On Thursday I kept my regular date on The Hugh Hewitt Show, where Hugh took me on a quick tour of a crumbling world:
MARK STEYN: Pakistan, I don't think there's any doubt, was the worst mistake of British post-war imperial policy. Basically, the Indian Empire was carved up into two states... One, India, was pluralist, democratic and forward-looking, and one, Pakistan, was ideological, turned in on itself, and to a large degree, I think, has gone backwards over the 65 years since independence. And Churchill wouldn't have been surprised about that. Basically, anything that works in Pakistan is a residue of pre-independence, such as the hospital that those children at that school where the massacre was a few weeks ago, the hospital there was built by the wife of Britain's viceroy in the 1920s, essentially. That still functions. Everything they've been doing in the last 65 years has basically been driving themselves in the opposite direction to India.
Next up - "no-go zones" in Europe:
MS: A couple of years ago on Holocaust Memorial Day, a group of Jews were touring the old Jewish West End, where fellows like Lionel Bart, the composer of Oliver!, came from. And they were greeted by youths of a certain persuasion who pelted them with stones, and a Canadian tourist and an A merican tourist wound up being taken to the hospital. That's Jews stoned on Holocaust Memorial Day in the East End of London. Likewise, there are no-go zones in parts of Birmingham in the Midlands, where in nothing flat, a city that was 0% Muslim 50 years ago now is 22% Muslim. They're the demographic energy in the city. A senior British police officer was talking about this. He was saying, he wasn't calling them 'no-go zones'. He was putting it in a sort of positive way, that these communities 'prefer to police themselves', as it were. 'And that's why we just leave them to get on with it'. And one consequence of that is that nobody who isn't a member of those 'communities' likes to go there... Those no-go zones are not as advanced as they are in France, but they are real and they are growing in British cities.
And finally the outrage of the week, speaking of Jews and "no-go zones": Israel's Prime Minister accepted an invitation to address Congress without running it by Obama first!!!!!! Horrors! So now Obama is letting it be known that the White House is one big no-go zone for Netanyahu:
MS: This is ridiculous. You know, President Tee-Time, up on the links while the world burns... it's offended his amour propre because Netanyahu didn't get on the phone and ask the Oval Office if he could have a visa rather than just flying in and landing at JFK or wherever... This is piffle for this guy to be worrying about at this stage in the world affairs.
You can find the full interview here.
~As to my appearance at what Hugh called "the Inigo Montoya Center" in Toronto, if you're having difficulty plugging that into your GPS, it's because it's actually Indigo, Manulife Centre - the Manulife Centre branch of Indigo Books at the corner of Bay and Bloor. I'll be there on Wednesday in conversation with my old chum Heather Reisman talking about The [Un]documented Mark Steyn and much more - 7pm January 28th. For more details, see here. I promise to rename the building the Inigo Montoya Center before the night is out.
