Mark Steyn: Wake up, folks

A couple of items from Tuesday’s papers. On the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian pilot programme for the Met’s new shoot-to-kill policy, the Daily Telegraph reports:

‘A Home Office spokesman last night admitted that it had not yet identified his immigration status: “We are looking into the case and will provide more information as soon as we are able to do so.’’’

Meanwhile, the Times includes this background information on one of the thwarted bombers of the 21 July attacks — Yassin Hassan Omar, a Somali ‘asylum-seeker’:

‘Omar, who was last seen vaulting a barrier at Warren Street station, has been the registered occupant of the flat since 1999. Ibrahim, who was last seen in Hackney Road, East London, after his failed attempt to blow up a No. 26 bus, shared it with him for the past two years. Omar received £88 a week in housing benefit to pay for the council property and also received income support, immigration officials say.’

1) Four days after Mr de Menezes became the most famous foreigner in the United Kingdom, Her Majesty’s Government is unable to give a definitive answer on his immigration status.

2) Four years after 9/11, British taxpayers are subsidising the jihad — in Mr Omar’s Bounds Green council flat and in many other places.

There’s a pleasant thought the next time you’re on a bus when some Islamakazi self-detonates: it’s on your tax bill; P-A-Y-E — pay as you explode.

Number One comes at a time when the relevant department, the Home Office, not content with being unable to run its existing records system for foreigners, is determined to inflict an expensive and cumbersome bureaucracy on every non-foreigner in the land. Indeed, the Home Secretary has now upgraded it into a fundamental human right: ‘Just let us put in place our hierarchy of rights,’ Charles Clarke told MEPs just before the second attacks. ‘The right to live. The right to go to work on the Underground. The right to have an ID card.’ Human rights-wise, that last one is right up there with the right to be subject to confiscatory taxation.

And Number Two isn’t some stunning shocking development, either. In The Spectator of 29 December 2001, I noted the likes of Zac Moussaoui, the French citizen who became an Islamist radical while living on welfare in London, and wrote:

‘If you’re looking for “root causes” for terrorism, European-sized welfare programmes are a good place to start. Maybe if they had to go out to work, they’d join the Daily Mirror and become the next John Pilger. Or maybe they’d open a drive-thru Halal Burger chain and make a fortune. Instead, Tony Blair pays Islamic fundamentalists in London to stay at home, fester and plot.’

I wasn’t the first to notice the links between Euro-Canadian welfare and terrorism. Mickey Kaus, an iconoclastic California liberal, was way ahead. But, after three-and-a-half years, one would be entitled to assume that a government whose fortunes are as heavily invested in the terrorist threat as this one’s might have spotted it, too — especially given the ever greater numbers of British jihadi uncovered from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Israel and America.

That’s why I regretfully have to disagree with the editor of this great publication in his prescription of the current situation which appeared in these pages a week or two back under the headline ‘Just don’t call it war’. As you’ll have gathered, the boss objects to the language of ‘war, whether cultural or military.... Last week’s bombs were placed not by martyrs nor by soldiers, but by criminals.’

Sorry, but that’s the way to lose. A narrowly focused ‘criminal’ approach means entrusting the whole business to the state bureaucracy. The obvious problem with that is that it’s mostly reactive: blow somewhere up, we’ll seal it off, and detectives will investigate it as a crime scene. You could make the approach less reactive by a sustained effort to improve scrutiny of immigration, entitlement to welfare and other matters within the purview of government. But consider those two snippets from the Tuesday papers and then figure out the likelihood of that happening. A ‘criminal’ approach gives terrorists all the rights of criminals, and between British and European ‘human rights’ that’s quite a bundle. If it’s a war, you can take wartime measures — including withdrawal from the UN Convention on Refugees, repeal of the European Human Rights Act, and a clawback of sovereignty from the EU. But if you fight this thing as a law-enforcement matter, Islamist welfare queens will use all the above to their full extent and continue openly promoting the murder of the Prime Minister, British troops, etc. with impunity.

Softly-softly won’t catchee monkey. Slo-mo conflicts are the hardest to win, in part because in advanced societies the public finds it hard to stay focused. Granted, there are exceptions to that rule: the government, battling the commies in Malaya, went the Boris Johnson route and declined to call it a war; and the eventual victory in the Malayan ‘Emergency’ might tend to support his thesis. It was said that London was reluctant to use the term ‘war’ for reasons of home and business insurance, but it’s also a broader kind of insurance: it lowers the stakes, it softens the people up for a non-victory — as in the Irish ‘Troubles’. Sometimes, as in Malaya, you happen to win one of these ‘emergencies’ or ‘troubles’, and that’s a bonus. But the point is, by designating something as other than a war, you tend to make it peripheral, and therefore loseable.

That’s not an option here. Madrid and London — along with other events such as the murder of Theo Van Gogh — are, in essence, the opening shots of a European civil war. You can laugh at that if you wish, but the Islamists’ most often-stated goal is not infidel withdrawal from Iraq but the re-establishment of a Muslim caliphate living under Sharia that extends to Europe; and there’s a lot to be said for taking these chaps at their word and then seeing whether their behaviour is consistent.

Furthermore, there’s a lot more of the world that lives under Sharia than there was, say, 30 years ago: Pakistan adopted it in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984.... Fifty years ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it’s in the grip of Islamic law. So, as a political project, radical Islam has made some headway, and continues to do so almost every day of the week: since the beginning of the year, for example, some 10 per cent of southern Thailand’s Buddhist population have abandoned their homes — a far bigger disruption than the tsunami, yet all but unreported in the Western press. And whatever one’s opinion of the various local conflicts around the world — Muslims vs Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs Jews in the Holy Land, Muslims vs Russians in Chechnya, Muslims vs Christians in Africa — the fact is that the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

If the jihad has its war aims, maybe we should start thinking about ours. What would victory look like? As fascism and communism were in their day, Islamism is now the ideology of choice for the world’s grievance-mongers. That means we have to destroy the ideology, or at least its potency — not Islam per se, but at the very minimum the malign strain of Wahabism, which thanks to Saudi oil money has been transformed from a fetish of isolated desert derelicts into the most influential radicalising force in contemporary Islam, from Indonesia to Leeds. Europeans who aren’t prepared to roll back Wahabism had better be prepared to live with it, or under it.

Mustering the popular will for that sort of struggle isn’t easy. But the longer you leave it the harder it becomes. Whether or not one accepts the Johnson line that Iraq is irrelevant to the war on terror, it requires a perverse genius on the part of Tony Blair to have found the political courage to fight an unpopular war on a distant shore but not the political courage to wage it closer to home where it would have commanded far more support.

On a couple of very fleeting visits to London and Belfast in recent weeks, I had the vague feeling that Britain is on the brink of a tragedy it doesn’t quite comprehend. America’s post-9/11 muscular nationalism was easily mocked by Europeans, but its absence in London is palpable: try to imagine Mayor Giuliani uttering half the stuff Ken Livingstone said in the last fortnight (‘The bombings would never have happened if the West had simply left the Arab nations alone in the wake of the first world war’). Even if he’s right, the message it communicates is weakness: bomb us, and we apologise — or at the very least go to comically absurd lengths to distinguish terrorism against London from terrorism against Israel. Tony Blair, in his recitation in the House of Commons of nations afflicted by terrorism, couldn’t even bring himself to mention the Zionist Entity. Boris Johnson, in his call to non-arms, began with an elaborate riff on the difference between Brits and Jews in these matters:

‘If we were Israelis, we would by now be doing a standard thing to that white semi-detached pebbledash house at 51 Colwyn Road, Beeston. Having given due warning, we would dispatch an American-built ground-assault helicopter and blow the place to bits. Then we would send in bulldozers to scrape over the remains....’

The distinction between coarse blundering Israelis and subtle sophisticated Britons depends where you’re standing. If you happen to be the late Jean Charles de Menezes, for example, you might wish fate had selected you instead to be the Palestinian suicide bomber interrupted en route to Tel Aviv that same Friday. The Euro-reviled IDF managed to disarm the Fatah terrorist of his explosives belt, packed with nails, without harming a hair on his pretty little suicide-bomber head. If the demented anti-Zionism of the British and Continental media these last four years ever had a point, it doesn’t now, when you’re in the early stages of the Israelification of Europe — and, in one of fate’s better jests, in this scenario you’re the Jews.

Any one of these issues would require enormous political will — stop funding the intifada, reclaim lost sovereignty from Europe, imprison and/or expel treasonous imams, end the education system’s psychologically unhealthy and ahistorical disparagement of the Britannic inheritance in your schools. But, without a big ambitious war-sized project, what’s left — aside from shooting the occasional Brazilian?

On the Thursday of the second attacks, I happened to pass through London, which isn’t the easiest town to pass through these days. I am a Canadian subject of Her Majesty and, when I showed up at the ‘Fast Track’ lane at Heathrow, the immigration officer plonked down in my passport a big stamp saying ‘RECOURSE TO PUBLIC FUNDS PROHIBITED’. ‘Tosser,’ I sneered. Well, OK, I murmured it, very sotto voce, as I had no desire to miss my appointment because the zealots of HM Customs suddenly fancied an intimate cavity search. But honestly, what a pathetic example of pointless gesture politics: if you’re a fancypants North American business traveller in town for less than 24 hours and splashing a ton of hard currency around the West End, the Home Office goes through a big hoop-de-doo about saying you’ve no entitlement to welfare. But if you’re a Somali and you want to live in public housing at public expense for six years while you fine-tune your plot to blow up Warren Street Tube station, pas de problème!

And, of course, in the event that I were overcome by a yen to join Yassin Hassan Omar on the public teat, an automatic stamp in the passport of every Canadian, American and Australian landing at Heathrow isn’t going to do anything to prevent it. For all the Home Office knows, I may already be living in a council flat in Bounds Green. This silly passport stamp was introduced after 9/11, in the wake of concerns about ‘asylum-seekers’, and it’s a classic example of what you get when you opt for a narrowly drawn law-enforcement approach entrusted to a complacent bureaucracy: rather than do anything about immigrant welfare fraud, they’ll simply order up a new rubber stamp that gives the vague air of doing something about it.

How come Tony Blair can bestride the world like a colossus, liberating Iraq, ridding Africa of poverty, and yet know so little about the one tiny corner of the planet for which he bears formal responsibility? Well, there are several possible reasons, but the effect is pretty much the same: daily, weekly, remorselessly, the situation will deteriorate. If it’s a war, you can win it. Anything less is unlikely to end in victory.

but rather the ideology and practitioners of Wahabism

Victor David Hansen was a guest on Savage the other night (Savage has been drawing better guests lately), and he made the argument that it isn't even about Wahabism. It's about the same culture that in the past used Pan-Arabism, Baathism, and Naziism to try to gain back the dominance of the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. Actually, he didn't mention the Ottoman Empire, that just occured to me. But his point was that they will ride whatever wave is available to help them acheive their goal, which is the destruction of Western Civ.

He said the point was well illustrated by Saddam who, starting as a communist, was building mosques by the end.

Softly-softly won’t catchee monkey.
Hate speech

Slo-mo conflicts are the hardest to win, in part because in advanced societies the public finds it hard to stay focused.
Perhaps why al-q likes to take a year off here and there

If the demented anti-Zionism of the British and Continental media these last four years ever had a point, it doesn’t now, when you’re in the early stages of the Israelification of Europe — and, in one of fate’s better jests, in this scenario you’re the Jews.
Good one. SCHADENFREUDE!

Excellent article!

But honestly, what a pathetic example of pointless gesture politics: if you’re a fancypants North American business traveller in town for less than 24 hours and splashing a ton of hard currency around the West End, the Home Office goes through a big hoop-de-doo about saying you’ve no entitlement to welfare. But if you’re a Somali and you want to live in public housing at public expense for six years while you fine-tune your plot to blow up Warren Street Tube station, pas de problème!

And this was one of the best parts!

Thank you so much.

The last paragraph gave my goosebumps chills. Liberals - unfortunately including Blair - are not realistic in facing the fact that this is a war with an enemy, not a crime family dealing drugs.

One reason they cannot accept that reality is it means one awful confrontation for them and their hand held mirrors. They are no longer young, wallowing in the sixties of peace, love and rock & roll haze. It is time to grow up and face reality.

Exactly. Idleness is the devil's workshop ping.

As fascism and communism were in their day, Islamism is now the ideology of choice for the world’s grievance-mongers.

The most destructive aspect of a nanny-state welfare system is that it cultivates large numbers of useless malcontents.

We must remember that it is the left in this country, really just underground Communists, who foment much of this discontent. That is their MO all over the world. Often their tactic is not to find a grievance but to create a grievance.

The poor have been with us forever and being poor in itself does not bring discontent. Most of the world has been poor for its entire history. As long as there is not starvation, poverty is routinely tolerated. By simply following the dictates of the Bible, or any religion other than Islam, it is apparent that happiness is not in worldly possessions or positions of power. Being content with poverty is not an aberation of human nature.

But let someone come on the scene and start telling you how terribly you are being treated by the rich and powerful and pretty soon many will become unhappy with their lot in life, a lot they were content with shortly before. Before long they have aggressive discontent with the powers that be. The agitators then use this discontent to gain power for themselves.

This present wave of Wahhabism is directly connected to the rise in Communism, which incidentally does parallel the end of WWI, and its cousin Nazism. The Nazis took an active role in the ME before and during WWII and the Communists took up the slack afterward. Ever since the Muslims have been imbued with an active hatred of democracy, and therefore, the West and Israel.

The Communists aren't dead, they are just playing dead and operating in stealth around the world, no where stronger than in this country and specifically in the Democrat Party and even more specifically through Hillaryski. The Wahhabis a just their latest surrogates.

It's about the same culture that in the past used Pan-Arabism, Baathism, and Naziism to try to gain back the dominance of the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. Actually, he didn't mention the Ottoman Empire, that just occured to me. But his point was that they will ride whatever wave is available to help them acheive their goal, which is the destruction of Western Civ.

Today that would be the Communists. In this country they masquerade as Democrats.

Why are the Western nations acting like they want this conflict to bring them down? Is it just multiculturalism gone haywire? Or is it a "Phoenix" scenario they're looking for?

Actually, it is the Communists who are reenacting the Phoenix scenario and they are the ones trying to bring down Western civilization. Multiculturalism is simply one of their tactics.

Who keeps the racial pots boiling? Who promotes, no insists upon, political correctness and multiculturalism? Who divides women from men? Who keeps the poor in poverty with programs supposedly designed to get them out of it but is really just an extension of big government?

The answer in this country is the Democrats. The Democrats are following the principles of Communism and have strong ties to Communism, though they will scream if you confront them. The Democrats are our enemies just like their allies the terrorists. We should treat them as such.

You could have asked the same question to the Roman Empire. It's decadence.

As I just said above, it is the Communists. The Roman empire was pagan and persecuted the Christians. With no abiding moral principles which stand independently of the government, a society will crumble on its own.

Who is fighting overtime to rid our country of religion, especially Christianity? No prayer in schools, no Ten Commandments, abortion, promotion of homosexuality, moral relativism, etc. It is the Democrat Party, performing as a stand in for the Communist Party, and we should stop skirting the issue. The Democrats are our enemies and must be treated as such.

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