Mark Steyn: Don't Worry, They Have Baseball Bats -

National Review ^ | December 5, 2005 | Mark Steyn

[UnklGene]

MARK STEYN: Don’t Worry, They Have Baseball Bats -

For the last couple of weeks, most of the Western media have been as overheated as a Renault 5 in Clichy-sous-Bois in their insistence that these riots have nothing to do with Islam. “The mayhem has yet to take on any ideological or religious overtones,” the New York Times assured us. “This has nothing to do with religion,” a Muslim told the Washington Post. Never mind the cries of “Allahu Akbar!,” never mind the invocation of “jihad” by at least some of the “youths,” never mind the particular care given to the incineration of Jewish targets, never mind the fact that the French government itself turned to various bigshot imams in an attempt to pacify les banlieues.

Instead, the move-along-folks-no-jihad-to-see-here crowd points to the rioters’ fondness for drugs, caterwauling rappers, casual sex, and hideous Western leisurewear as evidence of how culturally assimilated they are. Why, they threatened their victims with baseball bats!

Hold it right there for a minute. That’s how we define “assimilating” into Western society at the dawn of the 21st century? If a fellow deals a little coke while wearing pants with a gusset located at calf height while singing along to the remix of “Slap Up My B**ch,” we say, hey, he seems to be fitting in very nicely? No need to worry about his getting any wacky ideas down at the madrassah, he’s an impeccably secular pluralist Peugeot-torcher.

It’s true that the rioters look rather less foreign than, say, the stern young men in the mosques of Peshawar or the training camps outside Jalalabad. But, on the other hand, so did Mohamed Atta and his 18 confreres. They were very well “assimilated” by Clichy-sous-Bois standards. If you recall, in the days after 9/11 a flurry of all-American cocktail waitresses, lap-dancers, and prostitutes popped up to say they remembered Mohamed and Marwan and Majed and the rest of the gang chugging vodkas, groping strippers, renting porn videos — just like fully assimilated citizens of advanced Western democracies. They were said to have patronized, inter alia, Shuckums of Hollywood, Fla., Cheetah’s of San Diego, the Pink Pony of Daytona Beach, and Nardone’s Go-Go Bar of Elizabeth, N.J., none of which rates a mention in even the racier suras of the Koran. And none of which prevented the guys from drinking up, leaving a tip (lousy, according to the gals), and flying their planes into the Twin Towers on Tuesday morning.

The July 7th London bombers were also impeccably assimilated: They ate fish ’n’ chips and loved cricket. Omar Sheikh, the man believed to have masterminded the beheading of Daniel Pearl, is, in fact, an Englishman, educated at an English public (i.e., private) school and the London School of Economics. And so it goes: Somewhere right now far away from these shores, there’s a guy sitting in a Yankees cap, wearing a Disney T-shirt, listening to Britney Spears — and plotting to bomb America.

The two are not mutually exclusive. They never have been. The Merry Widow was both the biggest smash on Broadway and Hitler’s favorite operetta. In a not entirely persuasive attempt to humanize the old KGB hard man, Yuri Andropov was widely touted as a Glenn Miller fan. Former Chinese Communist leader Jiang Zemin could hardly attend a state banquet without getting up and singing Elvis’s “Love Me Tender.” Saddam Hussein is not just assimilated with Western culture, he’s eerily assimilated with National Review’s back-page columnist: The old Baathist mass murderer and I share the same favorite singer — Frank Sinatra. If you dialed up Amazon.com’s “We have recommendations for you!” CD page, Saddam’s and mine would be identical. Even more unsettling, we share the same favorite candy — Britain’s “Quality Street” chocolates, especially the big gold-wrapped toffees the shape and size of the old English penny. “Quality Street” was named after a 1902 West End hit by J. M. Barrie (of Peter Pan) whose principal characters were a loyal soldier of the Queen and his bonneted sweetheart. In the early advertisements for the toffees, the lovebirds were renamed Major Quality and Miss Sweetly:

Major Quality: “Sweets to the sweet, Miss Sweetly.”

Miss Sweetly: “Spare my blushes, Major Quality. Feast your eyes rather on this sumptuous array of toffees and chocolates.”

Put Saddam and me on a sofa with a box of “Quality Street” and we’d be billing and cooing like Major Quality and Miss Sweetly — right up until he called security to feed me feet first into the industrial shredder.

There’s no contradiction between a liking for Western pop culture and a loathing of Western civilization. Merely the latest in a long tradition, Mahmoud Khabou, the 20-year-old unemployed son of Algerian immigrants in Clichy-sous-Bois, understands more clearly than the media that jihad is by no means incompatible with conventional forms of Western delinquency. Asked by a reporter to name his heroes, he replied, “Osama bin Laden and Rodney King.”

The Snoop Dogg CDs, the chips, and cricket aren’t enough. In Yorkshire and in les banlieues, these “youths” have adopted so many Western trees we can’t see they lack the big overarching forest — the essence of identity, of allegiance — if, indeed, France and Britain still have one.

If by “cultural imperialism” you mean movies and pop songs, America’s very successful. If by “cultural imperialism” you mean the export of a core identity that transcends national citizenship, then political Islam’s the big globalization success story. Under the Western rap tracks and drug habits and fashions, the core identity of these young men is Muslim.

[RushLake]

I read Mark Steyn's colunm first when the latest National Review arrives in the mail. He is a true wordsmith.

I know well his point about the terrorist murderer filth frequenting ti##y bars and prostitutes. I have had "devout" islamics work with and for me and they almost invariably loved going to those type of things. Of course, the women were not nice islamic girls gone bad, they were just infidel women so what's the big deal?

[willyboyishere]

The last paragraph is the killer, and one of the sharpest observations made by the always sharp Mark Steyn.

[Thombo2]

My neighborhood convenience store owners(yes they're arabs)have assured me that the Paris riots had nothing to do with Islam.It was all all about racism and poverty.At least they aren't blaming president Bush.