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June 15, 2006
National suicide
Mark Steyn takes on the seeming desire of Canada -- and much of the Western world -- to commit national suicide, given the aftermath of the jihadi arrests in Toronto.
According to Steyn, it's a willful failure on the part of multi-culturalists to put aside their own prejudices and see the would-be bombers for who they really are -- not how multi-cultis wish them to be.
The best summation [of the jihadist mindset] is a line I first quoted in 2002, when a French oil tanker was attacked off the coast of Yemen. Back then, you'll recall, the French foreign minister was deploring American "simplisme" on a daily basis, and M. Chirac was the principal obstructionist of the neo-con-Zionist-Halliburton plan to remake the Middle East. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, France would surely be it.
But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, "We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels."
No problem. They are all infidels. In the scheme of things, launching a plot to behead the Prime Minister of Canada would not seem to be an obvious priority. No doubt they would have preferred to behead the President of the United States. But no problem. We are all infidels.
The multicultural society posits that each of its citizens can hold a complementary portfolio of identities: one can simultaneously be Canadian and Jamaican and gay and Anglican and all these identities can exist within your corporeal form in perfect harmony.
But, for most Western Muslims, Islam is their primary identity, and for a significant number thereof, it's a primary identity that exists in opposition to all others. That's merely stating the obvious. But, of course, to state the obvious is unacceptable these days, so our leaders prefer to state the absurd.
Steyn praises author Melanie Phillips and her book, Londonistan, to illustrate his point, extending it beyond London, to include Canada and the rest of the self-loathing West.
"Minority-rights doctrine," writes Phillips, "has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority."
If you want to appreciate the forces at play among Western Muslims in societies enervated by multiculturalism, Londonistan is an indispensable read. "It is impossible to overstate the importance -- not just to Britain but to the global struggle against Islamist extremism -- of properly understanding and publicly challenging this moral, intellectual and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa."
"With few exceptions, politicians, Whitehall officials, senior police and intelligence officers and academic experts have failed to grasp that the problem to be confronted is not just the assembly of bombs and poison factories but what is going on inside people's heads that drives them to such acts."
These are not Pushtun yak herders straight off the boat blowing up trains and buses. They're young men, most of whom were born and all of whom were bred in London, Toronto and other Western cities. And offered the nullity of a contemporary multicultural identity they looked elsewhere -- and found the jihad. If we try to fight it as isolated outbreaks -- a suicide attack here, a beheading there -- we will never win. You have to take on the ideology and the networks that sustain it and throttle them. Does [Toronto Mayor] David Miller sound like a man who's up to that challenge? A reader in Quebec, John Gross, emailed me to distill the mayor's approach as: "Don't get mad, get even . . . wimpier."
As always, with Mr. Steyn, read the whole thing.
Posted by Mike Lief at June 15, 2006 07:32 AM
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