The Undocumented Mark Steyn (47 page)

Less than two decades later, something very odd has happened. The United Kingdom is not (yet) a totalitarian regime, yet huge numbers of Britons have in effect signed on as informers to a politically correct Stasi, and with far greater enthusiasm than Gábor and György ever did. Last year, David Booker was suspended from his job at a hostel for the homeless in Southampton after a late-night chat with a colleague, Fiona Vardy, in which he happened to reveal that he did not believe in same-sex marriage or in vicars being allowed to wed their gay partners. Miss Vardy raised no objection at the time, but the following day mentioned the conversation to her superiors. They immediately suspended Mr. Booker from his job, and then announced that “this action has been taken to safeguard both residents and staff.”

That’s good to know, isn’t it? The hostel is run by the Society of St. James, which comes under the Church of England, which in theory holds exactly the same views on homosexuality as Mr. Booker. But, if in doubt, suspend. Six weeks ago, Roy Amor, a medical technician who made prosthetics for a company called Opcare, glanced out of the window at their offices at Withington Community Hospital, and saw some British immigration officials outside. “You better hide,” he said to his black colleague, a close friend of both Mr. Amor and his wife. Not the greatest joke in the world, but the pal wasn’t offended, laughed it off as a bit of office banter, and they both got on with their work. It was another colleague who overheard the jest and filed a formal complaint reporting Mr. Amor for “racism.” He was suspended from his job. Five days later, he received an email from the company notifying him of the disciplinary investigation and inviting him to expand on the initial statement he had made about the incident. Mr. Amor had worked in the prosthetics unit at Withington for thirty years until he made his career-detonating joke. That afternoon he stepped outside his house and shot himself in the head.

The black “victim” of his “racism” attended the funeral, as did other friends. It is not known whether the creep who reported the racist incident did, nor whether the management who opened the (presumably still ongoing)
investigation troubled themselves to pay their respects to an employee with three decades of service.

“You better hide, mate.” What can we do to show racists like the late Roy Amor that they won’t be tolerated in our tolerant society? Well, we can take early action. Fourteen-year-old Codie Stott asked her teacher at Harrop Fold High School if she could sit with another group to do her science project as in hers the other five girls all spoke Urdu and she didn’t understand what they were saying. The teacher called the police, who took her to the station, photographed her, fingerprinted her, took DNA samples, removed her jewelry and shoelaces, put her in a cell for three-and-a-half hours, and questioned her on suspicion of committing a Section Five “racial public order offence.” “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark,” declared the headmaster Antony Edkins. The school would “not stand for racism in any form.” In a statement, Greater Manchester Police said they took “hate crime” very seriously, and their treatment of Miss Stott was in line with “normal procedure.”

So what can we do to show racists like young Miss Codie Stott that racist remarks on the linguistic preferences of members of her school science project will bring the full force of the otherwise somnolent constabulary of Her Majesty’s crime-ridden realm crashing down on her? Well, obviously, we need to start the Racism Watch far earlier. The government-funded National Children’s Bureau has urged nursery teachers and daycare supervisors to record and report every racist utterance of toddlers as young as three.

Like what?

Well, for example, if children “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘Yuk,’” that could be a clear sign that they’ll grow up to make racist immigration gags like the late Roy Amor’s. If we get all their names in a big government database by pre-kindergarten, it’ll be much easier to keep tabs on them for the four or five decades until we drive them to suicide.

My British friends say of Mr. Amor, “Well, obviously, he was a little disturbed, he overreacted.” No, it’s the system that’s disturbed. Look at it from his point of view: you’ve worked hard, been a model employee, for thirty
years—and suddenly it’s all over because of a single joke that didn’t offend your black friend but only the white snitch who decided to get offended on his behalf. It wasn’t Roy Amor who overreacted.

“It’s an enormous tragedy and we are all in mourning,” said Opcare’s chief executive. But actually Roy blowing his head off works out pretty well from the company’s point of view. They could have dismissed the racism complaint as a lot of hooey, but then who’s to say the aggrieved complainant might not report them for “creating a racist work environment”? So they suspended Roy, investigated Roy, and probably would have fired Roy. And then he might have sued for wrongful dismissal and, even though no contemporary jurist would find in favor of such an obvious racist, just fighting the suit would rack up a six-figure legal bill. All in all, suicide’s the most cost-effective option. Maybe more racist employees might consider it.

Earlier this month, Matthew Parris, a very squishy Tory gay, was called up by the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4, and many others anxious to send TV and radio crews round to his country place to record his reaction to a front-page lead in
The Observer:
“Secret Tape Reveals Tory Backing for Ban on Gays.” As it turned out, the “ban on gays” was a bit oversold: the Shadow Home Secretary had been musing on distinctions in public accommodation between running a hotel on the High Street and a B&B out of your own home. Mr. Parris had no particular views on that one way or the other, but the “secret tape” bit prompted the following:

         
There was also something unpleasantly Orwellian in the lip-smacking way in which my informants were telling me how Mr. Grayling had been recorded—caught—expressing his opinion. That Nineteen Eighty-Four feeling was reflected, too, in the unself-aware failure of irony with which an
Observer
journalist referred to the view that Britain should not “tolerate” (his word) intolerance. Burn the bigots! To the tumbrels with zealots! Crack down on narrow-mindedness! No to the naysayers!

Droll, and very British—or it used to be. But in Little Stasi-on-Avon, where you can’t make a joke in private conversation or say “Yuk!” in the nursery school lunch hour, the words of the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut seem more pertinent: “The lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology,” he said in 2005. “And this anti-racism will be for the twenty-first century what Communism was for the twentieth century: a source of violence.”

I think back to those weeks in Budapest, and similar conversations in Berlin, Prague, and Bucharest, and I wonder whatever happened to that British sense of fair play.

But then, I suppose, the very concept is racist.

“THERE IS NO MORE MOLLY”

SteynOnline
, September 20, 2010

TOO MANY PEOPLE
in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven’t touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It’s one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it’s hard to see why it’s in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book—an inanimate object—and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? Why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf and his Ground Zero mosque. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’s First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a bible, U.S. government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maître d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers stampede to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. If you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it.

Maybe Pastor Jones doesn’t have any First Amendment rights. Musing on Koran burning, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer argued:

         
[Oliver Wendell] Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout “fire” in a crowded theater. . . . Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the “being trampled to death”?

This is a particularly obtuse remark even by the standards of contemporary American jurists. As I’ve said before, the fire-in-a-crowded-theatre shtick is the first refuge of the brain-dead. But it’s worth noting the repellent modification Justice Breyer makes to Holmes’s argument: If someone shouts fire in a crowded gaslit Broadway theatre of the Gay Nineties, people will panic. By definition, panic is an involuntary reaction. If someone threatens to burn a Koran, belligerent Muslims do not panic—they bully, they intimidate, they threaten, they burn, and they kill. Those are conscious acts, at least if you take the view that Muslims are as fully human as the rest of us and therefore responsible for their choices. Justice Breyer’s remarks seem to assume that Muslims are not fully human.

More importantly, the logic of Breyer’s halfwit intervention is to incentivize violence, and undermine law itself. What he seems to be telling the world is that Americans’ constitutional rights will bend to intimidation. If Koran-burning rates a First Amendment exemption because Muslims are willing to kill over it, maybe Catholics should threaten to kill over the next gay-Jesus play, and Broadway could have its First Amendment rights reined in. Maybe the next time Janeane Garofalo goes on MSNBC and calls Obama’s opponents racists, the Tea Partiers should threaten to behead a few people, and NBC’s free-speech rights would be withdrawn.

But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like us anti-Obama types, and look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? A cartoonist with
The Seattle Weekly
, she was shocked by the way Comedy Central had censored
South Park
after the usual threats from violent Muslims. So she proclaimed May 20 as “Everybody Draw Mohammed” Day. What was novel about this was that Ms. Norris is a liberal progressive, and therefore a rare, if not all but unique, example of a feminist leftie recognizing that the Islamic enforcers were a threat to her way of life. This was a very welcome development.

Unfortunately, Ms. Norris was not so much recognizing reality as blissfully unaware of it. When the backlash against her idea began, she disassociated herself from it and signed off with—Lord help us—a peace symbol. I dismissed Ms. Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to
Mark’s Mailbox
to object:

         
I agree with what you wrote. Mostly. But why do I have to carry all of the weight? Why won’t others do their part and step forward? There is nothing stopping others from doing something positive!

               
I don’t get it. It can be like a relay race, but it’s easier to condemn and sound “right”—right?

               
Molly Norris

               
Seattle, Washington

               
Mark says:
Well, you’re not “carrying all the weight,” are you? I mean, surely you can’t be that self-absorbed, can you? There’s a guy called Kurt Westergaard. He’s a cartoonist, like you. Four and a half years ago, he drew the best and most provocative of the Mohammed cartoons. Since then, he has lived with explicit death threats, and in a house extensively remodeled to accommodate a safe room, to which he was obliged to retreat recently when an Islamic nutcase broke in and tried to kill him and his granddaughter. On top of that, he’s just been involuntarily retired by his newspaper on “security grounds.” You think he hasn’t occasionally wished over the last half-decade that “others” would “do their part and step forward”? Other cartoonists maybe? Members of a profession (the media) that incessantly congratulates itself on its bravery, except on those rare occasions when it’s actually called to display some. . . .