Posted on 11/23/2006 8:26:38 PM PST by UnklGene
The Last Youth Standing -
What the West and Islam share are elites detached from their own demographic realities
Mark Steyn - November 20, 2006
I was watching Mansbridge One on One the other day. Don't ask me why. May have been an "encore presentation." Or more likely an encore presentation of an encore presentation. For a 24/7 news network, there's an eerie timelessness about CBC Newsworld: one would be only mildly surprised to switch on and find Mansbridge One on One with Lester B. Pearson or Sir Charles Tupper. Anyway, this week, the one he was on was the Aga Khan. And he wasn't exactly on him with anything other than a big slurpy puppy-dog tongue. In that soft breathy voice of his, His Highness was doing a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger routine on what had happened to Iraq--by which he meant not decades of Saddamite dictatorship but the American liberation therefrom.
"Can Iraq be put back together again?" asked the great Mansbridge sympathetically.
"'Put back together'?" I roared. "You **@*%**# ! 'Put back together' to a smoothly functioning genocidal dictatorship? Are you out of your mind even by CBC standards?" And I picked up the TV set and hurled it through the window where it killed two elderly spinsters taking their morning constitutional.
Okay, I didn't.
I merely rolled my eyes in mild exasperation, which was just as well, as the next bit was even better. The Aga Khan was asked who was providing real leadership in these troubled times, and he answered--wait for it--"Kofi Annan." This would presumably be the same Kofi Annan who preceded his secretary-generalship with the Rwandan genocide and ended it with the Darfur genocide. But don't waste your time quibbling about a million dead here and there. His Highness thought Kofi Annan had a "very good team" around him. This would presumably be the same very good team mired from top to toe in the oil-for-fraud scandal, from Benon Sevan, the program's head honcho (since resigned and back in the Cyprus apartment building in whose elevator shaft his aunt mysteriously plunged to her death before she could be questioned by investigators), to Alexander Yakovlev, the senior procurement officer (for UN peacekeeping, I mean, not the child sex rings that invariably accompany it). And let's not forget Kofi's Executive Co-ordinator for United Nations Reform, our own Maurice Strong, who unfortunately was obliged to resign before he could complete his "reforms."
Yet this is what the Aga Khan thinks is great global leadership, and, if Mansbridge felt tempted to raise a quizzical eyebrow, he either kept it under control or it was digitally re-lowered in post-production.
I hesitate to plug my own book, but, if the CBC carries commercials, I don't see why this column can't. The volume in question, America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It (recently excerpted in this magazine), was born in part from this kind of Great Man Syndrome: Mansbridge One On One with some other bigshot about what a splendid fellow yet another bigshot is. A year or two back, I was at a dinner party and mentioned that I was heading to Jordan a couple of days later. The very grande dame on my right--a celebrity journalist--asked if I was flying in to see King Abdullah. I said no, I wasn't. She found it hard to see the point of going to Jordan without seeing His Majesty and offered to use her good offices to get me some face time at the palace. I demurred politely. And here's why. I like swanking about with the international A-list as much as the next chap, but I became convinced a few months after 9/11 that great men jetting around and shooting the breeze with other great men is inadequate to the situation these days. I think you learn more about Jordan from going to Zarqa, the bleak industrial city that produced the late Mr. Zarqawi, or to the isolated towns in the eastern desert, whose tribal representatives refuse to vote against "honour killing" whenever it comes up in parliament. In other words, it's too easy to get the wrong impression about a place from the urbane bespoke Sandhurst-trained monarch who sounds so reasonable on CNN and the CBC but who doesn't always speak for the fellows jumping up and down in the street shouting "Death to the Great Satan!" And insofar as I have a universal theory these days it's that a lot of the problems in the world lie in the widening chasm between elites and the masses.
If you want an example of what I mean, consider an interview Condi Rice gave to Cal Thomas recently. "The great majority of Palestinian people," said the secretary of state, "they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don't believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that's what people are going to do."
Cal Thomas asked a shrewd followup: "Do you think this or do you know this?"
"Well, I think I know it," said Dr. Rice.
"You think you know it?"
"I think I know it."
So many of our present woes are due to thinking we know things. In the case of Palestine, however, it requires an almost absurd suspension of disbelief. When Condi Rice speaks of an "educated population" with a "culture of civil society," I'm sure we've all met Palestinians like that, in Montreal and Los Angeles and London--everywhere except Palestine. In Gaza, as I note in my book, the median age of the population is 15.8 years. Count back 15.8 years and you come to early 1991. In other words, a huge swathe of the population have spent their entire life in the depraved death cult of the post-Oslo Arafatist-Hamas squat. Not much of a "culture of civil society" there. Not much evidence that many of them "just want a better life." Au contraire, given the choice between "a better life" and blowing up Jews, quite a big chunk of the teenage and twentysomething males in Gaza would regard the latter as a lot more fun.
How could a smart woman like Dr. Rice be so misled on this point? No doubt she's seen all those Palestinian spokespersons--Saeb Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi--who've filled up the CNN and BBC airwaves decade in, decade out. No doubt she's met many soft-spoken "Palestinian intellectuals"--the territories' principal export, one might easily believe, given from the number who've turned up in CBC interview chairs over the years. But they don't speak for their people.
A few months after 9/11, I visited the Muslim slums of France. They're ugly dehumanizing places, and obviously I would rather have been hosting Steyn One on One with Jacques Chirac at the Elysée Palace. But in the last four-and-a-half years those alienated anonymous "youths" (as the papers refer to them) have been a central fact of French life--whether lobbing Molotov cocktails into police stations or torching buses and leaving passengers with third-degree burns. That's the reality. And everything Chirac and de Villepin and even Sarkozy have proposed has been a delusion: like Condi Rice, they thought that they knew. But the rioting youths knew better.
The Aga Khan is even more disconnected from the reality on the ground. His father was for many years the personification of a glamorous jet-set Islam, not least due to his marriage to Rita Hayworth. Nowadays I imagine a sense of self-preservation would caution even the most confident Muslim bigshot from marrying an infidel screen siren famed for revealing rather more than the average Ayatollah approves on. Today, His Highness embodies an Islam in eclipse.
The future will be determined by those youths in the European suburbs, by legions of teenagers in Gaza, by the angry platoons of the Pakistani madrassahs.
And in each case, General Musharraf, Mahmoud Abbas, Jacques Chirac and even Tony Blair will do their best to stay on the right side. The problem is not a lack of leadership, but the leadership's lack of followers.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
Even in revolutionary Paris, the ordinary person wanted peace, quiet, and stability. The problem was "the mob," which consisted of their neighbors and cousins, and sometimes the ordinary persons, too. When carried away by emotion and impulsive thinking, almost everyone will resort to violence, even if they know such violence will result in many evils, more to themselves and their enemies.
TERRORISTS firing more than 1000 rockets into a sovereign nation at innocent human beings, and the rest of the civilized world (and "The great majority of Palestinian people") does...?...anyone...?
Civilization for Dummies 1.0
Developing...
Give the teenagedconservative a break. Condi's statement is pure cr@p. God help us if she and Bush really believe it.
Bush is clearly better than either Gore or Kerry. However, that's not a great feat or compliment. I voted for Bush twice. That does not mean I'm happy with his conduct on the WOT. Specifically, playing patty cake with the Saudis (the cradle of Wahabbi Islamofacism), not cleaning up the militias in Iraq and gigging Mookie Sadr, foolhardy pc security at our airports, continued immigration and student visas from countries with populations supportive and sympathetic to Islamo facism. The list goes on.
The Iran nuclear jury is still out. However, if Bush lets Iran go nuclear his legacy will be FAILURE.
L
Sometimes gangsters can be reformed and made "respectable." But as the "Godfather" movies tell us, if you do evil, then it makes you evil.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
It's time for the "man on the Clapham omnibus" to wake up, stand up, and get loud...
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
People have a right to their own opinions. What they don't have is a right to their own facts.
The fact is nearly evey 'man on the street' in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Saudi, and 90% of the other mohameden ratholes of the world live, sleep, eat, and breathe this "Death To America" BS they've been spoon fed by their 'leaders'.
And a very, very large part of the problem is the fact that Bush, Rice, and most of those dimwits at State actually believe the exact opposite.
We're going to get a wake up call pretty soon that's going to make 9-11 look like a Sunday school picnic. God help us if the Dems are in charge when it happens.
L
Sicily was once ruled by the Arabs, and so the Mafia's code is a lot like those of the jihadists.
"People have a right to their own opinions."
I recently read a very subtle discussion of the difference between a freedom and a right. Today, these are often conflated, but they are in fact different.
For instance, God gives us free will, which means that we are free to wreak evil, but not that we have a right to wreak evil.
Similarly, we are free to be wrong, but do not have a right to be wrong.
"And a very, very large part of the problem is the fact that Bush, Rice, and most of those dimwits at State actually believe the exact opposite."
No argument about the morons at State, but I hope you're wrong about Bush.
"We're going to get a wake up call pretty soon that's going to make 9-11 look like a Sunday school picnic. God help us if the Dems are in charge when it happens."
No argument there.
It makes me think our state department likes "playing the game" a lot more than they like "solving the problem".
Can you say, "Job Security"? Or maybe, "Arrogance"?
It doesn't seem to me that very many people have even a glimmer of awareness of the threat that Islam itself represents to civilization.
worth repeating ....%100 agree with you . I can't believe how stupid and blind people are . I'm VERY afraid for the future of the US. People just can't imagine that there is a danger swelling that can topple this country .
Why is it so so so difficult for the average American to believe what you said ? Most people around here (NY city metro area ) think I'm crazy when I say we are in real danger and that we will get hit again .Meanwhile New Yorkers are walking around with targets on their backs and they don't know it .
I hope I'm wrong as well. The problem is I see precious little evidence that I am. He keeps on blathering the same infantile platitudes that Dr. Rice does.
In spite of all the evidence he keeps insisting that 'most palestinians want peace' when they want nothing of the sort. They want every Jew in the Middle East dead and they make no secret of it.
First we were told free elections by the 'palestinians' (God how I hate that fiction, but that's another subject) would solve the problem. Well the 'palis' went straight ahead and elected one of the most murderous terrorist organizations on the planet with a huge majority!
The hand-picked 'moderates' supported by Bush, Rice, and those blithering idiots at Foggy Bottom lost in a bloody landslide.
The same situation attains in Lebanon where the muslim voting block routinely sends Hezbollah thugs to Parliament!
And yet in spite of all this evidence the President and his advisors still prattle on about the islamofacists wanting 'peace'. They want peace alright. They want the Jews to have the peace of the dead.
I've had this 'right to my opinions' discussion with more than one person. As I said, they have a right to an opinion but they don't have a right to their own facts.
And the fact is that that region of the world is inhabited in large majority by a bunch of uncivilized bloodthirsty murderous savages. The thing that should scare civilized people right down to their bones is the fact that almost any one of them can be right here in America with nothing more than a routinely issued passport and a ridiculously cheap plane ticket.
Our leaders haven't learned a damned thing from 9-11 in spite of all the studies, Commissions, recriminations, and 'new ways of thinking'. Nothing.
They're going to blather us into another attack and then spend their time back-biting each other over petty details without even once identifying the real problem.
L
This grandmother?....
http://www.jihadwatch.org/
Our leaders haven't learned a damned thing from 9-11 in spite of all the studies, Commissions, recriminations, and 'new ways of thinking'. Nothing.
WORTH REPEATING >>>AGAIN AND AGAIN !
Obviously, the Palestinians are worse than Sec. Rice imagines.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.