‘Stan n’ Ali
ANOTHER FINE MESS
Just as the Taliban eventually seized control of Afghanistan, so they believe they’ll one day control Pakistan. Stan-wise, the principal difference is that control of the latter will bring them a big bunch of nukes. Meanwhile, life goes on. Just as the tribal lands seem to be swallowing Pakistan, so Pakistan is swallowing much of the world. It exports its manpower and its customs around the globe, and Pakistani communities in the heart of west have provided the London School of Economics student who masterminded the beheading of Daniel Pearl, the Torontonians who plotted to do the same to the Canadian Prime Minister, and the Yorkshiremen who pulled off the London Tube bombing. Saudi men pay lip service to Wahhabist ideology but it rouses very few of them from their customary torpor. In Pakistan, Islamism spurs a lot more action.
No people are immutable. It’s worth noting that Muslims next door in India are antipathetic to jihad. Yet they are ethnically and religiously indistinguishable from the fellows in Islamabad wiring up one-year old babies as unwitting suicide bombers. The only reason one’s an Indian and the other’s a Pakistani is because of where some British cartographer decided to draw the line in 1947. Since then, Indian Muslims have been functioning members of a modern pluralist democracy, while Pakistani Muslims have been mired in incompetence, backwardness and dictatorship, and embraced jihadism as the most viable escape route.
Mr. Steyn’s observations seem relevant and thoughtful to me. But at least I get to decide. If the “Human Rights”-crowd gets their way, those two paragraphs you just read would have been banned.
How do we defend ourselves if we can’t even talk about it?
Or is that the plan?
- Entries
On your point about the "Human Rights" crowd, well, just as nothing is as uncommon as common sense, nothing is so illiberal as neo-liberal attitudes toward dissenters. I hold Islamic extremists as accountable for their use of multi-culti enforcement mechanisms, as I hold big L libertarians for their use of roads - hey, as long as your tax dollars have paid for it, might as well use it, right? It's not Muslims generally or even the vanguard of the extremist Muslims that I hold liable for the actions of these so-called human rights establishments; it's the nihilistic and self-abnegating western liberals who let the Frankfurt School marxists and the victim movement hustlers foist them on us.
Thing is, as Gramsci noted, these kinds of institutions only work if the target is willing to submit to them. They have no real power otherwise. If you refuse to submit, they do not function - kind of like how Jesse Jackson and "PUSH" only go away if they are paid, or ignored. So why is it that so many victims of their blackmail, pardon the expression, knuckle under? I guess that they are unfamiliar with the tactics of resistance to cultural hegemony, practiced by these self-styled oppressed groups, groups that actually have the upper hand in practice. I suspect Mr. Steyn knows exactly what his refusal to submit does to his accusers (as a 'civil rights' group) and to the Commission - it reveals their fraudulent underpinnings, and it shows their impotence whenever a putative victim refuses to acquiesce.
Just as we live in a global economy, we also live in a global economy of ideas. When a bad idea takes root in Canada, it will be heading here, too, First Amendment or not. Especially given the outrageous habit of our Imperial Jurists to cite the "wisdom" of foreign tribunals as binding on Americans.
And that is why it is my solemn duty to put a rhetorical boot up their virtual ass.