If you don’t visit his website every so often, you ought to.
Since the splendidly robust Conrad Black got fitted up in America for nicking a
bit of office stationery (the other 44 charges having been dismissed, 2 on
appeal), and the rather more cautious Barclay Brothers took over the Telegraph
Group, Mark Steyn has been largely absent from the British press. I think it’s
a damn shame, mainly because the current lot of intelligent columnists we have in Britain pussyfoot
around when it comes to Islam. True, they live in an overcrowded island with an
ineffective police force, so a degree of self-preservation is rational. Steyn,
on the other hand, lives in the mountains of New Hampshire where defence of one’s
property and person is not a subject for debate.
That Steyn overstates his case goes without saying; he is a
polemicist, and hates nuance. Indeed, he thinks that it is endless nuance and hand-wringing
liberal guilt that has landed us in the tricky situation (which he would call the
almighty mess) that we find ourselves in with Islam. But he writes with such passion and
good humour. I met him once at a London political event and he is very much the
same in the flesh – quick-witted, self-confident and amusing.
Here he is, presenting a free speech prize to Lars Hedegaard
at the European Parliament. Hedegaard won’t mean much to you and me, being a Marxist
and a journalist who writes in Danish. He is uncomplimentary about Islam's effect on his country. He found himself opening his door to a ‘postman’
recently, who contrived to miss him from point-blank range with a pistol. It
would be fair to say that his life insurance premiums are now unaffordable.
Steyn's speech is less about Hedegaard, and more
about the attitude of the Left in Europe to Islam. It is right on the button
and often darkly comic:
Two years ago, as part of Lars'
conference on Islam and humor, I shared a platform in Copenhagen with the
Swedish artist Lars Vilks. They have a tradition in Sweden of roundabout dogs -
canine scultptures that pop up mysteriously on Swedish roundabouts - and Lars
Vilks decided to do a drawing of Mohammed as a roundabout dog. He wound up with
a fatwa on his head. And one night he came home to find the jihad boys had
firebombed his kitchen. As they escaped across the field heady with the thrill
of their glorious victory, they noticed that in the course of setting Mr Vilks'
home alight they'd also accidentally set their trousers on fire, and, after
some effort to extinguish their smoking pantaloons, were forced to discard
them. Unfortunately, in abandoning their pants and scampering off through the
icy night in their jihadist underwear, they neglected to remove the charred
driver's licenses and other identifying documentation, from which police were
able easily to track them down. When Mr Vilks told this story in Copenhagen,
the whole room was roaring with laughter. Muslim terrorists are like Yosemite
Sam in the Loony Tunes cartoons, forever shoving the stick of dynamite in their
own pants – until one day Yosemite Ahmed manages to get it right. After the
bombing of the British Conservative Party conference in 1984, the IRA taunted
Mrs Thatcher: "You have to be lucky every day, we only have to be lucky
once." Those jihad incompetents with the smoking trousers would modify the
line: We only have to be competent once, and no matter how many years roll by
they'll keep trying. Over four years after Mr Vilks' drawing, seven men were
arrested in Waterford, Ireland for plotting to kill him. I don't know how many
of you know Waterford. It sits in a beautiful spot on the southern Irish coast,
the oldest city in the country, population about 45,000. And yet in an Irish
city of 45,000 you can find seven men willing to kill a Swedish artist. At the
height of the so-called Irish "Troubles", you'd have been hard put to
find seven residents of Waterford willing to participate in a plot to kill a
British cabinet minister. But in the new multicultural Waterford you can find
seven men willing to kill some guy halfway across Europe over a four-year-old
drawing.
Or this:
After that conference with Lars in Copenhagen a couple of years ago, I
took the train over the water to Malmö in Sweden. Malmö was one of the
first Christian cities in what was then Denmark. It's now on course to
become the first Muslim city in Sweden. I sat and had a coffee in a nice
little place in a beautiful medieval square in the heart of town. Aside
from a few modernist excrescences, it would not have looked so
different in the early days of the Lutheran church. I got lucky, and
fell into conversation with a couple of cute Swedish blondes.
Fine-looking ladies. I shall miss Scandinavian blondes when they're
extinct. At dusk, and against their advice, I took a 20-minute walk to
Rosengard. As you stroll the sidewalk, the gaps between blondes grow
longer, and the gaps between young bearded Muslim men grow shorter. And
then eventually you're in the housing projects, and all the young boys
kicking a soccer ball around are Muslim, and every single woman is
covered – including many who came from "moderate" Muslim countries and
did not adopt the headscarf or hijab until they emigrated to Sweden,
where it's compulsory, at least in Rosengard.
.......
I would urge anyone to do that twilight walk from downtown Malmö to
Rosengard, as the blondes thin and the bearded men multiply. That's
Europe's future walking toward you, and most Europeans did not choose to
live in that world. In Malmö, in Rotterdam, in Yorkshire and here in
Brussels, their betters made the decision for them. A society that
becomes more Muslim becomes less everything else – less Jewish, less
gay, less feminist, less artistic, less scientific, less free. That's a
simple statement of fact, but we shrink from it.Dammit, read the whole thing.
