Mark Steyn on the West’s struggle with radical Islam. Video. Fox and Friends. Fox News, November 14, 2015. YouTube.
Steyn: Leaders Must Ask If Admitting “Millions of People” Is Smart, Some “Provide Comfort Zone” for Islamic Extremism. By Ian Hanchett. Breitbart, November 14, 2015.
Steyn:
As I write, Paris is under curfew for the first time since the German occupation, and the death toll from the multiple attacks stands at 158, the vast majority of them slaughtered during a concert at the Bataclan theatre, a delightful bit of 19th century Chinoiserie on the boulevard Voltaire. The last time I was there, if memory serves, was to see Julie Pietri. I’m so bloody sick of these savages shooting and bombing and killing and blowing up everything I like – whether it’s the small Quebec town where my little girl’s favorite fondue restaurant is or my favorite hotel in Amman or the brave freespeecher who hosted me in Copenhagen ...or a music hall where I liked to go to hear a little jazz and pop and get away from the cares of the world for a couple of hours. But look at the photographs from Paris: there’s nowhere to get away from it; the barbarians who yell “Allahu Akbar!” are there waiting for you ...when you go to a soccer match, you go to a concert, you go for a drink on a Friday night. They’re there on the train... at the magazine office... in the Kosher supermarket... at the museum in Brussels... outside the barracks in Woolwich...
Twenty-four hours ago, I said on the radio apropos the latest campus “safe space” nonsense:
Almost. When the Allahu Akbar boys opened fire, Paris was talking about the climate-change conference due to start later this month, when the world’s leaders will fly in to “solve” a “problem” that doesn’t exist rather than to address the one that does. But don’t worry: we already have a hashtag (#PrayForParis) and doubtless there’ll be another candlelight vigil of weepy tilty-headed wankers. Because as long as we all advertise how sad and sorrowful we are, who needs to do anything?This is what we’re going to be talking about when the mullahs nuke us.
With
his usual killer comedy timing, the “leader of the free world” told George
Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning, America” this very morning that he’d “contained”
ISIS and that they’re not “gaining strength.” A few hours later, a cell whose
members claim to have been recruited by ISIS slaughtered over 150 people in the
heart of Paris and succeeded in getting two suicide bombers and a third bomb to
within a few yards of the French president.
Visiting
the Bataclan, M Hollande declared that “nous
allons mener le combat, il sera impitoyable”: We are going to wage a war
that will be pitiless.
Does he
mean it? Or is he just killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and
Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking
about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and
Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed
away.
Among
his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight's events as “an
attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but
this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share.”
But
that’s not true, is it? He’s right that it’s an attack not just on Paris or
France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the
modern world – an attack on one portion of “humanity” by those who claim to
speak for another portion of “humanity.” And these are not “universal values”
but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were
kinda sorta “universal” when the great powers were willing to enforce them
around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as
Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay
lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and
those “universal values” are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.
And
then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries.
Most of those people don’t want to participate actively in bringing about the
death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most
of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which
they live – modern, pluralist, western societies and those “universal values”
of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or
just a guy who’s been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort
zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to
penetrate.
And all
Chancellor Merkel and the EU want to do is make that large comfort zone even
larger by letting millions more “Syrian” “refugees” walk into the Continent and
settle wherever they want. As I wrote after the Copenhagen attacks in February:
...or soccer matches, or concerts, or restaurants...I would like to ask Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt what’s their happy ending here? What’s their roadmap for fewer “acts of violence” in the years ahead? Or are they riding on a wing and a prayer that they can manage the situation and hold it down to what cynical British civil servants used to call during the Irish “Troubles” “an acceptable level of violence?” In Pakistan and Nigeria, the citizenry are expected to live with the reality that every so often Boko Haram will kick open the door of the schoolhouse and kidnap your daughters for sex-slavery or the Taliban will gun down your kids and behead their teacher in front of the class. And it’s all entirely “random,” as President Obama would say, so you just have to put up with it once in a while, and it’s tough if it’s your kid, but that’s just the way it is. If we’re being honest here, isn’t that all Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt are offering their citizens? Spasms of violence as a routine feature of life, but don’t worry, we’ll do our best to contain it – and you can help mitigate it by not going to “controversial” art events, or synagogues, or gay bars, or...
To
repeat what I said a few days ago, I’m Islamed out. I’m tired of Islam 24/7, at
Colorado colleges, Marseilles synagogues, Sydney coffee shops, day after day
after day. The west cannot win this thing with a schizophrenic strategy of targeting
things and people but not targeting the ideology, of intervening ineffectually
overseas and not intervening at all when it comes to the remorseless
Islamization and self-segregation of large segments of their own countries.
So I
say again: What’s the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn’t prepared
to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his “pitiless war”
isn’t serious. And, if they’re still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel’s mad
plan to reverse Germany’s demographic death spiral through fast-track
Islamization, then Europeans aren’t serious. In the end, the decadence of
Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and
everything you love.
So
screw the candlelight vigil.
~I'll
be talking about events in Paris on Fox & Friends Saturday morning at
around 9am Eastern/6am Pacific.
Hanchett:
Columnist and author Mark Steyn argued that a “large pool of people” who “provide a comfort zone within which this virus incubates” and that Western leaders are going to have to ask themselves “is it really a good idea to admit millions and millions of people to European countries?” on Saturday’s “Fox & Friends” on the Fox News Channel.
Steyn
said, “nobody wants to say they were right about this, but I wrote a book
almost ten years ago, and people said it was a alarmist. I’ve been listening to
you guys all morning, and it’s striking to me, every interview you’ve had,
Tucker has said, at one point, well, is it — some variation of is it really a
good idea to admit millions and of millions of people to European countries?
And people then start to tap dance around that issue, but when you get to it,
that’s at the heart of it. That there is a large pool of people who, they don’t
want to kill people, they don’t want bomb people, they don’t want to blow
people up, but they provide a comfort zone within which this virus incubates.
And at some point, if Mr. Hollande, and Mr. Cameron, and all these people
talking about our values this morning are serious about that, they will have to
do as Tucker did and ask themselves that question, and come up with an answer
to it.”
When
asked if the president realized “we have different values from the people who
did this,” Steyn answered, “No, he doesn’t, and he wants to preserve that myth.
If you look at the two big French attacks this year, for example, this attack
was on people who just going to concerts, just going to restaurants, just going
to soccer games, people find that well, easy to say, well you shouldn’t be
blown up if you just go to a restaurant, or you just go to a soccer game. But
when you get to the free speech thing, when you get to Charlie Hebdo in
January, the majority of Muslims, in France, and in other western European nations,
do not accept the concept of free speech. Free speech is not a universal value.
It arises from a very narrow, particular tradition on this planet, and when you
country becomes ten percent, 15 percent, 20 percent Muslim, there’s less and
less of market for a free speech. So, despite what Obama, and Cameron, and Mr.
Hollande say, that value of free speech will die, because there will be people
who do not share that value.”
Steyn
added that the war against terror can’t be fought on an “intelligence basis. I
mean, we’ve been talking about whether you can vet people before — as they come
in. A lot of these people, for example the Boston Marathon bomber, the guy who
did the stabbings in Colorado just last week, they come in, and they’re
perfectly normal little kids, and then they get radicalized as they live in
Western societies. A quarter million people entered one German state, Bavaria,
in September and October, a quarter million people. The German police estimate
that it takes 60 people working on just tracking one known person on these
watch lists. So, you cannot solve it by intelligence. You have to actually talk
about things like a moratorium on Muslim immigration, and waging the battle
ideologically. You have to be prepared — you have to, not just talk about our
values, as Cameron did. You have to identify what those values are, and be
prepared to defend and advance them in the world. Don’t just say that they’re
universal. Because the guy in Yemen, and the goat herd, the Pashtun goat herd,
and the fellow who thinks that his daughter got raped, so she deserves to die,
these people don’t think they’re universal values. And Obama is useless if
that’s all that he’s got to say about it.”
He
added, “I think it has to be a two prong thing. I mean, this is a domestic
battle, as much as an overseas war. In that these are people who nominally are
citizens of Western nations, yet feel no allegiance to those nations. I mean,
we pretend, we talk about the fellow in Colorado for example. The ABC News
headline was a Santa Clara teenager had perpetrated the attacks. So, we present
these people as normal residents of Santa Clara, of the United States, of
France, Canada, Australia, but they bare, they — in the end, their sense of
identity is not French, or Canadian, or Australian, or American. It’s with a
pan-national identity, that actually doesn’t think in terms of nation-states.
It’s bigger than that. The caliphate isn’t interested in the borders of France,
or Belgium, or Germany. it’s actually making the very concept of national
identity irrelevant, and replacing it with something bigger.”
