thus: “Correspondents say his Freedom Party (PVV), which has nine MPs in the lower house of parliament, has built its popularity largely by tapping into the fear and resentment of Muslim immigrants.”

Gotcha. This democracy business is all very well, but let’s face it, the people are saps, gullible boobs, racist morons, knuckle-dragging f–kwits. One-man-one-vote is fine in theory, but next thing you know some slicker’s “tapping into” the morons’ “fears and resentments” and cleaning up at the polls.

Strange how it always comes back to a contempt for the people. Whenever the electorate departs from the elite’s pieties, whether in the Netherlands or in Massachusetts last month, it’s because some wily demagogue like, er, Scott Brown has been playing on the impressionable hicks’ “fears and resentments.” To the statist bullies at Canada’s “Human Rights” Commissions, their powers to regulate speech are necessary to prevent hate-mongers like me tapping into the fears and resentments of the Dominion’s millions of birdbrained boobs. Yes, that would be you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmoe of 22 Dufferin Gardens. Sure, you’ve voted for the Liberals every year since Expo, but c’mon, in your heart you know even you might be…susceptible…impressionable.

In the old days—divine right of kings, rule by patrician nobility—it was easier. But today’s establishment is obliged to pay at least lip service to popular sovereignty. So it has to behave more artfully. You’ll still have your vote; it’s just that the guy you wanted to give it to is on trial, and his platform’s been criminalized.

To return to where we came in, what does it mean when the Ministry of Justice proudly declares that the truth is no defence? When the law stands in explicit opposition to the truth, freeborn peoples should stand in opposition to the law. Because, as the British commentator Pat Condell says, “When the truth is no defence, there is no defence”—and what we are witnessing is a heresy trial. The good news is that the Openbaar Ministerie is doing such a grand job with its pilot program of apostasy prosecutions you’ll barely notice when sharia is formally adopted.

Mark Steyn: The Islamization of the World

Posted on by

First, let me thank Mark Steyn for this blunt and fiercely important short article I am pasting below, stolen shamelessly from The National Review.

Metronieuws has an interview with Afshin Ellian, a witness for the defense in the Geert Wilders trial in Amsterdam. If you don’t read Dutch, there’s an English translation here. (I’ve modified it slightly, because I think he missed a nuance here and there.) Here’s the key passage:

You said the Wilders Trial reminds you of justice in your country of origin, Iran. Is that not somewhat exaggerated?

“The Netherlands, of course, is not comparable with Iran, but it’s about perception. If you cannot say that Islam is a backward religion and that Mohammed is a criminal, then you are living in an Islamic country, my friend, because there also you cannot say such things. Here I’m free to say that Christ was a faggot* and Mary was a whore, but apparently I should stay off of Mohammed.”

(*Judging from the routine taunts of Muslim youth to ethnic European males on the streets of Amsterdam at night, the word “flikker” seems to be one bit of Dutch every immigrant picks up instantly.)

What the Wilders prosecution, the Danish cartoons, the Canadian “human rights” suits against Ezra Levant, Maclean’s and me and many other ostensibly minor news stories all have in common is one consistent underlying principle – that Islamic law now applies to all.

If a Muslim doesn’t want to show representations of Mohammed, good for him. But why can’t Yale University Press?

If a Muslim doesn’t want Winnie-the-Pooh’s pal Piglet on his desk, go for it. But why can’t a lapsed Anglican working for a British municipal council?

If a Muslim wants to fast during Ramadan, fast away. But why does a Brussels cop or a Scottish hospital worker have to ease up on the donuts?

We are making Islam the de facto established church of the western world. And, lest you think this near parodic prostration before Islamic supremacism is a purely European phenomenon, read the official whitewash of Fort Hood, which is one of the most disgusting and contemptible documents ever produced by the US military. The families of the dead should be furious at its craven evasions.

PLEASE donate to Ezra. This is ALL our fight.

Posted on by

The article below is taken verbatim from Ezra Levant’s website here: Please click on over and donate anything you can at all. This is not just his fight. This is the Canadian version of the Geert Wilders trial. Donating to Ezra, is truly fighting for all of us.

Eeyore

By Ezra Levant on January 21, 2010 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments

Khurrum Awan of the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) has finally filed his nuisance lawsuit against me, as he threatened to do last summer. You can see it here.

Awan’s jihad: lawfare

Awan is the shakedown artist who targeted Mark Steyn and Maclean’s magazine with three human rights complaints in 2008, for Steyn’s political offence of criticizing radical Islam. Awan lost those suits, and his demand to censor Maclean’s was rejected, but he still managed to waste a lot of Maclean’s money – and even more taxpayers’ money, too.

That’s Awan’s strategy: abuse our courts to bully his opponents. It’s a shocking thing for a lawyer to admit to, but Awan isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. As he told an anti-Semitic meeting in British Columbia a while back, he was proud to have “cost Maclean’s two million dollars in legal expenses and lost circulation.” Awan’s friend, the notorious anti-Semite Greg Felton, approvingly quotes Awan saying “we attained out strategic objective—to increase the cost of publishing anti-Islamic material”.

So it’s not about justice. It’s not about “human rights”. It’s about abusing our legal system to punish his enemies.

Mark Steyn and Maclean’s magazine were first. And now I’m next in line.

This is the soft jihad of “lawfare”, the strategy where anti-Western radicals use our own laws to attack us, rather than pantybombs or shoebombs.

It’s Awan’s little jihad. And because I’ve criticized him (and the human rights commissions he hijacked), he’s coming for me now.

What kind of people are Awan and the CIC?

I won’t go through Awan’s entire history again; if you’re interested, I’d encourage you to read my biography of him when he first threatened me, last summer. But here are a few highlights.

Awan was the president of the CIC’s youth wing, loyally standing by the CIC’s president, Mohammed Elmasry, when he declared on national TV that every adult Israeli was a legitimate target for a terrorist attack.

You can watch that clip here, courtesy of SDA Matt:

Elmasry’s the kind of guy who puts the KKK in klassy.

For years Awan was Elmasry’s mini-me. But he moved out from under Elmasry’s shadow when he became the PR front man for the CIC’s human rights nuisance suits against Steyn and Maclean’s.

Awan was not actually the complainant in those complaints. He was one of Elmasry’s sock puppets, a ventriloquist dummy for Elmasry’s attack on the Canadian values of freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Elmasry needed puppets, because he had damaged his own reputation so badly with his televised comments. But here’s an interview where Elmasry boasts that Awan was little more than Elmasry’s stooge. And Awan was only too happy to comply.

Elmasry was smart enough not to sue in real court. Not Awan.

But even Elmasry wasn’t stupid enough to sue Maclean’s in defamation court, where truth is a defence. And though he whined when I wrote this about him, he was smart enough not to sue.

Which is why I’m looking forward so much to Awan’s trial. He isn’t smart enough not to sue.

Khurrum Awan and Mohamed Elmasry hurt their reputations by attacking Maclean’s – and the Canadian value of freedom. They were almost universally denounced.

They lost their human rights complaints, but they weren’t stuck with Maclean’s legal bills as they would have been in real court. And they never really underwent any true scrutiny – unlike in real courts, they escaped any meaningful examination of their own foul conduct.

Awan is about to find out that real courts are a lot more even-handed than the kangaroo courts he manipulated.

Another junk lawsuit

Let’s take a quick look through his nuisance lawsuit together.

The first thing to note are the dates. Awan is suing me for my in-the-courthouse reports on the CIC’s human rights complaints, back in June of 2008. But he didn’t bother to serve a libel notice on me until July of 2009, more than a year later. And then it took him nearly another six months to serve the suit itself, which my lawyer received over Christmas.

That’s 18 months after I wrote what I wrote. Which shows Awan’s strategy: this isn’t about correcting the record in a timely manner. It’s about punishing a political opponent.

The next interesting thing in the suit is that Awan describes himself as a lawyer. But a quick glance at the Law Society’s website shows that he is not in fact registered to practice law. I wonder why that is. After all, he was articling at Lerner’s, the same firm as Faisal Joseph, the lead CIC lawyer suing Maclean’s. Why didn’t Joseph keep him on? Competence? Politics? Not enough business? I’m quite curious. Aren’t you? I’m excited that I’ll learn about it in open court.

Awan’s lawyer in this lawsuit is Brian Shiller, the same lawyer representing Richard Warman and Warren Kinsella in their nuisance lawsuits against me (and many others they’ve targeted for silencing, including Kathy Shaidle, Kate McMillan and Free Dominion). Awan, Warman and Kinsella are all part of the same censorship cabal.

I’ve pointed out some of Shiller’s hilarious legal drafting errors in the past, and this lawsuit is no different. See paragraph 4: he manages to misspell the word Maclean’s (he writes it with a capital l) and to write the plural of Muslim as “Muslim’s” – with an apostrophe. Those aren’t important errors, of course. But they go to the sloppiness of Shiller’s work. But when you’re filing nuisance suits, it’s good enough.

Khurrum Awan is a serial liar

The main thrust of Awan’s suit is that I call him a liar. Well, he is a liar – and it was all revealed that day in court, when I wrote about it. Awan and his fellow sock puppets had repeatedly told the public that they had asked Maclean’s to publish a lengthy pro-Muslim essay, to rebut an article by Steyn, and that the rebuttal would be written by a “mutually acceptable” author. But under cross-examination by Maclean’s lawyer, Julian Porter, Awan admitted he had never asked Maclean’s to run a “mutually acceptable” article – he had demanded that they run a piece written by someone solely of the CIC’s choosing. The “mutually acceptable” thing was a lie told to the media, designed to make Awan and the CIC look more reasonable to the public. Here’s what I wrote when that lie was exposed on June 3, 2008. It’s a blog entry called Khurrum Awan is a serial liar:

Julian Porter himself was at the meeting where Khurrum Awan and his junior Al Sharptons tried to shake down Ken Whyte and Maclean’s for cash and a cover story.

Porter asked Awan point blank if the CIC’s proposed “counter-article” was to be “mutually acceptable” to Whyte or of the CIC’s own choosing.

After obfuscating for a few rounds, Awan acknowledged that he never in fact offered a “mutually acceptable” article — that was simply an after-the-fact lie, a little bit of taqqiya that Awan et al. has told the press.

Awan admitted that he made no such offer of a mutually acceptable author. It was to be the CIC’s own choice.

For an example of just how often Awan told that lie, let me recommend to you Colby Cosh’s notes on the subject.

That’s the bulk of Awan’s case. But let me point out one other little quirk: at paragraph 26, Awan claims that he “has been shunned by former friends” because of my blogging. That’s fascinating. I can hardly wait to learn the details about those friends – who they are, what they thought of Awan before they read my blog, how they decided to “shun” Awan afterwards, and what exactly it was that caused the change: Awan’s actions, or my blogging about his actions. (Do you think he’ll actually name names, or do you think he’ll mumble and crumble, like he did under Porter’s cross-examination in 2008?)

Awan’s lawsuit is for $50,000 plus costs. It’s not an enormous amount of money, but it will probably cost me $50,000 just to defend against it, plus a week at trial in another city.

Let’s go on the offensive. (They hate that!)

But here’s a question that has me pretty excited: can we turn lemons into lemonade here? By that I mean, instead of just fighting this lawsuit passively, what if I could use it to go on the offensive, and really root around inside the Canadian Islamic Congress, and expose their anti-Semitic, anti-Canadian ways? The trial will be partly about what I’ve written — no problem. But it will equally be about Awan’s reputation, and that of the CIC. It will give me a chance to ask Awan questions he’s never been asked before, and to see documents he’s never had to disclose before.

I’ll be able to expose the CIC for the venomous outfit that it is. I can picture spending at least an hour talking with Awan about his organization’s call for the decriminalization of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups.

My friends, I don’t like being sued. But I have to tell you, of all the junk lawsuits thrown at me because of my campaign for free speech – and there have been plenty – this one is in some ways the most important. If I handle this one right, I can expose the true nature of the CIC and the radical Islamist, pro-terrorist groups in Canada with whom Awan has consorted.

Let me quote a Jew now, just because it will irritate Awan. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote nearly 100 years ago, “publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” I’m going to bring some klieg lights to trial on this one.

I believe that nothing will disinfect our public square better than scrutiny and publicity of how illiberal Islamic fascists are waging war against our values. I hope that the lasting impact of this trial will be the complete and final detonation of the CIC’s credibility.

Bring it on.

Can you help me, please?

As I mentioned, this lawsuit will probably cost me $50,000 to fight. And it’s just one of many suits and complaints that the same cabal has hit me with, again and again.

Over the past two years I’ve been hit with three human rights complaints, over twenty complaints to the law society and this is the fifth defamation suit. That’s 28 suits and complaints. And they’re all junk lawsuits – SLAPP suits designed to shut me up.

I won the three human rights cases, and the first twenty law society complaints have all been dismissed. So far I have a perfect track record: 23 out of 23. Unfortunately, even if you win these sorts of nuisance complaints, you don’t get your legal costs back, so it’s been expensive.

If you’d like to help me, I’d appreciate it. It’s expensive fighting two dozen legal fights, even if they are junk. I think that a “normal” person would try to get out of a lawsuit like this – make a settlement, withdraw from the public square, and don’t criticize radical Islam or censorship anymore. But I don’t want to submit like that – I want to use this lawsuit to expose the truth about Awan and the CIC. And I certainly don’t want this suit to change what I say or do in my life, especially my ability to criticize radical Islam and its politically correct allies.

If you believe in fighting back against these bullies, please help me out. You can chip in by PayPal, by clicking on the button below. If you’d prefer to send in a cheque by snail mail, that’s great. Please make cheques payable to my lawyer:

“Christopher Ashby in Trust”

Attn: Ezra Levant defence fund

Suite 1013, 8 King Street East

Toronto, Ontario, M5C 1B5

Thank you very much. I promise to fight this battle all the way to the end.

“I am not a registered non-profit organization. Donations are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes.”

****To donate to Ezra please follow this link and scroll to the bottom of the article****

This seems like a good spot to repost this amazing moment from a speech by a Canadian Prof. of law, and former candidate for the federal N.D.P. party.

IFPS Steyn and Levant speak to Parliament

Posted on by

From the IFPS website:
This was an extraordinary thing. Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant spoke to Canada’s Parliament making the case for freedom of speech over the right not to be offended.
There will clearly be a sequel as you can tell at the end when they are invited back to restate the case once the evidence for their various claims have been properly examined. This was a great moment for freedom of speech.
James Cohen

Link: Steyn Levant ParliamentBelow, the same video from youtube, perhaps slightly better quality

Mark Steyn: Kingston not a good place for female Muslims.

Posted on by

From The National Review:

Watery Graves [Mark Steyn]

Three or so weeks back, a submerged car was found in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ont., containing the bodies of three teenage girls and their aunt — a story initially reported as Mysterious Death Of 4 Quebecers Baffles Kingston Police. When it emerged that the four female Quebecers were, in fact, Muslim, the tearful parents offered up a strange tale of an impromptu midnight driving lesson gone tragically wrong (Driving Lesson May Have Led To Drowning).

La Presse is now reporting that the girls’ father, mother, and brother have been arrested en route to Montreal Airport, and that the deceased “aunt” or (alternatively) “cousin” was, in fact, the girls’ father’s first wife. The words “crime d’honneur” are beginning to creep into newspaper accounts.

Meanwhile, the blogger Scaramouche suggests that, while they’re looking into honor killings in the Kingston area, the constabulary might take a gander at another curious aquatic accident this month:

Police say 14-year-old Kinza Kaianad died Monday evening at Kingston General Hospital as a result of injuries she sustained Saturday in a hotel pool in Gananoque, roughly 30 kilometres east of Kingston.

Her mother, 43-year-old Naila Yasmin, died in hospital on Sunday.

Yasmin, Kaianad and another daughter, age 11, were found unconscious in the indoor hotel pool just before 9 a.m. Saturday.

There would seem to be a statistically improbable number of multiple drownings of female members of Muslim families in Kingston this summer. If you’re a young female Muslim, and you have any say in the matter, you might want to vacation elsewhere.

[UPDATE: The third Muslim girl found in the swimming pool has died. That’s seven drowned young Muslim females showing up in the same morgue within a month. In other circumstances, they’d be planning the movie with Ashley Judd or some such as the crusading feminist Assistant DA. But as the M-word’s involved I expect poor Zainab Shafi and the rest will be quickly forgotten.]

Mark Steyn: The Geometry of Obama

Posted on by

Behind the Times. From The National Review:

There’s nothing cool about Obama.

By Mark Steyn

President Obama was supposed to be “cool.” But he isn’t. He’s square. Not just mildly so, but embarrassingly square. He’s squaresville squared. It’s like you’re having a party with your friends and he’s the cringe-making middle-aged parent who wants to show he digs where the young people are at by grooving around in the middle of the dance floor all night long.

How do I know? I’ve been there and I’ve been square. By “there,” I mean I’ve been in places that have tried all the cool Obama dance moves and eventually wised up to what utter clunkers they are.

A week ago, the House of Representatives passed some gargantuan “cap-and-trade” bill designed to “save” “the environment.” Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, accused those Neanderthals who voted against the bill of committing “treason against the planet.” By that standard, most of the planet is guilty of treason against the planet. I don’t mean just in the sense that China, already the world’s Number One CO2 emitter, and India and other rising economic powers have absolutely no intention of doing what the Democrats have done, no way, no how — because they don’t see why they should stay poor just because New York Times columnists think it’s good for them.

No, I mean that most of the developed world has already gone down the paved road of good intentions and is now frantically trying to pedal up out of it. New Zealand was one of the few western nations to sign on to Kyoto and then attempt to abide by it — until they realized they could only do so by destroying their economy. They introduced a Dem-style cap-and-trade regime — and last year they suspended it. In Australia, the Labor government postponed implementation of its emissions-reduction program until 2011, and the Aussie Senate may scuttle it entirely. The Obama administration has gotten to the climate-change hop just as the glitterball’s stopped whirling and the band’s packing up its instruments. Continue Reading →

“Western “even-handedness” on Bosnia was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of European Muslims.” – Mark Steyn

Posted on by

Another precient and brilliant column by Steyn:

Neutrality Isn’t an Option
You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.

By Mark Steyn

The polite explanation for Barack Obama’s diffidence on Iran is that he doesn’t want to give the mullahs the excuse to say the Great Satan is meddling in Tehran’s affairs. So the president’s official position is that he’s modestly encouraged by the regime’s supposed interest in investigating some of the allegations of fraud. Also, he’s heartened to hear that OJ is looking for the real killers. “You’ve seen in Iran,” explained President Obama, “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election . . . ”

“Supreme Leader”? I thought that was official house style for Barack Obama at Newsweek and MSNBC. But no. It’s also the title held by Ayatollah Khamenei for the last couple of decades. If it sounds odd from the lips of an American president, that’s because none has ever been as deferential in observing the Islamic republic’s dictatorial protocol. Like President Obama’s deep, ostentatious bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, it signals a fresh start in our relations with the Muslim world, “mutually respectful” and unilaterally fawning.

And how did it go down? At Friday prayers in Tehran, Ayotollah Khamenei attacked “dirty Zionists” and “bad British radio” (presumably a reference to the BBC’s Farsi news service rather than the non-stop Herman’s Hermits marathon on Supergold Oldies FM). “The most evil of them all is the British government,” added the supreme leader, warming to his theme. The crowd, including President Ahmadinelandslide and his cabinet, chanted, “Death to the U.K.” Continue Reading →

Mark Steyn: Obama’s first hundred days

Posted on by

Mark Steyn, Syndicated columnist, Friday, May 1, 2009
Obama looks moderate, acts radical

We’re still in the first hundred days of the joyous observances of Barack Obama’s first hundred days, and many weeks of celebration lie ahead, so here are my thoughts:
President Obama’s strongest talent is not his speechifying, which is frankly a bit of a snoozeroo. In Europe, he left ’em wanting less pretty much every time (headline from Britain’s Daily Telegraph: “Barack Obama Really Does Go On A Bit”). That uptilted chin combined with the left-right teleprompter neck swivel you can set your watch by makes him look like an emaciated Mussolini umpiring an endless rally of high lobs on Centre Court at Wimbledon. Each to his own, but I don’t think those who routinely hail him as the greatest orator since Socrates actually sit through many of his speeches.

On the other hand, if you just caught a couple of minutes of last Wednesday’s press conference, you’d be impressed. When that groupie from The New York Times asked the president about what, during his first hundred days, “had surprised you the most … enchanted you the most … humbled you the most and troubled you the most”, Obama made a point of getting out his pen, writing it down and repeating back the multiple categories: “Enchanted,” he said. “Nice.” Indeed. Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger, you may see a stranger across a crowded room, but then he scribbles down your multipart question to be sure he gets it right, and he looks so thoughtful, and suddenly he’s not a stranger anymore, and the sound of his laughter will ring in your dreams.

The theater of thoughtfulness is critical to the president’s success. He has the knack of appearing moderate while acting radical, which is a lethal skill. The thoughtful look suckered many of my more impressionable conservative comrades last fall, when David Brooks and Christopher Buckley were cranking out gushing paeans to Obama’s “first-class temperament” – temperament being to the Obamacons what Nick Jonas’ hair is to a Tiger Beat reporter. But the drab reality is that the man they hail – Brooks & Buckley, I mean; not the Tiger Beat crowd – is a fantasy projection. There is no Obama The Sober Centrist, although it might make a good holiday song:

“Obama The Sober Centrist

Had a very thoughtful mien

And if you ever saw it

You would say it’s peachy keen …”

And it is. But underneath the thoughtful look is a transformative domestic agenda that represents a huge annexation of American life by an ever more intrusive federal government. One cannot but admire the singleminded ruthlessness with which Obama is getting on with it, even as he hones his contemplative unhurried moderate routine on prime time news conferences. On foreign affairs, the shtick is less effective, but mainly because he’s not so engaged by the issues: He’s got big plans for health care, and federalized education, and an eco-friendly government-run automobile industry – and Iran’s nuclear program just gets in the way. He’d rather not think about it, and his multicontinental apology tours are his way of kicking the can down the road until that blessed day when America is just another sclerotic Euro-style social democracy, and even your more excitable jihadi won’t be able to jump up and down chanting “Death to the Great Satan!” with a straight face.

It would seem to me that reality is more likely to intrude on the Obama project from overseas than domestically. But if he’s lucky it won’t intrude at all, not until it’s too late. Thirty years ago this month, a grocer’s daughter from the English Midlands became Britain’s female prime minister – not because the electorate was interested in making (Obama-style) history, but just because nothing worked any more. The post-1945 socialist settlement – government health care, government automobile industry, government everything – had broken down: Inflation over 25 percent, marginal taxes rates over 90 percent, mass unemployment, permanent strikes. The country’s union leaders were household names, mainly because they were responsible for everything your household lacked. Even moving around was hard: The nationalized rail network was invariably on strike, and you had to put your name on a waiting list months in advance for one of the “new” car models. The evening news was an endless parade of big beefy burly blokes picketing some plant for the right to continue enjoying the soft pampering workweek of the more effete Ottoman sultans.

Margaret Thatcher was a great leader, who reversed her country’s decline – to the point where, two decades later, the electorate felt it was safe to vote the Labour Party back into office. And yet, in the greater scheme of things, the Thatcher interlude seems just that: a temporary respite from a remorseless descent into the abyss. In its boundless ambition, the Left understands that the character of a people can be transformed: British, Canadian and European elections are now about which party can deliver “better services,” as if the nation is a hotel, and the government could use some spritelier bellhops. Socialized health care in particular changes the nature of the relationship between citizen and state into something closer to junkie and pusher. On one of the many Obama Web sites the national impresario feels the need to maintain – “Foundation for Change” – the president is certainly laying the foundation for something. Among the many subjects expressing their gratitude to Good King Barack the Hopeychanger is “Phil from Cathedral City, Ca.”:

“I was laid off in mid-January from a job I had for 12 years. It’s really getting hard to make ends meet, but this month I got some great news. This week I received in the mail official notification that my COBRA monthly payments for medical, dental and vision insurance will decrease from $468 to only $163, all due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This is a $305 in savings a month!

“I can’t tell you how much of a weight off my shoulders this is. I am living proof of how the president’s bold initiatives are beginning to work!”

But just exactly how do these “bold initiatives” work? Well, hey, simple folk like you and I and Phil from Cathedral City don’t need to worry about the details. Once these “bold initiatives” really hit their stride maybe the cost of everything over four hundred bucks can be brought down to $163. Wouldn’t that be great?

The problem in the Western world is that governments are spending money faster than their citizenry or economies can generate it. As Gerald Ford liked to say, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And that’s true. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give Phil from Cathedral City everything he wants isn’t big enough to get Phil to give any of it back. That’s the stage the Europeans are at: Their electorates are hooked on unsustainable levels of “services,” but no longer can conceive of life without them.

Margaret Thatcher has a terrific line: “The facts of life are conservative.” Just so. Alas, while the facts are conservative, everything else – the culture, the media, the institutions in which we educate our children, the language of public discourse, the societal air we breathe – is profoundly liberal. Phil is “living proof” of something, but it’s not good news for conservatives.

©MARK STEYN

Mark Steyn: Exceptional essay on Islam, the west, the UK

Posted on by

From Jewish World Review Feb. 23, 2009 / 29 Shevat 5769

Going wobbly in the West

By Mark Steyn

Printer Friendly Version
Email this article

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | ‘It is hard to understand this deal,” said Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy. And, if the special envoy of the so-called smartest and most impressive administration in living memory can’t understand it, what chance do the rest of us have?

Nevertheless, let’s try. In the Swat Valley, where a young Winston Churchill once served with the Malakand Field Force battling Muslim insurgents, his successors have concluded the game isn’t worth the candle. In return for a temporary ceasefire, the Pakistani government agreed to let the local franchise of the Taliban impose its industrial strength version of sharia across the whole of Malakand Region. If “region” sounds a bit of an imprecise term, Malakand has over five million people, all of whom are now living under a murderous theocracy. Still, peace rallies have broken out all over the Swat Valley, and, at a Swat peace rally, it helps to stand well back: As one headline put it, “Journalist Killed While Covering Peace Rally.”

But don’t worry about Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of “extremists”: The Swat Valley is a good hundred miles from the “nation”‘s capital, Islamabad — or about as far as Northern Vermont is from Southern Vermont. And, of course, Islamabad is safely under the control of the famously moderate Ali Zardari. A few days before the Swat deal, Mr. Zardari marked the dawn of the Obama era by releasing from house arrest A. Q. Khan, the celebrated scientist and one-stop shop for all your Islamic nuclear needs, for whose generosity North Korea and Iran are especially grateful.

Continue Reading →

Mark Steyn on the UK and Geert Wilders.

Posted on by

The Arrest of Geert Wilders [Mark Steyn]

Andy and Andrew, that is a sad comment on a land that was once a crucible of freedom. As to the judgment of the British Home Office, they have no problem admitting to the United Kingdom the likes of Dr Ijaz Mian, who preached as follows at the Ahl-e-Hadith mosque in Derby:

You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir. We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others… King, Queen, House of Commons: if you accept it, you are a part of it. If you don’t accept it, you have to dismantle it. So you being a Muslim, you have to fix a target. From that White House to this Black House, we know we have to dismantle it. Muslims must grow in strength, then take over… You are in a situation in which you have to live like a state-within-a-state – until you take over.

And so it goes: Multiculti England will tolerate any intolerance, except the guy who points out the intolerance. We can’t tolerate that.

Mark Steyn on Geert Wilders and the Dutch courts. As expected, Steyn nails it.

Posted on by

Each incident that Mr. Steyn mentions in this article has been clearly detailed and documented here on Vlad. You can dig around for the links if you want to verify any of it. Its worth mentioning that as usual, Mark understated his own case. The Dutch policy of ‘non escalation’ was the grounds to prevent Dutch news crews from filming the destruction of the mural mentioned here in this article. But ultimately its to one purpose. To create a false impression of Islamic tolerance of it’s host nation.

From National Review…

Dutch courage [Mark Steyn]

Last year, The New York Times ran a story (front page, above the fold, gosh) on my troubles with the Canadian “thought police”, at the end of which I’m quoted as follows:

“Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world.”

The latest jurisdiction to get way too “comfortable with the regulation of opinion” is the Netherlands. As Andrew noted below, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal has ordered prosecutors to put the politician and film-maker Geert Wilders on trial for “making anti-Islamic statements”.

The Dutch, like the Canadians, think they can maintain social peace by shriveling the bounds of public discourse and bringing what little remains under state regulation. But one notices that the coercive urge, which comes so naturally to Euro-progressives, only goes in one direction. The Swedish Chancellor of Justice shuts down the investigation into the Grand Mosque of Stockholm for selling tapes urging believers to kill “the brothers of pigs and apes” (ie, Jews) because that’s simply “the everyday climate in the rhetoric”. The masked men marching through the streets of London with placards threatening to rain down another 9/11 on the infidels are protected by a phalanx of Metropolitan Police officers. The PC nellies of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, happy to hound the last neo-Nazi in Saskatchewan posting to the Internet from his mum’s basement, won’t go anywhere near Abou Hammaad Sulaiman Dameus al-Hayitia, the big-time Montreal imam whose book says infidels are “evil people”, Jews “spread corruption and chaos”, and homosexuals should be “exterminated”.

Instead, the state’s response to explicit Islamic intimidation is to punish those foolish enough to point out that intimidation. You don’t have to be as intemperate as Minheer Wilders can sometimes be: In the Netherlands even the most innocuous statement can get you into trouble. To express his disgust at Theo van Gogh’s murder, the artist Chris Ripke put up a mural outside his studio showing an angel and the words “Thou shalt not kill”. But the cops thought this was somehow a dig at the local mosque and so came round, destroyed the mural, arrested the TV news crew filming it, and wiped their tape. The Dutch have determined to commit societal euthanasia, and dislike fellows pointing out it might not be as painless as they’ve assumed.