Trust politicians to do nothing useful By Mark Steyn (Filed: 09/08/2005)
Daily Telegraph Responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany is considering introducing a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, put it: "A substantial fraction of Germany's government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people - believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists." Great. At least the 1930s' appeasers did it on their own time. But, in recasting appeasement as yet another paid day off, the new proposal cunningly manages to combine the worst instincts of the old Europe and the new. By contrast, consider the dramatic Air France crash at Toronto's Pearson International Airport last week, when an incoming Airbus A-340 skidded off the runway and into a gully. On television, it was all billowing black smoke and occasional explosions, and the gloomy CNN expert saying it was a "low survivability" catastrophe. Yet all 309 people got out alive. Eyewitness accounts vary: some people are said to have panicked, others to have stayed calm. The co-pilot was reported by police to have abandoned the plane and scrambled away to Highway 401, whereas passing motorists pulled off the road and hurried toward the burning jet to help any survivors. Of the eight emergency exits, two were deemed unsafe to use, and on a third and a fourth the slides didn't work. None the less, in a chaotic situation, hundreds of strangers co-ordinated sufficiently to evacuate a small space through four exits in less than a couple of minutes before the Airbus was consumed by flames. Those who didn't entrust themselves to the freelance evacuation systems of local passers-by were picked up by airport buses, in which they were then detained for several hours for their own "safety". I'm always impressed by such stories. Think of the last time you boarded a plane, the queue in the aisles, the guy fumbling for something in a bag in the overhead bin, the woman who for some reason wants to squeeze by in the opposite direction. But set the jet alight and all that disappears. In extreme situations, almost everyone wants to survive, and most of us are capable of a high degree of improvised co-ordination with whoever's at hand - what Baruch Fischhoff of the Society for Risk Analysis calls "social co-ordination". On September 11, the passengers on Flight 93 acted against the terrorists more swiftly and efficiently than all the fancypants federal acronyms - CIA, FBI, FAA et al. On July 7, London commuters figured out for themselves that the third rail was no longer live and they could escape down the tunnel. When the plane crashes, when the bomb goes off, when the guy in the next seat seems to be trying to light his shoe with a match, ad hoc formations of ordinary citizens are able to act decisively and effectively - be they French, British, American, Canadian. It's getting them to that point that's difficult - as the German Islamist Appeasement Bank Holiday Weekend suggests. Until the bomb goes off, citizens of advanced democracies are generally content to leave it to the professional ruling class - i.e., politicians, academics, lobby groups - whose sloth, incompetence, self-delusion and worse they have a remarkably high tolerance for. A British MP can go on Syrian television and cry in a crowded theatre of the easily inflamed - "Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters", etc - but it seems unlikely that his constituents will hold it against him come election day. If, following the London bombings, the Home Office is determined enough to foist ID cards on the general populace, the stoic British will most probably grin and bear the introduction of yet another sclerotic bureaucracy that even the dumbest Islamist can run rings around. The BBC shamelessly stacked the studio audience for its discussion on terrorism with a disproportionate number of aggrieved Muslims, but most viewers will still go on stumping up the licence fee, willingly feeding the hand that bites them out of residual nostalgia for Dad's Army or Muffin the Mule or Two-Way Family Favourites. "The studio audience was made up of a variety of people," explained Beeb honcho Sue Inglish, "particularly those most affected by the questions we were discussing in the wake of the bombings." To the BBC's way of looking at things, those "most affected" are apparently not the targets of the bombings - the British people - but only selected sub-sections thereof. Alas, as a non-approved identity group, the British people have no Sir Iqbal Sacranie to intervene on their behalf with the corporation. A conscientious objector might reasonably withhold from his taxes the money required to fund terrorists on the dole, MPs who urge on Britain's enemies and a national broadcaster that undermines national identity. But I doubt many will. I've been asked a lot in the past few weeks whether "we'll win this thing" - and the answer, of course, depends on whom you mean by "we". Not all the member states of what we loosely call "the West" will survive this existential struggle: on the Continent, the combination of terrorism, demographics, immigration and welfare would require a genius to steer through it, and there aren't many in sight, and little sign that the natives would be receptive to them. They will prefer the combination of appeasement of enemies and ongoing welfare for themselves so nicely summed up in that "Muslim Bank Holiday" concept. By the time they're ready for their burning-plane-on-the-runway heroics, it will be too late. Before he was knighted and raised up as the ne plus ultra of "moderate Muslims", Iqbal Sacranie considered the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and mused: "Death is perhaps too easy." I don't know about that, but slow societal suicide is certainly too easy. As we've seen these past few weeks, every issue - immigration, welfare - is now a national security issue. The question is whether the politicians really have the will to do anything about it and, if they don't, how long the people will put up with them. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <font face=arial size=-1><a href="http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12h268n1k/M=362329.6886306.7839369.3040540/D=groups/S=1705323667:TM/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1123634848/A=2894321/R=0/SIG=11dvsfulr/*http://youthnoise.com/page.php?page_id=1992 ">Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back!</a>.</font> --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. 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