Mona Charen Archives
Mona Charen
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/charen.html
Feb. 27, 2003/ 25 Adar I, 5763
The demonstrators thronged the streets of Europe's major cities. Mothers
pushed toddlers in strollers, teen-agers dressed up in death masks, men carried
huge placards reading "Better Neutral than Dead" and "You Can't Hug Your
Kids with Nuclear Arms."
In the United States, similar demonstrations brought thousands to the streets
of San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Boston. Arlo Guthrie sang "Blowin'
in the Wind" and ccelebrities Martin Sheen, Jesse Jackson, Phil Donahue,
Colleen Dewhurst, Jules Feiffer, Meryl Streep, Kris Kristofferson, Muhammad
Ali, Jane Fonda, Ed Asner and Robert Blake leant their names and prestige
to the movement.
That was then -- the early 1980s -- and it is so very like now. What brought
the demonstrators to the streets then was President Reagan's determination
to counter a Soviet move. The Soviets had placed intermediate-range nuclear
missiles in Europe. Together with our European allies, Reagan proposed placing
U.S. Pershing II missiles in Europe to right the balance.
In my just-published book,
"Useful Idiots" , I pointed out that the original Soviet move
-- an aggressive, bullying and destabilizing provocation -- had been met
with complete silence by the left. There were no anti-Soviet demonstrations,
no death masks and no moms with strollers. All of the anti-nuclear and antiwar
agitation at the time was aimed at the United States, not the Soviet Union.
The same kind of wishful thinking about the enemy we see regarding Iraq was
on display during the Cold War regarding the USSR. Just as the Nobel Committee
has honored former President Jimmy Carter for his denunciations of President
Bush, the Committee was similarly well disposed toward former German Chancellor
Willy Brandt, whose policies smiled upon the Soviet Union. That Nobel Peace
Prize winner participated in the anti-Pershing rallies of the 1980s and displayed
the kind of credulity toward the Soviets that was so typical of the left.
"Why haven't we taken the Soviets at their word in Geneva?" he asked.
The demonstrators of the 1980s told themselves that they were for "peace"
and against aggression. Yet the inescapable consequence of their one-sided
agitation was to bolster the Soviets -- the world's chief aggressor -- and
damage the United States. Certainly the Soviets understood this and devoted
considerable resources to the "peace movement." Today, Saddam watches the
marches in Western capitals with satisfaction. Newsweek reports that he told
an Egyptian newspaper: "Time is working for us. We have to buy some more
time, and the American-British coalition will disintegrate because of internal
reasons and because of the pressure of public opinion in the American and
British street."
One might have thought that the Cold War's conclusion would have convinced
the left that appeasement of dictators is not profitable. After all, since
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, we've
heard from the lips of former communists themselves that Reagan's toughness
helped cripple the communist enterprise.
But instead, from London, Paris, Barcelona, Bonn and Melbourne, along with
dozens of other cities around the globe, we see demonstrators once again
taking to the streets to denounce not Saddam's thuggery, but the United States
for standing up to it. A demonstration in Washington, D.C., drew hundreds
of thousands, though the event's sponsor -- a group called ANSWER -- is
explicitly communist.
Now they carry signs saying "No Blood for Oil" and "Make Tea not War." Jesse
Jackson is there, and the celebrity list now also includes Susan Sarandon
and Jeanine Garafalo. But the blindness and moral obtuseness remains exactly
what it always was. It does not seem to matter whether the United States
is thwarting the "evil empire" or the Islamofascists and their enablers --
the left's default mode is always to protest against us.
It isn't that these demonstrators love peace more than the majorities of
people in the free world who support George Bush and the war on terror. It's
that they value freedom and democracy less. Their jaundiced view is that
the United States has given the world only pollution, low-skilled jobs and
crass commercialism. If their policies had prevailed during the Cold War,
the Soviet Union would be in business today. And if their policies prevail
in this latest war, we must all prepare to don burkas and grow beards.
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Mark Steyn
Jewish
World Review Feb. 21, 2003 / 19 Adar I, 5763
Liberals are in denial about the threat posed to their most cherished values by militant Islam
I think Hal David's great lyric pretty much sums it up:
What's it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
In fact, if instead of al-Fie it were al-Qa'eda or even al-Jazeera, it would
be the theme song of the age. When you look at what happened on the streets
of the West's great cities last weekend, that's really the only thing at
issue: what's it all about? Not in the sense that 'It's all about oil'. Yes,
it's all about oil - for the French, whose Total Fina Elf boys have just
signed a big bunch of contracts with Saddam. But, for everybody else, what's
really going on here?
Barbara Amiel said in these pages that the London anti-war march was an
'anti-America, anti-free enterprise, anti-Israel display'. Her fellow columnist,
Vicki Woods, evidently thought Barbara was bonkers. She reckoned the massed
ranks of demo virgins were there because they were 'anti-Blair'.
They're both right. It's clear that the organisational muscle in the 'peace'
movement is provided by the crack troops of the West's self-loathers - those
who believe Amerikkka and capitalism are responsible for all the evils of
the world. The heavy dependence on clapped-out D-list celebs like Bianca
Jagger, Jesse Jackson and Harold Pinter tends to support the Amiel thesis.
On the other hand, if you'll pardon a colonial's assessment of the mother
country, I'd say the reason the Vicki Woodses of the world lined up behind
them is the simple fact that life in sad, grey Britain is so bloody miserable.
From my recent limited experience of your wretched hospitals and crummy trains,
I can understand why it must be supremely irritating to switch on the TV
night after night and hear that Tony Blair will be tied up indefinitely
rebuilding Iraq rather than, say, Humberside. Of course, this presupposes
that it's the job of the head of the national government to run every geriatric
ward and suburban rail line, a theory not all of us subscribe to. But if
like most Britons you do subscribe to it, Mr Blair's priorities must be
infuriating.
In the rest of the West, by contrast, the 'peace' movement seems more to
do with pre-9/11 contentment. Up in my part of the world, there were 'Bridges
to Peace' demonstrations on the spans across the Connecticut River between
New Hampshire and Vermont. They just about got enough demonstrators to hold
hands across the bridge if they all stretched out at arm's length. But it
was a freezing cold day and, especially if you were smack dab in the middle
of the bridge with a pre-windchill temperature of 20 below, you couldn't
hold that position for very long. All the demonstrators were 'flatlanders'
- that's to say, people born elsewhere who'd come to the mountains because
they liked the idea of small-town life, rural pursuits. Some had their snowshoes
and cross-country skis with them, accessories for the activities that would
occupy the rest of their weekends. They were a soccer-mommish crowd, the
kind of women who run recycling programs and so forth. They loved the Nineties
because you never heard a thing about macho stuff like war: it was all
micro-politics, new regulations for this, new entitlements for that - education,
environment, 'social justice'. Bush, Cheney and Rummy are from Mars, these
demonstrators were from Venus, and they want to go back to talking about
Venusian issues. I think that's also true in Australia and much of western
Europe. This war is an unwelcome intrusion on what large numbers of people
had assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics.
The other day the Independent's Joan Smith wrote a column headlined 'It's
About Time the US Got Over 9/11'. That presupposes 9/11 is itself over -
that it was just a one-off, a freak, like a bad tornado or the record-breaking
snowstorms that hit New York and Washington this week. The storm has passed
and normal life resumes. That's more or less what happened after the first
attempt to take out the World Trade Center in 1993: America got over it,
very quickly. So they bombed it again.
Ms Smith mocks the way the 9/11 obsessives are quivering in an 'advanced
state of paranoia'. Funnily enough, this was the way her side chose to live
during the Cold War, when CND were expecting the mushroom cloud any minute
and Raymond Briggs made a fortune with his post-nuclear droner When the Wind
Blows. In those days, only five guys had their fingers on the nuclear button
- Britain, America, France, China and the Soviet Union - but because two
of those fingers belonged to Ron and Maggie the Left was convinced the apocalypse
was just around the corner. Now we're at the dawn of the freelance nuke era,
and the Left is positively insouciant about it.
Who are the principal customers for these 'dirty nukes'? Ms Smith sneers
at the assumption that 'sees al-Qa'eda or Saddam behind every tragedy'. But
these days, when something strikingly unusual happens - a nightclub bombing
in Bali, a fatal beauty-contest riot in Nigeria, an entirely random sniper
in Maryland, a mass kidnapping at a musical in Moscow - you can generally
predict there's a Muslim involved. Not necessarily Saddam, not necessarily
Osama, but Muslims nonetheless. That suggests, at the very minimum, a certain
level of Muslim disaffection with the non-Muslim world.
What might stop them taking out any more skyscrapers or nightclubs or musicals?
What do these disaffected Islamist groups want? Well, to take them at their
word, they want a new Caliphate, in which the world's infidels convert to
Islam and agree to run the entire planet in accordance with the Koran. About
a year ago, I came across a Muslim website on which there was a lively discussion
on when various Western countries would introduce Sharia: circa 2040 in the
Benelux countries, a little later for Scandinavia, etc. On the face of it,
that's ridiculous, though, taking into account demographic trends, not entirely
impossible.
But more likely to happen is what Joan Smith and the 'peace' crowd want:
we 'get over' 9/11, and we opt for a quiet life. In her column, Barbara Amiel
wrote:
Laying out the world's changing attitudes to Israel and America so barely, makes it sound like a conscious decision - which is absurd. But changes in the spirit of the times are as difficult to explain as those immense flocks of birds you see sitting on some great African lake, hundreds of thousands of them at a time, till all of a sudden, successively, they fly up and turn in a specific direction. One can never analyse which bird started it and how it became this incredible rush. All you see is the result.
The world is always changing. No one would have thought, a mere 30 years
after Britain decriminalised homosexuality, that there'd be mainstream
politicians advocating gay marriage. If you're a gay who's been longing to
marry since 1968, that's an eternity. But it's a blink in the eye of British
social evolution. So what will the 'spirit of the times' look like in the
Western world in ten or 20 years' time? Here's a couple of early birds on
the lake, plucked more or less at random from recent headlines:
Last month, Judge Beaumont, the common serjeant of London, ruled that, in
the case of a Muslim cleric accused of inciting the murders of Jews and Hindus,
no Jews or Hindus or the spouses thereof could serve on the jury.
On 21 January, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported that the court
of appeals in Eidsivating had acquitted a Middle Eastern immigrant of raping
a retarded woman on the grounds that he had only lived 12 years in Norway
and so could not be expected to understand her condition.
The man was 22 years old. Thus, he had lived virtually his entire conscious
life in Norway. But the court ruled that his insufficient understanding of
the language was a mitigating factor. He was a cab-driver and the woman was
his customer. She paid for the ride with a 'TT' card - a form of transport
subsidy for the handicapped, which he evidently recognized because he accepted
it. Nonetheless, because of his 'cultural background', an adult who'd lived
in Norway since he was ten years old could not be expected to know that this
woman was mentally incapacitated and that he should not assault her.
In the second week of January, Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park cancelled
its tour of a specially commissioned new play by Glyn O'Malley called Paradise.
The subject of the work was the suicide bombing in March last year by an
18-year-old Palestinian girl, Ayat al-Akhras. You may remember our old friend,
the then Saudi ambassador in London, Ghazi Algosaibi, wrote a poem in praise
of Miss al-Akhras. O'Malley's approach was a little subtler. His starting
point was a Newsweek cover story contrasting young Ayat with one of the Jews
she killed, another teenage girl, a 17-year-old Israeli, Rachel Levy. To
some of us, this is already obscene - the idea that murdered and murderer
are both 'victims'. They're linked only because Ayat couldn't care less whom
she slaughtered as long as they were Jews.
But there wouldn't be much of a play in that. So O'Malley did the decent
liberal thing and bent over backwards to be 'balanced'. In his play, 'Fatima'
gets all the best lines, raging at the Israelis because they should know
better: 'How can you do this? You! You who know camps and humiliation and
hate and death.' 'Sarah', by comparison, is just a California airhead who's
come to Israel for the guys and can't really get a handle on the Holy Land:
'It's, like, old.'
But O'Malley didn't stop there: he moved the scene of the bombing from within
Israel proper to one of those 'illegal' West Bank settlements. He even managed
to remove any kind of religious component: to dear old Ghazi, Ayat was acting
as a good Muslim; in O'Malley's play, 'Fatima' insists, 'This is not about
Allah!' This is not some crude Muslim-Jew thing, but instead arises from
complex socio-economic issues unconnected to one's faith.
And what was the upshot? At a read-through before invited members of the
Jewish and Muslim communities, the latter denounced the work as 'Zionist
propaganda'. A few days later, the Jewish director was removed from the
production. A few days after that, the play was cancelled entirely.
What normally happens with 'controversial' art? I'm thinking of such cultural
landmarks of recent years as Andres Serrano's 'Piss Christ' - a crucifix
sunk in the artist's urine - or Terrence McNally's Broadway play Corpus Christi,
in which a gay Jesus rhapsodises about the joys of anal sex with Judas. When,
say, Catholic groups complain about these abominations, the arts world says
you squares need to get with the beat: a healthy society has to have 'artists'
with the 'courage' to 'explore' 'transgressive' 'ideas', etc. Yet with this
play, faced with Muslim objections, the big, courageous, transgressive arts
guys fold like a Bedouin tent. And, unlike your Pi-s Christs, where every
liberal commentator wants to chip in his two bits on artistic freedom, pretty
much everyone's given a wide berth to this one, except for Christopher Caldwell,
whom the Weekly Standard sent to Cincinnati to interview the various figures
involved. What was interesting from Caldwell's account was that the Muslim
community figures didn't really care in the end whether the play was pro-
or anti-Islam: for them, it was beyond discussion. When you soak a crucifix
in urine, you may get a few cranky Catholics handing out leaflets on the
sidewalk. When you do a play about suicide bombers, who knows what the offended
might do? The arts world seems happy to confine its trangressive courage
to flipping the finger at Christians.
These are a few straws in the wind, birds on the lake. The great issue of
our time is whether Islam - the fastest-growing religion in Europe and North
America - is compatible with the multicultural, super-diverse, boundlessly
tolerant society of Western liberals. If I were a feminist or a gay or an
'artist', I wouldn't be reassured by these early birds winging their way
from Norwegian courts and Midwestern playhouses.
Meanwhile, those of us who talk of reforming Iraq are assured by our opponents
that it's preposterous to think that Arabs can ever be functioning citizens
of a democratic state. If that's so, isn't that an issue, given current
immigration patterns, not for Iraq tomorrow but for Britain, France, Belgium
and Holland right now?
What's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live? Very possibly.
Given Europe's birth-rates, the survival of the West depends on conversion
- on ensuring that the unprecedentedly high numbers of immigrants to the
Continent embrace Western pluralism. Some of us think it would be easier
to do this if the countries from which they emigrate are themselves democratic
and pluralist. But to say there's no problem here except Texan cowboy
fundamentalist paranoia is to blind yourself to reality, to march to suicide
as surely as Ayat al-Akhras did.
| JWR contributor Mark
Steyn is North American Editor of The (London) Spectator and the author,
most recently, of
"The Face of the Tiger," a new book on the world post-Sept. 11.
Jane Fonda - terrorist supporter
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