Paean to Chauvinism

Well, not exactly, but I liked the sound of the title for a post. I'll have to go back and read it more closely, but it didn't take but a moment of reading and a few more moments of scanning to discover where Mark Steyn's essay, It’s the demography, stupid in the current New Criterion was headed.

We know it’s not really a “war on terror.” Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even “radical Islam.” The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in “Palestine,” Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about. Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose—as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

Let it not be said that I don't consider the arguments of those with whom I do not agree. And I read them with what I hope is an open mind, hoping all the while to trip across some new or important insight that I can add to my point of view. But this Muslims-as-microbes meme is more than I can take. I never thought of the whole Muslim population of the world as "these guys."

This essay is getting a lot of attention among the great washed and groomed. As another attack on that old demon called "Multiculturalism" it is not openly in favor of eugenics, but comes uncomfortably close.

...So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.

Hello. I'm uncomfortable with intolerance so I now have an "agenda."
Right. And uncomfortable really means masochistic.
You get the idea.

Go ahead and read it. It's gonna get some attention adding yet another brick to that wall dividing us from those who aren't like us.

That's enough from me. Anything more will just make my morning coffee give me indigestion. I wish I had come across something more edifying before going off to work today.