The Man Who Never Calls

by Mark Steyn  •  Jul 24, 2014 at 2:07 am

There was an odd moment during Tuesday's White House press briefing when Ed Henry of Fox News noted that the President was spending three out of five days this week fundraising for his party, and wondered, in effect, whether he still did any work. Press Secretary Josh Earnest responded:

Well, I will hazard a guess that a significant portion of the President's time each of those days will be dedicated to participating in the presidential daily briefing, getting updates from his national security team about the situation on the ground, making phone calls to world leaders, consulting with his national security officials who are traveling across the world...

Well, I will "hazard a guess" that he's actually making very few "phone calls to world leaders". Bush may have been loathed by large numbers of Europeans and Arabs, but he had very cordial relationships with their leaders, from Blair and Merkel to the brace of Abdullahs in Jordan and Saudi. Obama's too cool to work the phones. Which helps explain that photograph at right. With regard to what's happening in Gaza, the US president has no relationships with anybody in the region who matters. To define American "allies" as broadly as possible, name one who has any reason to trust Obama or his emissaries. In Cairo, General Sisi regards Obama as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer; in Riyadh, King Abdullah regards him as the enabler of the Shia Persian nuclear program; and in Amman, the other King Abdullah regards him as the feckless bungler who's left the Jordanians with the world's wealthest terrorist group on their eastern border.

Shuttle diplomacy, of the kind the vainglorious Kerry is attempting, only works if you already have a relationship. You can't start trying to build one after the shooting's started. And in this case the regional leaders' crude self-interest outweighs whatever value they might place on staying on the right side of President Fundraiser and Secretary Windsurfer. General Sisi wants to destroy the Brotherhood in Egypt, to which Hamas has significant ties. The Saudis are Israel's new best friend and see them as their last chance to scuttle Iran's nuclear ambitions. So we are in a bizarre situation where the Arab leaders are more hostile to Hamas than Washington is.

I'm often asked why I don't write more about the Palestinian situation, and the reason I don't is because the central fact of the dispute - the Palestinians' Jew hatred - never changes. So I said what I had to say about it many years ago, and there's very little to add. For example, in The National Post on April 18th 2002 I quoted an old Colonial Office hand:

"All British officials tend to become pro-Arab, or, perhaps, more accurately anti-Jew," wrote Sir John Hope-Simpson in the 1920s wrapping up a stint in the British Mandate of Palestine. "Personally, I can quite well understand this trait. The helplessness of the fellah appeals to the British official. The offensive assertion of the Jewish immigrant is, on the other hand, repellent." Progressive humanitarianism, as much as old-school colonialism, prefers its clientele "helpless," and, despite Iranian weaponry and Iraqi money and the human sacrifice of its schoolchildren, the Palestinians have been masters at selling their "helplessness" to the West.

In Europe, colonialism may be over, but colonialist condescension endures as progressive activism, and the Palestinians are the perfect cause. Everywhere else, from Nigeria to Nauru, at some point the natives say to the paternalist Europeans, "Thanks very much, but we'll take it from here." But the Palestinians? Can you think of any other "people" who'd be content to live as UN "refugees" for four generations? They're the only "people" with their own dedicated UN agency, and its regime has lasted almost three times as long as Britain's Palestine mandate did. To quote again from that 2002 Post column:

This is only the most extreme example of how the less sense the Arabs make the more the debate is framed in their terms. For all the tedious bleating of the Euroninnies, what Israel is doing is perfectly legal. Even if you sincerely believe that "Chairman" Arafat is entirely blameless when it comes to the suicide bombers, when a neighbouring jurisdiction is the base for hostile incursions, a sovereign state has the right of hot pursuit. Britain has certainly availed herself of this internationally recognized principle: In the 19th century, when the Fenians launched raids on Canada from upstate New York, the British thought nothing of infringing American sovereignty to hit back -- and Washington accepted they were entitled to do so. But the rights every other sovereign state takes for granted are denied to Israel. "The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews," wrote America's great longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer after the 1967 war. "Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem ... But everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab ... Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world."
Thus, the massive population displacements in Europe at the end of the Second World War are forever, but those in Palestine a mere three years later must be corrected and reversed. On the Continent, losing wars comes with a territorial price: The Germans aren't going to be back in Danzig any time soon. But, in the Middle East, no matter how often the Arabs attack Israel and lose, their claims to their lost territory manage to be both inviolable but endlessly transferable.

And so land won in battle from Jordan and Egypt somehow has to be ceded to Fatah and Hamas.

As I said, this is all the stuff that never changes, and the likelihood that it will change lessens with every passing half-decade. I wrote the above column at the time Jenin and the other Palestinian "refugee camps" were celebrating their Golden Jubilee. That's to say, the "UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees" is older than most African, Caribbean or Pacific states. What sort of human capital do you wind up with after four generations have been born as "refugees"? If you've ever met a charming, urbane Palestinian doctor or lawyer in London or Paris, you'll know that anyone who isn't a total idiot - ie, the kind of people you need to build a nation - got out long ago. The nominal control of the land has passed from Jordan and Egypt to Israel to Arafat to Abbas to Hamas, but the UNRWA is forever, runnning its Mister Magoo ground operation and, during the periodic flare-ups, issuing its usual befuddled statements professing complete shock at discovering that Hamas is operating rocket launchers from the local kindergarten.

But, like I said, that's all the stuff that never changes, decade in, decade out. The problem this time round is that everything else in the region is changing. Jordan's population has swollen by 25 per cent, refugees from the Syrian civil war. Does anyone seriously think the UN has plans to set up a refugee agency to minister to them until the year 2090 and beyond? ISIS have destroyed the Christian churches in Mosul and chased the entire Christian community out of town. Does anyone seriously think the Europeans will be championing Iraqi Christians' "right of return" for the next three-quarters of a century?

ISIS is doing what winners do in war: It's shaping the facts on the ground. It wants no Christians in Iraq, and it's getting on with it. General Sisi wants to kill the Muslim Brotherhood: He's getting on with it. The wilier Brothers have slipped over into a collapsing Libya to make common cause with various al-Qaeda affiliates, as the Libyan state implodes: Its would-be successors are getting on with it. In the new Middle East, everyone and his uncle has an Obama-Clinton "Reset" button and they've pressed it.

But they're not Jews. So nobody minds, and no preening Botoxicated buffoon of an American emissary comes to lecture them.

Kerry, as Obama's plenipotentiary, is a paradox - the physical presence of a geopolitical absence:

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

Thus John Kerry, in Jerusalem and Cairo and beyond.

The Will to Fell

by Mark SteynSteyn on the WorldNovember 9, 2014

The body of Peter Fechter, shot while trying to escape from East Germany to the west across the Berlin Wall. Fortunately, it "fell".

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It did not fall, of course. It was felled. It was felled by ordinary East German men and women who decided they were not willing to spend the rest of their lives in a large prison pretending to be a nation. On the other side of the wall - the free side - far too many westerners were indifferent to the suffering of the east. As I put it in my new book:

The presidents and prime ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated. Under cover of "détente", the Soviets gobbled up more and more real estate across the planet, from Ethiopia to Grenada. Nonetheless, it wasn't just the usual suspects who subscribed to this feeble evasion – Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Trudeau, François Mitterand – but most of the so-called "conservatives", too – Ted Heath, Giscard d'Estaing, Gerald Ford.

Consider one of the men present at today's celebrations: Gerhard Schröder, chancellor of a reunited Germany until his defeat by Angela Merkel in 2005 and now performing a little light "consulting" for Rothschild and one or two others. What was Herr Schröder doing back in the Eighties? Well, he was writing to Egon Krenz, deputy to East Germany's head gaoler Erich Honecker and the man who very briefly succeeded him 25 years ago. Here's Schröder schmoozing Krenz:

I will certainly need the endurance you have wished me in this busy election year. But you will certainly also need great strength and good health for your People's Chamber election.

The only difference being that, on one side of the wall, the election result was not in doubt. In other words, Schröder and a big chunk of the west's political class were part of the problem.When a free man enjoying the blessings of a free society promotes an equivalence between real democracy and a sham, he's colluding in the great lie being perpetrated by the prison state.
There were three key figures who stood against the détente fetishists, and in large part against the disposition of western electorates. Their names were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II - all heroes in Eastern Europe to this day, yet, as Richard Fernandez notes, all absent from the coverage of today's observances. The A-list guest is Mikhail Gorbachev, whose plan was to preserve Soviet Communism by putting a cosmetic gloss on it. Today, the old passivity has returned: The Wall "fell".
I would like to quote two US presidents in Berlin. First, again from The [Un]documented Mark Steyn:

Everything you need to know about the establishment's view of Ronald Reagan can be found on page 624 ofDutch, Edmund Morris' weird post-modern biography. The place is Berlin, the time June 12th 1987:
'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' declaims Dutch, trying hard to look infuriated, but succeeding only in an expression of mild petulance ... One braces for a flash of prompt lights to either side of him: APPLAUSE.
What a rhetorical opportunity missed. He could have read Robert Frost's poem on the subject, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' to simple and shattering effect. Or even Edna St. Vincent Millay's lines, which he surely holds in memory…
'Only now for the first time I see
This wall is actually a wall, a thing
Come up between us, shutting me away
From you ... I do not know you any more.'
Poor old Morris, the plodding, conventional, scholarly writer driven mad by 14 years spent trying to get a grip on Ronald Reagan. Most world leaders would have taken his advice: you're at the Berlin Wall, so you have to say something about it, something profound but oblique, maybe there's a poem on the subject... Who cares if Frost's is over-quoted, and a tad hard to follow for a crowd of foreigners? Who cares that it is, to the casual (never mind English-as-a-second-language) hearer, largely pro-wall, save for a few tentative questions toward the end..?
Reagan looked at the Berlin Wall and saw not a poem-quoting opportunity but prison bars...
'Tear down this wall!'
- and two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody - which is why his "rhetorical opportunity missed" is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans.

Here, from my previous book After America, is Reagan's hipper, cooler successor. He didn't see the Wall as a poem-quoting opportunity, either, but as just a bit of set-dressing for Barack Obama's great unending Song of Himself:

As he put it in his video address to the German people on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

'Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.'
Tear down that wall …so they can get a better look at me!!!
Is all of human history just a bit of colorful backstory in the Barack Obama biopic? "Few would have foreseen at the Elamite sack of Ur/Napoleon's retreat from Moscow/the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand/the passage of the Dubrovnik Airport Parking Lot Expansion Bill that one day I would be standing before you talking about how few would have foreseen that one day I would be standing before you."

When he's not talking about himself, he's even worse. Here, from his Brandenburg Gate citizen-of-the-world speech in 2008, is Obama's characterization of what happened a quarter-century ago:

People of the world – look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.

No, sorry. History proved no such thing. That's comforting pap, but it's not what happened. In the Cold War, the world did not "stand as one". One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people - the Barack Obamas of the day - were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because "the world stood as one" but because a few people stood against the pap-peddlers. The truly courageous ones were the fellows like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and a thousand lesser names, who had to stand against evil men who would have murdered them if they'd been able to get away with it. That they were no longer confident they could get away with it was because a small number of western leaders had shoveled détente into the garbage can of history and decided to tell the truth. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and John Paul II been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire would have survived and the wall would still be standing.
Since I'm quoting from my own books, here's a final one, from the predecessor to The [Un]documented Mark Steyn and After America - America Alone. It wasn't just Schmidt and Mitterand, but the bulk of their electorates, too:

There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: in the eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the west, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis The End Of History – written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism – is that the victors didn't see it as such. Americans – or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans – may talk about "winning" the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal Nato allies – they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the west only accelerated.

That bit about "hot-looking Red babes" wasn't a literary whimsy on my part. I was in Berlin a few weeks after the Wall had been breached, when the streets were still full of young Germans wandering back and forth from east to west still in semi-bewilderment. Me and my mate met a couple of cute Osterbirds and had a drink with them in the free world, and then they took us on a brief tour of the disintegrated tyranny on the other side. It was a great moment to pick up chicks - and none of them seemed to mind that the fetching young lad from Frankfurt or Munich had spent most of the Eighties protesting against the deployment of US Cruise missiles in western Europe, and cheering rock stars who complained that Ron and Maggie would lead us to Armageddon.
Reagan and Thatcher won the war. Obama and Schröder and the like inherited the peace. Which is why today's anniversary has that strange, passive, evasive quality. Or as Obama would put it:

There is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.

Generally speaking, when the world "stands as one" it's in the cause of inertia: Right now, the world stands as one in feeling it's no big deal if Iran goes nuclear, or Putin gobbles Ukraine, or the Islamic State starts head-chopping its way into Jordan, or members of certain unspecified multicultural communities plot to kill the Queen. The alternative to waiting for the world to "stand as one" is to stand up yourself, and stand for something. And now as in the Eighties there are few takers for that.

What Signal Does Barbie's Burka Send? (Mark Steyn On Islamopandering In The West Alert)

Macleans ^ | 12/11/2009 | Mark Steyn 

Posted on 12/11/2009, 12:43:13 PM by goldstategop

The other day, George Jonas passed on to his readers a characteristically shrewd observation gleaned from the late poet George Faludy: “No one likes to think of himself as a coward,” wrote Jonas. “People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it’s safer or more convenient, but because it’s the right thing . . . Successful terrorism persuades the terrorized that if they do terror’s bidding, it’s not because they’re terrified but because they’re socially concerned.”
This is true. Resisting terror is exhausting. It’s easier to appease it, but, for the sake of your self-esteem, you have to tell yourself you’re appeasing it in the cause of some or other variant of “social justice.” Obviously, it’s unfortunate if “Canadians” get arrested for plotting to murder the artists and publishers of the Danish Muhammad cartoons, but that’s all the more reason to be even more accommodating of the various “sensitivities” arising from the pervasive Islamophobia throughout Western society. Etc.
Yet this psychology also applies to broader challenges. By way of example, take a fluffy feature from a recent edition of Britain’s Daily Mail: “It’s Barbie in a Burka,” read the headline. Yes, as part of her 50th anniversary celebrations, “one of the world’s most famous children’s toys, Barbie, has been given a makeover.” And, in an attractive photo shoot, there was Barbie in “traditional Islamic dress,” wearing full head-to-toe lime-green and red burkas. At least, I’m assuming it was Barbie. It could have been G.I. Joe back there for all one can tell from the letterbox slot of eyeball meshing.
But Britain’s biggest Barbie fan, Angela Ellis, was thrilled. “Bring it on, Burka Barbie,” she said. “I think this is a great idea. I think this is really important for girls, wherever they are from, they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them.”
Well, Barbie is 50. And at an age when Katie Cougar—er, Couric—America’s all-time champion network news-ratings limbo-dancer, is being photographed ill-advisedly doing the lambada at the Christmas office party, there is perhaps something to be said for belatedly mothballing your 76-inch plastic bust. Or as the Canadian blogger Closet Conservative put it: “Great news: that bitch Barbie has finally reverted.” “And there’s no need for expensive accessories like books or cars or a life,” added Tim Blair of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, “because Barbie in a Bag isn’t allowed to leave her home unless accompanied by a male relative (Mullah Ken, sold separately).”
Mullah Ken? I’m not so sure about that. Given the long-time rumours, Ken’ll be lucky not to find himself crushed under one of those walls the Taliban put up for their sodomite-rehabilitation program. You’ll be glad to know the dolls are anatomically accurate: Burka Barbie has no clitoris, and, just like Mohamed Atta on the morning of Sept. 11, Ken’s genital area is fully depilated.
But we mean-spirited types are in the minority. The other day, I was watching, as one does, a German lingerie ad, for Liaison Dangereuse. It began with a naked woman—bit blurry and soft-focus, but you could see she had her hair in a towel and everything else in nothing at all, and there were definite glimpses of shapely bottom, the swell of her bosom and whatnot. All very Continental.
She applies her lipstick, sashays into her dressing room wiggling aforementioned posterior, hooks her brassiere, rolls up her seamed stockings, slips into her stilettos, and then—with one final toss of her glossy luxuriant hair—pulls on her burka and steps out the door. Tag line: “Sexiness for Everyone. Everywhere.”
Very clever. The agency is Glow of Berlin. Might win them an award. Yet the superficial cool and the O. Henry switcheroo at the tail seem less cutting-edge state-of-the-art than sad and desperate wishful thinking. For one thing, if the comely young lady were truly a believer as opposed to a jobbing infidel thespian, her underdressed gig would earn her death threats, if she were lucky, and, if she weren’t, actual death.
Still, Burka Barbie and Fatima’s Secret are minor and peripheral. What about the so-called most powerful man in the world? “The U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it,” President Obama told his audience in Cairo earlier this year. “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”
My oh my, he’s a profile in courage, isn’t he? It’s true that there have been occasional frictions over, say, the refusal of Muslim women to reveal their faces for their driver’s licences—Sultaana Freeman, for example, sued the state of Florida over that “right.” But the real issue in the Western world is “the right of women and girls” not “to wear the hijab.” A couple of weeks ago in Arizona, a young woman called Noor Almaleki was fatally run over by her father in his Jeep Cherokee for becoming “too Westernized.” If there were a Matthew Shepard-style gay crucifixion every few months, liberal columnists would be going bananas about the “climate of hate” in America. But you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse (to cite merely the most lurid recent examples of North American “honour killings”), and nobody cares. Certainly, there’s no danger of Barack Obama ever standing up for the likes of poor Miss Almaleki to a roomful of A-list imams. When it comes to real hate crimes, as opposed to his entirely imaginary epidemic, the president of the United States has smaller cojones than Ken.
If you eschew the Grand Cherokee in favour of the Toronto subway, you may have noticed that the poster girl for the latest “social justice” campaign is a Muslim woman. “Drop Fees for a Poverty-Free Ontario” is the ringing cry, and next to it is a hijab-clad lady speaking up and speaking out. It’s something to do with the cost of post-secondary education, which, like everything else in Canada, is supposed to be “free.” The image is a curious choice as an emblem for educational access: after all, one of the most easily discernible features of societies that adopt Islamic dress is how ignorant they are. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, girls were forbidden by law to attend school—i.e., not just fritter-away-half-a-decade-on-Ontario-taxpayers “post-secondary” education, but kindergarten and Grade 1. In Pakistan, 60 per cent of women are illiterate.
According to the UN’s 2002 Arab Development Report, half of all women in the Arab world cannot read. And even in Canada, the ability of the woman on the subway poster to access that post-secondary education depends not on the “fees” but on her father or, if she’s already been married off to her 16-year-old cousin back in Mirpur, her husband. The Saskatchewan Internet maestro Kate McMillan summed up the poster thus: “Subjugation of women—it’s the new normal.”
“Traditional Islamic dress” is not so “traditional.” Talk to any educated Muslim woman who attended university in the fifties, sixties or seventies—back when they assumed history was moving their way and a covered woman was merely a local variant of the Russian babushka, something old and wizened you saw in upcountry villages. Now you see them in the heart of the metropolis—and I don’t mean Beirut or Abu Dhabi so much as Paris and Brussels. It’s very strange to be able to walk around, say, Zarqa, hometown of the late “insurgent” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and look 90 per cent of the women in the eye, and even be rewarded with a friendly smile every so often, and then to fly on to London and be confronted by one masked face after another while strolling down Whitechapel Road in the East End. The burka, the niqab and the hijab are not fashion statements but explicitly political ones, and what they symbolize in a Western context is self-segregation.
That “Drop Fees” campaign would never dream of dressing up its poster gal as June Cleaver, Donna Reed or any other outmoded sitcom mom in twin-set and pearls. Golly, that would send all sorts of disturbing signals to today’s liberated females, wouldn’t it? What signal is Barbie’s burka sending? That, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, women were forbidden by law from ever feeling sunlight on their faces? Hey, there’s a positive message for young girls.
Phillip Longman is a demographer who is widely regarded as the antithesis of the Muzzies-are-coming alarmists like me. Yet his most famous essay on the world currently taking shape is titled “The Return of Patriarchy.” Don’t worry, it’s not the bad kind of patriarchy of 1950s sitcom dads. It’s the groovy multiculti kind—which presumably is why white liberal progressives are so eager to mainstream it. Perhaps they figure it can just be contained to the likes of Noor Almaleki, but I doubt it. I’ve mentioned previously a Euro-pal of mine, non-Muslim, who’s taken to covering herself in certain quartiers of an evening in order to avoid harassment by “youths.” She does exactly what that German lingerie lass does—and with the merest correction to the sign-off: “Subordination for Every Woman. Everywhere.”

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TOPICS: Canada; Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Philosophy; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: barbie; barbiesburka; burka; burkabarbie; burqabarbie; christianright; creepingsharia; creepingshariah; culturaljihad; gwot; islam; islamopandering; jihad; macleans; marksteyn; muslims; sharia; shariah;stealthjihad; steyn; wot

Lots of good things in this Mark Steyn missive on Barbie and Islampandering. But I think this paragraph says it all:

"If there were a Matthew Shepard-style gay crucifixion every few months, liberal columnists would be going bananas about the “climate of hate” in America. But you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse (to cite merely the most lurid recent examples of North American “honour killings”), and nobody cares. Certainly, there’s no danger of Barack Obama ever standing up for the likes of poor Miss Almaleki to a roomful of A-list imams. When it comes to real hate crimes, as opposed to his entirely imaginary epidemic, the president of the United States has smaller cojones than Ken." 

Indeed. Its not about Barbie's being dressed in a hijab or a burka. Its about us.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelogus

The Simulacrum of Self-Government

JUNE 28, 2013 4:30 PM

We might as well put the Constitution out of its misery. 

By Mark Steyn

...a corrupt bureaucracy dispensing federal gravy to favored clients; a pseudo-legislature passing bills unread by the people’s representatives and uncomprehended by the men who claim to have written them; and a co-regency of jurists torturing an 18th-century document in order to justify what other countries are at least honest enough to recognize as an unprecedented novelty. Whether or not, per Scalia, we should “condemn” the United States Constitution, it might be time to put the poor wee thing out of its misery.

THE SHAGGED SHEEP

by Mark SteynSteyn on the World02 Nov 2011

This is a long piece but it does have underage sex and bestiality in it. So enjoy!

The other day I had an e-mail from M J Murphy, who blogs as Big City Lib, saying only this:

I think you owe Dr. Miller an apology.

There followed a link to a post called Steyn Gets Punked By 28-Year Old Literary Hoax:

Remember the kerfuffle between Mark Steyn and journalism professor Dr. John Miller from a few weeks back? Dr. Miller accused Steyn of taking material for "America Alone" from illegitimate sources like the infamous Little Green Book: Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini.*
[*UPDATE: M J Murphy has quietly revised this paragraph, and so the airbrushing begins]

Actually, I don't think Dr Miller has accused me of any such thing, though I admit, given his shifting accusations, that I'm no longer quite sure what he's accusing me of. Just to recap, said "kerfuffle" arises from this passage in a review I wrote forMaclean's of Oriana Fallaci's final book The Force Of Reason:

Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam -- for example, Ayatollah Khomeini's "Blue Book" and its helpful advice on romantic matters: "If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer." I'll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: "A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin." Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year-old wife, but the Ayatollah's not clear on that.

A cheap joke en passant. Indeed, insofar as I dwelt on the ovine fornication, it was to suggest to La Fallaci that, even for us flagrant Islamophobes, it was not perhaps the most useful avenue of attack:

I enjoy the don't-eat-your-sexual-partner stuff as much as the next infidel, but the challenge presented by Islam is not that the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers. If I had to choose, I'd rather Mohammed Atta was downriver in Egypt hitting on the livestock than flying through the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. But he's not.

And that's it. That's all I said. And no one would remember had not El Mo's sock puppets included the sheep-shagging line in the dossier they submitted to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission. Whereupon Dr Miller …actually, I'm not sure he is a doctor: He calls himself "The Journalism Doctor", but the title seems to be entirely self-conferred. Anyway, at this point, Doc Miller, Prof Miller, Herr Baron von Miller or whatever he is got interested in the case and asked the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal if he could intervene. Silly ol' me assumed that he wished to intervene to argue the cause of free speech. But no: he wanted to intervene to argue that I was not a "responsible journalist", and so it was entirely appropriate for the state to censor me. As Rory Leishman notes, since this thought-police racket got going, "Most journalists have either condoned censorship or cowered in silence." Canadians who still value liberty should know that, if they rely on anemic PC flunkeys like Professor Miller, they'll lose their country. At any rate, the BCHRT gave him the bum's rush, so Prof Miller surfaced a few weeks ago and kept returning to the subject of the sheep-shaggers line. His complaint is in an apparently endless process of evolution. But let's go through the story so far:

1) First, insofar as I understand his initial argument, he advanced the curious line that the ruling from the Ayatollah was not widely cited, and therefore it was improper of me to use it.

After it was pointed out that in fact Khomeini's views on the post-bestiality buffet, child sex and other arcane points of Islamic law are known to many (especially those on the receiving end), a couple of weeks later he revised his line of attack:

2) Now his argument was that I'd concocted it out of whole cloth. The J-Doc declared boldly that Steyn "gave no citation for the quote, and I suspect it was made up."

In fact, as anyone who reads the passage above can see, I attributed it to Oriana Fallaci's book. The disinterested observer might conclude that Professor Ethics-Bore had never so much as glanced at the offending article but had simply taken the Sock Puppets' word for it. So the E-Bore was obliged to revise his argument yet again - and decided to accuse me of what he appeared to have done himself:

3) Now my sin was that I "clearly accepted someone else's word for it". Evidently, it wasn't all that "clear" when he was accusing me of making it up, but a drowning ethics prof can be forgiven for clutching at straw men.

At any rate, that makes three different complaints. As I wrote:

That's the great thing about the self-appointed "Journalism Doctor": When he diagnoses you, he provides his own second opinion.

Now, on Prof Miller's behalf, M J Murphy has revised my crime yet again:

Dr. Miller accused Steyn of taking material for "America Alone" from illegitimate sources like the infamous Little Green Book: Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

As I said, the sheep-shagging passage is from a review of La Fallaci's book in Maclean's. It's nothing to do with America Alone. There is no mention of sheep shagging in America Alone. There is no mention of any Little Green Book in America Alone. There is, indeed, no mention of Ayatollah Khomeini in America Alone. Prof Miller and Mr Murphy and theirenthusiastic chorus boys at Law Is Cool are welcome to check for themselves.

But, leaving that aside and forgiving M J Murphy for confusing America Alone with a book review in Maclean's, if you return to the passage up above, you'll see that neither Oriana nor I refer to any Little Green Book. We cite a "Blue Book" - or "Libro Azzurro", in La Fallaci's original Italian. That's the color we're nailing to our mast. We're singing the blues, and it's you fellers who are smelling the green. Indeed, the guy who brought up the Little Green Book is Prof Miller in his response to me. I never mentioned any green book. Like I said, I'd rather be blue. So, if M J Murphy and the excitable schoolgirls at Law R Cool have proved The Little Green Book is a "hoax", the person who's been "punked" is Professor Miller.

Incidentally, I wouldn't describe The Little Green Book as a "hoax". It would be truer to say that it is a somewhat lurid and condensed version of the Ayatollah Khomeini's work. Nevertheless, if you read M J Murphy's post, you'll find that Marvin Zonis of the University of Chicago declined to provide an introduction for it. Professor Zonis is evidently regarded by M J Murphy as a greater authority in these matters than I am, so please keep his name in mind.

However, as it happens, I didn't take "someone else's word" for anything, whether it was the word of Oriana Fallaci or the compiler of The Little Green Book. When it comes to the Ayatollah Khomeini's views on sheep shagging, my guide for many years has been a book called Resaleh Towzih al-Masael. The author is a chap called …Ayatollah Khomeini. Let's go back to the original offending quotation from my Maclean's book review:

Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam -- for example, Ayatollah Khomeini's "Blue Book" and its helpful advice on romantic matters.

Prof Miller has great sport with this. Why, that birdbrain Steyn! He can't even get the color of the hoax book correct: It's not a "Blue Book", it's a "Green Book". Everyone knows that. Boy, that Steyn, he don't get nuttin' right. As the Credentialed Fact-Checker gleefully mocks:

There is no Blue Book, it's The Little Green Book. And it wasn't written by the Ayatollah at all, as you say, but by a source who was apparently at least three times, and three languages, removed.

"There is no Blue Book": Thus saith the J-School Professor, and he surely wouldn't make such a baldly definitive statement if he hadn't fact-checked himself with the rigor Signora Fallaci and I are so deplorably lacking in.

Okay, I'm going to try to explain things very slowly for Doc Miller and M J Murphy, and with pictures, too. For personal reasons, which I'll explain in a moment, I happen to know that 30 years ago many Iranians did, indeed, refer to the Ayatollah's "Blue Book". Visiting Iran in the wake of the revolution, Oriana Fallaci would certainly have heard the Towzih al-Masael referred to both by Iranians and westerners as what she would call the "Libro Azzurro". Are you wondering why? Well, here's a clue:

Hmm. Here's another clue:

But how can that be? We all know: "There is no Blue Book." The Lord High Checker of Facts has pronounced. As it happens, Resaleh Towzih al-Masael has been published in Iran in several editions. But the most popular was the paperback edition published by Nashr I Sharia't of Tehran. It sold for 120 rials. It had some 350 pages, approx 5x7 inches, with a blue cover, featuring a picture of its ever more famous author. A souvenir hardback edition marketed as the perfect New Year gift was subsequently published by Rashidi with a plain blue cover. Since the old boy's death, the Khomeini Resaleh has got a bit like the Johnny Mathis Christmas album, re-released every year in a different color. But many versions of the "Blue Book" are still out there:

In the relevant passage in her book, Oriana recalls first seeing excerpts from the "Blue Book" in 1979. That's what it was back then: A blue book. The blue book in revolutionary Iran. It certainly wasn't a "little green book" as that wasn't published till 1980. So when she and I refer to the Ayatollah's "Blue Book" we're referring to that Nashr I Sharia't edition of the Resaleh. It was translated into English, unabridged, by J Borujerdi and published in 1984 by Westview in London and Boulder, Colorado under the title A Clarification Of Questions.

I was given it a couple of decades ago by the Iranian gal I was then dating. She had a copy of the pocket paperback with the Ayatollah on the cover, and once, when she read out a bit to me, I expressed skepticism that it could really be that wacky. So a few weeks later she presented me with the English edition. As she explained, these were not just some personal musings from the Ayatollah but a kind of moral compass for the Islamic state. So I didn't need to "accept someone else's word for it" on having sex with nine-year-old girls, because, like anyone else who's taken even a cursory interest in the subject, I've known for a long time that, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, girls could be legally married at the age of nine. Article 1041 of the Civil Code states:

Marriage before puberty by the permission of the Guardian and on condition of taking into interest the ward's interest is proper.

"Puberty" is defined as "nine full lunar years" - although, in practice, girls as young as seven can be married on the say-so of a doctor. The justification for all this is in the highly elaborate rules of Islamic life. They may sound unlikely to M J Murphy or Prof Miller but the Ayatollah's "clarification of questions" doesn't strike most devout Iranian Shi'ites that way. Mr Borujerdi, the English translator, was an Iranian émigré living in Cleveland, and he gave an interview about the book to David Remnick (now the editor of The New Yorker) in The Washington Post in 1985. It's not available online but M J Murphy and Prof Miller and the Law R Cool nellies are welcome to go to their local reference library and check it out. It's the Aug 21 issue, page B1:

"I did the translation because it gives a very close understanding of the Shiite view of the world," he said. "The Bantam Press published a very slight version five years ago called The Little Green Book'-just 6 percent of the original-but that was really a joke book, to poke fun at Khomeini and debunk Islam at the beginning of the hostage crisis. In Iran, this book is mandatory for every literate person, a kind of guide to living."

So this is the real deal, not the sensationalist précis but a serious, scholarly "unabridged translation" designed to provide "a unique picture of the belief structure of Shi'ism". Mr Borujerdi had no difficulty finding eminent academics to provide an introduction – namely, Professors Mehdi Abedi and Michael Fischer of Rice University in Houston. But he also consulted on the translation and interpretation with many other scholars, among them Professor Wilfred Madelung of the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, Professor Wheeler Thackston of Harvard's Near Eastern Languages department, Professor William Darrow of Williams College, Professor Vincent McHale of Case Western, Professor Merlin Swartz of Boston University …oh, and Professor Marvin Zonis of the University of Chicago. That would be the same Prof Zonis who was unhappy with The Little Green Book, and thus made M J Murphy unhappy, too. But Prof Zonis is cool with A Clarification Of Questions, so presumably M J Murphy will also be satisfied?

Resaleh Towzih al-Masael/A Clarification Of Questions consists of almost 3,000 "problems" for which Ayatollah Khomeini provides answers, plus a few follow-ups he dealt with in subsequent editions.

Here is a page from Mr Borujerdi's translation. In case you're on a slow dial-up in Mexico and the j-peg's taking its time a-loading, I'll reprint a bit:

#2631. It is loathsome to eat the meat of horse and mule and donkey and if somebody makes coitus with them, that is an intercourse, they become unlawful and they must be taken out of the city and sold elsewhere.

#2632. If they have intercourse with a cow and sheep and camel their urine and dung becomes unclean and drinking their milk will also be unlawful and they must be killed and burned without delay, and the person who had intercourse with them must pay money to the owner. Further, if he had intercourse with any beast its milk becomes unlawful.

I first read this book all those years ago with my Persian gal, and I take it off the shelf every once in a while because, like Oriana, I enjoy a good laugh: If you bonk your mule, you've gotta take him out the city and sell him. If you shag your neighbor's sheep, you've gotta write him a check. That's not me, that's not Oriana, that's not some compiler of some discredited anthology, that's the Ayatollah Khomeini. You can find the great man's magnum opus in the original Farsi atimam-khomeini.com. But here's the relevant lines:

(Click here for slightly bigger version.)

Now, it's true that La Fallaci's wording differs from Mr Borujerdi's. But so what? The King James Bible is different from the New International Version, or the Reader's Digest version. And the Towzi has been published in many different versions by the Ayatollah himself. For his translation, Mr Borujerdi looked at six different Farsi editions, some with supplemental questions, others with no answers to some of the original questions. In this instance, Oriana was translating into what she called "Fallaci's English" from an Italian version of the Ayatollah's Farsi that was excerpted in an Italian magazine under the headline "I Dieci Khomeindamenti", or "The Ten Khomeindments", which is a pretty funny title.

So, just to clarify, neither of us got "punked" by The Little Green Book, a book neither of us so much as mentioned. We both cited Khomeini's "Blue Book", because that's where we got it from. And Oriana's cited source for her Italian translation, "The Ten Khomeindments", was published in 1979, a year before Bantam released The Little Green Book, and at a time when the strictures of the "Khomeindments" were among the research she took to Iran for her famous interview with the Ayatollah.

So I wonder what it is Professor Ethics-Bore thinks I should have "checked". That the Ayatollah disapproves of post-coitally chowing down on your barnyard sex partner? Check! Indeed, check mate. On the other hand, the E-Bore didn't check anything - not my original book review, not Oriana's original quote. He pronounced magisterially on the non-existence of any such "Blue Book" without checking a thing.

But, beyond all that J-school snoozeroonie stuff, what I find even more perplexing is why Prof Miller, M J Murphy and the nellies at Law Am Cool are so weirdly obsessed with insisting that somehow the Ayatollah's rulings about eating shagged sheep and having sex with nine-year-olds must be some malicious rumor got up by Oriana and me and a couple of other neocon buffoons. No one who knows anything about Khomeini or Shia jurisprudence would be in the least bit surprised, so why would a prissy PC drone like Prof Miller be so cavalier as to expose himself as entirely ignorant of the subject he's loftily pontificating on? Not for the first time you realise that, for the lazy white liberal, driving around with a "CELEBRATE DIVERSITY" sticker absolves one from having to take the slightest interest in other cultures.

So, just to bring the deplorably unicultural Prof Miller up to speed, the easiest way to get a flavor of the Ayatollah's book is simply to sample the contents pages:

THE UNCLEANS
1&2. Urine and stool
3. Semen
4. Corpse
5. Blood
6&7. Dog and pig
8. Infidel
9. Wine
10. Beer
11. Sweat of an unlawful ejaculation
12. The sweat of a camel that eats uncleans

Hey, Multiculti Man, that would be you at big hit sound number 8: "Infidel" – right behind "Dog and pig" but, if it's any consolation, ahead of "Sweat of an unlawful ejaculation". But hang on: ejaculate-wise, the Ayatollah's just getting cranked up:

PRECEPTS OF EJACULATION
Things that are unlawful for an ejaculator
Things that are loathesome for an ejaculator
The bath of ejaculation…

I confess I was worried that Prof Miller, M J Murphy and Law R Cool might be in breach of the Ayatollah's "Precepts of Ejaculation" but, after thumbing through them, I can't find anything in there preventing you from doing it repeatedly all over the Internet.

In other words, anyone who had the most casual acquaintance with the Ayatollah's writings would be aware not only that it's not in the least bit surprising but entirely par for the course that the old boy had complex rules re using your embraceable ewe for the Friday night kebab special. But let's leave me and M J Murphy out of it, since we're merely the middle men in what is in effect Prof Miller's "fact check" of Oriana Fallaci. Could anything be more ludicrous than the tenured Ryerson bore presuming to lay down the law on Ayatollah Khomeini to the last western writer ever to interview him? In my (rigorously fact-checked) obituary of her for The Atlantic Monthly I wrote of Oriana's encounter with the Ayatollah:

After traveling to Qom and kicking her heels for ten days waiting for him to agree to see her, she was ushered – barefoot and wearing a chador - into his presence and found what she subsequently described as the most handsome old man she'd ever met. In his own way, he must have dug the crazy Italian chick: The meeting was terminated when she tore off "this stupid medieval rag" and hurled her chador to the floor. But he agreed to return a day or two later to finish the interview.

It seems a fantastical encounter now: a man who'd just shoveled every female in supposedly the most modernized of Middle Eastern nations back into "medieval rags" versus the apotheosis of the ballbusting western career woman. The phrase "personality interviewer" is grossly devalued these days: look at Mike Wallace's cringe-making oleaginous encounter with today's Iranian must-get, President Ahmadinejad. Indeed, Wallace seems to have found Ahmadinejad more attractive ("very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way") than Fallaci found Khomeini. She was by that stage "the greatest political interviewer of modern times" (Rolling Stone), and yet unlike so many of the bland bigshots jetting from foreign ministry to presidential palace she gravitated to power mainly for the opportunities it afforded to knee it in the crotch. She asked the Ayatollah indignant questions about the executions of prostitutes and homosexuals and he sneered at women like her for going around uncovered "dragging behind them a tail of men".

It's worth citing the "medieval rag" bit in full. La Fallaci had just raised with the Ayatollah the matter of "the condition of segregation into which women have been cast" in the Islamic republic. "They can't study at university with men, or work with men," she said, "or go to the beach or to a swimming pool with men. They have to take a dip apart, in their chadors. By the way, how do you swim in a chador?"

What a splendidly offhand question. Alas, the Ayatollah didn't care for it. "This is none of your business," said Khomeini. "Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women."

"That's very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I'm going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now. There. Done. But tell me something. A woman such as I, who has always lived among men, showing her neck, her hair, her ears, who has been in war and slept in the front line in the field among soldiers, according to you, is she an immoral, bold and unproper woman?"

That was 1979 - before any "literary hoax" called The Little Green Book was ever published. I had a thousand points of disagreement with Oriana Fallaci, but I adored her. She was a fearless woman, and when she went into a room with the dictators of the day she was full of facts. In a navel-gazing media forever congratulating itself on "speaking truth to power", she just got on and did it. In his "open letter" to me, Professor Miller wrote of Oriana:

When the New York Times wrote her obituary on Sept. 15, 2006, the headline called her a "writer-provocateur." Sound familiar? Remind us of anyone we know?

What a sad little man. He actually thinks he's insulting me by comparing me to the peerless Fallaci. But, of course, he's only doing it so he can go all J-school on us:

Journalists usually try to deal with primary sources (Writer-provocateurs seldom do).

Oh, my! I wonder if he has any idea quite what a Ryerson-atrophied pansy he sounds wagging his finger at Oriana Fallaci? "Writer-provocateurs" don't "deal with primary sources"? Well, her "primary source" on Ayatollah Khomeini is Ayatollah Khomeini. What have you got, Finger Boy? When she was hurling her chador at him in 1979, what were you doing? Retyping press releases from Ed Broadbent?

Unlike Signora Fallaci, I can't claim face time with the Ayatollah. But I've read his writings in the scholarly translations, and cross-referenced them with the original Farsi, and I am familiar with his rulings on camel sweat, touching one's beard after ejaculation, defecating in a dead-end street without the permission of its owner, and whether you can divorce your child bride before she's begun menstruating. It's unfortunate that the most influential Muslim of the late 20th century is a barbaric nutjob, but it happens to be the case.

So just to reprise:

Did I cite Oriana Fallaci accurately? Yes.

Did she cite Ayatollah Khomeini accurately? Yes.

Is there a volume by the Ayatollah commonly known as the "Blue Book"? Yes

Does it include rulings on sex with nine-year olds and what to do with a shagged sheep? Yes.

Did either of us mention a Little Green Book? No. In fact, the translation Oriana cites pre-dates The Little Green Book by a year.

I think Professor Waggy-Finger is doing what they call "projecting". He's accusing me of everything he's been doing himself. I took "somebody else's word for it". Er, no. That would be you, taking the Sock Puppets' word for it on my book review. I didn't check the "primary source". Er, no. That would be you, cavalierly announcing there's no such thing as a "Blue Book". To be more charitable to you than you deserve, you assume that Oriana Fallaci and I so want to think the worst of Islam that we'll fall for any old hooey. Actually not. On the other hand, you so want to think the worst of us blowhard provocateurs that you assume we're as ignorant of Islam as you evidently are.

To end where we came in, M J Murphy wrote: "I think you owe Dr. Miller an apology." Au contraire, I think "Dr Miller" owes me and Oriana an apology. Since he decided to go to such kinky lengths to catch my eye, he has accused me of failing to provide a source for a quote: False. He's accused me of making up famous rulings of the Ayatollah: False. He's declared flat out that there is no such thing as a Khomeini "Blue Book": False. And people pay money to study "responsible journalism" with this guy? At least for his own ill-advised adventures in fact-checking, his unfortunate acolyte, M J Murphy of Toronto, isn't charging cash.

If I were celebrated toilet photographer Warren Kinsella or leading Canadian Internet Nazi Lucy Warman, I'd sue. But I'm not. Nor, despite a flying visit to the Falklands and a couple of wet weekends in Wales, have I ever been attracted to sheep-shagging. But I imagine it feels a bit like dealing with Messrs Miller, Murphy and the Law R Cool kids: No matter how often you roger them senseless, they keep on bleating. I wouldn't have bothered with this response were it not for the fact that Professor Waggy-Finger traduced not me but a great and courageous lady who is no longer here to laugh her magnificent scoffing laugh in his face. Oriana Fallaci is a hundred times the man John Miller is. Read her interviews with Arafat or the Shah and ask yourself whether she needs any posthumous lessons in "journalistic ethics" from an unread parochial poseur. And, if you are considering a career in journalism, think about what you'd like to be looking back on in 40 years' time: Oriana's resume or Professor Miller's.

Prof Miller came on like the Fact-Checking Ethics-Bore J-School Ayatollah and limps off like a poor little lamb who has lost his way, as they sing in the barnyards of Qom. While we're waiting for Murphy and Miller to withdraw their feeble slander of La Fallaci [UPDATE: There doesn't seem much point waiting for Law Is Kool-Aid - see my thoughts on their various responses here], I think we'll keep this piece here with a convenient permanent link on the home page to enable them to find it easily enough. We'll call it "Professor Miller, M J Murphy and Law Is Cool: The Shagged Sheep." Come to think of it, that would make a good chapter title when we reprint this in The Mark Steyn Flagrantly Islamophobic Reader. But if they'd prefer an alternative title how about "Professor Miller's Precepts Of Ejaculation"?

BIG GOVERNMENT

Originally at,

The church of big government

but an alert reader noticed the link is dead. Now at:

Mr. KYL. Madam President, Mark Steyn is one of the most gifted writers of our time. His trenchant analysis appears regularly in National Review. Steyn writes with biting humor and personal experience with government censorship and has chronicled the concomitant growth in government power and loss of freedom in Europe and North America.

In the March 5, 2012, issue of National Review he warns that America, which he calls the ‘‘last religious Nation in the Western world,’’ is in danger of going the way of European nations in replacing faith and family with the all powerful national government as the source of everything we need. He calls his piece ‘‘The Church of Big Government.’’ It reminds me of Barry Goldwater’s warning that ‘‘a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government that is big enough to take away everything you have.’’

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the RECORD. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:

[From the National Review, Mar. 5, 2012]

THE CHURCH OF BIG GOVERNMENT LEVIATHAN IS NIBBLING YOUR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AWAY (By Mark Steyn)

Discussing the constitutionality of Obamacare’s ‘‘preventive health’’ measures on MSNBC, Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post told Chris Matthews that she reasons thus with her liberal friends:

‘‘Maybe the Founders were wrong to guarantee free exercise of religion in the First Amendment, but they did.’’

Maybe. A lot of other constitutional types in the Western world have grown increasingly comfortable with circumscribing religious liberty. In 2002, the Swedish constitution was amended to criminalize criticism of homosexuality. ‘‘Disrespect’’ of the differently orientated became punishable by up to two years in jail, and ‘‘especially offensive’’ disrespect by up to four years. Shortly thereafter, Pastor Ake Green preached a sermon referencing the more robust verses of scripture, and was convicted of ‘‘hate crimes’’ for doing so.

Conversely, the 1937 Irish Constitution recognized ‘‘the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith.’’ But times change. In 2003, the Vatican issued a ruminative document on homosexual unions. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned Catholic bishops that merely distributing the statement could lead to prosecution under the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, and six months in the slammer.

In Canada, Hugh Owens took out an advertisement in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, and he and the paper wound up getting fined $9,000 for ‘‘exposing homosexuals to hatred or ridicule.’’ Here is the entire text of the offending advertisement:

Romans 1:26

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13

I Corinthians 6:9

That’s it. Mr. Owens cited chapter and verse—and nothing but. Yet it was enough for the Saskatchewan ‘‘Human Rights’’ Tribunal. The newspaper accepted the fine; Mr. Owens appealed. That was in 1997. In 2002, the Court of Queen’s Bench upheld the conviction. Mr. Owens appealed again. In 2006, the Court of Appeal reversed the decision. This time the ‘‘Human Rights’’ Commission appealed. The supreme court of Canada heard the case last autumn, and will issue its judgment sometime this year—or a decade and a half after Mr. Owens’s original conviction. It doesn’t really matter which way their Lordships rule. If you were to attempt to place the same advertisement with the Star-Phoenix or any other Canadian paper today, they would all politely decline. So, in practical terms, the ‘‘Human Rights’’ Tribunal has achieved its goal: It has successfully shriveled the public space for religious expression—and, ultimately, for ‘‘exercise of religion.’’

In the modern era, America has been different. It is the last religious nation in the Western world, the last in which a majority of the population are (kinda) practicing believers and (sorta) regular attenders of church. The ‘‘free exercise’’—or free market—enabled religion to thrive. Elsewhere, the established church, whether de jure (the Church of England, the Church of Denmark) or de facto (as in Catholic Italy and Spain), did for religion what the state monopoly did for the British car industry. As the Episcopal and Congregational churches degenerated into a bunch of mushy doubt-ridden wimps, Americans went elsewhere. As the Lutheran Church of Sweden underwent similar institutional decay, Swedes gave up on God entirely.

Nevertheless, this distinction shouldn’t obscure an important truth—that, in America as in Europe, the mainstream churches were cheerleaders for the rise of their usurper: the Church of Big Government. Instead of the Old World’s state church or the New World’s separation of church and state, most of the West now believes in the state as church—an all-powerful deity who provides day-care for your babies and takes your aged parents off your hands. America’s Catholic hierarchy, in particular, colluded in the redefinition of the tiresome individual obligation to Christian charity as the painless universal guarantee of state welfare. Barack Obama himself provided the neatest distillation of this convenient transformation when he declared, in a TV infomercial a few days before his election, that his ‘‘fundamental belief’’ was that ‘‘I am my brother’s keeper.’’

Back in Kenya, his brother lived in a shack on $12 a year. If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why can’t he shove a sawbuck and a couple singles in an envelope and double the guy’s income? Ah, well: When the president claims that ‘‘I am my brother’s keeper,’’ what he means is that the government should be his brother’s keeper. And, for the most part, the Catholic Church agreed. They were gung ho for Obamacare. It never seemed to occur to them that, if you agitate for state health care, the state gets to define what health care is.

According to that spurious bon mot of Chesterton’s, when men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything. But, in practice, the anything most of the West now believes in is government. As Tocqueville saw it, what prevents the ‘‘state popular’’ from declining into a ‘‘state despotic’’ is the strength of the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the individual. But in the course of the 20th century, the intermediary institutions, the independent pillars of a free society, were gradually chopped away—from church to civic associations to family. Very little now stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why the latter assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life, including the provisions a Catholic college president makes for his secretary’s IUD.

Seven years ago, George Weigel published a book called ‘‘The Cube and the Cathedral,’’ whose title contrasts two Parisian landmarks—the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the giant modernist cube of La Grande Arche de la Defe´nse, commissioned by President Mitterrand to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution. As La Grande Arche boasts, the entire cathedral, including its spires and tower, would fit easily inside the cold geometry of Mitterrand’s cube. In Europe, the cube—the state—has swallowed the cathedral—the church. I’ve had conversations with a handful of senior EU officials in recent years in which all five casually deployed the phrase ‘‘post-Christian Europe’’ or ‘‘post-Christian future,’’ and meant both approvingly. These men hold that religious faith is incompatible with progressive society. Or as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s control-freak spin doctor, once put it, cutting short the prime minister before he could answer an interviewer’s question about his religious faith: ‘‘We don’t do God.’’

For the moment, American politicians still do God, and indeed not being seen to do him remains something of a disadvantage on the national stage. But in private many Democrats agree with those ‘‘post-Christian’’ Europeans, and in public they legislate that way. Words matter, as then-senator Barack Obama informed us in 2008. And, as president, his choice of words has been revealing: He prefers, one notes, the formulation ‘‘freedom of worship’’ to ‘‘freedom of religion.’’

Example: ‘‘We’re a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses.’’ (The president after the Fort Hood murders in 2009.) Er, no, ‘‘we’re a nation that guarantees’’ rather more than that. But Obama’s rhetorical sleight prefigured Commissar Sebelius’s edict, under which ‘‘religious liberty’’—i.e., the freedom to decline to facilitate condom dispensing, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion—is confined to those institutions engaged in religious instruction for card-carrying believers. This is a very Euro-secularist view of religion: It’s tolerated as a private members’ club for consenting adults. But don’t confuse ‘‘freedom to worship’’ for an hour or so on Sunday morning with any kind of license to carry on the rest of the week. You can be a practicing Godomite just so long as you don’t (per Mrs. Patrick Campbell) do it in the street and frighten the horses. The American bishops are not the most impressive body of men even if one discounts the explicitly Obamaphile rubes among them, and they have unwittingly endorsed this attenuated view of religious ‘‘liberty.’’ The Catholic Church is the oldest continuously operating entity in the Western world. The earliest recorded use of the brand first appears in Saint Ignatius’s letter to the Smyrnaeans of circa A.D. 110—that’s 1,902 years ago: ‘‘Wherever Jesus Christ is,’’ wrote Ignatius, ‘‘there is the Catholic Church,’’ a usage that suggests his readers were already familiar with the term. Obama’s ‘‘freedom to worship’’ inverts Ignatius: Wherever there is a Catholic church, there Jesus Christ is—in a quaint-looking building with a bit of choral music, a psalm or two, and a light homily on the need for ‘‘social justice’’ and action on ‘‘climate change.’’ The bishops plead, No, no, don’t forget our colleges and hospitals, too. In a garden of sexual Eden, the last guys not chowing down on once-forbidden fruits are the ones begging for the fig leaf. But neither is a definition of ‘‘religion’’ that Ignatius would have recognized. ‘‘Katholikos’’ means ‘‘universal’’: The Church cannot agree to the confines Obama wishes to impose and still be, in any sense, catholic.

If you think a Catholic owner of a sawmill or software business should be as free of state coercion as a Catholic college, the term ‘‘freedom of conscience’’ is more relevant than ‘‘freedom of religion.’’ For one thing, it makes it less easy for a secular media to present the issue as one of a recalcitrant institution out of step with popular progressivism. NPR dispatched its reporter Allison Keyes to a ‘typical’’ Catholic church in Washington, D.C., where she found congregants disinclined to follow their bishops. To a man (or, more often, woman), they disliked ‘‘the way the Church injects itself into political debates.’’ But, if contraceptives and abortion and conception and birth and chastity and fidelity and sexual morality are now ‘‘politics,’’ then what’s left for religion? Back in the late first century, Ignatius injected himself into enough ‘‘political debates’’ that he wound up getting eaten by lions at the Coliseum. But no doubt tut-tutting NPR listeners would have deplored the way the Church had injected itself into live theater. Ignatius’s successor bishops have opted for an ignobler end, agreeing to be nibbled to death by Leviathan. Even in their objections to the Obama administration, the bishops endorse the state’s view of the church—as something separate and segregated from society, albeit ever more nominally. At the airport recently, I fell into conversation with a lady whose employer, a Catholic college, had paid for her to get her tubes tied. Why not accept that this is just one of those areas where one has to render under Caesar? Especially when Caesar sees ‘‘health care’’ as a state-funded toga party. But once government starts (in Commissar Sebelius’s phrase) ‘‘striking a balance,’’ it never stops. What’s next? How about a religious test for public office? In the old days, England’s Test Acts required holders of office to forswear Catholic teaching on matters such as transubstantiation and the invocation of saints. Today in the European Union holders of office are required to forswear Catholic teaching on more pressing matters such as abortion and homosexuality.

Rocco Buttiglione’s views on these subjects would have been utterly unremarkable for an Italian Catholic of half a century ago. By 2004, they were enough to render him ineligible to serve as a European commissioner. To the college of Eurocardinals, a man such as Signor Buttiglione can have no place in public life. The Catholic hierarchy’s fawning indulgence of the Beltway’s abortion zealots and serial annullers is not reciprocated: The Church of Government punishes apostasy ever more zealously. The state no longer criminalizes a belief in transubstantiation, mainly because most people have no idea what that is. But they know what sex is, and, if the price of Pierre Trudeau’s assertion that ‘‘the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation’’ is that the state has to take an ever larger place in the churches and colleges and hospitals and insurance agencies and small businesses of the nation, they’re cool with that. The developed world’s massive expansion of sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shriveling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty, and the right to self-defense are under continuous assault by Big Government. In New York and California and many other places, sexual license is about the only thing you don’t need a license for. Even if you profoundly disagree with Pope Paul VI’s predictions that artificial birth control would lead to ‘‘conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality,’’ the objectification of women, and governments’ ‘‘imposing upon their peoples’’ state-approved methods of contraception, or even if you think he was pretty much on the money but that the collective damage they have done does not outweigh the individual freedom they have brought to many, it ought to bother you that in the cause of delegitimizing two millennia of moral teaching the state is willing to intrude on core rights—rights to property, rights of association, even rights to private conversation. In 2009, David Booker was suspended from his job at a hostel for the homeless run by the Church of England’s Society of St James after a late-night chit-chat with a colleague, Fiona Vardy, in which he chanced to mention that he did not believe that vicars should be allowed to wed their gay partners. Miss Vardy raised no objection at the time, but the following day mentioned the private conversation to her superiors. They recognized the gravity of the situation and acted immediately, suspending Mr. Booker from his job and announcing that ‘‘action has been taken to safeguard both residents and staff.’’ If you let private citizens run around engaging in free exercise of religion in private conversation, there’s no telling where it might end.

And so the peoples of the West are enlightened enough to have cast off the stultifying oppressiveness of religion for a world in which the state regulates every aspect of life. In 1944, at a terrible moment of the most terrible century, Henri de Lubac wrote a reflection on Europe’s civilizational crisis, Le drame de l’humanisme athe´e. By ‘‘atheistic humanism,’’ he meant the organized rejection of God—not the freelance atheism of individual skeptics but atheism as an ideology and political project in its own right. As M. de Lubac wrote, ‘‘It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.’’ ‘‘Atheistic humanism’’ became inhumanism in the hands of the Nazis and Communists and, in its less malign form in today’s European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. ‘‘Post-Christian Europe’’ is a bubble of 50-year-old retirees, 30-year-old students, empty maternity wards . . . and a surging successor population already restive to move beyond its Muslim ghettoes.

Already, Islam commands more respect in the public square. In Britain, police sniffer dogs wear booties to search the homes of suspected Muslim terrorists. Government health care? The Scottish NHS enjoined its employees not to be seen eating in their offices during Ramadan. In the United Kingdom’s disease-ridden hospitals, staff were told to wear short sleeves in the interests of better hygiene. Muslim nurses said this was disrespectful and were granted leave to retain their long sleeves as long as they rolled them up and scrubbed carefully. But mandatory scrubbing is also disrespectful on the grounds that it requires women to bare their arms. So the bureaucracy mulled it over and issued them with disposable over-sleeves. A deference to conscience survives, at least for certain approved identity groups. The irrationalism of the hyper-rational state ought by now to be evident in everything from the euro-zone crisis to the latest CBO projections: The paradox of the Church of Big Government is that it weans people away from both the conventional family impulse and the traditional transcendent purpose necessary to sustain it. So what is the future of the American Catholic Church if it accepts the straitjacket of Obama’s ‘‘freedom to worship’’? North of the border, motoring around the once-Catholic bastion of Quebec, you’ll pass every couple of miles one of the province’s many, many churches, and invariably out front you’ll see a prominent billboard bearing the slogan ‘‘Notre patrimoine religieux—c’est sacre´!’’ ‘‘Our religious heritage—it’s sacred!’’ Which translated from the statist code-speak means: ‘‘Our religious heritage—it’s over!’’ But it’s left every Quebec community with a lot of big, prominently positioned buildings, and not all of them can be, as Montreal’s Saint-Jean de la Croix and Couvent de Marie Re´paratrice were, converted into luxury three-quarter-million-dollar condos. So to prevent them from decaying into downtown eyesores, there’s a government-funded program to preserve them as spiffy-looking husks. The Obama administration’s ‘‘freedom to worship’’ leads to the same soulless destination: a church whose moral teachings must be first subordinated to the caprices of the hyper-regulatory Leviathan, and then, as on the Continent, rendered incompatible with public office, and finally, as in that Southampton homeless shelter, hounded even from private utterance. This is the world the ‘‘social justice’’ bishops have made. What’s left are hymns and stained glass, and then in the emptiness, the mere echo:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round

earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing

roar . . .