Mark Steyn - Lights Out

The Canadian Islamic Congress thinks that printing the above is a “hate crime”.

William Sampson is a Canadian citizen, yet, when he was seized, tortured and sentenced to be beheaded, his government entirely failed him. The only reason he’s walking around today is because the United Kingdom intervened on behalf of his fellow (British) hostages and Mr Sampson was released on their coat-tails, so to speak. He was sprung by Her Majesty’s Government in London, not in Ottawa. Yet the Canadian state that abandoned Bill Sampson to Saudi torturers is now prepared to drag into “court” the magazine that told the truth about his ordeal – on the grounds that five law students object to casting Saudi Arabia in a “negative light”.

How about casting Canada in a “negative light”? That’s exactly what the kangaroo courts’ deference to this totalitarian “case study” does.

And you know what? The Canadian Islamic Congress dossier on my criminal opinions barely skimmed the surface of my “Islamophobia”. I’ve been writing about the intersection of Islam and the west ever since I joined Maclean’s . Here are some additional hate crimes the thought police might like to take into consideration:

ONE OF THE very very minor aftershocks of 9/11 was how bad the “good writing” was. I don’t quite know why you’d commission a novelist to say something about the Twin Towers, but The New Yorker made John Updike an offer he couldn’t refuse and he sat down and got to it. And, even by the standards of the other contributors that week, it was painfully enervated: presumably, he thought going in for the old primal righteous anger routine would have been embarrassing. As it was, the elaborate avoidance thereof was even more cringe-making, a lot of fussy prettified self-regarding subordinate clauses condescending to their subjects:

Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure’s vertically corrugated surface. It fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air. An empty spot had appeared, as if by electronic command…

Etc. Oh, for a monosyllabic tabloid hack! The ghastly false tinkle of all those shivers and groans and curling rivulets, stillborn as they hit the page. We’re told that the movies are no longer “real”, but on that Tuesday morning a lot of the camcorder footage looked like slightly grittier versions of Godzilla and Independence Day : the moment of the tower’s collapse, with the crowds pounding down the sidewalk like film extras trying to outrun the fireball; or the startled “What the fuh…” of a street-level New Yorker, as high above him in the slit of sky between the buildings the second plane sailed across the blue and through the south tower. The laboured detachment of Updike’s prose “as if by electronic command” – reminded me of England’s recent poet laureates sloughing off birthday odes to minor royal duchesses.

Perhaps sensing that he hadn’t exactly risen to the occasion, Updike has now given us the Big Novel on terrorists, so Big indeed that its title is simply Terrorist . The eponymous terrorist – or “terrorist” – is Ahmad, a high school student in a decrepit New Jersey town called New Prospect, who gets mixed up in a plot to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. And Updike gets stuck into his protagonist from the opening sentence:

Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God . All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is there to see?

What else, indeed? It’s doubtful anyone could write “the” novel about Islam today – it is a faith, after all, that can seduce everyone from Ontario welfare deadbeats like Steven Chand to the Prince of Wales himself. Yet it seems to me Updike has gone awry from the very first word. If Muslims were simply über-devout loners, this whole clash-of-civilizations rigmarole would be a lot easier. But the London Tube bombers were perfectly assimilated: they ate fish’n’chips, loved cricket, sported hideous Brit leisure wear. Updike’s absurdly alienated misfit is a lot less shocking than the pre-detonation video that aired recently on Al Jazeera of July 7th jihadist Shehzad Tanweer: he’s spouting all the usual suicide-bomber claptrap, but in a Yorkshire accent. “Eeh-oop, Allahu akbar!” Imagine threatening “Death to the Great Satan!” in Cockney or Brooklynese. Or Canadian: “Death to the Great Satan, eh?” That’s far creepier and novelistic than Updike’s opening: it’s someone who appears perfectly normal until he gets in the subway car and self-detonates. As for the revulsion at navel studs, compare Ahmad with Assem Hammoud, recently arrested in a real-life plot to blow up another New York tunnel – the Holland. Mr Hammoud said he had been ordered by Osama bin Laden to “live the life of a playboy… live a life of fun and indulgence.” That way he would avoid detection. Pretty cunning, huh? Just to show how seriously he took his assignment, there was a picture of Assem with three hot babes (all burka-less) on a “mission” in Canada. “I was proud,” declared Mr Hammoud, “to carry out my orders” – even though they required him to booze it up and bed beautiful infidels all week long. But it’s okay, because he was nailing chicks for Allah. So he gamely put on a brave show of partying like it’s 1999, even though as a devout Muslim he’d obviously much rather party like it’s 799.

Like Shehzad Tanweer, Assem Hammoud seems a more vividly novelistic character than Ahmad. In fact, as that opening paragraph suggests, Ahmad is little more than an Updike-esque aesthetic distaste for contemporary America filtered through some rather unconvincing Koranic prissiness. Here’s another example: Joryleen, a black gal who enjoys coming on to Ahmad, tries to get him to ease up on his “purity”. “What about all them virgins on the other side? What happens to purity when those young-men martyrs get there, all full of spunk?”

“My teacher at the mosque,” explains Ahmad, “thinks that the dark-eyed virgins are symbolic of a bliss one cannot imagine without concrete images. It is typical of the sex-obsessed west that it has seized upon that image, and ridicules Islam because of it.” [1]

Oh, phooey. In the will he left behind after 9/11, Mohammed Atta wrote:

He who washes my body around my genitals should wear gloves so that I am not touched there.

He’d gone to the trouble of shaving off his pubic hair the day before the mission, and the principal preoccupation of his last will and testament was that the old frank-and-beans (if he’ll forgive such a porcine formulation) should make it to paradise without being contaminated by infidels and whores.