Why I Love Mark Steyn, Reason #237

No living writer opens a rhetorical can of whoopass with quite the elan and panache of Mr. Steyn.  It appears some blogger wrote with all the self-righteous rage that only a liberal can summon:

The excerpt from Mark Steyn’s America Alone that ran in Maclean’s last year is far more blatantly racist than I figured it would be when I began reading it. I knew Steyn was a bigot, with a 1920s obsession with demographic decline. (Cf. Tom Buchanan in Gatsby, who can’t stop talking about Rise of the Colored Empires, “by this man Goddard.”) But I imagined Steyn was more adroit in his use of code words and deniability feints. No! “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes” is merely the most spectacular example of – not code words. I’m not completely shocked that Steyn would write with such frank bigotry, or that Regnery would publish it. I’m somewhat surprised that an establishment organ like Maclean’s would run it.

Except that it turns out that the words quoted with such delicious condemnation are those of a prominent Norwegian imam, not Mark Steyn:

The words that so offend him are, indeed “frank bigotry”. However, if you read my racist diatribe, you’ll see the bigotry is not mine but Mullah Krekar’s:

“We’re the ones who will change you,” the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.” As he summed it up: “Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours.”

Hello, Mr Henley? Anybody home in there? Those are quotation marks, because they’re someone else’s words – not the blatant racism of the racist douchebag Steyn but of a prominent Scandinavian imam. It’s tempting to say to Jim Henley, “Douchebag, douche thyself”, and leave it at that.

Oh wow.  It hurts reading from here.  Across the anonymity of the Internet.  It’s like watching a pro boxer take down a retarded one-legged kid.

Mr. Jim Henley has yet to publish a retraction and an apology, but I’m very curious to see how he could recover any face from this.  Maybe he can take a page from Mapes/Rather and go with the “false, but accurate” meme?  Douchebag, douche thyself indeed.

-TS