Mark Steyn - After America

Among the technical advisers on the film, hired to ensure the accurate depiction of our furry friends, was Timothy Treadwell, the self-described eco-warrior from Malibu who became famous for his campaign “to promote getting close to bears to show they were not dangerous.” 101He did this by sidling up to them and singing “I love you” in a high-pitched voice. Brother Bear is certainly true to the Treadwell view of brown bears, and he would surely have appreciated the picture had he ever gotten to see it. But, just as Kenai found himself trapped inside a bear, so did Mr. Treadwell—although in his case he was just passing through. In September, a pilot arrived at the ursine expert’s camp near Kaflia Bay in Alaska to fly him out and instead found the bits of him and his girlfriend that hadn’t yet been eaten buried in a bear’s food cache.

Treadwell had always said he wanted to end up in “bear scat,” so his fellow activists were inclined to look on the bright side. “He would say it’s the culmination of his life’s work,” said his colleague Jewel Palovak. “He died doing what he lived for.” 102

I wonder if he was revising his view in the final moments. And if his girlfriend was quite so happy to find she had a bit part in “the culmination of his life’s work.”

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter at the fate of the eco-warrior, but it does make Brother Bear somewhat harder to swallow than its technical adviser manifestly was. There are People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but sadly no Animals for the Ethical Treatment of People. And, just as bugs are becoming resistant to antibiotics, so the big beasts are changing, too. Wild animals are not merely the creatures of their appetites; they’re also astute calculators of risk. Not so long ago, your average bear knew that if he happened upon a two-legged type, the chap would pull a rifle on him and he’d be spending eternity as a fireside rug. But these days it’s just as likely that any human being he comes across is some pantywaist Bambi Boomer enviro-sentimentalist trying to get in touch with his inner self. And, if the guy wants to get in touch with his inner self so badly, why not just rip it out of his chest for him?

North American wildlife seems to have figured that out. Why be surprised if other predators do? A soft Eloi culture will bend and accommodate and prostrate—and still be consumed as easily as Timothy Treadwell.

At American airports, to avoid even the hint of a suggestion that people who want to blow up airplanes are more likely to have certain characteristics than others and to maintain the polite fiction that all seven billion inhabitants of the planet pose an equal security risk, the Government of the United States has decreed that federal officials are entitled to inspect your private parts and those of your children and your grandmother. All 300 million sets of American genitalia are up for grabs—without probable cause. God forbid you should be so insensitive as to use “enhanced patdown” techniques on any Guantanamo detainees, but you can use them on three-year-old girls and octogenarian nuns. Cougars, lambs, sharks, baby seals: we must not profile.

Think of Frances Frost vigorously objecting to any suggestion the predator cougar be tracked down. Al-Qaeda understand that mentality—which is why they advise captured jihadists always to claim they’ve been tortured, and let the Frances Frosts of the grievance industry help them get lawyered up. So do the armies of the Undocumented. That sends a message about U.S. will, and not just to Latin-American peasants seeking economic betterment.

Picture Timothy Treadwell cooing love songs to his killers. You don’t have to go to the Arctic to see that. In Philadelphia, there is an organization called the BDS Coalition. BDS? As in “Bush Derangement Syndrome”? No.

It stands for “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions,” and it’s an alliance of groups committed to working for “social justice” in “Palestine.” So they staged a disruptive “flashdance” at a Philly supermarket to protest the store’s “policy” of carrying brands of hummus made by companies perceived to have too close ties to Israel. 103Watching these young white twentysomething American students “dance into action” around the hapless grocery clerks, you couldn’t help noticing that (without wishing to stereotype from modes of dress and levels of hirsuteness) more than a few of the young ladies appeared to be stern feminists, if not, ah, persons of orientation. In America, so what?

But try it in Hamas-run Gaza.

There is a group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. When they march in Gay Pride parades, they chant:

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid—now there’s a cause. When he spoke to Columbia University, President Ahmadinejad of Iran told his audience that there are no homosexuals in Iran. 105Not one. Where are they? On a weekend visit to Gaza to see the new production of Mame ? Alas, there was no time for follow-up questions. In Mullah Omar’s Afghanistan, homosexual men were put to death by being crushed under a wall specifically built for that purpose. 106Under the Taliban, it was just about the only work you could get in the otherwise depressed Afghan construction industry. Have you tried being a lesbian in Yemen? Have you tried being a woman in Yemen?

A few years back, I thought even spaghetti-spined western liberals might draw the line at “Female Genital Mutilation”—or “FGM,” as it’s already known in far too many western hospitals from Virginia to Australia. After all, it’s a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don’t demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest. Yet already female genital “mutilation” has been replaced by the less judgmental term of “female genital cutting.” In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics floated the suggestion that, because certain, ahem, “immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo “cutting,” in a spirit of multicultural compromise perhaps U.S. pediatricians should amend their opposition to the practice, and provide a “ritual nick” to young girls. 107

Nonetheless, at the Gay Pride parade they know their priorities:

There is a moral frivolity to the Eloi’s generalized concerns for “the planet.”

But it quickly advances to the next stage—a moral decadence that expresses itself by venerating those who will gladly kill them when they have served their purpose as useful idiots. Listen to Sheikh Muhammad al-Gamei’a, an Egyptian Muslim of such exemplary moderation that he was the head imam at the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque in New York at the time of 9/11’s, er, “controlled explosion.” Shortly thereafter, he explained why he agrees with Philadelphia BDS Coalition and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid that it’s all the fault of the Jews: “You see these people all the time, everywhere, disseminating corruption, heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs. Because of the Jews there are strip clubs, homosexuals, and lesbians everywhere. They do this to impose their hegemony and colonialism on the world….” 108