Steyn on the "dots we don't want to connect" to radical Islam

Mark Steyn had a lot to write about this week. And he started with Eric Holder's obvious discomfort when confronted with questions at a congressional hearing about whether "radical Islam" motivates people to commit terrorist acts:

At Fort Hood, Maj. Hasan jumped on a table and gunned down his comrades while screaming, "Allahu Akbar!", which is Arabic for "Nothing to see here" and an early indicator of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Times Square Bomber, we are assured by The Washington Post, CNN and Newsweek, was upset by foreclosure proceedings on his house. Mortgage-related issues. Nothing to do with months of training at a Taliban camp in Waziristan.

Listening to Attorney General Holder, one is tempted to modify Trotsky:

You may not be interested in Islam but Islam is interested in you. Islam smells weakness at the heart of the West. The post-World War II order is dying: The European Union's decision to toss a trillion dollars to prop up a Greek economic model that guarantees terminal insolvency is merely the latest manifestation of the chronic combination of fiscal profligacy and demographic decline in the West at twilight. Islam is already the biggest supplier of new Europeans and new Canadians, and the fastest-growing demographic in the Western world.

Therefore, it thinks it not unreasonable to shape the character of those societies - not by blowing up buildings and airplanes, but by determining the nature of their relationship to Islam.

A lest you think America is immune, Steyn points out that it isn't only Holder:

Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians noted that certain, ahem, "immigrant communities" were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo "female genital mutilation." So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They're not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a "ritual nick" to young girls.

A few years back, I thought even fainthearted Western liberals might draw the line at "FGM." After all, it's a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: Its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure.

True, many of us hapless Western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.

A ritual what? How very multi-cultural of them. Perhaps we can arrange it so the AAP doctors can all get a "ritual nick." I mean, how painful can it be, really?

Read the rest of this brilliant, troubling essay.


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