Tomorrow, Tuesday, I'll be back behind the Golden EIB Microphone, guest-hosting for Rush on America's Number One radio show. It starts at 12 noon Eastern/9am Pacific. Hope you can join me.
~In this Christmas season, what we used to call Christendom is sad and diminished, led by a fatuous social-justice pope and a European political class that has doubled down on civilizational suicide. Here is a small but telling story of the new France:
NICE, France – Valérie Aubry-Dumont got the news in a WhatsApp message from deep inside Islamic State territory. "Mom, you're going to be a grandmother," wrote her teenage daughter, Cléa.
When Aubry-Dumont last saw her daughter, Cléa was a 16-year-old girl attending Catholic school in a Paris suburb. After a breakup, Cléa met a young man online and within months the couple fled France to live in a stretch of northern Syria ruled by Islamic State.
Islam has a three-pronged strategy for its conquest of Europe: immigration, fertility, and conversion. I have been writing about the last for years. From seven years ago:
Let's say you work in an office in those cities: One day they install a Muslim prayer room, and a few folks head off at the designated time, while the rest of you get on with what passes for work in the EU. A couple of years go by, and it's now a few more folks scooting off to the prayer room. Then it's a majority. And the ones who don't are beginning to feel a bit awkward about being left behind.
What do you do? The future showed up a lot sooner than you thought... If you're the average post-Christian Eurosecularist, what's the big deal? Who wants to be the last guy sitting in the office sharpening his pencil during morning prayers?
Funny how quickly it all happened. There was the woman on reception, but she retired. And the guy in personnel who used to say, sotto voce, that Geert Wilders had a point. But he emigrated the year after Wilders did.
Four years later, just to underline the point, Arnoud van Doorn, the producer of Wilders's "Islamophobic" film Fitna, converted to Islam.
Yet I failed to discern perhaps the most poignant trend in this abandonment of their inheritance by native Europeans:
For some French families, the Paris attacks, while deepening the wedge between militants and the West, were a painful reminder of their ties to the enemy.
The French wife of Foued Mohamed-Aggad—who along with two others killed 90 people in Paris's Bataclan concert hall on Nov. 13—is living in Islamic State territory and ready to give birth "any day now," said Françoise Cotta, a lawyer Mohamed-Aggad's mother approached in an attempt to bring the child back to France.
"An alarming number of young men and women are leaving France to start a family in Syria," said Alain Ruffion, director at Unimed, a group that works to prevent the radicalization of residents around the southern French city of Nice.
Read that sentence and marvel. The Continent is in its unprecedented demographic death spiral because insufficient "young men and women" wish to start a family in Europe. But significant numbers of demoiselles like Cléa Aubry-Dumont are eager to find a nice fierce bearded young man and go off with him to "start a family in Syria". You'd almost get the impression Europe is literally barren soil.
As for this side of the Atlantic, it's not just that Trump wasn't hurt by his call for an end to Muslim immigration, but that (once you detach his name from the proposal) even 45 per cent of Democrats support the idea. In Europe, given the prosecutions of Geert Wilders and Marine LePen, it's not clear you're even allowed to pose the question. And, until it's asked and answered, there will be more and more middle-aged ladies like Valérie Aubry-Dumont who lose their daughters to Allah. Because something always beats nothing, and all Hollande and Merkel and the Eutopian political class are offering their subjects is one big cobwebbed nothing.
~As for that "painful reminder of their ties to the enemy", my reaction to the Paris bloodbath - "The Barbarians Are Inside, And There Are No Gates" - has been named by Doug Ross to his Fab Fifty 2015 Blog Awards. Also, while we're making the rounds today, the Hollywood Republican has a few words to say about yours truly, my latest book, and my appearance before the US Senate.
~I was very touched to hear from happy music-lovers and happier cat-lovers and happiest-of-all cat-music-lovers unwrapping their gifts on Christmas morning. Among them was this five-star reviewer at Amazon:
As Groovy As It Gets
My wife got me this album for Christmas (because I asked for it) and I love it. Mark Steyn matches his literary wit with musical wit in this album... I think my favorite is "Year of the Siamese Cat", which is a mash-up of "The Siamese Cat Song" as sung by Peggy Lee and "Year of the Cat" as sung by Al Stewart - the result is even greater than the sum of the two cubed, because there was nothing square about any of them.
Mark's smooth delivery even makes "Cat Scratch Fever"'s double entendre sound a little less lurid and a little more coy. I can imagine Mark's original "Nine Lives" becoming a standard some day, with its clever yet touching lyrics. Plenty of gems in every track. My wife is a little slow to the Feline Groovy party, but even she enjoys the funny "She only talks that way to the cat" and the "The cat came back". Bottom line - for Mark Steyn fans, your life isn't complete without this album.
Of course, even in a five-star review, there are grumbles, and John complains that "there was no homage to Leroy Anderson's 'The Waltzing Cat' or Disney's 'That Darn Cat'."
Well, since you ask, I like "That Darn Cat", but I felt it operated in too similar a territory to "Top Cat" - and "Top Cat" has the advantage of not already having a bunch of great records on it by Bobby Darin, Louis Prima, etc (as "That Darn Cat" does). Our backing singers, by the way, loved "Top Cat". At the end of the session, Emma sighed contentedly and said, "Well, I can cross that off my bucket list."
I'm also quite partial to "The Waltzing Cat" (lyrics by our late friend Mitchell Parish), but I didn't want to have two Leroy Anderson tunes, and I had a preference for "The Pussy Foot", mainly because I wanted to have a kitty dance craze and the only other suggestion was from my daughter, who thought we should write a song called "Do the Litter Tray", in which the dance steps would be little backwards scraping motions with the feet.
Still, as John says, the absence of "Waltzing" and "Darn" cats "just goes to show that Mark has barely clawed the surface of the scratching post, and plenty of room for more cat albums". Feline Groovy keeps flying off the shelves at Amazon, but don't be put off by that temporarily out of stock sign they've hung up. The new shipment of CDs arrives later today, so you can order with confidence and get it in your mailbox within days. There are still CDs available via CD Baby or direct from the Steyn store. And, of course, for instant gratification, it can be yours in seconds via digital download from Amazon or iTunes.
~And finally, for our readers Down Under: Don't forget to book early for my Australian tour, hosted by our friends at the IPA, this February. By popular demand, we're venturing deeper into the interior than we usually do, so we'll see how that works out. But we've crammed in as many states as we can and we hope one of the stops is in your neck of the woods, or bush.
