The Clock Ticks On by Mark Steyn

Steyn on the World

October 20, 2015 https://www.steynonline.com/7244/the-clock-ticks-on The world divides into those who sincerely believe in that "Coexist" sticker and those who think it's a delusional evasion. After all, if it weren't for that big Muslim crescent "C" at the front, you wouldn't need a bumper sticker at all: That peace-symbol "O"? It's Muslims, alas, who kill secular hippie pacifist backpackers in Bali nightclubs. That equal-rights "E"? It's Muslims who take girls as their sex slaves in Nigeria and kill their own daughters and sisters in Germany because rape has rendered them "unclean". The star-of-David "X"? It's Muslims who are currently stabbing and running over Jews in Jerusalem and then celebrating by passing out free candy. In India, it's Muslims vs Hindus. In southern Thailand, Muslims vs Buddhists. The world is a messy, violent, complicated place, but as a rule of thumb, as I said all those years ago in America Alone, in most corners of the planet it boils down to: Muslims vs [Your Team Here]. Millions of complacent westerners genuinely regard Islam as merely another exotic patch in the diversity quilt, but I find it hard to believe that the leaders of liberal progressive political parties can be quite that deluded. Nevertheless, there was Justin Trudeau at his victory rally at the Queen Elizabeth in Montreal last night: There are a thousand stories I could share with you about this remarkable campaign, but I want you to think of one in particular. Last week I was in St. Catharines, and I met a young Muslim mum wearing a hijab. She handed me her infant daughter and said something I will never forget. She said she's voting for us because she wants to make sure her little girl can make her own choices in life and that the government will protect those rights. To her, I say this: You and your fellow citizens have chosen a new government that believes deeply in the diversity of our country. We know in our bones that Canada was built from people from all corners of the world, belonging to every faith, every culture, speaking every language. We believe in our hearts that this country's unique diversity is a blessing bestowed upon us by previous generations of Canadians who stared down prejudice and fought discrimination in all forms. In other words: Canadians voted to say no to hate! On CTV early in the evening, Jason Kenney popped up and pushed back against Lisa LaFlamme's suggestion that the niqab controversy had cost the Tories the election. He pointed out that polls showed some 80 per cent of Canadians opposed to new citizens being masked when taking their oath of allegiance to Queen and country: It had the unusual distinction of being a Harper policy with near universal appeal. But so what? M Trudeau's narrative is the one that will prevail - that questioning Islamic self-segregation is at odds with "Canadian values". And so no politician with an eye to electoral viability will ever raise the subject again. Most people want to think of themselves as "nice", and so it's easier to welcome the increasing presence of shrouded women on the streets of Canada as a deepening of our heartwarming embrace of self-affirmation-by-multiculturalism, rather than something that mocks any conventional notions of women's rights. Yet, whatever disquiet might be felt, they will take their signal from their politicians, and fall silent on the matter. ~South of the border, Ahmed the Clock Boy made his long-awaited visit to Washington to meet President Obama, following his pilgrimage to President Bashir of Sudan, the butcher of Darfur, a couple of days earlier. When Ahmed first got into trouble for bringing his "clock" to school, Obama Tweeted his approval ("Cool clock, Ahmed") and invited him to bring it to the White House. Since then, the official line - precocious all-American teen's enthusiasm and ingenuity stymied by ingrained Islamophobia - has taken a bit of a hit. Ahmed can't make a clock. All he can do is rip the guts out of some crappy Radio Shack thing from the Seventies, and tape it into a simulacrum of a suitcase bomb, which is not a skill to be disdained, at least in some parts of the world. However, it's not really the talent all the hipster execs had in mind when, in the wake of the presidential Tweet, they invited Ahmed to visit the headquarters of Google, Facebook et al. The private sector apparently still has enough sense of self-preservation that the glamorous job offers and grants quietly faded away. And even the Oval Office had supposedly downgraded Ahmed's audience with Obama to part of the crowd scene on White House "Astronomy Night". But no: young Ahmed worked his way to the front of the line and was rewarded with a hug from the President. The greatest clockmaker of our time explained that he'd been unable to bring his clock to Obama because he's been "too busy traveling", and it's kinda bulky, being the size not of a clock but a bomb, and evidently President Bashir's security in Khartoum being pickier about large ticking devices than the White House. But he's certainly "busy traveling": The quintessential Texas teenager and his family have accepted an offer to move to Qatar. Nonetheless, like Niqab Girl, Clock Boy has taught us all a valuable lesson with his droll and spectacularly successful provocation. The US Department of Homeland Security's slogan is "If You See Something, Say Something" - unless it's something that might get you accused of Islamophobia, in which case keep it to yourself. Which is where we came in, on the morning of Tuesday September 11th 2001 at the US Airways First Class check-in desk: I got an instant chill when I looked at [Mohammed Atta]. I got this grip in my stomach and then, of course, I gave myself a politically correct slap...I thought, 'My God, Michael, these are just a couple of Arab businessmen.' Clockmed has raised the bar on that one. My God, this is just a young Muslim male. So what if he's ticking? Do I really want to be tied up in sensitivity-training hell for the next six months? ~Meanwhile, in Birmingham, England, where the clock is at the eleventh hour, a new government program designed to identify elementary-school children at risk of "self-detonation" - whoops, I mean "self-radicalization" - is already going gangbusters: A primary school has reported a 10-year-old Muslim boy to police on suspicion of terrorism, after he complained about not having a prayer room on a field trip. The boy, a pupil at Parkfield Community School in Birmingham, was on the trip when his 'changed' behaviour drew the teachers' attention. He also told female Muslim pupils they needed to cover their faces with a head scarf, and expressed an 'alternative' view about the Charlie Hebdo attack... The school referred the boy to police under the government's Prevent Duty initiative which provides guidance to teachers on spotting signs of extremism. Over the last 12 months the school, which caters for more than 740 pupils between the ages of five and 11, has reported three pupils to the Counter Terrorism Unit. All three children were referred after staff were concerned they were displaying signs of developing extremism. But why is demanding a prayer room a sign of "developing extremism"? All kinds of Muslims demand prayer rooms hither and yon, and they're not all terrorists, are they? Besides, what's wrong with wanting a prayer room? Come to that, what's wrong with expressing an "alternative" view on Charlie Hebdo? After all, an audience of pampered middle-class liberal progressives at Trinity College, Dublin loves "alternative" views on Charlie Hebdo. Why shouldn't a ten-year-old at Parkfield Community School? Oh, well. The great thing about a bureaucratic program that requires police investigation of grade-schoolers at risk of "developing extremism" is that it's the Big Government trifecta: expensive, time-consuming, and assuredly entirely ineffectual. Whereas, say, a policy of reducing Muslim immigration to the United Kingdom is just cloud-cuckoo land. Can't be done. Pie in the sky. Devoting police resources to investigating every ten-year-old schoolboy who says something "alternative": that we can do. ~Down Under, following the murder of a police accountant by a 15-year-old "violent extremist", authorities are now moving on to the jihad's junior varsity team: Security agencies are monitoring a 12-year-old boy in relation to suspected terrorist activity, the Australian federal police commissioner, Andrew Colvin, has said, in the leadup to a security summit in Canberra on Thursday... [Justice minister Michael] Keenan declined to say how many children under the age of 14 were on watchlists. "I do not think it is appropriate for me to go into that," he said. Indeed. Being on a "watchlist" doesn't affect their performance in the school play or on the track team, so lighten up: Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin said Australia's terrorist threat had evolved and become younger over the past year. "We're shocked that a 12-year-old is on police radar for these types of matters," Colvin told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television. ABC reported on Wednesday that the 12-year-old boy was the youngest of 18 suspected extremists named in a court document in March. The boy's name has not been published. In case someone invites him to the White House? And of course: [Mr Keenan] said it was important to "reach out a hand of friendship" to the Muslim community and "provide reassurance" that security measures were not targeted at one ethnic group or religion. Best thing to do is target all Aussie 12-year-olds, just to be on the safe side. ~If you're thinking this all seems an awful lot of trouble and expense for a demographic that seems unusually hard to assimilate, and indeed boasts of its disinclination to do so, well, don't worry; it'll get a lot more troublesome and expensive: Sweden is fast approaching a complete collapse. More and more municipalities are raising the alarm that if the migrants keep coming at this pace, the government can no longer guarantee normal service to its citizens. Who are these Continentals to demand priority over "migrants" when it comes to government "service"? Keep those migrants coming! Austria: By September they were arriving at the southeastern border at the rate of 10,000 or 12,000 a day. These migrants are associated in the public mind with the war in Syria but, in fact, come from throughout the Muslim world—Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Most of them are on their way to Germany. The great majority are young men. By the end of this year, Austrian authorities estimate, 375,000 will have passed through the country, and a quarter of them will have stayed to apply for asylum. Austria will have added 1 percent to its population in just about three months, with virtually all the newcomers Muslims... Citizens of all the tiny countries that lie between the Middle East and Germany were witnessing a migration far too big for Germany to handle. They knew Germany would eventually realize this, too. Once Germany lost its nerve, the huge human chain of testosterone and poverty would be stuck where it was. And if your country was smaller than Germany—Austria, for instance, is a tenth Germany's size—you could wind up in a situation where the majority of fighting-age men in your country were foreigners with a grievance. Whoa. Don't go there, girlfriend. It's like The New York Times says: VIENNA — As befits the city of Sigmund Freud, Vienna has two faces — one sweet, one sinister. Behind the schnitzel and strudel, Mozart and the opera, lurks the legacy of the Nazis who forced Jews to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes... Now, to the astonishment of many and the alarm of some, the burning question in Vienna's elegant cafes is, Which face will prevail in the city's bellwether elections on Oct. 11? So, if you're not passing out the strudel to every strapping young Muslim lad coming down the Karntnerstrasse, you're a Nazi. Speaking of cleaning the sidewalks with toothbrushes, I don't think that'll cut it in the small border town of Nickelsdorf, now "an orgy of garbage and feces of unparalleled dimensions". In the most well-ordered and maintained country on the Continent, the sh*t is hitting the fans of open borders. We're gonna need a lot more strudel. ~So don't mention the veil, don't mention the ticking, don't get too specific about the precise nature of the "alternative views" of Charlie Hebdo, "provide reassurance" that it's nothing to do with Islam ...and tell your crime reporters to fill the space with strudel recipes: Her father and brothers stabbed her to death on her mother's orders, after she was gang-raped by three men. The rape left her "unclean" and the mother allegedly demanded the killing to restore the family's honor. German police are seeking the father and brothers. That by itself is not newsworthy; what is newsworthy is the news itself, which appeared in not one of Germany's major daily newspapers or websites. Which brings us back to Justin Trudeau, and the niqab "controversy". You're not a Nazi, are you? Best to self-veil, metaphorically (for the moment): That way there's nothing to see. ~Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be greeting the bright dawn of a new Trudeaupia with Toronto's Number One morning man John Oakley live on AM640 at 8.30am Eastern. © 2020 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc. All rights reserved.

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