Mark Steyn's Blog, page 3

Jizya Is or Jizya Ain't My Baby?

Nathaniel, you quote that Cairo cleric, Dr. Khaled Said, sneering that U.S. aid to Egypt is a form of jizya, the tax Islam levies upon infidels:

We consider this aid to be jizya, not regular aid. . . .They pay so that we will let them be.

He's not the first to suggest this. From page 165 of my book America Alone, published in 2006:

But the Muslim world has effortlessly extended the concept of jizya worldwide. If you’re on the receiving end, it’s possible to see the American, European and Israeli subsidies of the Palestinian Authority as a form of jizya. Or even the billions of dollars Washington has lavished on Egypt, to such little effect (other than Mohammed Atta coming through the window).

As Steyn goes today, so goes tomorrow's third-rate Cairo imam.

Married by the Judge

 Three weeks ago, I wrote:

An institution that predates the United States by several millennia will be defined for a third of a billion people by whichever way Anthony Kennedy feels like swingin’ that morning. The universal deference to judicial supremacism is bizarre and unbecoming to a free people.

Paul Mirengoff says today over at Powerline:

The fact that the Supreme Court may be about to pass judgment on the age-old definition of marriage is the reductio ad absurdum of American constitutional jurisprudence. That we have reached this point tells us that the Supreme Court has taken some terribly wrong turns.

The fact that, until very recently, marriage has universally been deemed to require an opposite sex component doesn’t mean that this component must be required forevermore. But a decent appreciation of democracy, human history, and the fallibility of the individual means that nine glorified lawyers shouldn’t be the ones who make the change. Nor should they be in a position where they might make it.

Amen. And no court with any understanding of accountable government or constitutional propriety would go along with it. It may well be that the tide has turned, and the American people are cool with gay marriage. In that case, their elected representatives should enact it into law (as the House of Commons at Westminster recently did). But the spectacle of a nation agog waiting for a puff of smoke from Justice Kennedy to see which way he's going to blow is ridiculous. Why not ask Punxsutawney Phil?

Re: The Maliki Slapdown

Victor Davis Hanson concludes his thoughts on Secretary Kerry's visit to Baghdad thus:

When we examine our attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians, the U.K. in the Falklands, or Eastern Europe and Russia, contrasted with the embrace of the Arab Spring Islamists and Turkey, in some sense the U.S. has become everyone’s best enemy and worst friend.

Some years ago, on a National Review panel, our old friend Bernard Lewis said that America risked being seen as "harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend." From Syria and Egypt to Russia and Poland, that now seems to be the basic assumption.

Blurred Conquest

The other day, the Heritage Foundation arranged a screening of a documentary called Silent Conquest: The End Of Freedom Of Expression In The West, followed by a panel discussion. The film features a veritable who's who of notorious "Islamophobes", including me, Daniel Pipes, Allen West and many others known around these parts talking about Islam's challenge to the core western liberty of free speech. I haven't seen the picture and I have no very clear recollection of what I said on camera, but I would imagine it's some variant of what I've been saying for years - that the Mohammed cartoons controversy and similar crises are part of a sustained campaign to win, through small, incremental concessions by the west, acceptance of a very basic rule, that the tenets of Islam now apply to all.

So I found this account of the Heritage screening somewhat startling:

One discordant note, though, marred this highly informative and principled event.  During Silent Conquest's discussion of the controversial 2005 Danish Muhammad cartoons, the actual cartoons were not visible behind the filmmakers' technical image blurring.

Not the old pixilated Prophet routine? I've been mocking craven news organizations that go that route ever since the Motoons hit the fan:

CNN did show the cartoons in their news reports on the murder and mayhem, but with the Prophet’s face pixilated, as if Mohammed had entered the witness protection program. In reality, of course, it was CNN that had entered the witness protection program – or hoped it had.

What's the point of Silent Conquest rounding up every A-list "Islamophobe" to take a stand for free speech if the film's central visual image undermines every word uttered? If supposed champions of free speech can do no more than prostrate themselves before Islamic supremacism as completely as CNN and the other squishes, then it's over.

Off-Message (2)

Since readers seemed to enjoy the immigration line I quoted from Canada on Thursday, here's another Thought for the Day, from a celebrated British liberal writing in today's Daily Mail:

For a democratic state to have any meaning, it must ‘belong’ to existing citizens. They must have special rights over non-citizens. Immigration must be managed with their interests in mind.

You couldn't get away with that kind of talk in the Republican Party.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled platitudes about hardworking families... natural conservative constituency... comprehensive reform...

Geopolitical ADHD

Ten years ago, along with three-quarters of the American people, including the men just appointed as President Obama’s secretaries of state and defense, I supported the invasion of Iraq. A decade on, unlike most of the American people, including John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, I’ll stand by that original judgment.

None of us can say what would have happened had Saddam Hussein remained in power. He might now be engaged in a nuclear-arms race with Iran. One or other of his even more psychotic sons, the late Uday or Qusay, could be in power. The Arab Spring might have come to Iraq, and surely even more bloodily than in Syria.#ad#

But these are speculations best left to the authors of “alternative histories.” In the real world, how did things turn out?

Three weeks after Operation Shock and Awe began, the early-bird naysayers were already warning of massive humanitarian devastation and civil war. Neither happened. Overcompensating somewhat for all the doom-mongering, I wrote in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that “a year from now Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.” Close enough. Major General Andy Salmon, the British commander in southern Iraq, eventually declared of Basra that “on a per capita basis, if you look at the violence statistics, it is less dangerous than Manchester.”

Ten years ago, expert opinion was that Iraq was a phony-baloney entity imposed on the map by distant colonial powers. Joe Biden, you’ll recall, advocated dividing the country into three separate states, which for the Democrats held out the enticing prospect of having three separate quagmires to blame on Bush, but for the Iraqis had little appeal. “As long as you respect its inherently confederal nature,” I argued, “it’ll work fine.” As for the supposedly secessionist Kurds, “they’ll settle for being Scotland or Quebec.” And so it turned out. The Times of London, last week: “Ten Years after Saddam, Iraqi Kurds Have Never Had It So Good.” In Kurdistan as in Quebec, there is a pervasive unsavory tribal cronyism, but on the other hand, unlike Quebec City, Erbil is booming.

What of the rest of the country? Iraq, I suggested, would wind up “at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world, and, at best, pleasant, civilized and thriving.” I’ll stand by my worst-case scenario there. Unlike the emerging “reforms” in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria, politics in Iraq has remained flawed but, by the standards of the grimly Islamist Arab Spring, broadly secular.

So I like the way a lot of the trees fell. But I missed the forest.

On the previous Western liberation of Mesopotamia, when General Maude took Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, British troops found a very different city from the Saddamite squat of 2003: In a lively, jostling, cosmopolitan metropolis, 40 percent of the population was Jewish. I wasn’t so deluded as to think the Jews would be back, but I hoped something of Baghdad’s lost vigor might return. Granted that most of the Arab world, from Tangiers to Alexandria, is considerably less “multicultural” than it was in mid century, the remorseless extinction of Iraq’s Christian community this last decade is appalling -- and, given that it happened on America’s watch, utterly shameful. Like the bland acknowledgement deep in a State Department “International Religious Freedom Report” that the last church in Afghanistan was burned to the ground in 2010, it testifies to the superpower’s impotence, not “internationally” but in client states entirely bankrolled by us.

Foreigners see this more clearly than Americans. As Goh Chok Tong, the prime minister of Singapore, said on a visit to Washington in 2004, “The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America’s credibility and will to prevail.” Just so. If you live in Tikrit or Fallujah, the Iraq War was about Iraq. If you live anywhere else on the planet, the Iraq War was about America, and the unceasing drumbeat of “quagmire” and “exit strategy” communicated to the world an emptiness at the heart of American power -- like the toppled statue of Saddam that proved to be hollow. On the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, mobs trashed U.S. embassies across the region with impunity. A rather more motivated crowd showed up in Benghazi, killed four Americans, including the ambassador, and correctly calculated they would face no retribution. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, these guys have reached their own judgment about American “credibility” and “will” -- as have more potent forces yet biding their time, from Moscow to Beijing.#page#

A few weeks after the fall of Saddam, on little more than a whim, I rented a beat-up Nissan at Amman Airport and, without telling the car-hire bloke, drove east across the Iraqi border and into the Sunni Triangle. I could not easily make the same journey today: Western journalists now require the permission of the central government to enter Anbar Province. But for a brief period in the spring of 2003 we were the “strong horse” and even a dainty little media gelding such as myself was accorded a measure of respect by the natives. At a rest area on the highway between Rutba and Ramadi, I fell into conversation with one of the locals. Having had to veer onto the median every few miles to dodge bomb craters, I asked him whether he bore any resentments toward his liberators. “Americans only in the sky,” he told me, grinning a big toothless grin as, bang on cue, a U.S. chopper rumbled up from over the horizon and passed high above our heads. “No problem.”#ad#

“Americans only in the sky” is an even better slogan in the Obama era of drone-alone warfare. In Iraq, there were a lot of boots on the ground, but when it came to non-military leverage (cultural, economic) Americans were content to remain “only in the sky.” And down on the ground other players filled the vacuum, some reasonably benign (the Chinese in the oil fields), others less so (the Iranians in everything else).

And so a genuinely reformed Middle East remains, like the speculative scenarios outlined at the top, in the realm of “alternative history.” Nevertheless, in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America’s un-won wars, Iraq today is less un-won than Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, and that is not nothing. The war dead of America and its few real allies died in an honorable cause. But armies don’t wage wars, nations do. And, back on the home front, a vast percentage of fair-weather hawks who decided that it was all too complicated, or a bit of a downer, or Bush lied, or where’s the remote, revealed America as profoundly unserious. A senator who votes for war and then decides he’d rather it had never started is also engaging in “alternative history” -- albeit of the kind in which Pam Ewing steps into the shower at Southfork and writes off the previous season of Dallas as a bad dream. In non-alternative history, in the only reality there is, once you’ve started a war, you have two choices: to win it or to lose it. Withdrawing one’s “support” for a war you’re already in advertises nothing more than a kind of geopolitical ADHD.

Shortly after Gulf War One, when the world’s superpower assembled a mighty coalition to fight half-a-war to an inconclusive halt at the gates of Baghdad, Washington declined to get mixed up in the disintegrating Balkans. Colin Powell offered the following rationale: “We do deserts. We don’t do mountains.” Across a decade in Iraq, America told the world we don’t really do deserts, either.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Off-Message

I confess that, as a legal immigrant to the United States, I rather liked this line:

Illegal immigrants are to immigration what shoplifters are to shopping.

If you're wondering what hard-hearted, unyielding Republican with a death wish that came from, don't worry: It was a Canadian commentator* talking about Canadian immigration.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled platitudes about hardworking families . . . living in the shadows . . . doing the jobs Americans won't do . . . pathway to citizenship . . .

(*Jerry Agar of CFRB speaking on Sun News)

The Unmourned

In 2011, I wrote about mass murder at Kermit Gosnell's abortion "clinic":

From the Office of the District Attorney in Philadelphia:

Viable babies were born*. Gosnell killed them by plunging scissors into their spinal cords. He taught his staff to do the same.

This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale - and it barely makes the papers. Had he plunged his scissors into the spinal cord of a Democrat politician in Arizona, then The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC and everyone else would be linking it to Sarah Palin's uncivil call for dramatic cuts in government spending. But "Doctor" Kermit Gosnell's mound of corpses is apparently entirely unconnected to the broader culture.

And so it goes two years on, at "Doctor" Gosnell's trial:

Medical assistant Adrienne Moton admitted Tuesday that she had cut the necks of at least 10 babies after they were delivered, as Gosnell had instructed her. Gosnell and another employee regularly "snipped" the spines "to ensure fetal demise," she said.

Moton sobbed as she recalled taking a cellphone photograph of one baby because he was bigger than any she had seen aborted before. She measured the fetus at nearly 30 weeks, and thought he could have survived, given his size and pinkish color. Gosnell later joked that the baby was so big he could have walked to the bus stop, she said.

Funny!

Notwithstanding Dr. Gosnell's jest, and the fact that newborns delivered alive are generally regarded as "babies," the New York Times' only story on the case is punctilious enough to refer to Gosnell's victims as "viable fetuses," and its early paragraphs emphasize the defense's wearily predictable line that this is a "racist prosecution." Instead of my Arizona comparison, what about Sandy Hook? One solitary act of mass infanticide by a mentally-ill loner calls into question the constitutional right to guns, but a sustained conveyor belt of infanticide by an entire cadre of cold-blooded killers apparently has no implications for the constitutional right to abortion. As one commentator wondered two years ago:

Does 30 years of calling babies “blobs of tissue” have no effect on the culture?

For the answer, consider the testimony of "Nurse" Moton -- and the clarification by AP writer Maryclaire Dale:

She once had to kill a baby delivered in a toilet, cutting its neck with scissors, she said. Asked if she knew that was wrong, she said, "At first I didn't."

Abortions are typically performed in utero.

"Typically." So, finding oneself called on to "abort" a "viable fetus" in a toilet with a pair of scissors, who wouldn't be confused as to whether it's "wrong" or merely marginally atypical?

Gosnell's murderous regime in Philadelphia reflects on him. The case's all but total absence from the public discourse reflects on America:

It's time for the lukewarm to get over whatever prejudices are keeping them from getting on the right side of this issue, for the good of the victims of this ghastly culture, and for their own good as well.

Lights Out on Free Speech

On the end of freedom of the press in Britain, Messrs O'Sullivan, Cooke and Stuttaford have had their say below. I think our friend Iain Murray Tweets it well:

Let me get this right: Parliament will hold the press to account? Words cannot begin to express how bass-ackward that is.

Quite so. And yet, in Britain, in Canada, in Australia (which is to say in some of the oldest free societies on earth and among the very few developed nations that did not succumb to the mid-20th century totalitarian fevers), it is now received wisdom that state power is required to "balance" free speech with competing societal interests as determined by regulatory bureaucrats. Socialists are supposed to think like this, but Britain's hideously named "Royal Charter" is the triumphant "deal" of an ostensibly Conservative Prime Minister, and Canada's grotesque Supreme Court decision was passed by a bench the majority of whom were appointed by another Conservative Prime Minister.

As the casual acceptance of the notion that "Parliament will hold the press to account" suggests, increasingly we live in a world in which such debates as take place do so within an ever more statist framing. Aside from the small matter of abandoning core principles of English liberty, these "conservatives" cannot even calculate their own interests.

Palestinian Mom of the Decade Dies

Seven years ago, in my book America Alone, I noted the Hamas landslide in the 2006 Palestinian elections:

Among the incoming legislators was Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She’s a household name to Palestinians, known as Um Nidal - Mother of the Struggle – and, at the rate she’s getting through her kids, the Struggle’s all she’ll be Mother of. She’s famous for a Hamas recruitment video in which she shows her 17-year old son how to kill Israelis and then tells him not to come back. It’s the Hamas version of 42nd Street: You’re going out there a youngster but you’ve got to come back in small pieces.

"Um Nidal" passed away yesterday. Unusually for a member of the Farahat family, she expired not from firing up the old suicide belt and with body parts of dead Jews raining down on her, but, rather more prosaically, from multiple organ failure. One trusts that, reunited with mom in Paradise, her late sons won't hold it against her. Suicide for Allah "makes me happy", she famously declared. "Hepatitis for Allah" doesn't have quite the same ring.

Nevertheless, as this headline puts it, "Thousands participate in funeral of the Khansa of Palestine' Umm Nidal Farahat". Thousands. For a woman whose sole contribution to Palestinian "society" is a mound of dead sons.

"This is who the Palestinian people are, this is what they believe," I wrote in my book. "After 60 years as UN 'refugees', they’re now so inured they’re electing candidates on the basis of child sacrifice."