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.
Ping
In Gaza, as I note in my book, the median age of the population is 15.8 years.That's pretty amazing.
Another Steyn bump. I am thankful for Steyn.
Im a minister an I have worked with drug addicts, alcoholics and welfare type people for 25 years, almost everything the goverment does is a complete waste of time and money, chiefly because they do not know what is really happening in the slums, barrios and housing complexes.
They think they know, and they have a belief n people that is far from reality.
[I]n 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.
This article isn't all that clear: Would the elites of the West and Islam be more attuned to demographic reality if they were cheerleaders for the crazies in their midst?
If the future of the West is to be made by bus-burning youths, it seems the current elites are reconciled to that proposition. Worse, a sufficient plurality of voters seem to be as well.
"The liberals are right about one thing: This administration is completely and utterly incompetent."
If you are, in fact, a teenaged Conservative, you're too young to have a good perspective on the alternative. Perhaps GWB has had more than his share of problems, but do some reading on what happened during the most recent two Democrat administrations, then consider the prospects of having another one. My prediction is that you will become a poster named the AdultConservative.
The "Palestinian" pathocracy is discussed in the last few paragraphs.
And, while they may not know what is happening in them, government has done much to create and populate the slums, barrios and housing complexes.
"Active intervention" having failed, we might be advised to try some "benign neglect".
Dr. Rice is eye rolling tongue hanging out stuck on stupid..
Must be an affirmative action thing going on there..
Jeese.. our leaders are morons.. And the democrats just took over Congress..
I Feel like I'm living thru a Simpsons episode..
"our leaders are morons.. "
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.
"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
OR the gross mistake of electing any democrat to any elected position.. Ann Coulter said.. 20% are conservative, 20% are liberal, and 60% are morons.. However 50% of the 20% of conservatives are RINOs.. making it 90% morons.. If you are a democrat surely you are a moron..
I recently had an argument on the radio with a demonrat state representative.
Seems to me that two of the main logical fallacies they use to give themselves legitimacy are, "I have a right to my own opinions" and "I could say the same thing about you."
I think these are chinks in their armor that need to be attacked.
Big Steyn BTTT
Cheers,
knewshound
http://www.knewshound.blogspot.com/
"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
"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
Well...you have to wonder sometimes. If Arafat, for example, started his terrorist career back in the 70s by hijacking airplanes, and went on to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds or thousands of innocents, and yet was allowed to die a natural death 30-some years later...I sometimes lose my temper and say "What the F**K are they thinking?!" Are these gubmint types in charge any smarter than the average working stiff? What the hell is wrong with them? What kind of games are we playing?
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