Posted by Stuka on Tue, 02 Aug 2005 13:58 | #

How do we know Steyn is Jewish? I always thought his surname was South African, but I realise there is considerable debate in the blogopshere on the matter. Has Steyn clarified things? It’s not his Jewishness (if true) that bothers me; it’s his alarming appetite for musicals. 

Posted by Matra on Tue, 02 Aug 2005 16:29 | #

Steyn is of Jewish descent on his mother’s side. Going by memory of an interview he did (he has a southern England accent) a relative several generations back on his mother’s side went from Odessa to southern Ireland and somehow met up with a Steyn (grandfather I think) who was a Flemish Catholic. Mark Steyn was baptized a Catholic but is now a Baptist. When asked about the spelling of Steyn he mentioned that it was the common spelling of the name in South Africa.

Posted by Matra on Tue, 02 Aug 2005 17:18 | #

I’ve enjoyed Steyn’s writing ever since he did movie reviews for The Spectator in the mid-90s. But one thing that annoys me about him, along with numerous other war hawks, and that is he takes the Likudnik line on Israel, and supports the non-Muslims in just about every conflict in the world involving Muslims, except Serbia. There appears to be a kind of Serbian Exception with so many hawks (though Krauthammer seemed to be all for them).

Until Milosevic sold out his fellow Serbs his government behaved in a no-nonsense way towards the Muslims of Kosovo and Bosnia as well as the Catholic Croats yet the same people who defend Israel’s hardline on the Palestinians will condemn the Serbs for similar behaviour. Steyn even suggested a few weeks back that failure by the West (mostly Europeans) to take action against Serbia earlier was one of the reasons for Muslim anger today. Yet normally he dismisses, with contempt, those who suggest that the suffering of Palestinians may be a reason for the ongoing jihad against the West. I tend to agree with him on the Palestinian argument but I find it easier to believe that the mostly Arab jihadists would be more concerned about Palestine than Bosnia. 

I don’t see why Europeans of Christian heritage should care more about Jews in Palestine or the Buddhists under Muslim siege in Thailand Steyn has mentioned several times recently, than the European Christians of the former Yugoslavia. Thomas Fleming has suggested that Western liberals don’t like the Serbs because they see in them their own Christian patriot warrior ancestors. For me that’s one good reason to support them and it makes me suspicious of the motives of the warhawks when they criticise Europeans for “wimping out” in Bosnia.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 02 Aug 2005 17:34 | #

So, hold it there.  I have to call Steyn “that Flemish-Canadian Baptist neocon with a right of abode in Israel.”  Anything I’ve forgotten there?

Posted by Il Ragno on Tue, 02 Aug 2005 18:33 | #

While naturally I’m appalled at any act of terrorism - particularly since I’m a resident of the sort of metropolis these people tend to target - I’m just about out of patience with these chickenhawk court historians who suffer hot flashes in public every time the West gets hit back….who insist every sudden BOOM! is a wholly unprovoked one, and a challenge to the resolve of our very goodness.

Steyn, a very glib fellow who has carved out a nice little niche for himself as the upmarket Jonah Goldberg, continues to insist that Book 2 of the History of the World begins w/o prologue or preamble on 9/11/01, and would have us believe that The Wahhabi’ist Menace was there all along, but was Neville Chamberlained under the nap of the carpet long ago by appeasers more opportunistically fixated on Hitler and Stalin.

(When things aren’t going BOOM! outside of authorized war zones, Steyn can usually be counted on to dismiss such incidentals as the civilian casualties in Iraq stretching back to ‘91 with a disinterested wave of his hand, in favor of regaling us with his now-trademark lilac-scented one-liner jingoism.)

As I don’t recall hearing much from Steyn or his ilk, pre 9/11, regarding the long-range ramifications of Western society loading up on ineluctably-alien Third World flotsam and jetsam (save broadsides against the outmoded racism of yesteryear), pardon me if I sit on my hands while the rest of you applaud this fairweather warmonger, who masks his fury at Democracy’s Official Pinatas daring to return fire as his humane and principled horror of jihadis striking at innocents. That is unquestionably deplorable, but whores like Steyn relinquished their Moral Outrage Passes years ago. In for a penny, Mark, in for a pound.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 02 Aug 2005 22:38 | #

IR,

Pure intentions are all very well.  But in the big, bad Mainstream world certain limits apply.  Steyn stretches those limits - and so, less successfully, does Rod Liddell.

Neither, of course, are exactly travelling with us - or, if they are, they certainly won’t travel to our destination.  That’s understood.  But it does no harm to encourage them.  There are hundreds of newspaper journalists trotting out the establishment line.

Posted by Stuka on Wed, 03 Aug 2005 02:24 | #

Steyn, a very glib fellow who has carved out a nice little niche for himself as the upmarket Jonah Goldberg…

Yes, that’s it! Nice description. The “thinking man’s Jonah Goldberg.”

Posted by il ragno on Wed, 03 Aug 2005 02:39 | #

“Pure intentions”? I’d settle for merely soiled here. Here’s your idea of “the best it gets” back when a bit of publicly displayed sanity, if not backbone, might conceivably have made a difference; probably minute and insignificant, but just possibly enough to help stave off our current climate of waiting for the next blast for one more day at least. From “Imperialism is the Answer”, published five weeks after 9/11:

As we now know, it was our so-called ‘‘moderate’’ Arab ‘‘friends’’ who provided all the suicide bombers of Sept. 11, just as it’s in their government-run media—notably the vile Egyptian press—that some of the worst anti-American rhetoric is to be found. By comparison [to Arab autonomy in their own region], colonialism is progressive and enlightened. Even in Afghanistan, the savagery of whose menfolk has been much exaggerated by the left’s nervous nellies, such progress as was made in the country came when it fell under the watchful eye of British India. 

What will we do this time ‘round? Afghanistan needs not just food parcels, but British courts and Swiss police and Indian civil servants and American town clerks and Australian newspapers. So does much of the rest of the region.

America has prided itself on being the first non-imperial superpower, but the viability of that strategy was demolished on Sept. 11. For its own security, it needs to do what it did to Tojo’s Japan and Hitler’s Germany after the war: Systematically dismantle them and rebuild them as functioning members of the civilized world. Kipling called it ‘‘the white man’s burden’‘—the ‘‘white man’’ bit will have to be modified in the age of Colin Powell and Condi Rice, and it’s no longer really a ‘‘burden,’’ not in cost-benefit terms. Given the billions of dollars of damage done to the world economy by Sept. 11, massive engagement in the region will be cheaper than the alternative. If neo-colonialism makes you squeamish, give it some wussified Clinto-Blairite name like ‘‘global community outreach.’’ We can do it for compassionate reasons (the starving hordes beggared by incompetent thug regimes) or for selfish ones (our long-term security), but do it we must.

If this is the MSM’s “only honest voice”, then I’m afraid I have some bad news for the MSM.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 03 Aug 2005 10:04 | #

Yes, Steyn is a 50% neocon - the “invade the world” bit, to quote Steve.  We know that, and I said so.  However, I encourage the 50% with which I can agree.

Similarly with Rod Liddell, who used to be a producer of the notoriously liberal BBC4 programme “Today”.  He has only travelled latterly and part-way towards an enlightened position on race and immigration.  But good - he has travelled, and spoken out very bravely.  Another English journalist, Anthony Browne, has addressed the issue of immigration in Britain, including an article for Peter Brimelow.  But Browne, currently European Editor of the Times, is also not all that he might be from an ideal perspective.

The sad fact is that these guys are doing their jobs, not the ghost of Enoch Powell and not me.  So, either I say “a pox on all your houses until you are pure-hearts comme moi,” or I say, “Gee, thanks for the help there, guys.  Keep it coming.”

Truth-speaking in the media has to begin somewhere.  The liberal Dawkins wrote a book about multiplying memes.  It’s chicken and egg, though.  The meme of Western Man’s survival has to be propogated - meaning it has to get out of the nationalist ghetto - before it can propogate itself.  That will be measured in other journalists following Steyn’s example and going that bit further each time.  Pray for it, IR - don’t deride it out of existence.