Mark Steyn - Lights Out

The sheep-shagging bit sounded a bit odd to the blogger Scaramouche, who went looking for the source. It’s not a “clarification” of “The Future Belongs To Islam” or anything to do with that piece at all, but, as Scaramouche discovered, comes from the entirely separate column above:

So it appears that it was that late, great holy rollah, Khomeini, who brought up the subject of sheep-shtupping and whether or not, having had one’s way with lambikins, it was appropriate to then ingest him/her for lunch. The idea was not, as Pearl Eliadis would have you believe, something that suddenly popped into Steyn’s mind, ‘flagrantly Islamophobic’ though she and the Sockies may consider that mind to be. Steyn was merely riffing (and goofing) on the Ayatollah. In which case, maybe the Socky triad should consider hauling the late Ayatollah’s mouldering carcass in front of the HRCs, since, clearly, he’s the one who had the “dangerous” ideas.

I’d go a little further. Pearl Eliadis’ idea of a “diverse” “multicultural” society is one in which it’s okay for ayatollahs to riff on sheep-shagging but not okay for others – and she and her fellow “human rights” hacks will be the arbiters of which persons are permitted to raise the subject. Sorry, but that’s the death of liberty.

Ayatollah Khomeini was the single most influential Muslim of the last four decades. He was a murderous thug, but at another level he was a ridiculous figure, as any man who issues rulings on when it’s appropriate to eat one’s ovine concubine must surely be to any civilized society. I reserve the right to make what gags I want to about the Ayatollah, and I reject the jurisdiction of a self-important third-rate plonker like Pearl Eliadis over the jokes of a free people.

One of the pathetic aspects of Canada’s “human rights” regime is its prostration before identity politics. At the eventual trial in Vancouver in June 2008, the “expert witness” called by the absent Dr Elmasry’s mouthpiece was a Muslim professor flown in from Philadelphia. He testified that he didn’t think the Muslim youths rioting in France were motivated by Islam because that wasn’t the impression he’d got from reading the papers – presumably The Philadelphia Inquirer , The Philadelphia Daily News , maybe The New York Times or The Washington Post .

I’ve been to the Muslim ghettoes of Paris. I know well what role institutional Islam plays in the local power structure. He’s never set foot in those places. In real courtrooms, repeating what he’d read in the papers or someone had told him would be “hearsay”, not “expert testimony”. But, under the ersatz justice of Canada’s “human rights” commissions, because he’s a Muslim he’s the “expert” on the French riots, and because I’m not a Muslim I can’t be, and shouldn’t be commenting on it. Just like the Ayatollah can do the sheep shtick, but I can’t.

Canadian post-Christian secularists might like to note that ultimately this kind of intellectual apartheid spells the death of rationalism and objective inquiry. And buffoons like Pearl Eliadis are entirely on board with that.

Oh, and Dr Elmasry and Imam Delic declined to respond to my invitation to the Press Freedom Awards, although I’m sure they would have enjoyed the occasion. Happily, the event was covered by The Arab-American News :

The Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom announced its Tenth Annual Press Freedom Awards on May 2… Runner-up was Mark Steyn, who was nominated by Maclean’s for his article in their magazine, ‘The Future Belongs to Islam.’ The Canadian Islamic Congress brought charges against Maclean’s in various human rights commissions across Canada, claiming that the article constitutes a hate crime. The second place acknowledgement by the Committee serves to illustrate the self-defeating nature of the complaint, which has given Maclean’s , the article, and Steyn publicity which they ill deserve.

For more on the “sheep shagging” aspects of the above, please see Precepts of ejaculation .

FOUR YEARS ago, The Economist ran a cover story on the winner of the Brazilian election, the socialist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It was an event of great hemispherical significance. Hence the headline: “The Meaning Of Lula.”

The following week, a Canadian reader, Asif Niazi, wrote to the magazine:

Sir,

‘The meaning of Lula’ in Urdu is penis.

No doubt. It would not surprise me to learn that the meaning of Chávez in Arabic is penis. An awful lot of geopolitics gets lost in translation, especially when you’re not keeping up. Since 9/11, Latin America has dropped off the radar, but you don’t have to know the lingo to figure out it clearly doesn’t mean what it did five years ago at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. In April 2001 I spent a pleasant weekend on the Grand-Allée inhaling the heady perfume of SQ tear gas and dodging lumps of concrete lobbed over the security fence by the anti-glob mob. The fence itself was covered in protest bras hung there by anti-Bush feminist groups. “VIVA” said the left cup. “CASTRO” said the right. (Cup-wise, I mean stage left.) On another, “MA MERE” (left) “IS NOT FOR SALE” (right). 48D, if you’re wondering how they got four words on. That’s one big earth mother. I’m not much for manning the barricades and urging revolution, but it’s not without its appeal when you’re stuck inside the perimeter making chit-chat with the deputy trade minister of Costa Rica.

That was the point: hemispheric normality. As the Bush Administration liked to note, the Americas were now a shining sea of democracy, save for the aging and irrelevant Fidel, who was the only head of government not invited to the summit. But, other than that, no more generalissimos in the presidential palace; they were republics, but no longer bananas. When George W Bush arrived, he was greeted by Jean Chrétien. “ Bienvenue . That means ‘welcome’,” said the Prime Minister, being a bit of a lula. But what did Bush care? He was looking south: that was the future, and they were his big amigos.

Then September 11th happened. And the amigos weren’t quite so friendly, or at any rate helpful, and Bush found himself holed up with the usual pasty white blokes like Tony Blair and John Howard, back in the Anglosphere with not an enchilada in sight. And everyone was so busy boning up on sharia and Wahhabis and Kurds and Pashtuns that very few of us noticed that Latin America was slipping back to its old ways.

Frank Gaffney’s new book War Footing is subtitled Ten Steps America Must Take To Prevail In The War For The Free World, and includes, as one might expect, suggestions for the home front, the Middle East, the transnational agencies. But it’s some of the other chapters that give you pause when it comes to the bigger picture – for example, he urges Washington to “counteract the re-emergence of totalitarianism in Latin America”. That doesn’t sound like the fellows Condi and Colin were cooing over in Quebec. But, as Gaffney writes, “Many Latin American countries are imploding rather than developing. The region’s most influential leaders are thugs. It is a magnet for Islamist terrorists and a breeding ground for hostile political movements… The key leader is Chávez, the billionaire dictator of Venezuela who has declared a Latino jihad against the United States.”

Even Castro’s bounced back. Did you see that story in Forbes about the world’s richest rulers? Lot of familiar names on there: Saudi King Abdullah, the Sultan of Brunei, Prince Albert of Monaco… But Fidel came in seventh, pipping our own dear Queen. How’d he get so rich? It can’t all be Canadian tourist dollars, can it? Well, no. Castro is Chávez’s revolutionary mentor and the new kid on the block’s been happy to pump cash infusions into the old boy’s impoverished basket case. “Venezuela,” writes Gaffney, “has more energy resources than Iraq and supplies one-fifth of the oil sold in America.” In 1999, when Chávez came to power, oil was under ten bucks a barrel. Now it’s pushing US$70. And, just like the Saudis, Chávez is using his windfall in all kinds of malign ways, not merely propping up the elderly Cuban dictator but funding would-be “Chávismo” movements in Peru, Bolivia, El Salvador, Paraguay, Ecuador.