Okay Steyn, Now What?

27 February, 2006. 391 words.

By Thomas Krehbiel *

Mark Steyn’s latest is Needing to wake up, West just closes its eyes.

I didn’t care too much for the other two Steyn pieces I wrote about (see below), partially because of the content, and partially because I just didn’t like his writing style. They seemed like first drafts, rambling and winding all over the place, in need of serious editing. But Steyn is much-quoted in the conservative blogosphere (especially this time around-seriously, it’s getting tiresome seeing so many “you’ve gotta read Steyn’s latest!” posts), so I gave him another shot. And to his credit, this time he crafted a pretty good “final draft” essay.

Unfortunately, the topic of this latest piece is exactly the same as the last two. That being that the West (by which, of course, he usually means the multiculturally-tolerant liberal left) needs to “wake up” before Islamic law takes over the world.

What he fails to mention-again-is what to do about the impending takeover. So okay, I’ll admit there’s a real threat to Western society from radical Islamists… now what? It would seem that we’re not doing so great at winning the “hearts and minds” of moderate Muslims, and they aren’t doing much to police the radicals in their midst anyway. And for the more hawkish types out there, it’s kind of hard to find a target to throw missiles at, since the radical Islamists like to hide in caves and behind innocent women and children and so forth.

(Speaking of Islamic cowards, I saw today that Sadaam quit his 11 day hunger strike “for health reasons.” Har-har.)

Steyn doesn’t give us a solution, and I don’t have one either. But I do think one of the things we should not be doing is falling all over ourselves to avoid cartoons of the prophet Muhammad (pbuh). I understand the whole “no graven images” thing, but I can’t imagine what sort of person might accidentally worship a cartoon drawing. Overall, I think it would be better for everyone if we (and they) spent more time criticizing Islam. For one thing, it will clearly delineate the moderates from the radicals, and then maybe it will be easier to target those missiles!

Just kidding. Mostly.

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