Soon the slaughter at the Ariana Grande concert will be a week behind us. I've been seething all that time at the shameless display of euro cowardice - or at least euro cowardice from the usual suspects: our glib, arrogant, coward politicians and their lackeys in MSM. Indeed, I have NOWHERE come across a statement from a leading politician who labeled the callous terror attack with the proverb 'muslim' or 'islamic'. It's disheartening and depressing, since that is EXACTLY what it was, for the umpteenth time.
Mark Steyn came up with two columns of such remarkable insight and wisdom that I suspect that, a long time from now, these words will be upheld, reproduced, and reoffered on a huge scale to a wiser public - provided islam does not succeed - as the perfect illustration of the insanity ruling our times.
Here are some key exerpts from his post
'Dangerous Woman meets Dangerous Man', May 23, 2017:
"... A few weeks ago the BBC reported that "approximately 850 people" from the United Kingdom have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for Isis and the like. That's more volunteers than the IRA were able to recruit in thirty years of the "Troubles", when MI5 estimated that they never had more than a hundred active terrorists out in the field. This time maybe it's the exotic appeal of foreign travel, as opposed to a month holed up in a barn in Newry.
No assholes, there are other ways to respond to attacks like in Manchester: calling a spade a spade and IDENTIFYING this mass murder as islamic might be a good start.
Carrying on in Germany, 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. For a while, it was Europe's Jews, at a Brussels museum and a Toulouse school and a Copenhagen synagogue and a Paris kosher supermarket. But Continentals are, except for political photo-ops on Holocaust Memorial Day, relatively heartless about dead Jews, and wrote off such incidents as something to do with "Israeli settlements" and "occupation" and of no broader significance.
So they moved on to slaughter 49 gays in a nightclub in Orlando - the biggest mound of gay corpses ever piled up in American history and the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11. But all the usual noisy LGBTQWERTY activists fell suddenly silent, as if they'd all gone back in the closet and curled up in the fetal position. And those Democrats who felt obliged to weigh in thought it was something to do with the need for gun control...
So they targeted provocative expressions of the infidel's abominable false religion, decapitating a French priest at Mass and mowing down pedestrians at a Berlin Christmas market. But post-Christian Europe takes Christianity less seriously than its enemies do, and so that too merited little more than a shrug and a pledge to carry on.
So they selected symbols of nationhood, like France's Bastille Day, Canada's Cenotaph, and the Mother of Parliaments in London. But taking seriously assaults on your own nation's symbols would require you to take your nation seriously, and most western citizens are disinclined to do so. As the great universal talismanic anthem of the age has it, "Imagine there's no countries/It's easy if you try..."
So the new Caliphate's believers figured out that what their enemy really likes is consumerism and pop music. Hence the attacks on the Champs-Élysées and the flagship Åhléns department store in Stockholm, and the bloodbath at the Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris and now at Ariana Grande's "Dangerous Woman" tour.
In the decade since the Canadian Islamic Congress launched their "flagrant Islamophobia' lawsuits over my book, various comrades such as Ezra Levant and Douglas Murray have noted, correctly, that a principled commitment to free speech has always been a minority concern - and an even smaller minority with respect to free speech about Islam. As the most learned imam John Kerry put it with respect to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, there was "a sort of particularised focus and perhaps even a legitimacy – not a legitimacy, but a rationale..." Those cartoonists, they were all wearing short skirts and asking for it.
Conversely, most other western citizens believe that, to invert Trotsky, if you're not interested in Islam, Islam won't be interested in you. Ariana Grande was eight at the time of 9/11, and most of her fans even younger. They have passed their entire sentient lives in the age of Islamic terror, yet somehow assume it's something compartmentalized and sealed off from them. "Dangerous Woman" is meant to be an attitude, nothing more - an edgy pose in a pop culture that lost any edge long ago; a great T-shirt, like the ones last night scavenged from the merchandising stands and used to bandage the wounded. It must come as a shock to realize there are those who take your ersatz provocations as the real thing, and are genuinely provoked by them.
"Carrying on exactly as before", as The Independent advises, will not be possible. A few months ago, I was in Toulouse, where Jewish life has vanished from public visibility and is conducted only behind the prison-like walls of a fortress schoolhouse and a centralized synagogue that requires 24/7 protection by French soldiers; I went to Amsterdam, which is markedly less gay than it used to be; I walked through Molenbeek after dark, where unaccompanied women dare not go. You can carry on, you can stagger on, but life is not exactly as it was before. Inch by inch, it's smaller and more constrained...."
The day after he ran a short article
rightfully blasting the #Stand United bozos:
"...Twenty-four hours after the Manchester attack, I joined Evan Solomon on CFRA in Ottawa to talk about what it meant and where we go. You can hear the full interview here (scroll down if necessary). I began by making the point that I was offended by the media coverage's Orwellian inversion of language - whereby "#ManchesterStrong" means a limp passivity of flowers and candlelight vigils and teddy bears for a couple of days before we all forget it until the next "strong" "united" community gets blown apart.
My thoughts yesterday did not meet with universal agreement. Linda Cianchetti emails:
The killer was the queen of England's clan.
Rothschild Soros club.
Stop zionist Israel jews from manufacturing all this illusion. They are the banking cartel around the world. Stop blaming everyone but the culprits, themselves. Or we will have no respect for journalists and the tales they put out.
Well, thanks for clearing that up.
I get a lot more of this than I used to. I suspect Ms Cianchetti would blame "zionist Israel jews" and "the queen of England's clan" whatever happened, but it's a close call whether she's any more detached from reality than, say, Newsweek fretting about "reprisals" against Muslims or the nincompoop diversicrat who serves as Chief Constable of Greater Manchester sternly warning that we must not "tolerate hate" - by which he means not the hate of people who shred little girls' bodies with nail bombs but the mean-spirited Tweets of people who get angry at the people who shred little girls' bodies with nail bombs.
Newsweek's columnist Conor Gaffey, a Monumental Idiot, should have been forced to pull bolts and nails out of little girls' bodies.
If Winston Churchill would have been PM instead of lame duck Theresa May, Ian Hopkins, Manchester's foul, incompetent Orwellian IDIOT of a Chief Constable would by this time have been overseeing rusting whale stations in South Georgia instead of police operations in Greater Manchester. In a sane society, YOU shouldn't be tolerated asshole.
The Official Lies are getting more ludicrous, and (with respect to the investigation of Fleet Street columnists for entirely innocuous observations) dangerous and totalitarian. One further danger of the Official Lies is that their obvious fraudulence bolsters the confidence of Ms Cianchetti and the similarly inclined in their derangements..."
Political correctness will be the death of us.
MFBB.
