The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  Like what?

  Well, for example, if children “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘Yuk,’” that could be a clear sign that they’ll grow up to make racist immigration gags like the late Roy Amor’s. If we get all their names in a big government database by pre-kindergarten, it’ll be much easier to keep tabs on them for the four or five decades until we drive them to suicide.

  My British friends say of Mr. Amor, “Well, obviously, he was a little disturbed, he overreacted.” No, it’s the system that’s disturbed. Look at it from his point of view: you’ve worked hard, been a model employee, for thirty years—and suddenly it’s all over because of a single joke that didn’t offend your black friend but only the white snitch who decided to get offended on his behalf. It wasn’t Roy Amor who overreacted.

  “It’s an enormous tragedy and we are all in mourning,” said Opcare’s chief executive. But actually Roy blowing his head off works out pretty well from the company’s point of view. They could have dismissed the racism complaint as a lot of hooey, but then who’s to say the aggrieved complainant might not report them for “creating a racist work environment”? So they suspended Roy, investigated Roy, and probably would have fired Roy. And then he might have sued for wrongful dismissal and, even though no contemporary jurist would find in favor of such an obvious racist, just fighting the suit would rack up a six-figure legal bill. All in all, suicide’s the most cost-effective option. Maybe more racist employees might consider it.

  Earlier this month, Matthew Parris, a very squishy Tory gay, was called up by the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4, and many others anxious to send TV and radio crews round to his country place to record his reaction to a front-page lead in The Observer: “Secret Tape Reveals Tory Backing for Ban on Gays.” As it turned out, the “ban on gays” was a bit oversold: the Shadow Home Secretary had been musing on distinctions in public accommodation between running a hotel on the High Street and a B&B out of your own home. Mr. Parris had no particular views on that one way or the other, but the “secret tape” bit prompted the following:

  There was also something unpleasantly Orwellian in the lip-smacking way in which my informants were telling me how Mr. Grayling had been recorded—caught—expressing his opinion. That Nineteen Eighty-Four feeling was reflected, too, in the unself-aware failure of irony with which an Observer journalist referred to the view that Britain should not “tolerate” (his word) intolerance. Burn the bigots! To the tumbrels with zealots! Crack down on narrow-mindedness! No to the naysayers!

  Droll, and very British—or it used to be. But in Little Stasi-on-Avon, where you can’t make a joke in private conversation or say “Yuk!” in the nursery school lunch hour, the words of the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut seem more pertinent: “The lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology,” he said in 2005. “And this anti-racism will be for the twenty-first century what Communism was for the twentieth century: a source of violence.”

  I think back to those weeks in Budapest, and similar conversations in Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest, and I wonder whatever happened to that British sense of fair play.

  But then, I suppose, the very concept is racist.

  “THERE IS NO MORE MOLLY”

  SteynOnline, September 20, 2010

  TOO MANY PEOPLE in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven’t touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It’s one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it’s hard to see why it’s in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

  Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book—an inanimate object—and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

  Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? Why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf and his Ground Zero mosque. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’s First Amendment rights?

  When someone destroys a bible, U.S. government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maître d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers stampede to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. If you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it.

  Maybe Pastor Jones doesn’t have any First Amendment rights. Musing on Koran burning, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer argued:

  [Oliver Wendell] Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout “fire” in a crowded theater. . . . Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the “being trampled to death”?

  This is a particularly obtuse remark even by the standards of contemporary American jurists. As I’ve said before, the fire-in-a-crowded-theatre shtick is the first refuge of the brain-dead. But it’s worth noting the repellent modification Justice Breyer makes to Holmes’s argument: If someone shouts fire in a crowded gaslit Broadway theatre of the Gay Nineties, people will panic. By definition, panic is an involuntary reaction. If someone threatens to burn a Koran, belligerent Muslims do not panic—they bully, they intimidate, they threaten, they burn, and they kill. Those are conscious acts, at least if you take the view that Muslims are as fully human as the rest of us and therefore responsible for their choices. Justice Breyer’s remarks seem to assume that Muslims are not fully human.

  More importantly, the logic of Breyer’s halfwit intervention is to incentivize violence, and undermine law itself. What he seems to be telling the world is that Americans’ constitutional rights will bend to intimidation. If Koran-burning rates a First Amendment exemption because Muslims are willing to kill over it, maybe Catholics should threaten to kill over the next gay-Jesus play, and Broadway could have its First Amendment rights r
eined in. Maybe the next time Janeane Garofalo goes on MSNBC and calls Obama’s opponents racists, the Tea Partiers should threaten to behead a few people, and NBC’s free-speech rights would be withdrawn.

  But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like us anti-Obama types, and look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? A cartoonist with The Seattle Weekly, she was shocked by the way Comedy Central had censored South Park after the usual threats from violent Muslims. So she proclaimed May 20 as “Everybody Draw Mohammed” Day. What was novel about this was that Ms. Norris is a liberal progressive, and therefore a rare, if not all but unique, example of a feminist leftie recognizing that the Islamic enforcers were a threat to her way of life. This was a very welcome development.

  Unfortunately, Ms. Norris was not so much recognizing reality as blissfully unaware of it. When the backlash against her idea began, she disassociated herself from it and signed off with—Lord help us—a peace symbol. I dismissed Ms. Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark’s Mailbox to object:

  I agree with what you wrote. Mostly. But why do I have to carry all of the weight? Why won’t others do their part and step forward? There is nothing stopping others from doing something positive!

  I don’t get it. It can be like a relay race, but it’s easier to condemn and sound “right”—right?

  Molly Norris

  Seattle, Washington

  Mark says: Well, you’re not “carrying all the weight,” are you? I mean, surely you can’t be that self-absorbed, can you? There’s a guy called Kurt Westergaard. He’s a cartoonist, like you. Four and a half years ago, he drew the best and most provocative of the Mohammed cartoons. Since then, he has lived with explicit death threats, and in a house extensively remodeled to accommodate a safe room, to which he was obliged to retreat recently when an Islamic nutcase broke in and tried to kill him and his granddaughter. On top of that, he’s just been involuntarily retired by his newspaper on “security grounds.” You think he hasn’t occasionally wished over the last half-decade that “others” would “do their part and step forward”? Other cartoonists maybe? Members of a profession (the media) that incessantly congratulates itself on its bravery, except on those rare occasions when it’s actually called to display some. . . .

  Nobody asked you to cook up “Everybody Draw Mohammed” Day. You chose to do that—and, if you didn’t understand what you were getting into, then where have you been the last nine years? Kurt Westergaard, who’s 74, could have bailed after 48 hours and whined that it’s all getting way more attention than he ever expected and drawn a picture of himself in a peace-sign T-shirt. But he didn’t.

  That’s why we’re all down on you. You took a bad situation and made it worse. You announced that at last there was a liberal progressive who was going to stand up to Islamic intimidation—and then you caved, in nothing flat. And even then I could have forgiven you, if it weren’t for the final self-humiliating coup de grâce of your crappy peace-sign T-shirt. I’d love to have glimpsed the stage of the creative process at which you thought that would be just the ticket. Good luck betting your future on that clapped out obsolescent talisman.

  I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:

  You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.

  On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’s own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

  Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

  Who knows? But listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and The Seattle Weekly are telling us about where we’re headed. It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, Obama & Co. are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop.” Ooh, no, I wouldn’t say that if I were you, because my friend here is a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up, because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

  While I was in Denmark, one of the usual Islamobozos lit up prematurely in a Copenhagen hotel. Not mine, I’m happy to say. He wound up burning only himself, but his targets were my comrades at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. I wouldn’t want to upset Justice Breyer by yelling “Fire!” over a smoldering jihadist, but one day even these idiots will get lucky. I didn’t like the Danish Security Police presence at the Copenhagen conference, but I understood why they were necessary. No one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won’t be there for you.

  Four years later, there was not much left of “Everybody Draw Mohammed” Day, but there was even less of Molly Norris. As the website Blogwrath put it:

  Because of the Muslim death threats, Molly Norris, who started the event, had to go into hiding and change her name. She disappeared completely and nobody knows whether she is dead or alive.

  Salman Rushdie was, with hindsight, fortunate in his timing. Had he written The Satanic Verses twenty years later, no one would have published it. But, even if someone had, far fewer liberals (if any) would have spoken up on his behalf.

  And so it is that an American citizen has vanished from the face of the earth because she made a joke about Islam.

  Hello, Molly?

  THE UNSAFE SPACE

  The Spectator, April 19, 2014

  THESE DAYS, PRETTY MUCH every story is really the same story:

  •In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) program against Israel is shouted down with cries of “F**king Zionist, f**king pricks. . . . Get the f**k off our campus.”

  •In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.

  •At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek “special clearance” before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson.

  •In Massachusetts, Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.

  •In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from Monty Python to Downton Abbey sign an open letter in favor of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries.

  •And in Canberra the government is planning to repeal Section 18C1—whoa, don’t worry, not all of it, just t
hree or four adjectives; or maybe only two, or whatever it’s down to by now, after what Gay Alcorn in the Melbourne Age described as the ongoing debate about “where to strike the balance between free speech in a democracy and protection against racial abuse in a multicultural society.”

  I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian “human rights” commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you “strike the balance,” where you “draw the line” . . . which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

  But I don’t really think that many people these days are genuinely interested in “striking the balance”; they’ve drawn the line, and they’re increasingly unashamed about which side of it they stand. What all the above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

  A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody’s asking you to defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But even that’s further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the media are prepared to go. As Erin Ching, a student at sixty-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper after being affronted by a visit to campus of a (stand well back) Christian conservative: “What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.” Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.