Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt fighting the global war on cultures

HH: Mark Steyn joins me as he does most Thursdays, Mark, it is reported at this hour that President Ahmadinejead of Iran is writing a letter to Benedict. What do you think he's going to talk about?

MS: I should imagine it will be another 18 page masterpiece, full of great rhetorical flourishes. But basically, it's a kind of wind up. I mean, he's got...a lot of these fellows that we think of as just kind of primitive guys, they're not really media savvy, they're not tuned in to spin cycles and things, they're actually quite ingenious at hitting all the right talking points. And certainly, he did in his last letter to Bush. He brought up all kinds of topics that show he at least has got his TV set in Tehran tuned to CNN International. And I should imagine he'll be doing the same with the Pope as well.

HH: And at the same time, Robert Ferrigno, who wrote the book, Prayers For The Assassin, is arguing that those like me who mock this stuff are missing that point, that he's actually communicating with a worldwide audience of young, estranged Muslim men, in an attempt to radicalize them and bring them into his sort of orbit.

MS: Yes, I think that's the thing where you've got to be careful about what travels and what doesn't travel. The stuff that sounds nutty to us actually sounds inspirational to young unemployed Muslim men in the ghettos of France and Belgium and the Netherlands and Sweden. And so in a sense, he is talking to a global audience. And he's providing them with a kind of braggadocio that they find very appealing. It's like a kind of global gang leader. If you can imagine some guy from the Cripps in the 1980's getting elected president of some country, how inspirational that would be to a lot of young men around the world.

HH: You know, Mark Steyn, again I go back to the book, Alone, about Churchill between the wars. And during that time, Hitler would often rant with the intention and successfully stirring up of Germans living in Austria, then the Sudetenland. And then in Alsais. He always was talking to an audience, not his own people.

MS: Yes, well I think this is the important feature here, that often disaffected populations in other countries, they can't identify with the host society, the country that they nominally hold the passport and citizenship of. And so in a sense, they're there for the bidding. If you've got a stronger idea...and what's got stronger and stronger and stronger since the 1970's is this pan-Islamic identity. If you talk to the grandparents of Muslims who emigrated to, say, Scotland or the Netherlands in the 1950's or the 1970's, those grandchildren are far more consciously pan-Islamic in their sense of identity than their grandparents were.

HH: Let me read you the couple of opening paragraphs from the Times of London's online story from today. A senior judge was shot dead in Turkey's highest administrative court today in an apparent protest at a ruling against the Muslim head scarf, which is barred from any places in the secular country. The gunmen shouted Allah akbar as he sprayed bullets across the courtroom before police guards had time to react. He broke into the council of state's 2nd chamber and opened fire, wounding five of the six people present. This is rising Islamist violence around the world, Mark Steyn.

MS: Yes, and we heard...I mean, if you go back to September 11th, we used to hear that how well Turkey is the example of how you can secularize a Muslim society. And we're all looking for the Kemal Ataturks of these other Muslim countries, where you know, you used to read that General Musharraf in Pakistan, for example, if he played his cards right, he could be Pakistan's Ataturk, and successfully transform Pakistani society. Whereas in those five years, the exact opposite has happened, and we've come to see how fragile even Turkey's successful moderate, pluralist, Muslim society is, and how vulnerable it is. And I think there's a big open question about the likelihood of losing Turkey into the kind of morass and mire of the rest of the Muslim world within the next few years.

HH: And an interesting detail of this story is that the assassin is an Islamist lawyer.

MS: No, and that's the other mistake we often made in those months after September 11th. We assumed that these people are just sort of uneducated Pushtoon Yak herds. They're not. Often times, they're lawyers, or they're like Mohammad Atta, who was I think an architectural engineer. They're people who could be pulling down six figure salaries in most developed countries. And yet the fact of the matter is, that when they're given a choice between pulling down the six figure salary or actually expressing their Islamist identity, they choose the latter. And I think again, there's a lesson there that the veneer of civilization is often very thin. If you go back to Yugoslavia in the 1990's, the Dalmation Coast was like this booming tourist destination. They were getting all these...even before communism collapsed, they were getting all these British tourists and European tourists...

MS: Yeah, and yet when it came to a choice between having a booming tourist economy or reducing the country to rubble over some ancient ethnic grievance, they chose the latter. And we forget how many societies...that veneer of civilization is very thin.

HH: So Mark Steyn, I spoke with Tony Snow about this yesterday, about new media and how the President's speech got chewed up within 20 minutes of it being issued. And there's this world...and with Rumsfeld a couple of weeks ago about this worldwide effort to do media in the presence of this Islamist threat. We still don't really do it, do we?

MS: No, and I think the President actually ought to learn about that, because it seems to me that thinking about that speech, he pitched it in perfect terms for the ABC, CBS, NBC mode of discourse, in all the fluffy evasions that go down well on the old school three network system. And in fact, the internet and talk radio and some other things, it's much more, they're much more raw and forensic than that, and it was chewed up and spit out. And as we've seen in the most recent polls today, in effect, the new media interpretation of the President's speech came to prevail over the fluffy evasions that went down so well on ABC and CBS.

HH: I don't think they have a plan, and let's hope that they get one. Meanwhile, the conservative base is at war with itself, between Mark Tapscott, Jim Geraghty, Stephen Bainbridge, The Corner. I'm sure you're following this.

MS: Well yes, I am. I mean, there's been a fascinating discussion on the Corner at National Review this afternoon, which I think is worth...if people haven't seen, it's worth reading about, what it is the President actually feels about this immigration issue. And the argument is made that he actually feels a geniune special bond with Mexican people, and that he doesn't look on them as foreigners in the same way he loos on, I don't know, Beligians or Slovenes as foreigners. And I think that actually is...there's something to be said for that, that that's the idea that's motivating him on this immigration issue, because it's not just at odds with his base, it's at odds with sanity. The idea of willingly embracing, actively embracing a large, specifically bi-cultural identity, I think, is very dangerous. Bi-cultural societies all over the world are the most unstable.

HH: Well, since we spoke on Monday night, I've been thinking about your condemnation of guest worker program. And I think that resonates with people, Mark Steyn, as they begin to think about a permanent underclass called in to work. And I think it's ringing a bell that reminds us of Europe.

MS: Well, you don't have to just talk about Europe where I think it has been a disaster. I mean, you talk about relatively benign societies that don't make the news. Fiji...a century ago, the British imported, essentially, a guest worker class to Fiji. Indian workers. And what happened was that eventually, the population rose, and I'm quoting off the top of my head here, but it's about like 46, 48 Indians to native Fijians. And as a result, that country has become tribal and profoundly unstable. And if you look at any...even the most benign bi-cultural societies are profoundly unstable. This is not an immigration issue. When you have up to maybe a fifth of the population of the United States as a special illegal class, mainly from one other society in the world, that is not an immigration issue. Immigration is a quite separate thing. There's already 79 different forms of visas for people. I mean, there's already 20 different guest worker programs. If they don't fit into any of those 20...I mean, there is a level of dishonesty at which the political class is conducting this debate that is actually quite shameful.

HH: Well, today, they're also tone deaf. Today, they voted to extend full social security benefits for contributions made while working illegally in the United States.

HH: It's so stupid as to defy...I mean, how could they possibly vote for that, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, this is again back to the dishonesty. When President Bush says that under this so-called amnesty, or not so-called amnesty, whatever it's called, that they will have to pay a fine. If they're going to...for paying the fine, they also receive the backlog of social security benefits from the ten or twenty years they've been working here, then most of these people are going to be actually getting a net gain. They're going to be rewarded for their criminality.

MS: I mean, any society that grants citizenship on that basis is a society with a death wish.

A disturbing conversation between Hugh Hewitt and Mark Stein. Here are some money quotes from Steyn:

"I think there's a big open question about the likelihood of losing Turkey into the kind of morass and mire of the rest of the Muslim world within the next few years."

"And we forget how many societies...that veneer of civilization is very thin."

"Bi-cultural societies all over the world are the most unstable."

"If they're going to...for paying the fine, they also receive the backlog of social security benefits from the ten or twenty years they've been working here, then most of these people are going to be actually getting a net gain. They're going to be rewarded for their criminality."

I cannot believe the social security aspect of the Senate bill, where illegals get their benefits even though they were illegal, does not get cut out of the joint committee session when they meet to resolve there differences.

American politicians seem bent upon turning America into a giant version of Canada. We can see how well bi-lingual culture has worked there. Americans instinctively reject such a future. And the Senate's bill also amounts to a deep affront to the basic American value that good ought to be rewarded and crime should be punished. No wonder the political class in Washington is suffering such low ratings - and not just the Republicans. Most of us wish a pox upon both their houses for not having the highest interests of the country at heart.

(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")

The Senate bill is DOA in the House. An amnesty bill simply won't pass. I don't think the House will budge on enforcement-only first and the Senate won't give up on its amnesty-only first approach. With a proverbial Mexican standoff looming, we will get no immigration bill this year. That would be a good outcome.

(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")

...for paying the fine, they also receive the backlog of social security benefits from the ten or twenty years they've been working here, then most of these people are going to be actually getting a net gain. They're going to be rewarded for their criminality... any society that grants citizenship on that basis is a society with a death wish. - Mark Steyn

Precisely.

Nobody says it better than Steyn.

...we will get no immigration bill this year. That would be a good outcome.

I agree that no bill is a good outcome. But what concerns me even more than the real possiblity of very bad bills being passed, is why are current, existing laws not being enforced, and is this activity in Congress being cynically used to divert our attention from the issue of no law enforcement? Why are laws not being enforced? When did we decide to drop the idea of being a nation governed by law?

I am not so sure the House will not buckle when push comes to shove. I want to have your confidence but I cannot. I think some kind of compromise will emerge when the the committees get together.

Money quote: "This is not an immigration issue."

He's right and the sooner the conservatives move this discussion to a debate on bi-cultural national identity, the better. Let's stop talking about an immigration bill and start talking about a Bi-Culture Bill.

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