Sunday, November 6, 2005
And here's Steyn (Hat Tip: Mal):
Mark Steyn: Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands
Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.''
''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois...
Reading the whole thing, one must be.
and i can't get my medieval colleagues to even discuss this.
i take it back. here's one:
It's by Mark Steyn. He's a Canadian who used to be a serious arts journalist in the UK. At some stage it seems he underwent a neocon Damascene conversion - apparently not unrelated to being a pal of Conrad Black, possibly also from going to live in the USA. Anything he writes can be safely ignored.
need i comment?
and another:
"It is inflammatory- not to mention ridiculous- to even draw such a comparison."
comment. inflammatory is an interesting word and underlines what i think is characteristic of why so much of the events bloggers follow don't get covered by the MSM -- to be aware of them is to get upset and even angry. as two readers wrote about David Cook's book on Muslim Apocalyptic http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0815630581/qid=1131316432/sr=8-4/ref=pd_bbs_4/102-6272315-9152122?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 -- it should not be published because it's "hate speech." a book about hate speech shdn't be published because it would cause readers to hate (or at least dislike) the haters. (i keep hearing Indiana Jones say, "Nazis I hate those guys.")
what to do (other than get the book published by another publisher)?
at last something in a different key:
"The intense and scurrilous anti-semitism endemic in both European and Middle Eastern Muslim circles (and among non-Muslim fellow-travelers in the Academy and elsewhere) has been widely publicized for a long time, for many years, on and in those "safely ignorable" neo-con websites and publications in North America and of course among certain "safely ignorable" circles in Europe. But among the beautiful people, the cognoscenti, it was considered impolite to mention them and thus we reach the present situation. Perhaps if we continue to ignore it it will go away."
academia is not entirely a "lost territory"
Heh. Thanks for those! That first is indicative of a wide strain of the problem in academia. I thought the "neo-cons" were running everything these days, yet here's a guy who figures someone who has that angle on things can be "safely ignored." That doesn't grant much confidence in his analysis of current events.
he was being sarcastic. it was in response to the earlier post (which i copied above in my first citation.
I know (I think). I was referring to the first citation. (If I'm sorting this right)
sorry. you are right.
r