Mark Steyn - Lights Out

It requires a fairly fantastic interpretation to get that to mean what Elmo’s Sock Puppets claim in Assertion #16. But the geniuses of Osgoode Hall Law School are not done yet:

31. Japan will inevitably be taken over by Muslims

Really? Here again is the relevant passage:

So what will happen? There are a couple of scenarios…

Actually, let’s just leave it there. For after all if there are “a couple of scenarios”, how can either of them be “inevitable”? And, as it happens, the Japanese section is nothing to do with Muslims: it’s about, er, the Japanese. As I put it, “Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It’s a country with no immigration, no significant minorities and no desire for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.” The boneheadedness of Assertion #31 alone should have been enough even for the PC drones at the “human rights” commissions to toss out this half-baked report. It’s a “case study” not of Maclean’s Islamophobia but of the basic cognitive skills of students at what purports to be one of Canada’s most elite institutions.

Once it became clear that my “hate crime” was nothing more than grotesque misrepresentation facilitated by the multicultural cringers of the PC establishment, I started getting a lot of letters along these lines:

What I don’t understand is why you are even bothering to acknowledge Canada’s human rights commission. You live in New Hampshire, right? So why don’t you just ignore them? No court in America is going to extradite you over this stupid Islamic Congress case.

Well, maybe not – although for a while it looked as if that Saudi sheik might have some success enforcing his English legal judgment against Rachel Ehrenfeld in a US court. But my reader was right in a broader sense: I live in the hills, I have an inexpensive lifestyle, I could afford to write off my Canadian business interests – and my British ones, or European ones, or Australian ones, or wherever the next of these legal assaults arises. But I’m not prepared to give up on free expression in one of the oldest settled democracies on the planet, simply because defending it is a pain in the neck and consumes way too much time and money.

And there’s another reason. The Sock Puppets’ fraudulent misrepresentations were subsequently recycled throughout the Canadian media with the usual carelessness. I found myself obliged to point out time and again that that line about Muslims “breeding like mosquitoes” was not mine but a direct quotation from Mullah Krekar. Four months after Jim Henley was forced to issue a correction, Naseem Mithoowani (in person, one of the most charming of the Socks) was interviewed on America’s National Public Radio and still somehow managed to attribute the mosquito crack to me rather than Mullah Krekar. If she’s that bugged by it, why not take it up with her coreligionist?

The man who interviewed Mullah Krekar was a journalist called Carsten Thomassen. On January 14th 2008, he was in Kabul covering the Norwegian Foreign Minister’s tour of Afghanistan. That day, he was in the lobby of the Serena Hotel waiting to meet with the minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, when two members of the Taliban killed the exterior guards, forced their way inside and opened fire. Carsten Thomassen died of his injuries at a Nato field hospital. The Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called the terrorist murders an attack not only on Norway but on freedom of speech.

I didn’t know Carsten Thomassen, except as a skilled reporter who extracted devastating quotes from Mullah Krekar and others. But we owe it to his memory to insist on the truth about that mosquito line – not just because his murder reminds us of the difference between real “hate” and the pseudo-victims of the Canadian “human rights” circus, but because to allow Dr Emasry and his Osgoode Hall sock puppets to bully the media into going along with their misrepresentations is to collude in a lie. And no society that does that can be truly free. Mr Thomassen gave his life. The least I can do is stand up to a twerp like Elmasry and his enablers in the Canadian “human rights” racket.

Aside from my book excerpt, the Sock Puppets’ “case study” cited a bunch of other “flagrantly Islamophobic” Maclean’s columns, including reviews of novels and sitcoms. So here they come – the original articles, in all their Islamophobic glory, followed by the Socks’ forensic analysis of their offensiveness. Enjoy!

I’VE HAD A RECURRING experience in the last few months. I’ll be reading some geopolitical tract like Sands Of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards Of Global Ambition by Robert W Merry, and two-thirds of the way in I’ll stumble across:

With the onset of the Iraq War and European opposition, many Americans embraced a severe anti-European attitude. ‘To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history,’ wrote Mark Steyn in the Jewish World Review .

Or I’ll be slogging through Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership , edited by Tod Lindberg, and find that Timothy Garton Ash’s essay on “The New Anti-Europeanism In America” begins thus:

In the year the United States went to war against Iraq, readers saw numerous articles in the American press on anti-Americanism in Europe. But what about anti-Europeanism in the United States? Consider the following:

‘To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France’s Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be.’ (Mark Steyn, Jewish World Review , May 1, 2002)

If the best evidence of the pandemic of “anti-Europeanism in the United States” is a Canadian columnist writing for a Canadian newspaper ( Jewish World Review is a plucky New York website that happened to reprint a piece of mine from The National Post ), that would seem to be self-refuting. A European who wanders along to his local bookstore to sate his anti-Americanism will find a groaning smorgasbord of tracts catering to every taste, including the French bestseller that claims the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11 never existed. An American who strolls into Barnes & Noble to sate his anti-Europeanism will have to make do with a two-sentence quote by an obscure Canadian on page 243 of some book sternly warning of the rampant anti-Europeanism all around.

Until now. Two books have just hit the shelves – While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying The West From Within by Bruce Bawer, and Menace In Europe: Why The Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too by Claire Berlinski. In media-speak, two of anything is just one short of a trend, and Clive Davis doesn’t care for this one. Davis is a perceptive commentator for The Times of London and, in reviewing Bawer and Berlinski for the Washington Times , he sniffed: “What worries me about books like this is that they risk reducing Europe to a caricature in much the same way as Stupid White Men turns America into one big Wal-Mart with drive-by shootings.”

That’s unfair, and does a disservice to both authors. For many Europeans – and Canadians – the Stupid White Men school of anti-Americanism is a form of consolation: the Great Moron may be economically, militarily and culturally dominant but we can still jeer at what a bozo he is. Bawer and Berlinski, both genuine American Europhiles, have a serious purpose: in his titular evocation of Winston Churchill’s book on pre-war European appeasement, While England Slept , Bruce Bawer makes plain that he wants to wake Europe up – and, if it’s too late for that, then at least to wake up America. Neither is a xenophobic yahoo: Miss Berlinski “divides her time” – as the book jackets say – between Paris and Istanbul; she has a doctorate in international relations from Oxford. Mr Bawer is a homosexual who moved to the Continent because he was weary of the theocratic oppressiveness of redneck America and wanted to live his life in the gay utopia of the Netherlands. Alas, when he got there he found the gay scene had gone belly up and, theocratic oppressor-wise, Pat Robertson has nothing on some of the livelier Amsterdam madrassahs. Both books are somewhat overwrought – Miss Berlinski dwells on her own relationship with some Muslim lad who later figured in Zadie Smith’s hit novel White Teeth , and Bruce Bawer is reluctant to give up on the idea that a bisexual pothead hedonist utopia is a viable concept rather than, as it’s proving in the Netherlands, a mere novelty interlude; his book might have been better called While Europe Slept Around .