Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Paragons of paranoia

Usually I point to good stuff online, but Crooked Timber has linked to an interview so repellent that it needs to be discussed. It's not that the subject, Mark Steyn, is conservative, though he is. (The fact that he wrote recently for the Atlantic is evidence of its rightward shift, even if he was writing on Sinatra.)

It's that the xenophobic, homophobic Steyn, author of the appropriately named book "America Alone" -- because that's what we'll be if we follow his prescriptions -- creates a paranoid vision of a world dominated by subversive lesbians (who are simply victims of bad marriages), radical female Muslims (ditto), restive Muslims, dirty rotten Muslims.... Here he is on the Muslims in the British or European housing projects:

So you have this grotesque license, the sense of license and self gratification that your ordinary English yobbo would have merge with the sort of basic misogyny of the Muslim community and it produces something quite terrifying in these rape gangs they've now got in Scandinavia and France and Belgium and places. I think it's that the western world impacts on a lot of young Muslims in ways that make them far more alienated, far more fiercely Islamist in effect than to some goat herder in Afghanistan.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:23 PM

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