Mark Steyn: Why are we still in Germany?

According to Bismarck's best-known maxim on Europe's most troublesome region, the Balkans are not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Americans could be forgiven for harboring similar sentiments after the murder of two U.S. airmen in Germany by a Kosovar Muslim.

Remember Kosovo? Me neither. But it was big at the time, launched by Bill Clinton in the wake of his Monica difficulties: Make war, not love, as the boomers advise. So Clinton did — and without any pesky U.N. resolutions, or even the pretense of seeking them.

Instead, he and Tony Blair and even Jacques Chirac just cried "Bombs away!" and got on with it. And the left didn't mind at all — because, for a modern western nation, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you're waging.

Unlike Iraq and all its supposed "blood for oil," in Kosovo no one remembers why we went in, what the hell the point of it was, or which side were the good guys. (Answer: Neither.) The principal rationale advanced by Clinton and Blair was that there was no rationale. This was what they called "liberal interventionism", which boils down to: The fact that we have no reason to get into it justifies our getting into it.

A decade on, Kosovo is a sorta sovereign state, and in Frankfurt a young airport employee is so grateful for what America did for his people that he guns down U.S. servicemen while yelling "Allahu akbar!"

The strange shrunken spectator who serves as President of the United States, offering what he called "a few words about the tragic event that took place," announced that he was "saddened," and expressed his "gratitude for the service of those who were lost" and would "spare no effort" to "work with the German authorities" but it was a "stark reminder" of the "extraordinary sacrifices that our men and women in uniform are making . . ."

The passivity of these remarks is very telling. Men and women "in uniform" (which it's not clear these airmen were even wearing) understand they may be called upon to make "extraordinary sacrifices" in battle. They do not expect to be "lost" on the shuttle bus at the hands of a civilian employee at a passenger air terminal in an allied nation.

But then I don't suppose their comrades expected to be "lost" at the hands of an army major at Fort Hood, to cite the last "tragic event" that "took place" — which seems to be the president's preferred euphemism for a guy opening fire while screaming "Allahu akbar!"

But relax, this fellow in Frankfurt was most likely a "lone wolf" (as Sen. Chuck Schumer described the Times Square Bomber) or an "isolated extremist" (as the president described the Christmas Day Pantybomber).

There are so many of these "lone wolves" and "isolated extremists" you may occasionally wonder whether they've all gotten together and joined Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves and Isolated Extremists, but don't worry about it: As any Homeland Security official can tell you, "Allahu akbar" is Arabic for "Nothing to see here."

Bismarck's second best-known maxim on the region is that the Balkans start in the slums of Vienna. The Habsburg imperial capital was a protean "multicultural society" wherein festered the ancient grievances of many diverse peoples.

Today, the Muslim world starts in the suburbs of Frankfurt. Those U.S. airmen were killed by Arid Uka, whose Muslim Albanian parents emigrated from Kosovo decades ago. Young Arid was born and bred in Germany. He is a German citizen who holds a German passport. He is, according to multicultural theory, as German as Fritz and Helmut and Hans. Except he's not. Not when it counts.

Why isn't he a fully functioning citizen of the nation he's spent his entire life in? Well, that's a tricky one.

Okay, why is a Muslim who wants to kill Americans holding down a job at a European airport? That's slightly easier to answer. Almost every problem facing the western world, from self-detonating jihadists to America's own suicide bomb — the multi-trillion dollar debt — has at its root a remorseless demographic arithmetic.

In the U.S., the baby boomers did not have enough children to maintain their mid-20th century social programs. I see that recent polls supposedly show that huge majorities of Americans don't want any modifications to Medicare or Social Security.

So what? It doesn't matter what you "want." The country's broke, and you can vote yourself unsustainable quantities of government lollipops all you like, but all you're doing is ensuring that when, eventually, you're obliged to reacquaint yourself with reality, the shock will be far more devastating and convulsive.

But even with looming bankruptcy America still looks pretty sweet if you're south of the border. Last week, the former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Steve Murdock, told the Houston Chronicle that in Texas "it's basically over for Anglos." He pointed out that two out of every three children are already "non-Anglo", and that this gap will widen even further in the years ahead. Remember the Alamo? Why bother? America won the war, but Mexico won the peace.

In the Lone Star State, Murdock envisions a future in which millions of people with minimal skills will be competing for ever fewer jobs paying less in actual dollars and cents than they would have earned in the year 2000. That doesn't sound a recipe for social tranquility.

What's south of Europe's border? Why, it's even livelier. In Libya, there are presently one million refugees from sub-Saharan Africa whose ambition is to get in a boat to Italy. There isn't a lot to stop them.

Between now and mid-century, Islam and sub-Saharan Africa will be responsible for almost all the world's population growth — and yet, aside from a few thousand layabout Saudi princes whoring in Mayfair, they will enjoy almost none of the world's wealth.

Niger had 10 million people in 2000, and half-a-million of them were starving children. By 2010, they had 15 million, and more children were starving. By 2100, they're predicted to hit 100 million. But they won't — because it would be unreasonable to expect an extra 90 million people to stay in a country that can't feed a population a tenth that size.

So they will look elsewhere — to countries with great infrastructure, generous welfare, and among the aging natives a kind of civilizational wasting disease so advanced that, as a point of moral virtue, they are incapable of enforcing their borders.

The nations that built the modern world decided to outsource their future. In simple economic terms, the arithmetic is stark: In America, the boomers have condemned their shrunken progeny to the certainty of poorer, meaner lives.

In sociocultural terms, the transformation will be even greater. Bismarck, so shrewd and cynical about the backward Balkans, was also the father of the modern welfare state: When he introduced the old age pension, you had to be 65 to collect and Prussian life expectancy was 45.

Now life expectancy has near doubled, you get your pension a decade earlier, and, in a vain attempt to make that deformed math add up, Bismarck's successors moved the old East/West faultline from the Balkans to the main street of every German city.

Americans sometimes wonder why, two decades after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the U.S. Army still lives in Germany. The day is approaching when they will move out — if only to avoid any more "tragic events" "taking place."

Must See TV

Michael Coren interviews Mark Steyn on Canadian television.  A wonderful 45 minutes discussing topics that the politically correct world  would not dare touch.  Enjoy and share.

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



Part 4

Fred Thompson and Howard Dean on the 2010 election

If you have some time, and nothing to do, here are former senator Fred Thompson and former governor Howard Dean conducting a civilized debate about the 2010 election. Mark Steyn moderates.

If we could have presidential debates in this style, we would be able to elect much better candidates. 

Mollifying Muslims, and Muslifying Mollies

The folowing is an article by Mark Steyn on Islam and the West.  It is as perceptive and brilliant as ever. 

While I've been talking about free speech in Copenhagen, several free speech issues arose in North America. I was asked about them both at the Sappho Award event and in various interviews, so here's a few thoughts for what they're worth:

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 US 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? As Diana West wrote, 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. Where's the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones' First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man 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 line up 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. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, 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' argument: If someone shouts fire in a gaslit Broadway theatre of 1893, 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. As my colleague Jonah Goldberg points out, 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 reined in. Maybe the next time Janeane Garafolo goes on MSNBC and calls Obama's opponents racists, the Tea Partiers should rampage around town and NBC's free-speech rights would be withdrawn.

Meanwhile, in smaller ways, Islamic intimidation continues. One reason why I am skeptical that the Internet will prove the great beacon of liberty on our darkening planet is because most of the anonymous entities that make it happen are run by people marinated in jelly-spined political correctness. In Canada, an ISP called Bluehost knocked Marginalized Action Dinosaur off the air in response to a complaint by Asad Raza, a laughably litigious doctor in Brampton, Ontario. Had his name been Gordy McHoser, I doubt even the nancy boys at Bluehost would have given him the time of day. A similar fate briefly befell our old pal the Binksmeister at FreeMarkSteyn.com: In other words, a website set up to protest Islamic legal jihad was shut down by the same phenomenon. In America, The New York Times has already proposed giving "some government commission" control over Google’s search algorithm; the City of Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the Constitution signed, is now so removed from the spirit of the First Amendment that it's demanding bloggers pay a $300 "privilege" license for expressing their opinions online. The statists grow ever more comfortable in discussing openly the government management of your computer. But, even if they don't formally take it over, look at the people who run publishing houses, movie studios, schools and universities, and ask yourself whether you really want to bet the future on the commitment to free speech of those who run ISPs. SteynOnline, for example, is already banned by the Internet gatekeepers from the computers at both Marriott Hotels and Toronto Airport.

But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like me. Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She's the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up "Everybody Draws Mohammed" Day, and then, when she realized what she'd stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark's Mailbox to object. 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' 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? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that's the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he's just a craven squish. Which is an odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.

Listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, The Seattle Weekly and Bluehost internet services are telling us about where we're headed. As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that "in my country everyone is free to criticize the President", and the Soviet guy replies, "Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President." Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west's inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals' loathing of their own.

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 threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest 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, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets 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, and I preferred being footloose and fancy-free when I was prowling the more menacing parts of Rosengard across the water in Malmö the following evening. No one should lose their name, their home, their life, their 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.

Mark Steyn on Danish TV: European elites drew wrong conclusion after WWII

Mark Steyn, in an interview for Danish TV. The introduction is for about thirty seconds in Danish, and the rest is in English. By the way, if you have not read America Alone, you are missing a great book.

Must read this weekend...

My hero Mark Steyn has a brilliant analysis of the Obama presidency and the impact of two leaks.  The leak in the Gulf and the leak in public support for a president who fooled more than half of the electorate into believing that he was a genius of almost messianic capabilities.

Read Mark Steyn's article.

On similar vein to the above topic, Peggy Noonan explains Barack Obama is in the process of becoming a Jimmy Carter.

Read Peggy Noonan's article.

To complement Steyn and Noonan, we have Charles Krauthammer explaining Obama's visionary approach and his believe that the government can do everything, including the development of unknown sources of energy.  The same government that cannot "plug the hole."

Read Charles Krauthammer's article.

The Lesson of a Jewish Cemetery

Mark Steyn has once again managed to distill in an article the essence of the problems Jews are facing, and the way the world at large is reacting to Israel and Jews.

Reading this column made me remember the axiom "Not all critics of Israel are anti Semites, but all anti Semites are critics of Israel.

The article was published in the Canadian magazine Maclean's.

The lesson of a Jewish cemetery, by Mark Steyn

Jewish cemetery in Cracow

Thanks to the wonders of globalization, I’m writing this in a fairly decrepit salon de thé off the rue de la Liberté in Tangiers, enjoying a coffee and a stale croissant grilled and flattened into a panini. What could be more authentically Moroccan? For some reason, the napkins are emblazoned with “Gracias por su visita.”

Through a blizzard of flies, I can just about make out the plasma TV up in the corner on which Jimmy Carter, dubbed into Arabic, is denouncing Israel. Al Jazeera doesn’t so much cover the Zionist Entity as feast on it, hour after hour, without end. So here, at the western frontier of the Muslim world (if you don’t include Yorkshire), the only news that matters is from a tiny strip of land barely wider at its narrowest point than a rural Canadian township way down the other end of the Mediterranean.

Notwithstanding saturation coverage of the “Massacre In The Med” (as the front page headline in Britain’s Daily Mirror put it), there are other Jewish stories in the news. This one caught my eye in Canada’s Shalom Life: “No danger to the Jewish cemeteries in Tangiers.” Apparently, the old Jewish hospital in this ancient port city was torn down a couple of months back, and the Moroccan Jewish diaspora back in Toronto worried that their graveyards might be next on the list. Not to worry, Abraham Azancot assured Shalom Life readers. The Jewish cemetery on the rue du Portugal is perfectly safe. “Its sanctity has consistently been respected by the local government that is actually providing the community with resources to assist in its current grooming.”

Sounds great. Being in the neighbourhood, I thought I’d swing by and check out the “current grooming.” It’s kind of hard to spot unless you’re consciously looking for it: two solid black metal gates off a steep, narrow street where the rue du Portugal crosses the rue Salah Dine, and only the smallest of signs to indicate what lies behind. On pushing open the gate and squeezing through, I was greeted by a pair of long underwear, flapping in the breeze. In Haiti, this would be some voodoo ritual, alerting one to go no further. But in Tangiers it was merely wash day, and laundry lines dangled over the nearest graves. If you happen to be Ysaac Benzaquen (died 1921) or Samuel Maman (died 1925), it is your lot to spend eternity with the groundskeeper’s long johns. Pace Mr. Azancot, there is no sense of “sanctity” or “community”: as the underwear advertises, this is no longer a public place, merely a backyard that happens to have a ton of gravestones in it. I use the term “groundskeeper” but keeping the grounds doesn’t seem to be a priority: another row of graves was propping up piles of logs he was busy chopping out of hefty tree trunks. Beyond that, chickens roamed amidst burial plots strewn with garbage bags, dozens of old shoes, and hundreds of broken bottles.

It’s prime real estate, with a magnificent view of the Mediterranean, if you don’t mind the trash and the stench and the chickenshit, and you tiptoe cautiously around the broken glass. I wandered past the graves: Jacob Cohen, Samuel J. Cohen, Samuel M. Cohen . . . Lot of Cohens here over the years. Not anymore. In one isolated corner, six young men—des musulmans, naturellement—watched a seventh lightly scrub a tombstone, as part of a make-work project “providing the community with resources to assist in its current grooming.”

What “community”? By 2005, there were fewer than 150 Jews in Tangiers, almost all of them very old. By 2015, it is estimated that there will be precisely none. Whenever I mention such statistics to people, the reaction is a shrug: why would Jews live in Morocco anyway? But in 1945 there were some 300,000 in this country. Today some 3,000 Jews remain—i.e., about one per cent of what was once a large and significant population. That would be an unusual demographic reconfiguration in most countries: imagine if Canada’s francophone population or Inuit population were today one per cent of what it was in 1945. But it’s not unusual for Jews. There are cemeteries like that on the rue du Portugal all over the world, places where once were Jews and now are none. I mentioned only last week that in the twenties, Baghdad was 40 per cent Jewish. But you could just as easily cite Czernowitz in the Bukovina, now part of Ukraine. “There is not a shop that has not a Jewish name painted above its windows,” wrote Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, visiting the city in 1937. Not today. As in Tangiers, the “community” resides in the cemetery.

You can sense the same process already under way in, say, London, the 13th-biggest Jewish city in the world, but one with an aging population; and in Malmö, Sweden, where a surge in anti-Semitism from, ahem, certain quarters has led Jewish residents to abandon the city for Stockholm and beyond; and in Odense, Denmark, where last year superintendent Olav Nielsen announced he would no longer admit Jewish children to the local school. The Jewish presence almost anywhere on the map is as precarious as, to coin a phrase, a fiddler on the roof. And Israel’s enemies are determined that the biggest Jewish community of all should be just as precarious and prove just as impermanent.

In 1936, during the Cable Street riots, the British Union of Fascists jeered at London Jews, “Go back to Palestine!”, “Palestine” being in those days the designation for the Jewish homeland. Last week, Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, jeered at today’s Jews, “Get the hell out of Palestine,” “Palestine” being now the designation for the land illegally occupied by the Jewish apartheid state. “Go home,” advised Miss Thomas, “to Poland and Germany.” Wherever a Jew is, whatever a Jew is, he should be something else somewhere else. And then he can be hated for that, too.

North Korea sinks a South Korean ship; hundreds of thousands of people die in the Sudan; millions die in the Congo. But 10 men die at the hands of Israeli commandos and it dominates the news day in, day out for weeks, with UN resolutions, international investigations, calls for boycotts, and every Western prime minister and foreign minister expected to rise in parliament and express the outrage of the international community.
Odd. But why?

Because Israel is supposed to be up for grabs in a way that the Congo, Sudan or even North Korea aren’t. Only the Jewish state attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence, and insisting that, after 62 years of independence, that issue is still not resolved. Let’s take a nation that came into existence at precisely the same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of postwar British imperial policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift, and in Canada a “human rights” complaint or three.

The “Palestinian question” is a land dispute, but not in the sense of a boundary-line argument between two Ontario farmers. Rather, it represents the coming together of two psychoses. Islam is a one-way street. Once you’re in the Dar al-Islam, that’s it; there’s no checkout desk. They take land, they hold it, forever.

That’s why, in his first post-9/11 message to the troops, Osama droned on about the fall of Andalusia: it’s been half a millennium, but he still hasn’t gotten over it, and so, a couple of years ago, when I was at the Pentagon being shown some of the maps found in al-Qaeda safe houses, “the new caliphate” had Spain and India being re-incorporated within the Muslim world. If that’s how you think, no wonder a tiny little sliver of a Jewish state smack dab in the heart of the Dar al-Islam drives you nuts: to accept Israel’s “right to exist” would be as unthinkable as accepting a re-Christianized Constantinople.

To this fierce Islamic imperialism, the new Europeans, post-Christian, post-nationalist and postmodern as they are, nevertheless bring one of their oldest prejudices—that in the modern world as much as in medieval Christendom Jews can never be accorded full property rights. On a patch of the Holy Land, they are certainly the current leaseholders, but they will never have recognized legal title. To be sure, there are a lot of them there right now. But then there were a lot of them in Tangiers and Baghdad and the Bukovina and Germany and Poland, for a while. Why shouldn’t Tel Aviv one day be just another city with some crumbling cemeteries and a few elderly Jews?

That’s the reason the “Palestinian question” is never settled. Because, as long as it’s unresolved, then Israel’s legitimacy is unsettled, too.

Still, the impatience of the new globalized Judenhass is now palpable. I used to think that, when Iran got the bomb, it wouldn’t use it. I wouldn’t take that bet now. The new anti-Semitism is a Euro-Islamic fusion so universal, so irrational and so fevered that it’s foolish to assume any limits.

Mark Steyn: Obama's lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl

The more I read Mark Steyn, the more I am in awe of the clarity of thought with which he presents his ideas.  In this article Steyn analyzes the speech given by Obama while signing the Daniel Pearl Freedom Press Act, and the intellectual laziness or neglect with which Obama chose his words of "tribute" to Daniel Pearl's memory.  Actually, I think that Obama is incapable of saying anything critical that might be misconstrued as critical of Islam.  At this point I wonder if this is the result of his new strategy of dealing with Islam, or is it the direct result of his sympathies.  If I had to bet, I would say that it is the latter.

Click here to read the article in The Orange County Register.  I am also placing the article in this entry, so that if the readers are too lazy to click, they can read it in the this blog.

Mark Steyn: Obama's lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl

Barack Obama's remarkable powers of oratory are well known: In support of Chicago's Olympic bid, he flew into Copenhagen to give a heartwarming speech about himself, and they gave the games to Rio. He flew into Boston to support Martha Coakley's bid for the U.S. Senate, and Massachusetts voters gave Ted Kennedy's seat to a Republican. In the first year of his presidency, he gave a gazillion speeches on health care "reform" and drove support for his proposals to basement level, leaving Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Like a lot of guys who've been told they're brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn't always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the "Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act." Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That's how I'd put it. This is what the president of the United States said:

"Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world's imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is."

Now Obama's off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he's talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased's family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it's the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving and true. Indeed, for Obama, it's the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above, which in its clumsiness and insipidness is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

Even if Americans don't get the message, the rest of the world does. This week's pictures of the leaders of Brazil and Turkey clasping hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are also monuments to American passivity.

But what did the "loss" of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was "one of those moments that captured the world's imagination." Really? Evidently it never captured Obama's imagination because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl's fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: "one of those moments" – you know, like Princess Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever – "that captured the world's imagination."

Notice how reflexively Obama lapses into sentimental one-worldism: Despite our many zip codes, we are one people, with a single imagination. In fact, the murder of Daniel Pearl teaches just the opposite – that we are many worlds, and worlds within worlds. Some of them don't even need an "imagination." Across the planet, the video of an American getting his head sawed off did brisk business in the bazaars and madrassahs and Internet downloads. Excited young men e-mailed it to friends, from cell phone to cell phone, from Karachi to Jakarta to Khartoum to London to Toronto to Falls Church, Virginia. In the old days, you needed an "imagination" to conjure the juicy bits of a distant victory over the Great Satan. But in an age of high-tech barbarism the sight of Pearl's severed head is a mere click away.

And the rest of "the world"? Most gave a shrug of indifference. And far too many found the reality of Pearl's death too uncomfortable, and chose to take refuge in the same kind of delusional pap as Obama. The president is only the latest Western liberal to try to hammer Daniel Pearl's box into a round hole. Before him, it was Michael Winterbottom in his film "A Mighty Heart": As Pearl's longtime colleague Asra Nomani wrote, "Danny himself had been cut from his own story." Or as Paramount's promotional department put it, "Nominate the most inspiring ordinary hero. Win a trip to the Bahamas!" Where you're highly unlikely to be kidnapped and beheaded! (Although, in the event that you are, please check the liability-waiver box at the foot of the entry form.)

The latest appropriation that his "loss" "reminded us of how valuable a free press is." It was nothing to do with "freedom of the press." By the standards of the Muslim world, Pakistan has a free-ish and very lively press. The problem is that some 80 percent of its people wish to live under the most extreme form of Sharia, and many of its youth are exported around the world in advance of that aim. The man convicted of Pearl's murder was Omar Sheikh, a British subject, a London School of Economics student, and, like many jihadists from Osama to the Pantybomber, a monument to the peculiar burdens of a non-deprived childhood in the Muslim world. The man who actually did the deed was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed in March 2007: "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi." But Obama's not the kind to take "guilty" for an answer, so he's arranging a hugely expensive trial for KSM amid the bright lights of Broadway.

Listen to his killer's words: "The American Jew Daniel Pearl." We hit the jackpot! And then we cut his head off. Before the body was found, The Independent's Robert Fisk offered a familiar argument to Pearl's kidnappers: Killing him would be "a major blunder... the best way of ensuring that the suffering" – of Kashmiris, Afghans, Palestinians – "goes unrecorded." Other journalists peddled a similar line: if you release Danny, he'll be able to tell your story, get your message out, "bridge the misconceptions." But the story did get out; the severed head is the message; the only misconception is that that's a misconception.

Daniel Pearl was the prototype for a new kind of terror. In his wake came other victims from Kenneth Bigley, whose last words were that "Tony Blair has not done enough for me," to Fabrizzio Quattrocchi, who yanked off his hood, yelled "I will show you how an Italian dies!" and ruined the movie for his jihadist videographers. By that time, both men understood what it meant to be in a windowless room with a camera and a man holding a scimitar. But Daniel Pearl was the first, and in his calm, coherent final words understood why he was there:

"My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA ..."

He didn't have a prompter. But he spoke the truth. That's all President Obama owed him – to do the same.

I mentioned last week the attorney general's peculiar insistence that "radical Islam" was nothing to do with the Times Square bomber, the Pantybomber, the Fort Hood killer. Just a lot of moments "capturing the world's imagination." For now, the jihadists seem to have ceased cutting our heads off. Listening to Obama and Eric Holder, perhaps they've figured out there's nothing much up there anyway.

Must Read

If you are scratching your head wondering what all the fuss is about the current crisis in Greece, you must read Mark Steyn's article in Maclean's, the Canadian weekly.  He has a great way of putting complex issues into perspective, and he does so here. 

Read Article

More Vintage Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn: Getting our groupthink on

A man asks for a plastic bag at the supermarket checkout. Next thing you know, his head's slammed against the counter, and he's being cuffed by the Green Police. "You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy," sneers the enviro-cop, as the perp is led away. Cut to more Green Police going through your trash, until they find ... a battery! "Take the house!" orders the eco-commando. And we switch to a roadblock on a backed-up interstate, with the Green Police prowling the lines of vehicles to check they're in environmental compliance.

If you watched the Super Bowl, you most likely saw this commercial. As my comrade Jonah Goldberg noted, up until this point you might have assumed it was a fun message from a libertarian think-tank warning of the barely veiled totalitarian tendencies of the eco-nanny state. Any time now, you figure, some splendidly contrarian type – perhaps Clint lui-mêmein his famous Gran Torino – will come roaring through, flipping the bird at the stormtroopers and blowing out their tires for good measure. But, instead, the Greenstapo stumble across an Audi A3 TDI. "You're good to go," they tell the driver, and, with the approval of the state enforcers, he meekly pulls out of the stalled traffic and moves off. Tagline: "Green has never felt so right."

So the message from Audi isn't "You are a free man. Don't bend to the statist bullies," but "Resistance is futile. You might as well get with the program."

Strange. Not so long ago, car ads prioritized liberty. Your vehicle opened up new horizons: Gitcha motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure ... . To sell dull automobiles to people who lived in suburban cul de sacs, manufacturers showed them roaring round hairpin bends, deep into forests, splashing through rivers, across the desert plain, invariably coming to rest on the edge of a spectacular promontory on the roof of the world offering a dizzying view of half the planet. Freedom!

But now Audi flogs you its vehicles on the basis that it's the most convenient way to submit to arbitrary state authority. Forty years ago, when they first began selling over here, it's doubtful the company would have considered this either a helpful image for a German car manufacturer or a viable pitch to the American male.

But times change. As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, all the men in the Audi ad are the usual befuddled effete new-male eunuchs that infest all the other commercials. The sort of milksop who'll buy the TDI and then, when the Green Police change their regulatory requirements six weeks later, obediently take it back to the shop and pay however many thousand bucks to have it brought it into compliance with whatever the whimsical tyrant's emissions regime requires this month.

Let's turn to an item from The Philadelphia Inquirer. A young American with a white-bread name ("Nick George") and a clean-cut mien returns from Jordan to resume his studies at Pomona College in California, and gets handcuffed and detained for five hours by U.S. Immigration and Philly police. Why? Well, he had Arabic-language flash cards in his pocket. Also, upon his return to the United States, his hair was shorter than on his Pennsylvania driver's license. "That is an indication sometimes," explained Lt. Louis Liberati, "that somebody may have gone through a radicalization." Really? As Nick George's boomer mom remarked, once upon a time long hair was a sign of radicalization. But now it's just a sign that you're an all-American spaced out doofus who'll grow up to congratulate himself for driving an Audi TDI.

At any rate, the coiffure set off a Code Red alert, and Nick George found himself being asked: "How do you feel about 9/11?"

According to the Inquirer's Daniel Rubin, "He said he hemmed and hawed a bit. 'It's a complicated question,' he told me by phone." However, young Nick ended up telling his captors, "It was bad. I am against it."

My, that's big of you.

Take it as read that the bozos at the airport called this one wrong. The problem is not that Nick George, his radical haircut notwithstanding, is a jihadist eager to self-detonate on a transatlantic flight. The problem is that he is an entirely typical American college student – one for whom 9/11 is "a complicated question." After all, to those reared in an educational system where the late Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States" (now back in the bestseller lists) is conventional wisdom, such a view is entirely unexceptional. It's hardly Nick's fault that the banal groupthink of every American campus gets you pulled over for secondary screening when you're returning from Amman.

America can survive a few psychotic Islamic terrorists flying planes into skyscrapers. Whether it can survive millions of its own citizens mired in the same insipid conformo-radicalism as Nick George is another matter.

If you think "conformo-radicalism" is a contradiction in terms, well, such is the way of the world. It was reported last week that as many as a dozen men have been killed in disputes arising from karaoke performances of Frank Sinatra's "My Way." Surely, bellowing out "I did it my way" to Frank's backing track in a karaoke bar is the very definition of not doing it your way, but it's marginally less pathetic than the song's emergence in post-Christian Britain as a favorite funeral anthem: For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has not? Nothing sums up your iconoclastic individualism than someone else's signature song, right?

That's Nick George: "9/11? I do it my way." That's the metrosexual ninny in the Audi ad: "Thinking the way everyone else thinks has never felt so cool." The good news is, as in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," there are still a few holdouts. The Washington Post ran a remarkable headline this week: "Europe Could Use Its Own Tea Party." Underneath David Ignatius went through the obligatory metropolitan condescension toward America's swampdwelling knuckledraggers before acknowledging that the Continent's problem was that there was no similar populist movement demanding fiscal sanity from the governing class.

He's right. I've been saying for months that the difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament, demanding to know why government didn't do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets. You can shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multitrillion-dollar porkathons. This isn't karaoke. These guys are singing "I'll do it my way" for real.

But it's awfully late in the day. The end is near, we face the final curtain, and it's an open question whether the spirit of the tea parties can triumph over the soporific, sophomoric, self-flattering conformism of that Audi ad: Groupthink compliance has never felt so right!

©MARK STEYN

Vintage Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn has another vintage column where in his caustic tone he manages to show the ridiculousness and insanity of the left. This time in the United Kingdom. I was going to put the link, but I realized that this article merits to be placed in its entirety. Read and enjoy...or weep.

THE NEATHERWORLD

Steyn on Britain and Europe
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
HAPPY WARRIORfrom National Review

"Would it not be easier,” wrote Bertolt Brecht after the East German uprising in 1953, “for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

The thought has occurred to several governments over the years, and I don’t mean the dictatorships. Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, wrote a piece for the London Evening Standard the other day and, considering he’s one of those quintessentially slippery New Labour spinmeisters, it was disarmingly insouciant in its straightforwardness. When Labour came to power in 1997, the number of work permits issued each year quadrupled and immigration exploded. Mr Neather revealed that there was “a driving political purpose” behind this: “Mass immigration was the way that the UK Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.” From Labour’s point of view, it would have the additional benefit of helping put the Conservatives out of sync with the times: As Mr Neather writes, “The policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” If the justification for US immigration is that we need foreigners to do “the jobs that Americans won’t do”, in the United Kingdom they need them to do the jobs that no-one in their right mind would hire a working-class Brit for: The imported workers would be engaged in fields that “certainly wouldn’t be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley,” sneers Mr Neather. “Fascist au pair, anyone?”

The BNP is the British National Party, and yes, it is, broadly, fascist. But it barely existed until New Labour’s plan to “make the UK truly multicultural” got under way, and it certainly never had such a purchase on England’s white working class that the one major European power that never succumbed to ‘tween-wars fascism this year elected two BNP members to the European Parliament.

That’s the problem with dissolving the people and electing another: You’d have to be a genius to pull off such a transformation without any unintended consequences. If Blair’s game was to import cool new Labour voters and make the dead white males of the Tory Party look even more squaresville, he also wound up imposing huge and potentially fatal stresses on Britain’s fraying societal structure.

Take the recent observations of Anjem Choudary, Principal Lecturer of the London School of Shariah: “There is a spark that has ignited and its flame has become unstoppable,” he declared. “We find ourselves in the year 2009, waiting for Rome to fall, waiting for the White House to fall and indeed waiting for Buckingham Palace to fall.” Mr Choudary is a subject of the Crown but does not think of himself as such. His organization has demanded the Queen convert to Islam, wear a burka, and “stop playing God”. His website, Islam4UK, has many detailed illustrations of British landmarks after the introduction of Sharia: Buckingham Palace would be renamed “Buckingham Masjid” (or mosque) and have a dome fitted on top with speakers to call the faithful to prayer. It would be used as an Islamic court to issue punishments under Sharia, and also as a detention center for “prisoners of war”.

As it happens, Anjem Choudary is not an immigrant: He is British born and bred. But he is a testament to the “true multiculturalism” that New Labour prized so highly. For all but a few guilt-ridden middle-class liberals, “multiculturalism” is a nullity and those within its vapid bounds will seek their identity elsewhere. In a Britain with high Muslim immigration, high Muslim birth rates and high Muslim conversion rates, that means the host community winds up assimilating with the newcomers. In Surrey, the town of Sutton has just introduced female-only swimming sessions in the municipal pool for Muslim women. They’ll put blinds on the windows so no infidel men can see in, and the male lifeguards will be reassigned to other shifts. Might fall afoul of church-state separation in the US, but hey, what’s the big deal?

But why stop there? Azad Ali, the new advisor to the Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent, more or less, of the US Attorneys), is a supporter of Abdullah Azzam, a key influence on Osama bin Laden, and a man who quotes approvingly such observations as “If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation.” Mr Ali’s appointment is part of the curious British strategy of “defusing” Islamic radicals by putting them all on the government payroll.

Even if one takes the view that arresting fellows for treason is awfully vulgar and a touch heavy-handed, it’s hard to see quite what benefit such chaps are to the United Kingdom. You can’t even say they contribute to “diversity” since such views are becoming distressingly ubiquitous. At a certain level, the idea of the muezzin issuing his call from Buckingham Palace is risible. But, after the Fall of Constantinople, it happened to what was then the largest Christian cathedral in the world. Is it really so fanciful to imagine the same thing happening in a country undergoing artificially induced, unprecedented demographic transformation?

The transparent ambition of an Anjem Choudary is less deluded than the blithe arrogance of an Andrew Neather. Combine them and toss in the likes of the British National Party, and you have the certainty of profound social convulsions in the years ahead. There'll always be an England? Ninety years ago, Bernard Shaw set his play Heartbreak House on the eve of the Great War among a British ruling class too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming. “Do you think,” he wrote, “the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?”from National Review

Vintage Mark Steyn

For the purposes of argument, let's accept the media's insistence that Major Hasan is a lone crazy.

So who's nuttier?

The guy who gives a lecture to other military doctors in which he says non-Muslims should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats?

Or the guys who say "Hey, let's have this fellow counsel our traumatized veterans and then promote him to major and put him on a Homeland Security panel?

Or the Army Chief of Staff who thinks the priority should be to celebrate diversity, even unto death?

Or the Secretary of Homeland Security who warns that the principal threat we face now is an outbreak of Islamophobia?

Or the president who says we cannot "fully know" why Major Hasan did what he did, so why trouble ourselves any further?

Or the columnist who, when a man hands out copies of the Koran before gunning down his victims while yelling "Allahu akbar," says you're racist if you bring up his religion?

Or his media colleagues who put Americans in the same position as East Germans twenty years ago of having to get hold of a foreign newspaper to find out what's going on?

General Casey has a point: An army that lets you check either the "home team" or "enemy" box according to taste is certainly diverse. But the logic in the remarks of Secretary Napolitano and others is that the real problem is that most Americans are knuckledragging bigots just waiting to go bananas. As Melanie Phillips wrote in her book Londonistan:

Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing
wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the
receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the
'oppressive' majority"

To the injury of November 5, we add the insults of American officialdom and their poodle media. In a nutshell:

The real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.

My Favorite Articles This Weekend

From Valerie Jarrett to Julius Caesar to Larry David. Mark Steyn offers his spin on personalities and events in the news. Perceptive and funny. Vintage Steyn.

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For those who see in government the solution to our health problems, look at the way the distribution of the H1N1 vaccine was handled by the Obama administration. By the way, Google to find out how the press reported on flu vaccine shortages during the Bush administration.

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Will Obama be a Truman or a Carter in foreign affairs. Victor Davis Hanson offers a historical perspective on these three presidents.

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Why are Egyptian liberals antisemitic? For those who rush to say that it is a an anti Israeli reaction, read this article. There is little differentiation between Israel and Jews in the eyes of anti Semites.

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Read This

The most ethical Congress ever. Well...perhaps not.

Read Article from Associated Press

The Canadian magazine Maclean has just published Mark Steyn's latest column. This one deals with the Copenhagen Agreement and the rise of statism under the guise of protecting the planet. Regardless of your position on the subject, read it and ponder.

Click for Mark Steyn's article in Maclean

Who knows more, Republicans or Democrats? A new study by the Pew Research Center attempts to find an answer to this question. Take the test and find the results. Interesting.

Read Pew's Study

For history buffs only. A book review of Thucydides: The Reinvention of History by Donal Kagan.

Read Book Review

Hating Haters

The insanity of political correctness is manifested everyday in what otherwise would be considered insignificant events. For example, The Daily Mail reports from London that pensioner Pauline Howe was visited by the police after she complained about a gay rally. This action was deemed as a hate crime, and as such investigated by the police.

'I've never been in any kind of trouble before so I was stunned to have two
police officers knocking at my door,' she said.

'Their presence in my home made me feel threatened. It was a very
unpleasant experience.
'The officers told me that my letter was thought to be
an intention of hate but I was expressing views as a Christian...'

The two police officers later turned up at her home in Poringland, near
Norwich, and informed her the contents of her letter had caused offence.

The insanity of this action in a democracy is frightening. Having the police become a branch of the thought police, is taking another step into the world of 1984, Kafkaesque nightmares, or the descriptions in the novels of Solzhenitzyn.

Writing about the topic of hate crimes in Canada, Mark Steyn writes in the Corner in National Review Online:

Ian Fine, the senior counsel of the CHRC, has declared that the commission is
committed to the abolition of hatred—not hate crimes, not hate speech, but hate.
Hate is a human emotion; it beats, to one degree or another, in every breast. It
is part of what it means to be human... and when the alternative is a coercive
government bureaucracy regulating what you can say... you are no longer
free.

Must Read!

Once again Mark Stey manages to convey in few words and with a sense of humour an analysis of current events.

Read Article by Mak Steyn

Steve Huntley, of the Chicago Sun-Times has a scathing column basically telling Obama that blaming the Bush administration as an excuse for his problems is wearing thin.

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NO COMMENT!!!

Read this article and ask yourself what would be the headlines if the records broken were in reverse.

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And while we are on the subject...

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From London to Londonistan

Over the last two decades I have become interested in demographics and the impact that demographic changes have had on world politics. By far the best book on the topic is America Alone, by Mark Steyn. The reason I consider this the best study on the topic of demographics is that it is written in plain English, it is easy to understand without being simplistic, and most importantly is politically incorrect. Most studies conducted by members of academia are influenced by the fear of losing a grant or not getting tenure. Steyn doesn’t give a damn about correctness nor is he intimidated by thought police. A Google search would allow you to read more about him, and the persecution he faced at the hands of the Ontario Human Rights Commission on behest of the Canadian Islamic Congress.

Today I was thinking about Steyn and his forecasts when reading an article published in the London Times. The headline of the article is “Muslim population 'rising 10 times faster than rest of society”. A study by the British Office for National Statistics has shown that the Muslim population in England is multiplying at a rate ten times faster than the rest of the population. This, combined with conversions and immigration has led to the Muslim population increasing in the last four years by 500,000 while the number of Christians has declined by 2 million.

This trend is not different from the trend seen in countries across Western Europe. The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, France, Spain, Germany and Italy are facing similar demographic changes, and in many of this countries the shifts have become irreversible. After all, if a German couple marries when the woman is 27, and have a couple of children by the time she 30, in no way can they reverse the demographic changes occurring when a Muslim couple who is married when the woman is 19 and who by age 30 had six children. Many of this couple's children will at age 18 be sent to their ancestral lands to marry a native cousin, who will then migrate to Europe ensuring that by the end of the twenty first century Europe will become Eurabia.

While we are on the topic of Islam, yesterday Iran stoned a man accused of adultery. According to Sharia law, he was buried up to his waist and stoned with stones small enough to ensure a slow death. It is estimated that in some cases it takes up to half an hour to kill the the victim. I was stunned by the silence of of the media and human right organizations. I guess they were too busy fighting water boarding.

Steyn on Subprime Demography

For a long time I have been interested in demography. This interest peaked when I read America Alone, by Mark Steyn, where he makes some of the most interesting analysis of population trends and the impact that those trends are having on the geopolitical situation around the globe.

In another interesting article for National Review, Mark Steyn looks at the current financial crisis and the demographic trends impacting the housing and subprime mortgages. Well worth reading.

Here is a paragraph to wet your appetite:

Which is the situation much of the developed world is facing. A bank is a kind of demographic shorthand, by which old people with capital lend to young people with ambition and ideas. Unfortunately, the western world is running out of young people. Japan, Germany and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty per cent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 per cent to just shy of 60 per cent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, 20 per cent of 40-year old women are childless. In Germany, 30 per cent of all women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 per cent of Germans answered “None.”

Worth Reading

Links to great columns and articles:

Mark Steyn on superhero Bailoutman

Ben Johnson on Obama's science adviser John P. Holdren

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