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Mark,
     I am sick to my stomach listening to Obama and his team say they could accept the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan. You wrote a column when they fell about how indifferent feminist groups were about Afghan women. Could you re-publish it?

Lynn Rosen
Florida

MARK SAYS: Certainly. This is included in The Face Of The Tiger, if you'd like to have a copy to hand permanently. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

Omar's girls
from The Face Of The Tiger

November 29th 2001
All of the west’s flabby intellectual elites have had problems with September 11th, but it’s the professional feminists who are really feeling the squeeze (if they’ll pardon the expression). They started confidently enough. In the stirring clarion call of Professor Sunera Thobani of the University of British Columbia (your tax dollars at work!), speaking at a feminist conference two weeks after the attack, “There will be no emancipation for women anywhere on this planet until the western domination of this planet is ended.”

Meanwhile, the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism And War, which includes Susan Sarandon, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker and about 75 other sisters and is “Worldwide” mainly in the sense the World Series is, organized a petition called “Not In Our Name”. “We will not support the bombing,” they declared, and who can blame them? I dropped out of women’s studies in Grade Two, but, as I recall, a bombing campaign is a quintessential act of patriarchal oppression and sexual domination. The male pilot, looming over the curvy undulating form of the Third World hillside, unzips his bomb carriage and unleashes his phallic ordinance to penetrate his target. Needless to say, he explodes on contact, typical bloody men.

Unfortunately, this thesis, while it may get you a Federal grant from Hedy Fry, took a bit of a knock after the fall of Kabul, when to the surprise of the Worldwide Sisterhood the Afghan sisters began emerging from their hoods. Momentarily stunned, the feminists nimbly discovered a whole new set of grievances. Oh, sure, Bush is making a big deal about women’s rights in Afghanistan now, but where was he five years ago when the Taliban first showed up? Well, five years ago, he was in Austin, Texas, and the guy with his feet under the desk in the White House never did a thing - though, if ever there was a fellow with a vested interest in ensuring that impenetrable facial hoods for ladies never caught on, it was surely Mr Clinton.

But now the Taliban’s gone and, of all the various factions negotiating a broad-based government, only the original patriarch – the old king – has plans to include any broads. Washington, said Gloria Steinem, was colluding in “gender apartheid”. Well, yes, it’s regrettable that there appear to be no Pashtun Janet Renos on the horizon in Kabul, and the Jalalabad Playhouse has yet to book The Vagina Monologues, and that Take Your Daughter To Work Day has not been written into the Constitution. But, on the other hand, Don’t Take Your Daughter To School Year is now off the calendar; Afghan females will be able to be educated, get jobs, receive proper medical treatment, walk unaccompanied in public, show their faces and dress as they wish.

It was this last point that the more inventive feminists seized on. As The Boston Globe put it, “The war on terrorism has certainly raised our awareness of the ways in which women’s bodies are controlled by a repressive regime in a far away land, but what about the constraints on women’s bodies here at home?” This was in a column entitled “The Burka And The Bikini” by Jacquelyn Jackson, a “women’s health advocate”, and Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a historian at Cornell University and author of The Body Project: An Intimate History Of American Girls. “Taliban rule has dictated that women be fully covered whenever they enter the public realm, while a recent US television commercial for ‘Temptation Island 2’ features near naked women,” they pointed out. “American girls and women have been stripped bare by a sexually expressive culture whose beauty dictates have exerted a major toll on their physical and emotional health.”

Got that? Afghan men make their women cover up, western men make their women strip off.

But, according to the Montreal Gazette, quite the opposite is true: Afghan men make their women cover up – and so do we! “The burqa has many forms,” writes Linda Gilman Novak. “North American females are urged to wear burqas of a different sort. Their appearance is subtle and sophisticated and not as easy to identify.” I’ll say.

Still, Ms Gilman Novak does her best. She has noticed that various advertisements for Say What? Sweaters, Cover Girl mascara, Bonnebell makeup and Esprit clothing show models with turtlenecks pulled up to cover their mouths and copy lines like, “I let my eyes do the talking.”

“This is the sporty, outerwear version of the burqa,” writes Ms Gilman Novak. “Young girls learn from these images what society expects of them when they mature, and the message that rings loud and clear is that to speak out is not ‘ladylike’. Girls grow up conditioned to be silent. Advertising tyrannizes women in our culture. It is the Taliban of North American society.”

To be honest, the only reason I stumbled across the column was because of the come-hither eyes of the Esprit model, which the Gazette’s editors placed slap in the centre of the comment page. Ms Gilman Novak wouldn’t be impressed to learn that, long before Say What? Sweaters came along, people were letting their eyes do the talking. The gateway to the soul, and so forth:

Who’s right? The Boston Globe gals or the Montreal Gazette’s? Are we western Taliban making women strip off or cover up? Well, the answer is: Both. Neither. Who cares?

The point the Misses have missed is that the burqa was not a “cultural confine”, but the law: if you went for a stroll in Kabul wearing a turtleneck, you’d be arrested. And even “cultural confines” are mostly confined to non-western cultures – for example, to those Muslim societies where it’s the “cultural tradition” for men whose sisters get raped to kill them. In 2001, North American women face no “cultural confines”. If relentless messages about “body image” are tyrannizing American women into bulimia, how come it’s the fattest society in human history? Go to a suburban Multiplex any night of the week and you can watch Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow surrounded by an audience whose distaff side weighs an average 250 lbs and is happily chowing down on supersized extra-buttery popcorn. Whatever oppressive messages about “body image” are being transmitted, these gals are cheerfully ignoring; they long ago burst any “cultural confines”. Men, on the whole, don’t go for the Kate Moss type but would prefer something a little under 300 lbs, but it’s perfectly obvious that their views on the matter are utterly irrelevant. If you stroll around downtown Washington, you can’t help noticing that, in contrast to the heels and cleavage of Paris and Rome and almost every other western capital, there’s nothing but a vast tide of women in sneakers and comfortable, shapeless clothing.

This is their right as free citizens. But, when feminists yak on about “cultural confines”, they’re denying the very essence of liberty – that each of us is free to choose and therefore responsible for his or her actions. To equate the turtleneck with the Taliban requires a failure of the imagination bordering on the psychotic: imagine never being allowed to feel sunlight on your face – by law.

Most women understand this. The traditional “gender gap” in wars - women are usually between 10 and 15% behind men in their approval of military action – has statistically all but vanished: 86% of American men back the Afghan campaign, 79% of women. So the more interesting question is why there’s such a huge gap between the overwhelming majority of women and the feminists who claim to represent them. Pace Professor Thobani, the west does not dominate the world because it  “exploits” people, but because it emancipates them – it untaps its greatest resource, its citizens, and invites them to exploit their own potential. Some will rise to high office (Condi Rice), some will make a nice living cranking out ridiculous theses for a lucrative niche market (Joan Jacobs Brumberg). But, if you want one phrase that encapsulates the difference between the society we live in and the ones our enemies wish to impose, it’s this: the treatment of women. The gal in the street gets it. A pity the stars of the sisterhood don’t.

from The Face Of The Tiger

Dear Mark,
     Now that the Obama Administration is apparently ready to work with the mass murderers of the Sudan, I wonder if you could rerun your column about what a joke the left's campaign for Darfur was.

Michael Weinberg

MARK SAYS: Well, I've written many Darfur columns over the years, so I'm not sure which one you had in mind. But this, from Down Under, seems to fit the bill. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

Not serious
from The Australian, May 8th 2006

I see George Clooney and Angelina Jolie have discovered Darfur and are now demanding "action". Good for them. Hollywood hasn't shown this much interest in indigenous groups of the Sudan since John Payne and Jerry Colonna sang "The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish" in Garden of the Moon (1938).

I wish the celebs well. Those of us who wanted action on Darfur years ago will hope their advocacy produces more results than ours did. Clooney's concern for the people of the region appears to be genuine and serious. But unless he's also serious about backing the only forces in the world with the capability and will to act in Sudan, he's just another showboating pretty boy of no use to anyone.

Here's the lesson of the past three years: The UN kills.

In 2003, you'll recall, the US was reviled as a unilateralist cowboy because it and its coalition of the poodles waged an illegal war unauthorised by the UN against a sovereign state run by a thug regime that was no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders, which it killed in large numbers (Kurds and Shia).

Well, Washington learned its lesson. Faced with another thug regime that's no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders which it kills in large numbers (African Muslims and southern Christians), the unilateralist cowboy decided to go by the book. No unlawful actions here. Instead, meetings at the UN. Consultations with allies. Possible referral to the Security Council.

And as I wrote on this page in July 2004: "The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead." And as I wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph in September 2004: "The US agreed to go the UN route and it looks like they'll have a really strongish compromise resolution ready to go about a week after the last villager's been murdered and his wife gang-raped."

Several hundred thousand corpses later Clooney is now demanding a "stronger multinational force to protect the civilians of Darfur".

Agreed. So let's get on to the details. If by "multinational" Clooney means a military intervention authorised by the UN, then he's a poseur and a fraud, and we should pay him no further heed. Meaningful UN action is never gonna happen. Sudan has at least two Security Council vetoes in its pocket: China gets 6 per cent of its oil from the country, while Russia has less obviously commercial reasons and more of a general philosophical belief in the right of sovereign states to butcher their own.

So forget a legal intervention authorised by the UN. If by "multinational" Clooney means military participation by the Sudanese regime's co-religionists, then dream on. The Arab League, as is its wont when one of its bloodier members gets a bad press, has circled the camels and chosen to confer its Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on Khartoum by holding its most recent summit there.

So who, in the end, does "multinational action" boil down to? The same small group of nations responsible for almost any meaningful global action, from Sierra Leone to Iraq to Afghanistan to the tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia and on to East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The same core of English-speaking countries, technically multinational but distressingly unicultural and unilingual and indeed, given that most of them share the same head of state, uniregal.

The US, Britain, Australia and Canada (back in the game in Afghanistan) certainly attract other partners, from the gallant Poles to the Kingdom of Tonga. But, whatever international law has to say on the subject, the only effective intervention around the world comes from ad hoc coalitions of the willing led by the doughty musketeers of the Anglosphere. Right now who's on the ground dragging the reluctant Sudanese through their negotiations with the African Union? America's Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick and Britain's International Development Secretary Hilary Benn. Sorry, George, that's as "multinational" as it's gonna get.

Clooney made an interesting point a few weeks ago. He said that "liberal" had become a dirty word in America and he'd like to change that. Fair enough. But you're never going to do so as long as your squeamishness about the projection of American power outweighs your do-gooder instincts.

The American Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg penned an almost comically agonised piece fretting about the circumstances in which he'd be prepared to support a Bush intervention in Darfur: Who needs the Janjaweed when you're prepared to torture your own arguments the way Goldberg does? He gets to the penultimate paragraph and he's still saying stuff like: "The question, of course, is whether the US seeks Security Council support to legitimise such airstrikes."

Well, no, that's not the question. If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you're not being serious. The good people of Darfur have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what's going on. Eventually, they reported back that it's not genocide.

Thank goodness for that. Because, as yet another Kofi-appointed UN committee boldly declared, "genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated". So fortunately what's going on in the Sudan isn't genocide. Instead, it's just hundreds of thousands of corpses who happen to be from the same ethnic group, which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, at which point the so-called "decent left" can support a "multinational" force under the auspices of the Arab League going in to ensure the corpses don't pollute the water supply.

What's the quintessential leftist cause? It's the one you see on a gazillion bumper stickers: Free Tibet. Every college in the US has a Free Tibet society: There's the Indiana University Students for a Free Tibet, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Students for a Free Tibet, and the Students for a Free Tibet University of Michigan Chapter. Everyone's for a free Tibet, but no one's for freeing Tibet. Idealism as inertia is the hallmark of the movement.

Those of us on the Free Iraq-Free Darfur side are consistent: There are no bad reasons to clobber thug regimes, and the postmodern sovereignty beloved by the UN is strictly conditional. At some point, the Left has to decide whether it stands for anything other than self-congratulatory passivity and the fetishisation of a failed and corrupt transnationalism. As Alexander Downer put it: "Outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism."

Just so. Regrettably, the Australian Foreign Minister isn't as big a star as George Clooney, but I'm sure Mr Downer wouldn't mind if the Hollywood elite wanted to appropriate it as the Clooney Doctrine. If Anglosphere action isn't multinational enough for Sudan, it might confirm the suspicion that the Left's conscience is now just some tedious shell game in which it frantically scrambles the thimbles but, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shrivelled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support When It Counts.

Dear Mark,
     I appreciated your remarks on The Hugh Hewitt Show. My husband is serving in Afghanistan. The enemy know Nato troops can only fight with one hand tied behind our back. You wrote about the ROE in Maclean's last year. Please could you reprint it?

Name withheld

MARK SAYS: Actually, it was two years ago, and not in Maclean's but in Ezra Levant's much missed Western Standard. But here's the column, and thank your husband for his service in an honorable cause not always well served by its leadership on the home front. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

Operation Enduring Restraint
from The Western Standard, May 2007

The CanWest News Service report began somewhat offhandedly:

The "latest Canadian soldiers to be killed" presumes there will be more, as there certainly will. We are supposedly a "peacekeeping" nation, but there is no peace to keep in Kandahar. The world needs peacemaking militaries - i.e., armies that will hunt down and kill the enemy. Which means, inevitably, that there will be days when the enemy hunts down and kills our guys. Judging from recruitment numbers, those Canadians who wish to be members of our forces prefer real soldiering to UN crossing-guard duties. But the public doesn't, and nor does half the Canadian Parliament. And in the end that gulf between the men on the front line and the folks back home imperils the mission more than the roadside bomb which killed those brave Dragoons.

We - i.e., most of the developed world - are not a culture at ease with war. And so we have invented a new role for our militaries - NGOs in uniform, dispatched by postmodern great powers not to rattle sabres but to shine by their very disinterest. What is an army for in 2007? It's certainly not for the projection of force in the national interest, heaven forbid; it's for the projection of narcissistic myths of moral virtue, which means explicitly not in the national interest but only in the service of some amorphous transnational one-common-denominator ineffectual mission approved by the UN. It's precisely because we're unable to identify any strategic Canadian interest in, say, Rwanda that makes the mission indispensable to Canada's sense of itself. It didn't work out so great for the locals, but who cares?

War is hell. But war waged under the delusion that it's something else entirely is even more hellish. There are two missions in Afghanistan. The first is Operation Enduring Freedom, which is (as the name suggests) the Americans' show, with support from the British. The other is the International Security Assistance Force, a NATO mission to which the Yanks and Brits contribute but whose broad character is determined by the Europeans. Canada is in Afghanistan as part of ISAF. So, for example, when our chaps ran into a spot of bother in the south and called in air support from their NATO comrades in a neighbouring province, the Continentals refused on the grounds that their rules of engagement do not permit them to leave their own province. All for one and one for all, as long as I don't have to leave the house. The Afghan mission is a classic NATO racket: two dozen countries have bravely volunteered to man the photocopier back at barracks in the somnolent north; a far smaller number want to take on the Taliban in the far more dangerous south. The ones that do are, as I've written before, strikingly unicultural: America, Britain, Canada, Australia (which isn't even a NATO member but makes a more meaningful contribution than most of the countries that are), plus the Netherlands, which isn't officially an English-speaking country but which speaks better English than most of the ones that are.

They held a NATO summit in Quebec City the other day and Canadian officials tried to get the Europeans to try to revise their position on out-of-province air support. The Germans and their pals nixed any such butching up of their mandate but did agree to consider leaving their placid northern provinces and heading for the badlands in the event of a serious emergency. Big of them. The last time I was at the Pentagon the bigwigs were distinguishing in a very jocular fashion between the NATO members that fight and those that don't. There are way too many in the latter camp.

But what worries me is not NATO's non-military military allies but the very small number of countries that are still prepared to go into combat. Recently Greg Sheridan had a fascinating column in The Australian, including this choice tidbit:

I wonder how many of that vast crew of Taliban bit players ISAF is not allowed to target have gone on a week or two later to blow up ISAF men like Master Corporal Stewart and Trooper Pentland. Greg Sheridan brought up the rules of engagement in the course of a disquisition on the latest Aussie deployment. John Howard's ministry originally wanted its chaps to go into Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom but came under pressure from the Europeans to go in under the ISAF auspices. They agreed, but insisted on retaining operational control and following the rules of engagement "in an Australian way." As Sheridan put it, "Sending soldiers into harm's way is a serious and profoundly consequential business. Canberra's view is you either send them in to do the business, or you're better off not sending them at all."

That's correct. But, as becomes clearer every day, in Afghanistan the "international community" seems to have erected a system explicitly designed to make it all but impossible to "do the business." As a matter of policy, the civilized world fights not by Marquess of Queensbury rules but out of some kinky Marquis de Sade self-flagellation fetish. Imagine if you're a Taliban commander and you know about these absurdly constrained "rules of engagement" that enable the bulk of your forces to move around with impunity. Imagine if you're an Iranian provocateur and you know that the Royal Navy are under orders not to "escalate" the situation. Imagine you're a Syrian jihadist running raids over into al-Anbar province in Iraq and you know that the U.S. has chosen not to avail itself of the right of hot pursuit. To be able to assume restraint on the part of your enemy is a huge advantage.

The historian Victor Davis Hanson calls the present state of our world "post-western." That's to say, the behaviour of the functioning nations on whom global order depends makes sense only in the context of an exhausted civilization that no longer believes in anything, that is merely killing time before time kills us. There are degrees of decay, of course: first, the NATO members who won't fight at all; then, the NATO members who will fight but only if sufficiently sensitive rules of engagement tie one hand behind their backs; and finally the hyperpower itself, which garrisons not remote ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest allies, almost two decades after the Cold War and thereby absolves them of a critical attribute of an adult nation: the defence of the realm.

This is asymmetrical warfare: in Iraq and Afghanistan, the enemy is waging total war on all fronts - blowing up schools and mosques and markets full of their fellow Muslims in order to provide the nightly scenes of carnage for the evening news back in Europe and North America. We, on the other hand, refuse to fight total war, and operate through institutions and alliances that decline to acknowledge even the possibility of such a vulgar concept. "It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it," General MacArthur said -and so it has proved time and again. The ISAF rules of engagement give grave cause for concern. The Royal Canadian Dragoons are tough men doing a tough job. They deserve to be allowed to get on with it.

Dear Mark,
     Last year, you wrote about a correspondent who said to you that the US was so rich and powerful that "we can afford to be stupid".  Now, a year later, after an economic meltdown and with a reckless narcissist as president, I'm wonder just how much stupidity any country can really afford.  It seems to me the bill has come due with startling suddenness.  Could you please reprint the piece you wrote on the subject?  Thanks!

Wanda Sherratt
Ottawa

MARK SAYS: The column you're referring to originally appeared in Maclean's and is anthologized in Lights Out. As the title says, it's about societal "self-loathing", starting with our reaction to Islam and moving on to a broader sense of civilizational ennui. But the logic behind "we're rich enough to afford to be stupid" assumes that we will remain rich enough, which is why I've had cause to revisit the phrase in the last year. So here's the original essay. And don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

The Song of Civilizational Self-Loathing
from Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West, May 12th 2008

A couple of years ago, an Australian reader wrote to say he was beginning to feel as Robert Frost did in “A Minor Bird”:

My correspondent’s unceasingly cheeping bird was Islam. He was fed up waking every morning and reading of the latest offence taken by the more excitable Mohammedans. If memory serves, this exhaustion was prompted by a Muslim protest outside Westminster Cathedral demanding death for the Pope. It was organized by a fellow called Anjem Choudhary, who says that “whoever insults the message of Mohammed is going to be subject to capital punishment.” But then again it might have been some other provocation entirely – say, the chocolate swirl on the top of a Burger King dessert carton that an aggrieved customer complained bore too close a resemblance to the Arabic script for “Allah” (the offending menu item was subsequently withdrawn). If you’re that eager to take offence, it’s not difficult to find it. Or as President Bush said to me around the same time: “If it’s not the Crusades, it’s the cartoons.”

Which would make a great bumper sticker. It encapsulates perfectly not only the inability of the perpetually aggrieved to move on, millennium-in millennium-out, but also the utter lack of proportion.

Anyway, my New York Times bestseller (and Canadian hate crime) America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It is released in paperback across the Dominion’s bookstores this week, and, if a mere excerpt in Maclean’s was enough to generate two “human rights” prosecutions, the softcover edition should be good for a full-blown show trial followed by a last cigarette and firing squad – although, this being Canada, there’ll be no last cigarette. (To mark the paperback launch, I’ll be in Toronto at the Bay & Bloor branch of Indigo on Wednesday May 7th with my old pal Heather Reisman. So do come along if you’re interested in hearing what the book’s about, or if you’re an Ontario “Human Rights” Commissar and you’d like to arrest me.) In any event, with a new round of promotional interviews looming, several readers wrote to ask if I ever felt like my Australian pal: Don’t I wish the Islamic bird would just fly away? Wouldn’t it be nice not to be up to your neck in jihad 24/7?

I’m using “up to your neck” metaphorically, but a lot of chaps are more literal. Naeem Muhammad Khan, the unemployed Torontonian whose website urges that the “apostasy” of Maclean’s contributor Tarek Fatah and other Muslim moderates be punished by death, says of one of his targets: “Behead her!!! And make a nice video and post it on YouTube.” There is no point wishing Mr Khan would fly away and not sing by our house all day. He’s here to stay, and anyone who advocated, say, his deportation would find himself assailed by moderate reasonable Canadians horrified at such a betrayal of our multicultural values.

Which is the point. For as Robert Frost’s poem continues:

In the case of an enfeebled west at twilight, the fault is wholly in us. After September 11th 2001, many agonized progressives looked at America and its allies’ relations with the Muslim world and argued that we need to ask ourselves: Why do they hate us? As Brian Dunn, a Michigan blogger, put it, a more relevant question is: Why do we hate us? After all, if all our institutions, from grade school to public broadcasting to Hollywood movies to Canadian “human rights” commissars, operate from the basic assumption that western civilization is the font of racism, imperialism, oppression, exploitation and all the other ills of the world, why be surprised that the rest of humanity takes us at our word?

“Multiculturalism” is a unicultural phenomenon. It exists only as a western fetish, and we don’t believe in it, not really. Most people, given the choice, want to live in an advanced western society. That’s why even impeccably PC lefties refer carelessly to other cultures as “developing nations”: the phrase assumes they’re “developing” into something closer to ours, because that’s the direction of progress. Even hardcore multiculturalists want to live in a western society. For one thing, that’s the only place you can make a living as a multiculturalist. The general thinking was summed up in an email I got the other day from a reader arguing that there was no point getting irked by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s call for the introduction of sharia in the United Kingdom. We are, said my correspondent, “rich enough to afford to be stupid.”

I wonder if it’s quite that simple. We are encouraging of certain forms of assertiveness: I am woman, hear me roar! Say it loud, I’m black and proud! We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it! But the one identity we’re enjoined not to trumpet is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others: our identity as citizens of a very specific kind of society with a very particular inheritance, built on the rule of law, property rights, and freedom of speech. Heaven forbid we should assert any of that: I am western, hear me apologize! Say it loud, I’m Dutch and cowed! We’re Brits, we’re shits, awf’lly sorry about that!

If you no longer know what you stand for, how can you know what you stand against? That’s why Swedish cabinet ministers say we should be nice to Muslims now so that when they’re in the majority they’ll be nice to us, and Dutch cabinet ministers say they’d have no objection to sharia as long as a majority of Dutch electors voted for it, and Canadian Prime Ministers say things like: “I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree.”

That was Paul Martin, and he was reacting to the news that the youngest Khadr boy and his mum had landed at Pearson to renew their OHIP cards. Junior had been paralyzed in the shootout with Pakistani forces that killed his dad, the highest-ranking Canuck in al-Qaeda (at least until Osama’s Canadian passport turns up in the back of the cave). And, not fancying a prison hospital in Peshawar, the kid and his mum flew “home” to enjoy the benefits of Ontario health care. Would it have killed Mr Martin to express mild distaste at the idea of your tax dollars paying for the treatment of a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience but unfortunately that’s the law, blah blah blah? Apparently so. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of a multicultural state so boundlessly tolerant it even lets you choose what side of the Afghan war you’re on: When the draft card arrives, just check “home team” or “enemy” according to taste. We’ll still be congratulating ourselves on our boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume us.

Which is more likely? That the Ontario “Human Rights” Commission will investigate Naeem Muhammad Khan for his explicit incitement to murder? Or that it will rebuke Maclean’s for being so “racist” and “Islamophobic” as to quote such chaps? Well, they’ve already done the latter. So have Her Majesty’s constabulary in England. After Channel 4 broadcast an undercover report showing imams in British mosques urging the murder of gays and apostates and whatnot, the West Midlands Police launched an investigation …into the TV network for its insensitive “Islamophobia”. As Bruce Bawer, a gay American who lives in Scandinavia, writes in the current City Journal:

Indeed. The bird that needs to fly the coop is the one that’s been chirruping away with the Song of Civilizational Self-Loathing for two generations now. To quote another landmark of ornithological versifying:

Spread your tiny wings and fly away.