Mark Steyn, Richard Dreyfuss, & multiculturalism

 

Jaws image seen on SteynOnline

Mark Steyn’s column yesterday was in part a renewed pitch for his book America Alone The End of the World as We Know It.  Having read the book some years ago, I can highly recommend it.  But it’s Mr Steyn’s reaction to actor Richard Dreyfuss that prompted the column. Here’s some of it:

American conservatives on the Internet are abuzz with the recent interview given to Glenn Beck by Richard Dreyfuss, star of Jaws, Mr Holland's Opus, American Graffiti and many more. Mr Dreyfuss has given up acting to save his country:

@RichardDreyfuss tells me he gave up acting "ONLY for something I loved as much, which was saving my country...It infuriates me that people don't understand what this place means."

SteynOnline regulars will not be surprised by this development. Mark and Mr Dreyfuss have met only once, very briefly, two decades back at the memorial tribute in Montreal to their mutual friend Mordecai Richler. But seven years ago it emerged that the actor was one of many who had read Steyn's bestselling book. As Mr Dreyfuss put it in a three-part theopolitical dialogue with Susannah Black:

Mark Steyn, a writer with an irritating case of the smart-alecs, has written a book I urge you read called America Alone. Just the first few chapters are a geo-political wake-up call, and he is not someone I agree with very much. But he quotes bin Laden: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." And he quotes Donald Rumsfeld: "If we know anything it is that weakness is provocative."

We are on a clock we don't see or comprehend. We will not survive this century unless civic virtue is revived. We can discuss its origins all day—if we have the right to speak at all, and aren't dead under jihad.

Seven years after that observation, "the right to speak at all" is increasingly imperiled, in ever more areas - even for those as celebrated as J K Rowling, and even in Richard Dreyfuss's own field, the arts. As Mark mentioned on his first post-heart-attack appearance, he ran into an actress friend, a lifelong leftie, who nevertheless has grasped the essential fact of our time - that western civilization is sliding off a cliff. And, as Steyn put it, once that is seen it cannot be unseen.

Mark's book was never Harry Potter boffo, but it kept selling year on year, and picking up new fans en route, including from Hollywood. For a tome by an irritating smart alec, America Alone proved somewhat prescient, but its warnings went unheeded by the presidents and prime ministers in a position to do something about them.

. . .

Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school "holiday" concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug. . . . Multiculturalism was conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.

For the rest of it, click here.

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Mark Steyn on free speech: another casualty

 

image credit: contrarypedant.blogspot.com

Mark Steyn’s column today reports on another grim milestone: the death of Lars Vilks, one of the vocal few who made up the front line in the “free speech wars”:

Here's the score card from that 2010 event [in the free-speech wars, gathered to mark the fifth anniversary of the Danish Mohammed cartoons in Copenhagen in 2010]: Lars Hedegaard, of the Danish Free Press Society, had invited five of us that day - a Dane, a Swede, a Norwegian, a Dutchman and yours truly:

~The Norwegian comedienne Shabana Rehman had already had her family's restaurant firebombed; she now lives under 24/7 police protection, which is not the easiest way to practice observational standup;

~The Dutch cartoonist Nekschot was obliged, for security reasons, to appear on stage with his face obscured and unidentifiable. So he chose to wear a burqa. Funny, but not quite secure enough. Nekschot had already been arrested for "hate speech" with the authorities openly taunting him about the impending loss of his anonymity. He now lives in hiding, and is no longer a cartoonist;

~Our host Lars Hedegaard was subsequently shot at point-blank range, but fortunately by an incompetent, so he survived. Mr Hedegaard also lives in hiding; the would-be assassin lives free in Turkey, where Sultan Erdogan refuses to extradite;

~and now Lars Vilks is dead.

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, he was being driven in a bulletproof car by two of his protection officers when there occurred what Swedish police regard as a freak collision with a truck. An almighty fire ensued and neither Lars nor the policemen survived; the driver of the other vehicle is seriously wounded and in hospital. This all happened near Markaryd, about an hour north-east of Helsingborg, where Lars was born. Helsingborg, like many Swedish cities, is utterly transformed, which is why Lars Vilks ended his life in an unmarked car being driven home under police protection from a guarded lunch with an old friend.

The BBC reported his demise thus:

Muhammad cartoonist killed in traffic collision

He was not, in fact, a cartoonist. He was an artist, primarily a sculptor - of limited technical skills (as he conceded) but of whimsical imagination. Yet, as the gates clank shut on free speech across Europe, it's easier for lazy Beeb hacks to lump every dissenter under the category of "Muhammad cartoonist".

. . .

It was an unusual traffic accident. On a divided carriageway with a sturdily fenced median, the police vehicle somehow managed to cross into the oncoming lane to find itself just in front of a large truck. As Robert Spencer puts it:

The names of his police guards need to be released. As does the name of the truck driver. Note that 'the rescue service and the police said it would take a lot for a vehicle to be able to pass into the other lane, given that it is separated by a wire fence.'

The Swedish police continue to investigate. Whatever the circumstances of the fatal crash, Douglas Murray is correct as to the broader cause of death:

Lars Vilks was a man, and an artist, of enormous courage. He should never have been in this situation, and if other artists and others across Europe had not been such cowards then he never would have been.

I ponder the grim arithmetic of that 2010 event. Six of us on stage that day: One firebombed, one forced into hiding and out of his job, one shot, and now one dead. It's like Agatha Christie for jihadists: And Then There Were None. Maybe someone would like to produce a film or a play on the theme. Ah, but no: As Douglas says quite correctly, Lars Vilks was only in that van because of the miserable cowardice of our so-called artists, a "community" that spends the whole year giving each other awards back and forth for their "courage" and "heroism".

Mark’s full column is here.

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How the media manipulates the report

investigaction.net

Mark Steyn walks us through exactly HOW the media transmutes a news report into outright propaganda – step by step -- in his "Taqiyya for Easter." He starts off:

Let's say a fire breaks out at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris at the start of Holy Week, and just after two of the city's other most prominent houses of worship - St Sulpice and the Basilica of St Denis - have been attacked and vandalized.

Well, I think we can all confidently say as the first flames are beginning to lick the ceiling that it's undoubtedly an accident. Cigarette butt. Or maybe computer glitch. Probably just an overheated smart phone. We don't need to get in there and sift through the debris. We can just announce it.

On the other hand, when there are coordinated attacks on Easter services at several churches in Sri Lanka, it becomes a little more challenging to pass off multiple suicide-bombings killing nearly three hundred people as an electrical malfunction.

So, in contrast to the confident declarations of a week ago, on Sunday morning the media opted for a subtler narrative. Lead sentence from The Economist:

IT HAS BEEN nearly ten years since the guns fell silent in Sri Lanka's civil war. But bloodshed returned with a vengeance...

So it's something to do with the Tamil Tigers? Their guns fell silent, but now they've returned with a vengeance, eh?

Well, er, no, er, not, ah, precisely... But it's useful for "context", lots and lots of context. And, if you pile up enough context, you can bury the actual story. 

Do read the rest of the how-to analysis here.

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Election fraud, corruption, and jihad

image credit: huffingtonpost.com

Robert Spencer is a leading authority on Islamic jihad, and his column yesterday is about what’s going on with the Florida, Arizona, and probably a few other states with election results still not confirmed. He compares the corruption of our electoral systems to terrorism :

The theft of elections, even defying court orders to stop while the whole world is watching, is a new low in American politics, and testifies to the Left’s overriding lust for power. The Democrats have never recovered their equilibrium after losing to Donald Trump in 2016, and now appear to be willing to stop at nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to neutralize Trump and regain their hegemony.

. . .

The election fraud in Arizona and Florida is a continuation of the Kavanaugh hearings. Just as the outrageously false allegations of sexual assault and rape against Brett Kavanaugh did, the election fraud demonstrates that there is no low to which the Democrats will not stoop to gain and hold power. They will even affect a self-righteous mien of moral superiority while stooping.

The lesson that conservatives are meant to learn is not just that the Left will stop at nothing, but that the Left is unstoppable. Republicans and conservatives can vote for “drain the swamp” candidates all they want -- but the swamp will not be drained, as those candidates will not take office even if they win.

The intention is to intimidate and demoralize conservatives, induce them to give up and get out of this dirty game. This is, in a word, terrorism.

Read the full article here.

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Steve Salvi on the jihad attack in New York City

photo credit: via Jihad Watch

Steve Salvi is the Founder of the Ohio Jobs & Justice PAC (OJJPAC). He posted the following on his FB page after the ISIS attack in New York City yesterday:

Why is it surprising to people that we have terrorists in the US killing people? We have hundreds of cities run by Socialist Democrat Progressives who have instituted "sanctuary policies" for illegal aliens"and refuse to turn in criminal illegal aliens until they kill our citizens nor prosecute those legal immigrants or citizens who aid and abet their legal presence and plots.

We have inept visa programs, including the visa lottery program, which allow terrorists to legally enter the US to attack us, and tens of thousands of unvetted Muslim refugees (selected by people at the UN who include anti-American nationals) and allowed to enter the US during the Obama administration.

When Pres. Trump attempts to keep terrorists from traveling to the US, what do Clinton and or Obama appointed judges do? They block Trump's orders by supporting lawsuits filed by their partisan Democratic State Atty. Generals and or its political coalition group allies.

In another post, he mentions that the jihad suspect once lived in Cuyahoga Falls. Steve’s website is here.  

Robert Spencer has several posts on his website Jihad Watch. Here's one of several posted there today; the photo at the top is from the linked report.

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The Manchester jihad attack

Victim in Manchester: eight-year-old Saffie Roussos

photo from Religion of Peace website

Being a Tea Party person, I subscribe to the three core values:

Fiscal responsibility

Limited government

Free markets

Those values are under attack by ISIS and jihadists who have declared war on all infidels, such as us. The Manchester suicide bombing is only the latest in the continuing jihad against Western Civilization.

And to hear the official government responses, the UK (and Germany and France and Sweden and . . . ) are still playing defense. That guarantees one result: more terror attacks. As usual, Mark Steyn nails it in his “Dangerous Woman Meets Danger Man” column:

Angela Merkel pronounced the attack "incomprehensible". But she can't be that uncomprehending, can she? Our declared enemies are perfectly straightforward in their stated goals, and their actions are consistent with their words. They select their targets with some care. . . .

the arithmetic is not difficult: Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam. France and Germany and Belgium admit more and more Islam, and thus more and more terrorism.

. . .

Few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither - and, for the sake of the dead of last night's carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly.

Theresa May's statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be "defiant", but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it - like the Eloi in H G Wells' Time Machine, too evolved to resist the Morlocks.

. . .

If Mrs May or Frau Merkel has a happier ending, I'd be interested to hear it. If not, it is necessary not to carry on, but to change, and soon - before it's too late.

The rest of his column is here.

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See No Jihad

art credit: 123rf.com

IMHO, Andrew McCarthy is one of the go-to columnists on matters jihad. Back in January, when McCarthy wrote his short piece for the Conservatives Against Trump issue of National Review online, I shook my head in disappointment. Here’s a short quote:

A president may not have to be good with names to oppose [the jihad agenda] effectively, but he has to grasp the animating ideology, the power relations, and the goals of the players — and how weakening one by strengthening another can degrade rather than promote our security.

Donald Trump does not have a clue about any of this,  careening wildly from vows to stay out of the fray (leaving it in Vladimir Putin’s nefarious hands) to promises that the earth will be indiscriminately scorched. The threat against us has metastasized in our eighth year under a president who quite consciously appeases the enemy. But the remedy is not a president oblivious of the enemy.

I wonder if Mr. McCarthy has reconsidered his opinion. I’d like to think that back in January, he was towing the NR anti-Trump line half-heartedly, but maybe he still thinks Trump has no clue. 

However, in view of McCarthy’s analysis today of the jihad attacks in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota, it would be difficult to square his Never Trump position with the presidential race. Today, Trump is the candidate speaking in plain English about the threat of jihad to Americans and about screening those who would enter the United States from overseas. Here’s McCarthy on the latest spate of jihad attacks on US soil:

In the all too familiar pattern, things are going boom, Americans are under attack, and the American political class is already busy playing the “See No Jihad” minuet.

In a rational world, where our highest imperative would be to understand the threat that confronts us rather than to find the least offensive way of describing it, it would be patently, undeniably obvious that we are targets of international terrorism fueled by Islamic supremacist ideology. Nevertheless, the political class can only bring itself to say this kicking and screaming, and only if there is no other plausible alternative — which basically means a terrorist caught in the act while wearing an ISIS T-shirt.

. . .

Here is reality: The enemy that unifies the terrorist siege against the U.S., Israel, and the West is Islamic supremacist ideology, which aims to bring the world under sharia dominion. This ideology is far more important than ISIS and al-Qaeda because it is what created ISIS and al-Qaeda. It was the catalyst before those jihadist organizations existed, and it will be around when they are gone — for as long as we fail to take it on without apology and discredit it in the light of day.

The attacks spurred by this ideology, like those carried out this weekend, are international terrorist attacks, regardless of whether the operatives who execute them are affiliated with or inspired by a designated international terrorist organization. There are no “homegrown” attacks because the ideology is alien. There are no “lone wolves” because the wolves are part of a huge pack — a fundamentalist Islamic anti-Western movement that has millions of adherents, some percentage of which will always be willing to take up arms and kill for the cause.

Pro-American Muslims need us to help them discredit the fundamentalists. We cannot do this without openly acknowledging — as, for example, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has courageously done — that the roots of jihadist aggression are Muslim scriptures. This must not be obscured by political correctness. The scriptures in question must be acknowledged and reinterpreted in a manner that confines them to their historic context and nullifies a literal interpretation of them in modern life.

If we don’t confront the animating ideology and its stealth supporters with every bit as much energy as our police pursue the murderous jihadists, we lose. Winning begins with cashiering political correctness, with speaking openly about, and understanding, what we are up against.

Read the rest here. (And Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is meeting with both presidential candidates during his visit to New York and the United Nations this week.)

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Trump on Islamic threat: Make America Safe Again

photo credit: indianexpress.com

GOP Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump spoke today in Youngstown, Ohio on the threat to America and western civilization coming from Islamic jihad. The full text is here and contains extensive footnotes. Two take-aways:

The Obama-Clinton foreign policy has unleashed ISIS, destabilized the Middle East, and put the nation of Iran – which chants ‘Death to America’– in a dominant position of regional power and, in fact, aspiring to be a dominant world power. It all began in 2009 with what has become known as President Obama’s global ‘Apology Tour.’

In a series of speeches, President Obama described America as “arrogant,” “dismissive” “derisive” and a “colonial power.” He informed other countries that he would be speaking up about America’s “past errors.” He pledged that we would no longer be a “senior partner,” that “sought to dictate our terms.” He lectured CIA officers of the need to acknowledge their mistakes, and described Guantanamo Bay as a “rallying cry for our enemies.”

Perhaps no speech was more misguided than President Obama’s speech to the Muslim World delivered in Cairo, Egypt, in 2009.

In winning the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan repeatedly touted the superiority of freedom over communism, and called the USSR the Evil Empire.

Yet, when President Obama delivered his address in Cairo, no such moral courage could be found. Instead of condemning the oppression of women and gays in many Muslim nations, and the systematic violations of human rights, or the financing of global terrorism, President Obama tried to draw an equivalency between our human rights record and theirs. 

His naïve words were followed by even more naïve actions.

. . .

Our victory in the Cold War relied on a bipartisan and international consensus. That is what we must have to defeat Radical Islamic terrorism. But just like we couldn’t defeat communism without acknowledging that communism exists – or explaining its evils – we can’t defeat Radical Islamic Terrorism unless we do the same. This also means we have to promote the exceptional virtues of our own way of life – and expecting that newcomers to our society do the same. Pride in our institutions, our history and our values should be taught by parents and teachers, and impressed upon all who join our society.

Assimilation is not an act of hostility, but an expression of compassion. Our system of government, and our American culture, is the best in the world and will produce the best outcomes for all who adopt it.

This approach will not only make us safer, but bring us closer together as a country.

Renewing this spirit of Americanism will help heal the divisions in our country. It will do so by emphasizing what we have in common – not what pulls us apart.

The rest is here. Or if you prefer to watch on video, it’s here.

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