Mark Steyn's Blog, page 56

Federal Enlargement

The Federal Government is requiring new labels for breast implants.

I would make a joke about that, but the Federal Government is cracking down on those, too.

That's One Way to Avoid an Enhanced Patdown

The US Airways dress code.

For added gaiety on a crowded flight, seat him next to Rajeit ("Allahu Akbar" is Arabic for "How long you gonna be in there?") Almurisi.

Geert Wilders Acquitted

Geert Wilders has been acquitted of all charges at his show trial in Amsterdam:

The court ruled that some of Wilders' statements were insulting, shocking and on the edge of legal acceptibility, but that they were made in the broad context of a political and social debate on the multi-cultural society.

"On the edge of legal acceptability," eh? As for the latter part -- "the broad context of a political and social debate" -- the genius "jurists" are effectively conceding what I said when this racket got going -- that the Dutch state was attempting to criminalize the political platform of a popular opposition party. That's the sort of thing free societies should leave to Mubarak & Co, and even then, you can only get away with it for a while before people draw the obvious conclusion.

Nevertheless, as in all these cases, the process is the punishment. The intent is to make it more and more difficult for apostates of the multiculti state to broaden the terms of political discourse. Very few Europeans would have had the stomach to go through what Wilders did -- and the British Government's refusal to permit a Dutch Member of Parliament to land at Heathrow testifies to how easily the craven squishes of the broader political culture fall into line.

And at the end the awkward fact remains: Geert Wilders lives under 24-hour armed guard because of explicit death threats made against him by the killer of Theo van Gogh and by other Muslims. Yet he's the one who gets puts on trial.

That's the Netherlands, 2011. Shameful. As for the Islamic imperialists, they're taking their case to the logical venue. As Reuters reports:

Minorities groups said they would now take the case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, arguing the ruling meant the Netherlands had failed to protect ethnic minorities from discrimination.

"The acquittal means that the right of minorities to remain free of hate speech has been breached. We are going to claim our rights at the U.N.," said Mohamed Rabbae of the National Council for Moroccans.

The genteel evasions of the eunuch prose ("minorities groups") are a big part of the problem here.

Hate Couture

I gave (via video) a short speech in Melbourne this week supporting Andrew Bolt and the cause of free speech in Australia. It's easy to defend Bolt: He's a humane and civilized writer, and his prosecution is a disgrace.

John Galliano is a harder case. The celebrated Dior couturier would appear to be a visceral Jew-hater: He told Geraldine Bloch she had a "dirty Jewish face," and two Italian women that their parents should have been gassed and that he loved Hitler.

Nonetheless, like this (Jewish) blogger, I don't see why someone should be hauled into court for calling someone a "dirty Jew." Had I been Mme Bloch's "partner" (in Euro-speak), I would have slugged the rancid little toad. But I'm not interested in empowering the state to micro-regulate human conversation. France, in particular, could use a lot more honest discourse.

And, if the justification is pour encourager les autres, it doesn't seem to be working -- any more than the prototype "hate speech" regime of Weimar Germany did. Euro-leftists are ever more openly anti-Semitic, and liberal Jews get harassed in Central London. The ever more coercive enforcers of the Diversity Commissars will have no impact on those malign trends, except to ensure that no one gets to raise the subject in public with any honesty.

Galliano is an irrelevant drug-addled old queen, but the law under which he's being prosecuted is a big part of Europe's problems.

Dancing in the Dark

From CNN:

Talking to the Taliban: 'It Takes Two to Tango'

That's probably not the best opening pitch to Mullah Omar.

Dance of the Post-Modern Veils

This one may make your head hurt. From a court in New South Wales:

A MUSLIM woman sentenced to six months' jail for making a deliberately false statement that a racist policeman tried to forcibly remove her burka has been freed on appeal.

Judge Clive Jeffreys said he was not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt it was Carnita Matthews, a 47-year-old Muslim woman from Woodbine, NSW, who accused the police of racism...

Fair enough. So why aren't you sure it was Mrs Matthews?

...because the person who handed in the complaint to police was wearing a burka at the time.

To reach the level of proof of identity to prove the case, it appears Mrs Matthews would have been required to identify herself by lifting her burka at the police station to prove her identity - which is what started the uproar in the first case.

So, if I follow correctly, we can never establish the identity of the woman who falsely accused the police of demanding she remove her burka because to establish her identity the police would have to demand she remove her burka thereby rendering her false accusation true.

As to what Mrs Matthews looks like in or out of her burka, I'm none the wiser. She was flanked by a phalanx of young Muslim men who prevented anyone getting a look at her.

Mrs Matthew's lawyer Stephen Hopper defended them, saying: "They are obviously happy with the result and are expressing it in a way that is culturally appropriate to them".

...by yelling "Allahu Akbar!" and attacking cameramen. You can't get more "culturally appropriate" than that.

Voldemort Alert

A minor news item from Sweden:

The police station in Malmö district Rosengård, in the south of Sweden, was fired upon early Saturday morning.

Oh, my! Sweden? Any more details?

"At 4:29 a.m. police on location alerted us about the gunshots," Hanna Berndtsson, Skåne police information officer, told the TT news agency.

Anything else?

...a forensic investigation squad is on location to find out what happened.Thus far the forensic investigation has revealed that live ammunition was used in the shooting, and therefore an attempted murder probe has been initiated...

Yeah, yeah, gotcha. What else?

Rosengård, centrally located in Malmö, is an area commonly associated with social difficulties, and has been the place of several riots and clashes between local youths and authorities in recent years.

Ah. "Social difficulties" and "youths."

I was in Rosengård last fall. The salient point about Rosengård is that it's overwhelmingly Muslim, and when it comes to "youths" I mean that very literally: Indeed, during my twilight perambulation, I had something of a tense encounter with "youths" on the gangwalk of one of the unlovely housing projects. And by "Muslim" I mean a fierce self-segregating Islam, so that female immigrants from Muslim nations where women go uncovered are obliged to adopt the veil once they get to Sweden, of all places.

Yet the word "Muslim" appears nowhere in the report. Perhaps news stories could come with simultaneous signing for the multiculturally impaired.

Still, at least, as Megan Seaward, 18, would say, the reporter wasn't "inappropriate" or "offensive." And that's what counts, right?

Shut Up, He Explained

Daniel, re Lindsey Graham's suggestion that everyone should just "shut up" about the Libyan Non-War, you'll recall that the last time the Senator attracted any attention in these parts he was also telling everyone to shut up - this time about Islam. Maybe it would be easier if he just issued the rest of us with an approved list of conversational topics.

Alternatively, here's a suggestion for Senator Graham: Why don't you shut up? Not permanently, but just long enough to:

a) reflect whether this apparently reflexive response of yours is really appropriate for a citizen-legislator in a self-governing republic;

b) articulate a rationale for the Libyan mission that would be so persuasive it would save you the trouble of making a fool of yourself by insisting that those who have the temerity to disagree with you are beyond the bounds of public discourse;

and c) spend ten minutes in a darkened room with a nice cup of herbal tea and ponder, re your assertion that those who won't "shut up" are "empowering Qaddafi", whether that line has any credibility coming from a member of the Congressional jet set who only two years ago was "empowering Qaddafi" by taking tea in the pock-marked transvestite's tent as part of some greasy little Senatorial outreach mission.

It was striking that, at Monday's debate, even the more hawkish candidates were unable to articulate a rationale for the present Afghan mission. It's hard to win a war when you don't have war aims, and, as I wrote in National Review a couple of weeks back, America has gotten into the habit of unwon wars - in part because a buffoon like Graham and his dictatorial air miles are what passes for geostrategic "expertise" in Washington.  

LibzGetReal

Last week was a great week for lesbians coming out of the closet -- coming out, that is, as middle-aged heterosexual men. 

On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, “Miss Brooks” and “Miss Arraf” were colleagues. “Amina” had posted at LezGetReal before starting “A Gay Girl In Damascus.” As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:

Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.

#ad#Who knows what romance might have blossomed had not “Amina” been arrested by a squad of Baath Party goons dispatched by Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Tom MacMaster then created “Rania,” a fake cousin for his fake lesbian, to try to rouse the world to take up the plight of the nonexistent Amina’s nonexistent detention.  

A “Free Amina!” Facebook page sprang up.

“The Obama Administration must speak about this,” declared Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic. “This woman is a hero.”

On June 7th the State Department announced that it was looking into the “kidnapping.”

Now consider it from Assad’s point of view. Unlike “Amina,” “Rania,” and the “three armed men in their early 20s” who “hustled Amina into a red Dacia Logan,” you have the disadvantage of actually existing. You’re the dictator of Syria. You’ve killed more demonstrators than those losers Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Gaddafi combined, and the Americans have barely uttered a peep. Suddenly Hillary Clinton, who was hailing you as a “reformer” only 20 minutes ago, wants to give you a hard time over some lesbian blogger. Any moment now Sarkozy or Cameron or some other Europoseur will demand anti-homophobic NATO bombing missions over your presidential palace. On CNN Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper will be interviewing each other back and forth all day long about the Gay Spring sweeping the Arab world. You’ll be the first Middle East strongman brought down by lesbianism. You’ll be a laughing stock at Arab League Where-Are-They-Now? nights.

Who needs it? “Release the lesbian bloggers!” commands Assad.

“Er, what lesbian bloggers?” says his vizier. “This is Damascus, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” And he spends another sleepless night wondering if this is the most devilish CIA dirty trick of all, or if one of their satellite drones merely misinterpreted the grainy footage from the Colonel Gaddafi Lookalike round of Syrian Idol.

The pretty young lesbian Muslim was exposed as a portly 40-year-old male infidel at the University of Edinburgh with the help of “Paula Brooks,” shortly before “Paula” was exposed as a 58-year-old male construction worker from Ohio. “He would have got away with it if I hadn’t been such a stand-up guy,” the second phony lesbian said of the first phony lesbian. As to why stand-up guys are posing as sit-down lesbians, “Paula” told the Associated Press that “he felt he would not be taken seriously as a straight man.”

“He got that one right,” sneered the Toronto gay magazine Xtra.

Indeed. A century ago, a British Army officer went to the Levant and reinvented himself as Lawrence of Arabia. Now a middle-aged American male college student goes to the Internet and reinvents himself as Florence of Arabia. We have become familiar in recent years with the booming literary genre of the fake memoir, to which Oprah’s late Book Club was distressingly partial. Greg Mortensen’s now discredited Three Cups Of Tea took it to the next level, not just near mandatory in the usual circles (grade schools and sentimental punditry) but also compulsory in the Pentagon for commanders en route to Afghanistan. After centuries of disdain for the preferred beverage of imperialists, American officers in the Hindu Kush now drink more tea than the Brits, and they don’t even like it. But a charlatan told them to do it, so the tea allowance now consumes 23 percent of the Pentagon budget.

#page#

Yet Tom MacMaster topped even that. He took an actual, live, mass popular uprising and made an entirely unrepresentative and, indeed, nonexistent person its poster “girl.” From CNN to the Guardian to Bianca Jagger to legions of Tweeters, Western liberalism fell for a ludicrous hoax. Why?

#ad#Because they wanted to. It would be nice if “Amina Arraf” existed. As niche constituencies go, we could use more hijab-wearing Muslim lesbian militants and fewer fortysomething male Western deadbeat college students. But the latter is a real and pathetically numerous demographic, and the former is a fiction -- a fantasy for Western liberals, who think that in the multicultural society the nice gay couple at 27 Rainbow Avenue can live next door to the big bearded imam with four child brides at Number 29 and gambol and frolic in admiration of each other’s diversity. They will proffer cheery greetings over the picket fence, the one admiring the other’s attractive buttock-hugging leather shorts for that day’s Gay Pride parade as he prepares to take his daughter to the clitoridectomy clinic.

Yes, yes, I stereotype. But stereotypes become stereotypes because they’re grounded in observable reality. “Amina Arraf” is grounded in nothing more than a fetish fantasy as preposterous as those lipstick lesbians in porn movies who can’t wait for some hot straight guy to jump in and make it a threesome.

It would be statistically improbable for there to be no women attracted to other women in Damascus. But “Amina Arraf” is nothing more than the projection of parochial obsessions on to distant lands Western liberals are too lazy to try to figure out. In 2007 in The Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan, not yet mired up Sarah Palin’s birth canal without a paddle peddling bizarre conspiracy theories about the maternity of her youngest child, announced that, never mind his policies, Barack Obama’s visage alone would be “the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan.” As he explained:

It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees this man -- Barack Hussein Obama -- is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.#...#If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.

For crying out loud. The assumption that “a young Pakistani Muslim” in Lahore or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the most feeble kind of projection even by the standards of Western liberal navel-gazing. If doting progressives stopped gazing longingly into “Obama’s face” for just a moment, they might notice that in Benghazi “democracy activists” have been rounding up Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. In Bahrain “democracy activists” have attacked hundreds of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, ripping the tongue out of one muezzin and leaving him brain damaged. What’s so “multicultural” about the pampered middle-aged narcissists of the West’s leisurely “activist” varsity pretending that the entire planet is just like them?

You can learn a lot from the deceptions a society chooses to swallow. “Amina Arraf” was a fiction who fit the liberal worldview. That’s because the liberal worldview is a fiction.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2011 Mark Steyn.

Re: ATMs and Automation

Jonah, it's easy to mock Barack Obama, but I think he makes a very good point about ATMs vs bank tellers.

If you go to an ATM and tap in, say, $16.4 trillion and wait for the machine to disgorge it in $20 bills, you get an anonymous computer message saying, "Sorry. You have exceeded your limit. Better luck next time."

But, if you go inside and talk to a compassionate human individual like head teller Ben Bernanke, he says, "Sure. You seem the kind of prudent responsible person whose credit is good for another couple trillion", and then he hires members of the Amalgamated Union of Quantitive Easers to plant extra money trees out back.

That's good for jobs and the environment and it stimulates demand for green-colored paper. What part of that don't you get? Like the First Lady says, the President is way smarter than anybody briefing him.