Christopher Hitchens reviews Mark Steyn's book.

City Journal ^ | Winter 2007 | Christopher Hitchens

[Billthedrill]

Hitchens on Steyn promised to be a fascinating confluence of ideas and this review exceeded my hopes. An outstanding piece, and thanks for posting it. I am stunned by Martin Amis's recognition that we really are at a point where an honest attempt at understanding is met only with the interpretation that it is weakness. His own struggles with totalitarianism and a hint of his relationship with Hitchens is revealed in his superb Koba The Dread: Laughter And The 20 Million. Highly recommended.

Now, a few particulars:

Little binds a Somali to a Turk or an Iranian or an Algerian, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries.

Quite true, but if it is the sort of friction that exists between vultures and hyenas contending over the same corpse it isn't a great deal of comfort to the deceased. Unfortunately the inevitable measures against Islamism will result in a certain level of Islamic solidarity among otherwise contending groups. Confining those measures to the lawless will help this but where lawlessness consists of pushing the envelope - the veil, the insistence on internal Shari'a within these groups - it is going to be a touchy tightrope for policymakers to walk.

I still think—or should I say hope?—that the sheer operatic insanity of September 11 set back the Islamist project of a “soft” conquest of host countries...

I'm inclined to agree. It was, after all, a declaration of war by an impatient and violent man against societies already under challenge. Bin Laden may have done the West a favor but I'd still put a bullet in the bastard given a chance.

Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time.

Nor do I. Most of the victims did nothing more reprehensible than living in inconvenient places, some for generations. But I will have to concede that one understands the Serbian passion over the matter a little better now. It doesn't take a great number within an unassimilable population to create an insurmountable problem for the host society. And these passions go back more than a millennium. It would be supremely ironic if the Europe that shunned Milosevic should be forced by its own inaction to adopt his policies or worse, to see the sort of uncontrolled gang warfare that eventually he could not stop. I hope it does not come to that.

[an amused spectator]

we agree. Destroy? Contain.

Dar Al Harb/Dar Al Islam

Are you familiar with the terms, kh?