Steyn Speaks

Because I am a great admirer of Mark Steyn I've been following his tour of Australia closely. Due to the distance involved, though, I've been stuck relying on newspaper and magazine reports of what Steyn has been saying.

From the MSM-Aussie Division I learned that he's all for "nuking Iran, or nuking North Korea, or both," that anti-immigration campaigners and political cranks are who are going to see Steyn speak, that Steyn is the last guy who thinks Bush is a genius and, oh yes, as the Age quite pointedly remarked as the last sentence in its story on a Steyn appearance, quite out of context, Steyn is of Jewish ancestry (he would not even be considered Jewish under the Gestapo laws [why be polite? let me say German laws instead], and they were known for their inclusiveness.)

In other words, the usual bullshit. Fortunately, again, we live in a new age where we can read and listen and judge for ourselves. In that spirit, I present to you the transcript of Steyn's key note addresss while down under:

"It's Not 'Them', It's Us: The Need to Regain Confidence in Western Culture

Thank you, thank you very much Janet. I'm honoured to be here on what's beginning to feel a bit like my End of The World Tour. Everywhere I go I just talk about depressing issues like the decline and death of the West, but my End of the World Tour is a bit like Barbara Streisand's Farewell Tour: if the world doesn't end I'll be back to do another End of the World Tour in a couple of years. Let me start with a request, I feel a bit like Kylie Minogue when the crowd call out for all the early hits. I got to Australia a week or so back and people keep asking me to repeat a quote I mentioned in a column a few months ago. We crazed right-wing war mongers are often said to be hot for war and slaughter and so forth. But I'm not. I don't want to make an argument for more war, more bombing, more killing but for more will, more civilisational confidence that's the best way to avoid all the death and destruction.

Here's what I mean, here's the quote I get requests for. It's about a relatively minor imperial administrator. Two hundred years ago, in a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of Sati-that's the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husband. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural. He said: 'You say that it's your custom to burn widows, very well. We also have a custom. When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their neck and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it my carpenters will build a gallows; you may follow your custom, then we will follow ours.' As it happens, my wife's uncle was named after General Napier which I guess makes me a British Imperialist by marriage. But India today is better off without Sati. And what's so strange about the times we live in is that even to say that is to invite accusations of cultural supremacy. If you don't agree that India is better off without Sati, if you think that's just dead white-male-euro-centricism, fine, but I don't think you really do believe that. Non-judgemental multiculturalism, cultural relativism, is an obvious fraud and I think it's subliminally accepted on that basis. I think that, after all, most people, given the choice, don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. They think that pretending that all societies are equal is in a sense part of the wallpaper of living in an advanced Western society. And they think you can contain multiculturalism, they think multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting them to sing jingle bells. Or that your holistic masseur uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality. But it doesn't mean that you or anyone that you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society.

I checked into my hotel yesterday and I'd been in the room 10 minutes when I got a call from the Spa asking if I wanted to have a new kind of massage they were offering a special on using techniques I think developed from Buddhist spirituality. And I'm very grateful for that, I think its marvellous and that it adds a lot to the gaiety of life, but it's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug if it goes beyond that. And if you think Sati is just an example of the rich vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your present suburb would be like if 25, 30 or 48% of the people around you really believed in it too. That's the situation that much of the Western world is facing; that we're losing the consensus within our populations on what it means to be a citizen of a pluralist society. Multiculturalism, I believe, was conceived by Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own and in that sense it's the real suicide bomb. Islam and terrorism would not be a threat to the Western world if the Western world weren't so enervated that it gives the impression that it's basically just dying to keel over and to surrender to somebody.

Sati's gone, nobody in India burns widows, so when Indians immigrate to Sydney, or London or Toronto, they're not building pyres in the front yard for grandma anymore. But there are other cultures where women lack basic rights. Under the Taliban, Afghan women were prevented by law from ever feeling sunlight on their faces; by law. As Ahmed Al-bakar (spelling unclear), an MP from the one of the more progressive Muslim nations, Kuwait, recently put it, mixing the proposal to give women the right to vote, 'God said in the Holy Koran that men are better than women...why can't we settle for that?' Why indeed. Well here's a story from the Associate Press in Multan, Pakistan. Nazeer Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25 year-old step-sister to salvage his family's honour. Well, you know, I suppose to a lot of us, Pakistan's a crazy place a long way away. But the honour killings, the murder of Muslim women, punished often for no other reason than that they happened to have been raped by some fella, the honour killings are getting closer. In London last summer, the Metropolitan police announced they were reopening investigations into 120 deaths among British Muslim girls that they'd hitherto declined to look at too closely on grounds of cultural sensitivity. Now think about that. Think about that. One hundred and twenty women are murdered and their murders go uninvestigated because the cops thought it was just some multicultural thing. I believe you had a similar issue here when one of your state police departments announced that it was changing the basis on how spousal abuse and battery of women was investigated according to what cultural community you happened to belong to. So in other words, in parts of Australia, law enforcement takes the view that whether you're allowed to beat up a woman depends on who you are. If I try it, I'll be going to jail; but if other people try it, it's part of their rich cultural tradition. You cannot have a society organised on that basis. I don't want to live in a country where honour killing is regarded as part of the rich tapestry of cultural diversity, like a slightly livelier version of a national dance at the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony. So those are the sorts of things you can make judgements about competing culture, judgements on liberty, on religious freedom, the rule of law, we need to recover the cultural cool that General Napier demonstrated. That's really the word: cool. You don't have to go through a whole lot of excitable talk about nuking Mecca and all this kind of thing; that's all a waste of time. If we knew who we were, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems that we seem to be having and rousing ourselves to defend our society. If we know who we are, if we're secure in our sense of where our society came from, we'll be fine.

Let me give a small example of the wrong way of looking at things. It's not life threatening, but if you don't understand the philosophy that underpins it, it can become life threatening. In your nation and in mine, many people have acknowledged, and indeed even boasted, that immigration changes our country. For example, in Australia, and to a lesser extent in Canada, there are a lot of people who wish to replace the monarchy with a republic and there are respectable arguments for and against the monarchy. But the dangerous argument is the lazy line pedalled by too many politicians that in an Australia or a Canada of evolving immigration patterns, an immigrant from Moldova or China or Brazil or Saudi Arabia can't be expected to relate to the Queen, to the existing constitutional system. Now try this line the next time you're in Saudi Arabia: if you immigrate to Saudi Arabia and say 'hey man, I just can't relate to the House of Saud, and what's with this Wahhabism, can't we get a couple of sports bars with wet t-shirt nights every Thursday'? The Saudis would have a grand old laugh about it and then behead you. So when we accept that argument, in essence we're explicitly promoting the principle of reverse assimilation; that immigration imposes not the obligation that the immigrant assimilate to his new land, but that his new land assimilate to him. And thereby lies great peril, not for the Queen, she'll get by, but for a whole bunch of the rest of us. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen, its whole merely the sum of its parts. And so in the absence of cultural confidence, demography will decide. Or in the superb summation of the American writer James C. Bennett, 'democracy, immigration multiculturalism ... pick any two'.

At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally valid. And to accept that proposition means denying reality; the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, global population movement. And multiculturalism isn't the first ideology founded on the denial of truth. You recall Herman Goering's memorable assertion that 'two plus two makes five, if the Fuhrer wills it'. Likewise we're asked to accept that the United States' constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation. If a generation of multi-culti theorists in American universities, if the ethnic grievance lobby, and even if a ludicrous resolution of the United States congress so wills it, that's what happened. The United States Congress passed a resolution hailing the Iroquois Confederation as the inspiration for the US Constitution, which would have been news to the dead white euro-centric males who wrote it. Harmless, harmless isn't it!

What's wrong with playing make-believe if it helps us all feel warm and fuzzy about each other. Because it's never helpful to put reality up for grabs; there may come a day where you need it. And today is the day that we do need a shot of reality. We need to understand what it is that is important and vital and rare about our society, because if we don't, then in a thousand, silly, itsy-bitsy, little ways, like removing pork from Australian hospital cafeteria menus, we're giving the very clear message that we lack the will to defend our civilisation. In 1773, one of America's founding fathers Simeon Howard, addressed the ancient and honourable artillery company in Boston, and 'an incautious people' he said, 'may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrecoverably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries small in themselves, may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them, especially if they're persisted in.' During the Danish cartoon Jihad, you may recall, over the representations of the prophet Mohammed earlier this year, the New York Times gave one of its routinely pompous explanations as to why it wouldn't be showing readers these offensive cartoons: sensitive news organisations, the editors explained, have the duty to 'refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbol symbols'. The very next day, the Times illustrated the story on the Danish controversy with an illustration of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung ... a piece of New York art from a couple of seasons earlier. They had no problem with gratuitous assaults on religious symbols when it came to a dung-covered Virgin Mary or the Piss-Christ-the crucifix immersed in the artist's urine that was the sensation of the New York art world a couple of seasons back. He was the biggest artist in America for a while, a guy called Andre Serrano. I don't know what he's doing now, haven't heard from him a couple of years, I don't know what he's doing ... maybe he got cystitis or something ... anyway, his career dried up.

A friend of mine did a satirical play in England a couple of years ago, he's an old leftie, very anti-Iraq war, so in his show he had Bush and Blair come out and sing 'we're sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus' ... ha-ha, very funny. Well how about if you have a couple of Imams dancing around singing 'we're sending you a schoolgirl bomb from Allah'. Well oddly enough, my pal was far more reluctant to do that, on the reasonable grounds that unlike insulting Christianity, if you insult certain other faiths, a far more motivated crowd is likely to be waiting for you at the stage door. Multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke, in which the American tells the Soviet that 'in my country, everyone is free to criticise the President' and the Soviet guy replies 'same here! In my country everyone is free to criticise your President'. Under the rules, as understood by the New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one had to choose, on balance, Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elite's loathing of their own. Now I have a great sympathy for Muslims that face demands that they assimilate; it's on the front pages of all the newspapers in London this weekend. Even if you wanted to, even if you wanted to, how would you assimilate with say, Canadian national identity? You can't assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It's much easier to dismantle a society than put anything new and lasting in it place. And across much of the developed world, that's what's going on right now.

The advantage for the US and for Australia, and to a lesser extent other parts of the English-speaking world, is that Europe, in its civilisational exhaustion, is ahead in the line, and its fate might wake up even the most blinkered on this side of the continent. But it comes down to this: we are the issue. It's about us. We don't understand that the world we've lived in since 1945 is very precious, very unusual, and very rare and is at odds with most of human history. And if we want our world to continue, if we want our children to grow up in the kind of society we've lived in this last half-century, then we have to understand the blessings we enjoy are not an accident. If we don't value it, we won't have it.

Thank you very much.

The Cultural Tide is Turning, Part III

Up in Canada, Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj has just had to resign from the shadow cabinet after playing kissy-face with Hezbollah in meetings in Beirut. Complaints of the MPs behavior came not only from the Conservative benches, but also from the saner portions of his own Liberals. (From the NDP, we hear nothing but support, continuing the not-so-curious phenomena of an socialist party sharing the foreign policy worldview of Islamists and, not coincidentally, reaping Muslim votes because of it).

It's simply amazing what positive changes the minority Conservative government have brought into the political culture in Canada in such a short time.

With the Liberal-dominated CBC, the Liberal-dominated newspapers and a Liberal-dominated intellectual culture, opposing points of view were rarely even presented, let alone challenged.

Now, with a non-Liberal government, a major player in Canada is able to add its voice to this uniform chorus and--shock!--it turns out there are a number of Canadians out there actually open to considering opposing points of view.

And now, we see in this event the self-same, smug Liberal party having to make a political conciliation by sacking one of its own from the shadow cabinet where before his line would have been tacitly approved government policy. (Credit is due to the Liberal Party for declaring Hezbollah a terrorist organization to begin with, but I have no doubt that this would not have stopped them from calling for negotiations with them anyway).

Not only are more and more average Canadians starting to realize the nature of the enemy and the threat he presents, but his government is now, for the first time, beginning to make noises that such clear-headed views are shockingly beginning to be held by those in power.

Yesterday, Conservative MP and Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister Jason Kennedy had this to say about the great issue of the day:

"There was another political party in the past which had democratic support, which provided social services, which played an important role in the political life of its country in Germany in the 1930s which was also dedicated to violence against the Jewish people," said Kenney, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and one of the Conservatives' senior political strategists.

"The world was wrong to negotiate with that party then and it would be wrong to negotiate with Hezbollah today and I'm shocked that Mr. Wrzesnewskyj doesn't understand that," he said.

* * *

"The Liberal party of Canada and other opposition parties cannot claim to be prepared to be ready to govern Canada if they cannot even establish a coherent position on such a clear-cut issue as the terrorist nature of Hezbollah, an organization motivated by anti-Semitism and dedicated to the destruction of Israel."

Kenney said the Liberal MP's logic that Hezbollah should be negotiated with in order to achieve peace in the Middle East is flawed. There is nothing to negotiate with a group motivated by hatred and dedicated to the destruction of a state, he said.

Good Lord. Here I am all worried about Canada for the past 15 years and one minority election later and-hey presto!-I would give my right arm to hear one Bush Administration official talk like this.

People are starting to wake up. Through the fog of soggy "can't we all get along?" group-think, people are starting to see things for as they are. Not nearly enough yet, but growing daily.

Update I: Vancouver radio reports the following:

Exacerbating things for the Liberals were comments by a party youth leader in British Columbia who recently wrote on an Internet blog that Israel was the "most vile nation in human history," and suggested Hezbollah might be considered freedom fighters.

Thomas Hubert has now resigned his post on the youth wing executive.

The Soldiers Will Have Their Say

***UPDATE BELOW***

The grotesque farce that is the U.N. cease-fire resolution continues to play out in exactly the obvious and depressing way it was expected to. Having loudly demanded that Israel desist from defending itself, lest it hurt any of the world's precious Muslims, Europe now is nowhere to be seen now that action is called upon to back-up lofty sentiment. Where the great nation of France once spoke of leading the charge into south Lebanon to prevent further bloodshed, her president now confirms that no more than 200 engineers of the French Army will be offered. More: the Republic's defense minister also has stated that this paltry force will remain in Lebanon no later than February, 2007, and, in addition, France requires "security guarantees" so that France will know her sons sleep in safety.

To all with their head still in the sand: here are the people who parade in their superiority, revealed for all to see. As in Bosnia, we see it again. They hold us to be cowboys and war criminals, but when there is fighting to be done they crouch behind their lofty rhetoric and ask for someone to save them. How very European.

As I predicted here and elsewhere, Hezbollah leapt on the cease-fire and is now reaping the benefits of Israel's leaders' failure of will. The many who have expressed surprise at Hezbollah's discipline in holding its fire across the board have both badly underestimated the strategic sense of our enemy and the wider political ramifications of Israel's defeat.

The U.S. Government, having midwifed the U.N. resolution and having bought European assurances at face value, stands revealed once again as being either horrifically incompetent, dangerously stupid or some perilous combination of both. As noted below, that our Secretary of State now openly speaks of our "wish" that Hezbollah disarm voluntarily speaks volumes to the level of dysfunction and delusion adrift in our upper circles.

The Israeli Government, now half-heartedly trying to pin the loss on a reluctant American dragging her down, is now flailing around and acting as if it does not understand the basic terms of the deal it not only signed on to in New York but actively pushed. Having signed a document that any idiot on the street could see was a masterpiece of international intellectual masturbation, the Israeli Government then proceeded to pronounce itself shocked that the U.N. peacekeeping force will be made up of fourth-rate soldiers from fifth-rate countries, most of which are hostile to Israel as a matter of official policy. To make matters worse, they then play cute with the resolution's language and flagrantly break the cease-fire by launching a "defensive" raid. Is there any situation under which this current Israeli Government will not seek the opportunity to claim the maximum level of international condemnation while advancing its cause not one whit?

Our leaders having proved themselves useless and, worse, dangerous, the only remaining option is for the average people of all our countries to begin to demand change and to settle for nothing less than real leadership.

And, in Israel, it appears that this challenge is being taken up by the citizen-soldier, the reservists who in large measure are the heart of the IDF. From Ha'aretz:

The following is the text of a petition signed by IDF reservists who served in the Spearhead Brigade in Lebanon, sent to Defense Minister Amir Peretz and IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz in protest at the handling of the war by the government and senior military officials:

We, fighters and commanders at the Spearhead [Hod Hachanit] Brigade, were called up to enlist under an emergency mobilization order [Tzav 8] on July 30, 2006. Our attendance was complete in all battalions.

As we were signing on the battle equipment and weapons, we knew that we were signing for much more. We left behind wives and children, girlfriends and families. We put aside our jobs and livelihoods; we were prepared to carry out our mission under the most difficult of conditions, in heat, thirst or hunger.

At the back of his mind, each and every one of us knew, that for the just cause of protecting the citizens of Israel, we would even put our lives on the line.

But there was one thing we were not and would not be willing to accept: We were unwilling to accept indecisiveness. The war's aim, which was not defined clearly, was even changed in the course of the fighting.

The indecisiveness manifested itself in inaction, in not carrying out operational plans, and in canceling all the missions we were given during the fighting. This led to prolonged stays in hostile territory, without an operational purpose and out of unprofessional considerations, without seeking to engage in combat with the enemy.

The "cold feet" of the decision-makers were evident everywhere. To us the indecisiveness expressed deep disrespect for our willingness to join the ranks and fight and made us feel as though we had been spat on, since it contradicts the principles and values of warfare upon which we were trained at the Israel Defense Forces.

The heavy feeling that in the echelons above us there is nothing but under-preparation, insincerity, lack of foresight and inability to make rational decisions, leads to the question - were we called up for nothing?

We are now on the day after, and it seems that the immorality and the absence of any shame are the fig-leaves to be used in order to cover up for the blunders. The blunders of the past six years and the under-preparation of the army have been carried on our backs - the backs of the fighters. In order to face the next battle prepared - and this may happen soon - a thorough and fundamental change must take place.

The crisis of confidence between us as fighters and the higher echelons will not be resolved without a thorough and worthy investigative commission under the auspices of the state. When the commission completes its task, conclusions must be drawn both on the level of strategic planning and national security, and on the personal level of the parties involved.

We paid a heavy price in order to fight and come out of the battle victorious, and we feel this has been denied of us. We will all attend calls to enlist in the future for any mission we will be required to complete, but we would like to know that these missions will be part of a clear objective and will be carried out by striving to engage in combat.

As soldiers and citizens we expect a response at your earliest convenience,

We the undersigned

Fighters and officers of the Spearhead Brigade

Today, word comes that this political action by the soldiers is beginning to spread and to pick up steam. Protests are constant in front of the disgraced prime minister's office, and soldiers are starting to set up camps in city squares. Talk radio there is said to be abuzz with the need to replace the government. Newspapers from the hawkish Jerusalem Post to the dovish Ha'aretz have published prominent authors calling for the urgent dismissal of the government.

And now, from New York, we learn the following:

General Ya'alon To Return Home Amid Speculation
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
August 21, 2006

TEL AVIV, Israel — With Prime Minister Olmert's government facing trouble after the cease-fire in Lebanon, the man who might just lead its replacement will be arriving in Israel on Thursday.

Moshe Ya'alon, the general who broke the back of the second Palestinian Arab intifada in 2003 only to find himself fired from his job as chief of staff of the military for opposing Ariel Sharon's withdrawal of settlements and soldiers from Gaza, is something like Israel's General Dwight Eisenhower, a popular ex-general who is being pursued quietly by Israel's conservative opposition that seeks a steady hand in what is shaping up to be a long war against Islamic terror.

Just like Ike, the military hero is waiting for the right moment to enter politics. The general so far has not declared his allegiance to any party. In an interview yesterday, Mr. Ya'alon said he was returning from a residency at the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs to take up a post at the Shalem Center, a center-right think tank in Jerusalem, and to write a book.

"I am going back now but I don't want to speak politics. I am ready to speak substance, not to speak about this party or that party, but to speak out my mind," he said.

But Mr. Ya'alon's mind is very much in step with the Likud opposition that has behind the scenes sought to revive its party with his prestige. A poll earlier this year conducted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs found that Mr. Ya'alon enjoyed a 90% approval rating.

The general, like the vanquished Likud party, warned that Israel's withdrawal a year ago from Gaza would imperil its southern cities. He shares the frustration of Likud leaders that the war in Lebanon was fought in a feckless manner and argues that Israel and the west must eventually confront Iran.

A spokesman for the Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, yesterday agreed that Mr. Ya'alon's positions on war and peace were in line with his boss. But he cautioned that no deals had been done and denied Israeli press reports that Mr. Netanyahu was in close touch with General Ya'alon over the last week.

"There is nothing done yet. We will announce something when there is something to announce," the Netanyahu spokesman, Ofir Akunis, said.

Prediction: There will something to announce. And soon.

Another prediction: The next time the IDF sees action, no one from the air wing will be in charge, nor will the prime minister publicly complain about his inability to sleep due to worry over casualty counts.

Update I: From Ha'aretz, Tuesday morning:

Report: Ex-IDF chief Ya'alon to join ranks of Likud Party

By Haaretz Service

Former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Lieutenant General (res.) Moshe "Bogey" Ya'alon intends to join the ranks of the Likud Party, Israel Radio reported Tuesday.

Sources in the Likud said chances are increasing that Ya'alon will join the party, and could become party leader Benjamin Netanyahu's candidate for defense minister.

Speaking on Channel 1 TV on Monday, Ya'alon said from Washington "I have a lot to say and I will say it when I return to Israel."

I have a feeling that reports of Likud's death have been a bit premature.