Posted on 12/13/2001 9:19:31 PM PST by gcruse
By Mark Steyn, a columnist for Britain's Daily
Telegraph and Canada's National Post.
Having successfully introduced the novel legal
concept of the "hate crime," progressive opinion has
now taken it to dizzying new heights: the hate-me
crime. In a traditional hate crime, you beat someone
up not just for his fake Rolex but because you hate
him on the basis of his race, creed or color. With the
new hate-me crime, you beat someone up because
you hate him on the basis of his race, creed or color
-- and hey, that's cool, he's OK with it, so feel free
to take another swing.
The other day, Robert Fisk, of the British newspaper The Independent, was set upon by a gang of
Afghans. Mr. Fisk has had decades of experience in the Muslim world and is a widely acknowledged
expert on the subject. That's to say, since Sept. 11, he's got pretty much everything wrong. (Sample
Fisk headlines: "Bush Is Walking Into a Trap," "It Could Become More Costly Than Vietnam," "How
Can The U.S. Bomb This Tragic People?")
You can understand why Mr. Fisk has been in low spirits of late: The much-feared "Arab street" is as
seething and turbulent as a leafy cul-de-sac in Westchester County; and poor old Afghanistan's
reputation as the humbler of empires has gone south since Mullah Omar contracted out homeland
defense to a bunch of Saudi, Paki, Brit and Californian losers.
But last weekend the people finally roused themselves -- and beat up Fisky! His car broke down just a
stone's throw (as it turned out) from the Pakistani border and a crowd gathered. To the evident surprise
of the man known to his readers as "the champion of the oppressed," the oppressed decided to take on
the champ. They lunged for his wallet and began lobbing rocks. Yet even as the rubble bounced off his
skull, Mr. Fisk was shrewd enough to look for the "root causes":
"Young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn't see for the
blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn't
blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to
the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner
I could find."
It's not their fault, he insisted, their "brutality is entirely the
product of others" -- i.e., George Bush, Tony Blair, Donald
Rumsfeld, you. And in a flash, the gloom of recent weeks
lifted and Mr. Fisk turned in the heady, exhilarating columnar
equivalent of a Sally Field acceptance speech: you hate me,
you really hate me!
You'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with
laughter. Even as a mob is trying to kill him, he absolves them
of all responsibility. It's "entirely" America's fault. Noam
Chomsky, eat your heart out. Any old Ivy League professor
can give droning speeches about America's "silent genocide";
any European Union minister can swan off to U.N. gabfests in Durban to apologize to Robert Mugabe
for Western civilization. But, at a stroke, Mr. Fisk has dramatically raised the bar for standards of
Western self-loathing.
By way of contrast, consider another Afghan story his paper carried: a call by Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch and others for "a full inquiry" into whether or not U.S. forces in Afghanistan are
guilty of torture. Torture? My God, what are our boys up to? Well, it seems "very disturbing" "threats"
were made to a member of the Taliban and captured on videotape. The offending party was the CIA
team of Mike Spann and his comrade, known only as "Dave." They were at the Qala-i-Jangai prison,
interrogating the celebrated Marin County Taliban, born John Yoko Ashram Fonda Country Joe And
The Fish Walker Lindh but now going under the name Mustapha Jihad.
Mike and Dave seem to have been doing a good cop/bad cop routine on the "poor fellow," with Mike
quietly pointing out that "there were several hundred other Muslims killed" at the World Trade Center
and Dave stomping around in the background using the f-word a lot and muttering that Little Johnny
must "decide if he wants to live or die."
Had the Marinated Muslim spent less time in the madrassa mastering the ways of his adopted people
(how to brandish your AK-47 without getting it snagged in your floor-length beard) and more time
watching American pop culture, he would have recognized the Mike/Dave scene from "There's
Something About Mary." But Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch thinks Dave's "threat" would,
under international law, be considered torture. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words are
illegal and constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
We can't bring Mike Spann before a war crimes tribunal because unfortunately Tali-Boy's fellow
prisoners rose up and beat, kicked and bit the CIA man to death before booby-trapping his body with
grenades. But British SAS commandos managed to rescue Dave and he could certainly be prosecuted
by an international court. If the U.S. refused to extradite, Dave could be tried in absentia. Perhaps he
could even be bitten to death in absentia.
These two stories usefully clarify the peculiar pathology of the antiwar left. On the one hand, we need
international investigations if Americans are insufficiently decorous in their questioning. On the other, it's
perfectly justifiable for disaffected Muslims to target Western civilians purely on the basis of their ethnic
identity. On the one hand, we can't do anything right. On the other, they can't do anything wrong. The
Fisk Doctrine, taken to its logical conclusion, absolves of responsibility not just the perpetrators of
Sept. 11 but also Taliban supporters who attacked several of Mr. Fisk's fellow journalists in
Afghanistan, all of whom, alas, died before being able to file a final column explaining why their
murderers are blameless.
In recent weeks, some of us have found it hard to suppress the occasional titter at President Bush's
attempts at Islamic outreach. But it testifies, if nothing else, to Mr. Bush's humanity: He believes the
third-graders at the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Elementary School in Kandahar are at heart no
different from those in Crawford, Texas. He may be naïve about this: It could be that, even if he sat
down to read "'Twas The Night Before Ramadan" to a bunch of six-year-olds in Yasser's toxic
classrooms in Ramallah, the little tykes would think it sucked compared to Suicide Bombing 101. But at
least, whenever he talks about anyone, Texans or Tajiks, Afghans or Australians, the old right-wing Big
Oil stooge accords them fundamental dignity as human individuals.
By comparison, every argument the enlightened antiwar progressives make has at its core the
proposition that these people are primitives: They are no more culpable for tearing you apart than a
pack of hyenas would be. As Mr. Fisk sees it, the mob who mugged him and robbed him were "truly
innocent of any crime except being the victim of the world." Not true. They had a choice, and to deny
that they had a choice is to dehumanize them far more than Pentagon euphemisms about "collateral
damage" do.
Before the scenes of shaven Afghans cheering their liberation disheartened the peaceniks, you could go
to most any college town and see signs saying "Stop your racist war!" As they no longer seem to need
the placards, I was wondering if we warmongers could borrow them. Because the intellectual assault
being waged by the extreme left is explicitly racist. To old-school imperialists, these excitable Pashtun
types were the "lesser breeds without the law" (Kipling). To self-loathing multiculturalists, they still are.
Or, rather, they're still "without the law" but now they're the "superior breeds" -- their moral integrity
confirmed by their resistance to such concepts as individual responsibility. Rousseau's "noble savage"
was savage because of his isolation from the West; the Chomsky-Fisk-Said "noble savage" is savage
precisely because of the West, which you've got to admit is a dandy improvement, if only in terms of
heightening the delicious masochistic frisson.
If I were, say, Abdullah Abdullah, the new Afghan foreign minister, I'd be getting a bit sick of the
exquisite condescension of Western liberals. From 1886 to 1973, Afghanistan was one of the more
peaceful corners of the planet -- at least when compared to, oh, Germany, Italy, France, Poland,
Russia, Japan and China. There's no reason why it can't be again. The Bonn talks went well. The new
cabinet includes a woman. The interim government starts next week. And the only Yankee war crime to
get steamed up about is the robust vocabulary of one agent: "Hey, hey, CIA/How many naughty words
did you use today?"
It must all be very disheartening for the massed ranks of Western doom-mongers. But, c'mon, don't
beat yourself up over it. As Robert Fisk well knows, there's plenty of Afghans who'll do it for you.
If you are not already, you should become a regular reader of Mark Steyn. He is an excellent writer, and this time he knocks the ball far into the night. In the bottom of the ninth. With the based loaded.
Congressman Billybob
This is the kind of stuff that Pulitzers should be made of.
All of it is great, and not a single word should be missed. So I hate to abstract any of it for fear of implying that one part is better than another, but I can't help having a personal favorite:
Any old Ivy League professor can give droning speeches about America's "silent genocide"; any European Union minister can swan off to U.N. gabfests in Durban to apologize to Robert Mugabe for Western civilization. But, at a stroke, Mr. Fisk has dramatically raised the bar for standards of Western self-loathing.
Too true. Too too too too true. Apologies to Robert Mugabe for Western Civilization. That is the left. He has captured the Left. All of your Left are belong to Steyn.
I had never heard of Steyn before the attacks, but now I think he's one of the best writers around-- I NEVER miss a column. I'm happy to see I'm not alone in my opinion-- he's in ALL the best places thse days: Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review. Well-deserved success, and like you say, he looks like Pulitzer material to me!
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