Mark Steyn - Lights Out

And the good news is that that body’s already on its way. The European Union’s Justice and Security Commissioner, Franco Frattini, said on Thursday that the EU would set up a “media code” to encourage “prudence” in the way they cover, ah, certain sensitive subjects. As Signor Frattini explained it to The Daily Telegraph , “The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression… We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.”

“Prudence”? “Self-regulate our free expression”? No, I’m afraid that’s just giving the Muslim world the message: You’ve won, I surrender, please stop kicking me.

But they never do. Because, to use the Arabic proverb with which Robert Ferrigno opens his new novel, Prayers For The Assassin , set in an Islamic Republic of America, “A falling camel attracts many knives.” In Denmark and France and the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him.

The issue is more basic than “freedom of speech” or “the responsibilities of the press” or “sensitivity to certain cultures”. The issue, as it has been in all these loony tune controversies going back to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is the point at which a free society musters the will to stand up to thugs. British Muslims march through the streets waving placards reading “BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM”. If they mean that, bring it on. As my columnar confrère John O’Sullivan argued, we might as well fight in the first ditch as the last.

But then it’s patiently explained to us for the umpteenth time that they’re not representative, that there are many many “moderate Muslims”.

I believe that. I’ve met plenty of “moderate Muslims” in Jordan and Iraq and the Gulf states. But, as a reader wrote to me a year or two back, in Europe and North America they aren’t so much “moderate Muslims” as quiescent Muslims. The few who do speak out wind up living in hiding or under 24-hour armed guard, like the Dutch Member of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

So when the EU and the BBC and The New York Times say that we too need to be more “sensitive” to those fellows with “Behead the enemies of Islam” banners, they should look in the mirror: They’re turning into “moderate Muslims”, and likely to wind up as cowed and silenced and invisible.

“RUN THIS BY me again,” I said as we circled Lagos Airport. “We’re doing a new ‘culturally sensitive’ Miss World?”

“That’s right,” said Julia Morley. “I got the idea from all those stringy London feminists droning on about how we’re only promoting a narrow exploitative western image of women. And to be honest, after a week in England listening to their bitching and whining, I’m glad to be back in Nigeria. The locals’ll go crazy for this.”

“I hope not,” I said. But I was pleasantly surprised as we landed smoothly and taxied down the runway. “Look, Julia, a gun salute!”

“Duck, girls!” she yelled, as a SAM missile pierced the window, shot through the First Class curtain and took out the Economy toilet.

“Now don’t you worry, Mark,” she said once we were safely in the limo. “Your material’s hardly been changed at all. Just remember, when you and Tony Orlando do ‘Thank Heaven For Little Girls’, there’s a Sudanese warlord in a third-row aisle seat who’s got a new 12-year-old wife you don’t want to be caught looking at.”

“Got it,” I said. The house band, made up entirely of Hausa band members, played the opening strains of Stevie Wonder’s classic love song and Julia pushed the revised culturally sensitive lyrics into my hand. It was then that the first nagging doubts began to gnaw at the back of my mind. But what the hell, I was in my tux and they were playing my song.

I bounced out on stage, grabbed the mike and punched the air:

The audience seemed wary and an alarming number appeared to be reaching into their robes. But I ploughed on:

There was a momentary silence, just long enough for me to start backing upstage nervously. And then the crowd went wild! The guys in the balcony cheered deliriously and hurled their machetes across the orchestra pit, shredding my pants. An Afghan wedding party grabbed their semi-automatics and blew out the chandeliers, sending them hurtling to the aisle, where they killed a Japanese camera crew. Tough luck, fellers, but that’s what happens when you get between me and my audience.

I took my usual seat with the celebrity judges, in between “Baywatch” hunk David Hasselhoff and Princess Michael of Kent. Lorraine Kelly said: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give our panel a really big hand!” A really big hand landed on the table with a dull thud, courtesy of a Saudi prince in the royal box.

“How’d they like you?” I asked Princess Michael.

“Well, by the end of ‘Man, I Feel Like A Woman’, I had the crowd with me all the way. But I shook ’em off at Kaduna.”

“Who’s the bloke next to you?”

“Oh, he’s a judge.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, duh !”

“No, I mean, he’s a real judge. He’s some Fulani bigshot who’s here to decide who gets stoned.”

“And which mother of a Mick Jagger love-child is on the panel this year?”

“That’s Marsha Hunt. Had an affair with him in the late Sixties.”

The small talk was somewhat stilted. “Have you ever been stoned?” asked the judge. Marsha tittered.

Princess Michael explained that the fellow on Marsha’s left was Alhaji Abdutayo Ogunbati, the country’s leading female circumcisionist, there to ensure every contestant was in full compliance, and next to him was Hans Blix, there to ensure every involuntary clitorectomy was in accordance with UN clitorectomy inspections-team regulations.

I glanced at my watch. “For crying out loud, when are they going to raise the curtain?”

“They have raised the curtain,” said David. “Those are the girls.”

I peered closer at the shapeless line of cloth, and he was right: there they all were, from Miss Afghanistan to Miss Zionist Entity.

I sighed. “How long till the swimsuit round?”

“This is the swimsuit round,” said David.

FATE CONSPIRES to remind us what this war is really about: civilizational confidence. And so history repeats itself: first the farce of the Danish cartoons, and now the tragedy – a man on trial for his life in post-Taliban Afghanistan because he has committed the crime of converting to Christianity.