by Mark Steyn
As I write, Paris is under curfew for the first time
since the German occupation, and the death toll from the multiple attacks
stands at 158, the vast majority of them slaughtered during a concert at the
Bataclan theatre, a delightful bit of 19th century Chinoiserie on the boulevard
Voltaire. The last time I was there, if memory serves, was to see Julie Pietri.
I'm so bloody sick of these savages shooting and bombing and killing and
blowing up everything I like - whether it's the small Quebec town where my little
girl's favorite fondue restaurant is or my favorite hotel in Amman or the brave
freespeecher who hosted me in Copenhagen ...or a music hall where I liked to go
to hear a little jazz and pop and get away from the cares of the world for a
couple of hours. But look at the photographs from Paris: there's nowhere to get
away from it; the barbarians who yell "Allahu Akbar!" are there
waiting for you ...when you go to a soccer match, you go to a concert, you go
for a drink on a Friday night. They're there on the train... at the magazine
office... in the Kosher supermarket... at the museum in Brussels... outside the
barracks in Woolwich...
This is what we're going to
be talking about when the mullahs nuke us.
Almost. When the Allahu Akbar
boys opened fire, Paris was talking about the climate-change conference due to
start later this month, when the world's leaders will fly in to
"solve" a "problem" that doesn't exist rather than to
address the one that does. But don't worry: we already have a hashtag
(#PrayForParis) and doubtless there'll be another candlelight vigil of weepy
tilty-headed wankers. Because as long as we all advertise how sad and sorrowful
we are, who needs to do anything?
With his usual killer comedy timing, the "leader of the free world" told George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning, America" this very morning that he'd "contained" ISIS and that they're not "gaining strength". A few hours later, a cell whose members claim to have been recruited by ISIS slaughtered over 150 people in the heart of Paris and succeeded in getting two suicide bombers and a third bomb to within a few yards of the French president.
Visiting the Bataclan, M
Hollande declared that "nous allons mener le combat, il sera
impitoyable": We are going to wage a war that will be pitiless.
Does he mean it? Or is he just
killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Malcolm
Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking about sea levels in the
Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and
Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away.
Among his other coy evasions,
President Obama described tonight's events as "an attack not just on
Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack
on all of humanity and the universal values we share".
But that's not true, is it?
He's right that it's an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an
attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world - an attack
on one portion of "humanity" by those who claim to speak for another
portion of "humanity". And these are not "universal values"
but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were
kinda sorta "universal" when the great powers were willing to enforce
them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such
as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to
pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and
those "universal values" are utterly alien to large parts of the map
today.
And then Europe decided to
invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people
don't want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and
concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish
or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live - modern,
pluralist, western societies and those "universal values" of which
Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy
who's been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in
which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.
And all Chancellor Merkel and
the EU want to do is make that large comfort zone even larger by letting
millions more "Syrian" "refugees" walk into the Continent
and settle wherever they want. As I wrote after the Copenhagen attacks
in February:
I would like to ask Mr
Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt what's their happy ending here? What's their
roadmap for fewer "acts of violence" in the years ahead? Or are they
riding on a wing and a prayer that they can manage the situation and hold it
down to what cynical British civil servants used to call during the Irish
"Troubles" "an acceptable level of violence"? In Pakistan
and Nigeria, the citizenry are expected to live with the reality that every so
often Boko Haram will kick open the door of the schoolhouse and kidnap your
daughters for sex-slavery or the Taliban will gun down your kids and behead
their teacher in front of the class. And it's all entirely "random",
as President Obama would say, so you just have to put up with it once in a
while, and it's tough if it's your kid, but that's just the way it is. If we're
being honest here, isn't that all Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt are
offering their citizens? Spasms of violence as a routine feature of life, but
don't worry, we'll do our best to contain it - and you can help mitigate it by
not going to "controversial" art events, or synagogues, or gay bars,
or...
...or soccer matches, or
concerts, or restaurants...
To repeat what I said a few
days ago, I'm Islamed out. I'm tired of Islam 24/7, at Colorado colleges,
Marseilles synagogues, Sydney coffee shops, day after day after day. The west
cannot win this thing with a schizophrenic strategy of targeting things and
people but not targeting the ideology, of intervening ineffectually overseas
and not intervening at all when it comes to the remorseless Islamization and
self-segregation of large segments of their own countries.
So I say again: What's the
happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn't prepared to end mass Muslim
immigration to France and Europe, then his "pitiless war" isn't
serious. And, if they're still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel's mad plan to
reverse Germany's demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization,
then Europeans aren't serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande,
Cameron and the rest of the fin de
civilisation western leadership will cost
you your world and everything you love.
So screw the candlelight
vigil.
