Mark Steyn: The axis of evenhandedness

Western Standard (Canada) ^ | 08/22/06 | Mark Steyn

[Pokey78]

There's a hoary old joke from a few years back in which the Secretary-General proposes that, in the interests of global peace and harmony, the world's soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.

"Great idea," says his deputy. "Er, but who would we play?"

"Israel, of course."

And so, on a tour of residential areas of Beirut, UN humanitarian honcho Jan Egeland accused Israel of "excessive use of force" and "a violation of humanitarian law," whatever that is. His colleague, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Canada's Louise Arbour, went further and accused Israel of being guilty of "war crimes" under the Geneva Conventions.

Really? Hezbollah is an organization of unlawful combatants that as a matter of policy uses civilians as shields: under Geneva, that's a war crime. But Mme. Arbour and Mr. Egeland couldn't care less. So the value of their observations lies less in their interpretation of "international law" than as a reminder of the peculiar psychology of the post-nationalist, indeed postmodernist, "civilized world." It's not just that the terrorism and the resistance to terrorism are seen as morally equivalent: perish the thought. In the eyes of the UN, the resistance to terrorism is the real crime.

Israel's challenge in the years ahead is most accurately summarized by the IRA. After they tried and failed to kill Mrs. Thatcher in the Brighton bombing, they warned her: "You have to be lucky every day. We only have to be lucky once." That's the situation the Zionist Entity is in. Until these last few weeks, they had no idea Hezbollah could launch rockets into Haifa--rockets specially augmented with ball bearings, which have no value in military terms but maximize civilian casualties (that's also a war crime, if Mme. Arbour and Mr. Egeland are interested). Those ball bearings tell us that Hezbollah is in the business of killing as many Israelis as they can. So what will they have a year or two down the line? In an age of nuclear terrorism--where "non-state actors" can project force around the world more easily than Canada--the odds of Hezbollah getting lucky on a scale the IRA could never have dreamed of improve with every passing year.

That's the "disproportionality" the UN and the Europoseurs never address. What does Israel want from its enemies? A few acres here and there maybe, and some bad guys in jail. What do its enemies want from Israel? The liquidation of the state and the removal one way or another of every Jew. As President Ahmadinejad told his people the other day, "We shall soon witness the elimination of the Zionist stain of shame."

Oh, well, I'm sure that's just that time-honoured Persian rhetorical tradition we hear so much about. In the Toronto Star the other day, Linda McQuaig wrote that Stephen Harper is "abandoning our traditional attempt at even-handedness in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." But it would be truer to say that it's Linda's columnar colleagues who've abandoned any "even-handedness." As Richard Cohen wrote in The Washington Post, "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself." Matthew Parris in The Times of London stopped a few yards short of that: "The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast. My opinion--held not passionately but with little personal doubt--is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was"--which lets you know how he would argue it if minded to. In essence, then, Messrs. Cohen and Parris, two famously moderate voices in the leading newspapers of two of the least anti-Israeli capital cities in the West, have nevertheless accepted the principle underpinning Ahmadinejad's view of the situation: Israel should not be where it is. Whether it's a "stain of shame" or just a "mistake" is the merest detail.

If this is "evenhandedness," who needs it? Israel is not yet in the suicide business. Faced with an existential threat, it has determined to resist it. Yet even then it feels obliged to fight in the postmodern western manner, with one hand tied behind its back. It accepts, implicitly, that it's not allowed to crush and exterminate Hezbollah, only to degrade its capability to one degree or another. And then Hezbollah will catch its breath, and wait to be resupplied by Iran via Syria. This isn't even Westphalian. Linda McQuaig, the EU, the UN and many others demand, in effect, that Hezbollah, a terrorist "non-state actor," be recognized as a formal, permanent part of the landscape.

"The Jews are a peculiar people," wrote America's great longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer after the 1967 war. "Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem . . . But everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab . . . Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world."

That's an interesting question, isn't it? Is it that we hold Israel to a higher standard? Or is rather that in the postmodern era Israel--unlike Canada, Britain, France, New Zealand--is the only western nation that's found itself fighting an existential struggle? Let's take it as read that a lot of folks don't like Jews. The present conflict then is chiefly of significance as a study in whether the least enervated of western nations is capable of seeing off the terrorist proxies of nuclear Islamists. Because, if Israel can't hold off a resurgent Islam, what chance Norway or Belgium?

For over a generation now, Canada and many other countries have regarded civilizational self-loathing as just another alternative lifestyle, like being gay or vegetarian. It's a kind of literal "homophobia"--a fear (phobia) of the same (homo-), the same old white-bread people that produced the world in which you live, the legal system, the property rights, the economic prosperity. Yawn. Who needs them? Along with Linda McQuaig's musings, the Toronto Star recently produced an editorial supporting Stephen Lewis' campaign for a UN agency for women's rights. I don't happen to see the point of creating yet another transnational racket: just as the "Human Rights Council" is manned by all the worst human rights abusers, no doubt a women's rights council would wind up being staffed by Sudan's leading clictorectomy enforcers and Pakistani honour-killing advocates. But I regard the broader cause of women's rights as one of our best long-term strategies against Islamism, and I'm always interested in rare glimpses of pampered western feminists rousing themselves from their self-absorption to take an interest in their sisters overseas. So what did the Star's gal have to say about the status of women abroad? Well, it seems they're in big trouble because of "colonialist manipulation."

Yes, indeed. It would never have occurred to those Jordanian wives-beaters to ill-treat their womenfolk had it not been for 24 years of nominal British rule. But wait, that's not all: in Afghanistan, "women's hardships" were "used to arouse emotions that justify misleading international involvement."

Under the Taliban, women were forbidden to feel sunlight on their faces. By law. Bush and Blair ended that. If you feel that intervention was "misleading," fine. But under your scenario those women would still be prisoners in their own homes. So, unlike Bush's support for Afghan women, your support for Afghan women makes no difference.

It's an open question whether those who think like the Star editorialists are in a majority. Certainly, they hold a majority of cultural levers--at the CBC, in schools and universities, on the roll of Governor-General's Award winners, in the UCC and other churches. But that kind of cultural relativism is unsustainable in the face of primal forces like Islamism. The advantage of being Israeli is that one understands every day the precariousness of liberty. In Belgium and Sweden and, alas, much of Canada, we don't.

[Loud Mime]

Every liberal I talk to believes they are superior because they want good to happen....but they don't want to do it themselves. It's for government to do after banning all churches.

[Convert from ECUSA]

Mark Steyn ping!

[gcruse]

"And manages to add yet more muchable quotables, as if it's as easy as snagging flies in the outfield."

Steyn is a cross between Mark Twain and HL Mencken, a treasure for our times who goes incredibly underrecognized. Maybe he needs to write books; he surely needs to be on Fox News.

[goldstategop]

The average Israeli understands what the country's chattering classes do not: that self-loathing is a prescription for national suicide. And as much as Israel has been invaded by trendy post-ideological nihilism that manifests itself in the form of post-Zionism, most Israelis are far from ready to turn the off button and convert themselves into an Internet website. Pereo Israel -Velum Cado Super Occasus. It might be something to keep in mind, for if Israel can't defeat Islamofascism, the West won't be around for long.

( No more Olmert! No more Kadima! No more Oslo!)

[COUNTrecount]

Thanks.

[Paul Ross]

Here's the edge of the envelope on righteous indignation in print. Mark seems to have patented the words that exactly state the vileness against which he inveighs, without descending into the same pit of anger and hate. And manages to add yet more muchable quotables, as if it's as easy as snagging flies in the outfield.

Bingo!

I especially liked the label he coined "Europoseur" ...

Another home-run by Mark Steyn:

The only thing I would add is that the liberal editorialists that now smugly opine about the "mistake" of planting European Jews in the Mideast...draw this conclusion from a truly monumental historical ignorance.

Israel was primarily founded, and is still to this day composed, of refugees from Dhimmitude in the Middle East, and other lands of persecution...such as the Sharon family (then Scheinerman) which fled the Red Army in Russia. Many fled from Egypt, and various points around the Ottoman Empire, and even Iran, and India... to the British mandate of Palestine, a barren virtually unpopulated region, which England promoted as a Jewish homeland with the Balfour Declaration*...long before the United Nations "creation" of the State of Israel in 1948.

It is truly an embarrassment that the UK has waffled so much over that since. All this fence-sitting and murmuring and back-biting to placate the very oil-drenched Islamists who pretend to be civilized today. I postulate that any Muslim State which rejects Israel's right to exist...is per se not civilized. A perfect, and indeed, a Biblical litmus test of their own legitimacy, or lack thereof. And we in the West should beware those in our media and "leadership" who manifest such grave ignorance, and perpetuate and promote that ignorance, so as possibly to imperil our own status of civilization...and favor with Divine Providence.

* The first Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917: An official letter from the British Foreign Office headed by Arthur Balfour, the UK's official Foreign Secretary (from December 1916 to October 1919), to Lord Rothschild, who was seen as a representative of the Jewish people. The letter stated that the British government "view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country".

[RobbyS]

The amazing thing is how ignorant the putatively Jewish Cohen is. He doesn't know that the majority of Israelis are of non-European origin, unless he wants to ignore history and include the Russians.

[Malesherbes]

As usual, Steyn looks reality directly in the eye - while others avert their gaze. Western civilization is faced with an existential struggle; most countries are AWOL, and little Israel struggles on.

[Paul Ross]

The amazing thing is how ignorant the putatively Jewish Cohen is. He doesn't know that the majority of Israelis are of non-European origin, unless he wants to ignore history and include the Russians.

Bump! My thoughts exactly.

[ichabod1]

They seem to be, yes.

[Tax-chick]

The present conflict then is chiefly of significance as a study in whether the least enervated of western nations is capable of seeing off the terrorist proxies of nuclear Islamists. Because, if Israel can't hold off a resurgent Islam, what chance Norway or Belgium?

Or the U.S.?

(I'll still be thin, under the chador ...)

[okie01]

to the British mandate of Palestine, a barren virtually unpopulated region, which England promoted as a Jewish homeland with the Balfour Declaration*...long before the United Nations "creation" of the State of Israel in 1948.

In civilized terms, it can clearly be said that the Jews enjoy "clear title" to Israel.

From the Ottomans to the Brits, via the League of Nations, and thence to the Jews -- with no costs charged to the Arabs.

The Arab neighbors may not like it but, if they were civilized, they'd live with it.

That they will not proves the point.

[Jocko from Canada]

Linda McQuaig wrote that Stephen Harper is "abandoning our traditional attempt at even-handedness in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

In a past column (June 4, 2006) Ms. McQuaig wrote and I quote: “ The Canadian Jewish Congress argued last week that this “right of return” would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This may be true. If it remained democratic, Israel might become a multi-religious and multi-ethnic state – like Canada – rather than being an exclusively Jewish State.

This to me is an indicator of the depth of McQuaid’s knowledge or ignorance of Israel as a society.
I toured Israel in May 2006 and I saw Arab Muslims in Haifa, Nazareth and Jerusalem to name just a few known towns. I met with Druze in their villages and saw the Bedouin encampments in the dessert. Christian’s archeological sites and churches are there all over the country!
Twenty percent of the country is composed of Arabs. They are, for the most part, the Arabs and their children who did not follow the directives of their brethren to leave Israel in the war of 1948. This was requested of the Arabs Israel to clear the way for the invading armies with a promise of returning to their homes after the Jews were destroyed.
They are for the most part still living in camps today because most Arab countries refuse to absorb them in their societies. About eight hundred thousand Jews chased out of their Arab homes were integrated in Israel during the same historical period.
Today, Arabs sit in the Israeli Parliament representing their people. Where in the Middle East do you see Jews in Government representing their people Ms. McQuaid?

The Canadian Government traditional even-handedness that she refers to is best demonstrated by our voting record in the UN when issues concerning Israel were raised. We are a nation that helped finance Palestinian text books to demonize the Jews and preached the destruction of Israel. That is the approach that McQuaid and fellow leftist travelers want Canada to resume.

Mark Steyn presents the facts on an intellectual level and with humor that McQuaid and company only dream of one day emulating!

[AmishDude]

So brilliant. With regard to Israel the "mistake", I have to be amused by the mindset: Those Muslims are crazy, so whatever we do, we shouldn't provoke them. We shouldn't have international relations defined by behavior toward the homeless.

And this is a great observation, too: Is it that we hold Israel to a higher standard? Or is rather that in the postmodern era Israel--unlike Canada, Britain, France, New Zealand--is the only western nation that's found itself fighting an existential struggle?

[91B]

Big bump for some really good Steyn.

[GMMAC]

PING!

[steveyp]

FYI Apparently Rush announced today (8/23) that Steyn would be his guest host tomorrow. There is a thread on the board about it.

[knighthawk]

Ping

[knighthawk]

Thanks for the ping. Steyn is so right again.

[Ruth A.]

Pinging myself to return and read when I have time to savor and think.