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.
And that is why Dr. Rice will fail.
L
Yes, they do. You aren't the only "smart" one in the world.
"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."
I'm really tired right now, and the argument is still in development, so this is going to be cursory.
I don't agree that people have a right to an incorrect opinion. We -- and God -- accord people the freedom to be wrong, but there can be no right to be wrong.
That is an important distinction, because in saying that people have a right to an opinion, we accord opinions legitimacy just by virtue of the fact that they are someone's opinion, even if they are grossly mistaken, or even evil.
It is much better to say that people are free to be wrong.
As for the rest of your post, can't disagree. Wish I could, but I can't.
That's quite a word bomb you dropped. I would love to hear all your explanations of why you believe that. Could it come from your indepth studies or do you find it easier just to parrot what you read?
Those idiots at State are going to be responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people before this is over.
L
Wrong. Sicily was once ruled by the Moors. The Moors were African, not Arab.
L
Rice is a Russian specialist and not a Middle East specialists. So, she gets her briefings and her understandings from the Arabists, who can produce long, long scholarship (some good but the most garbage) that shore up their contentions.
Let's not let him/her post that the administration is "completely and utterly incompetent" without back up.
Where as I do not agree with this Administration's Israeli policy (check out my home page to find out why), this administration has done more to fight, combat, and win over Islam than all other administrations put together. That is hardly "complete and utter incompetence".
Furthermore, the President gave Israel all the international cover it needed to destroy Hizbollah it could have wanted, but Israel lacked the will to kill its soldiers in order to destroy its enemy.
Now, I am all up for a debate on how to fight the war. Whether a limited war with huge political safeguards is the correct way to go about it. Or should we unleash total war and just get it done. The debate should be made.
But, total war means all Muslims are our enemies. It means that all Muslims are "jihadists" and all Muslims want our deaths. That is simply not true. And it is the use of the one broad paint brush in international affairs that I strenuously object to. Teenaged Conservative used it. Let's not let such sloppy thinking be encouraged.
Marking.
We would have run away from the fight (like Reagan in Lebanon), we would have coerced our ally (Israel) into feeling like she had no choice but to make her own peace with the Palestinians (Oslo Accords), or we would have changed the whole truth of Islam terrorism from state sponsored terrorism to a nameless-faceless shadowy group that we can only prosecute when we have enough evidence (Clinton).
This administration has not done that. Since 9/11, they have been on the offensive.
I believe that I will see the destruction of the USA in my lifetime and I'm in my late 40s.
There are times that I fear for the republic as well. Mark Steyn said that a civilization that believes it is not worth defending is dead already. I have the opportunity to mix with young graduate students every day and they absolutely feel that this great nation is the reason for all the ills of the earth (and are backed up by the academia they are so enthralled with). And when I hear that, I think...this great nation will be gone before I am reach old age.
"Yes, they do. You aren't the only "smart" one in the world."
I see no evidence of that. There really aren't enough that understand to make a difference.
Where aren't there enough that understand to make a difference.
I'm sorry, but your post is rather unclear.
Well, I wouldn't want to bore you with anymore of my odd answers, so thanks for posting to me. Have a nice day.
Condi '08 !!
Haven't seen those folks for a while... ;)
this administration has done more to fight, combat, and win over Islam than all other administrations put together
True but silly. Of course he has. 9/11 occured during his administration. FDR did more to fight facism than all prior administrtions. So what.
Nothing in your response that would interest me in carrying the conversation any further.
Feel free to ignore my posts in the future.
"But, total war means all Muslims are our enemies. It means that all Muslims are "jihadists" and all Muslims want our deaths."
Aha! Thank you very much. That is the error I've been trying to identify.
No, there is no requirement to believe those things. One must only understand that Islam, by its very nature, will periodically spawn Jihadists...that, in fact, Islam was designed to do just that.
Certainly there will be a number of innocuous Muslims at any given time, but as long as Islam is allowed to exist, the world will always be faced with the prospect of Jihad.
Islam itself is the enemy, regardless of the numbers of innocuous Muslims.
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