Fisking Mark Steyn
The Goal: Can you create a rational, coherent and informed defense of the current state of the War on Terror?The Candidate: Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times
The Article: Here
It wasn't a "tragic event" or even one of a series of unfortunate events. It was an "attack," an "act of war." I sat at the lunch counter with a guy who'd tuned out the same station on the grounds that "I never heard my grampa talk about 'the tragedy of Pearl Harbor.' " But, consciously or otherwise, a serious effort was under way to transform the nature of the event, to soften it into a touchy-feely, huggy-weepy one-off. As I wrote last year: "The president believes there's a war on. The Dems think 9/11 is like the 1998 ice storm or a Florida hurricane -- just one of those things."
So anyone who calls September 11 a tragedy is implicitly suggesting that it wasn't an act of war? or of evil? or of human agency? I googled the phrase "tragedy of pearl harbor". I got 517 hits. The testimony of that guy's grandfather, as surprising as it sounds, does not seem to speak for the American public as a whole. Nor does it speak to the dictionary definition of tragedy, which is A disastrous event, especially one involving distressing loss or injury to life.
So it doesn't seem that human agency has anything to do with the word tragedy at all. But that doesn't stop some people from hysterical overreaction to a perfectly relevant word.
I didn't know the half of it. If an act of war is like a hurricane -- freak of nature, get over it -- it's evidently no great leap to believe that a hurricane is an act of war. Katrina was thus "allowed" to happen because Bush "hates black people." The Army Corps of Engineers was instructed to blow up New Orleans' 17th Street levee so that the flood would kill the poor people rather than destroy the valuable tourist real estate.
Whatever. As part of their ongoing post-9/11 convergence, the left now talks about Bush the way the wackier Islamists talk about Jews. I thought the Australian imam who warned Muslims the other week to lay off the bananas because the Zionists are putting poison in them was pretty loopy. But is he really any more bananas than folks who think Bush is behind the hurricane? Bush is apparently no longer the citizen-president of a functioning republic, but a 21st century King Canute expected to go sit by the shore and repel the waters as they attempt to make landfall. Instead, he and Cheney hatched up the whole hurricane thing in the Halliburton research labs to distract attention from their right-wing Supreme Court nominee . . .
I love the quotation marks around the word "allowed" in the first paragraph above. Who, exactly, is Mark Steyn quoting? Just to see, I looked up "Bush" "allowed" and "Katrina" in google. Here's what I found:
"Federal troops were not allowed access..."
"Bush allowed these fools to [run] FEMA..."
"the media will not be allowed to inform Americans of the death toll..."
needless to say, no one suggested Bush "allowed", was "behind" or planned Katrina. The argument is that he was negligent in his duty to Americans, especially poor and black Americans, by a wide variety of idiotic actions, most of which are well understood by everybody. He cut the funding for levees that may have protected New Orleans. He put an incompetant crony in charge of FEMA. He did not in any way try to evacuate New Orleans, and seems to have assumed that the poor people in the city would be able to evacuate without the government providing any means for their transportation. Once the hurricane hit, it became clear he was totally unprepared to deal with the disaster, and did little for several days before the press and public outrage convinced him to go into political damage control.
Indeed, Bush's actions are so fundamentally indefensible, it is understandable that rather than address his critics, Mark Steyn would prefer to paint a disgusting and irrelevant caricature of them. This is what you get for demanding accountability from this administration and their supportors: straw man arguments and ad hominem attacks.
On this fourth anniversary we are in a bizarre situation: The war is being won -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, the broader Middle East and many other places where America has changed the conditions on the ground in its favor.
It is a little difficult to analyze what Mark Steyn means by "the war is being won" since the goals of the War on Terror are so fundamentally intangible that victory or defeat are difficult to measure. But here are some things that might explain the "bizarre situation" in which most Americans don't see things Mark Steyn's way: a chaotic Iraq on the verge of civil war, a government barely in control of a small minority of Afghanistan, and a broader Middle East that increasingly hates us because of the illegal war we started. Oh, and it's been four years since we were attacked and we still haven't caught the bastard who did it.
Steyn continues:
Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers, and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers, but big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists' strategic goals: For example, according to a recent poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That's a "moderate" Westernized Muslim: He wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he's a "moderate" because it's not such a priority that he's prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper.
Here's what the poll actually said: 61 percent of British Muslims support using Sharia to decide civil cases inside their own community and so long as the penalties do not contravene British Law. Whether this was an intentional omission by Mr. Steyn is debatable; perhaps he was ignorant of the actual question used in this poll. But nonetheless, his statement is misguided and inaccurate in the extreme. Depressingly, of course, most people will just take his ignorant word for it.
As with IRA killers and the broader Irish nationalist population, these shared aims provide a large comfort zone in which terror networks can operate. And it enables the non-violent lobby groups to use the terrorists -- or the threat of terrorists -- as part of a good cop/bad cop routine. Thus, the Islamic lobby groups pressure governments to make concessions to them rather than to the terrorists -- even though both elements share the same aims.
So Muslims should not use illegal, violent methods to advocate for their rights, because that is terrorism. And Muslims should not use legal, political methods to advocate for their rights, because that indirectly uses terrorism as a presumed threat. So I guess Mark Steyn believes that Muslims should simply not have rights at all.
And, incidentally, given that the Irish are the most successful example in history of a group that renounced terrorism and pursued its rights politically, eventually leading to a situation in which there was both peace and justice between the Irish and the Brits, shouldn't their example be a positive one for Muslim groups? Shouldn't we be encouraging Muslims to engage in the political process?
You can pluck out news items at random: In London, a religious "hate crimes" law that makes honest discussion of Islam even more difficult; in Ontario, the moves toward sharia courts for Muslim community disputes; in Seattle, the introduction of gender-separate, Muslim-only swimming sessions in municipal pools. The 9/11 terrorists were in favor of all these things.
The 9/11 terrorists were in favor of gender-seperate Muslim-only swimming sessions in Seattle pools. If the city of Seattle allows this, the terrorists truly have truly scored their greatest and most important victory. Listen, people of Washington. For the sake of freedom, for the sake of democracy, and in the memory of all who lost their lives on September 11, do not allow specified times during the day for men and women to swim seperately in your munincipal pools. If America is to prevail in this struggle against the Islamic extremists, men and women must swim together, at all times of the day.
Logic-O-Meter: 2 (on a scale to 10)
Fallacies cited: straw man, ad hominem attacks, inaccurate presentation of evidence, unclear assertions without evidence, comically inept illogical conclusions.
posted by Satya @ 7:19 PM
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