I am a little calmer today, after my decade-delayed right to confront my accuser in court was thwarted by the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt American "justice" system at the last moment. We have managed, finally, to secure seats on a flight out of this grisly capital of a decayed and decadent republic.
As this pointless trip to DC draws to a close, I thank all those of you who have ordered our limited-edition SteynOnline Liberty Stick - the agreeable alternative to Mann's hockey stick, and featuring Magna Carta at one end and the US Constitution at the other, so you can wave it at whomso'er you wish. I took it down to the District of Columbia Superior Court with my chums Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer and "Disgrace to the Profession" narrator Melissa Howes and shook it at that worthless courthouse and all its works. En route I swung by Mann's National Academy of Sciences:
Every Liberty Stick is signed and numbered by yours truly - and, you'll be stunned to hear, is made not in China, but right here in the USA - in Minnesota, to be more precise.
~As you may recall, whenever we have our friend Dorothée Berryman on the show, I usually mention that she starred in the Oscar-winning film Les Invasions Barbares - Barbarian Invasions. But I hadn't seen the actual movie in years, until I stumbled upon it during my medically-necessitated sojourn in France this summer. The director Denys Arcand is the usual Québécois leftie, and the title of his film arises in reference to 9/11: some telly intellectual is pontificating on TV about how the World Trade Center attacks are an historically insignificant event except as a harbinger of the new barbarian invasions.
At the time, I thought this was just the traditional franco-condescension toward the Americans: My own confident view was that the "war on terror" was a difficult but winnable conflict, and Washington and its allies would be serious about waging it. The Frenchie intellectual was just enjoying a sneer at the cruder Yanks because that was how he rolled. But, upon re-viewing the scene after all this time, I realized that M Arcand was right. 9/11 is historically insignificant except as the official inauguration of the age of barbarian invasions. The wars abroad were ineffectually prosecuted and eventually lost. Domestically, meanwhile, America and its allies reacted to the attacks by doubling the rate of Muslim immigration to the west - a suicidal and indeed traitorous decision. So now, entirely predictably, kosher dining halls at American universities are being closed out of an "abundance of caution" and Jews are enjoined to grab some takeout and eat it at home, maybe in the attic, out of an abundance of even more caution. On the streets there are mobs howling "Allahu akbar" outside Westminster Abbey:
Cries of 'Allahu Akbar' outside Westminster Abbey tonight.
ARREST & DEPORT pic.twitter.com/GlXpY763LV
— Stan Voice of Wales (@StanVoWales) October 30, 2023
As you'll know if you've read The Prisoner of Windsor, English and then British sovereigns have been crowned at Westminster Abbey for a millennium. What's happening in the scene above isn't ultimately about Jews; it's about you and your future.
The veneer of civilisation is very thin: Life is good, better than it's ever been historically, and, as Goethe's Faust believed, there is no reason why the moment shouldn't last forever. You have a grand job in one of the fanciest skyscrapers in the world - and one Tuesday morning you look up to see Mohammed Atta flying through the window. You're celebrating your national holiday on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice - and suddenly hear a truck accelerating. You take your daughter to an Ariana Grande concert, because the kid is crazy about her - and the love of your life gets blown to pieces.
And, even in the one nation that surely is more aware than any other of the fragility of civilisation, the soft beguiling temptations of our modern pampering world are too seductive: You are at a music festival, for "peace", dancing the night away - and you glance upward to see strange figures descending through the skies; the barbarians have learned to paraglide.
Yesterday, the Government of Israel announced that Shani Louk, whose terrible fate we have followed here, has been officially declared dead:
We are devastated to share that the death of 23 year old German-Israeli Shani Luk was confirmed.
Shani who was kidnapped from a music festival and tortured and paraded around Gaza by Hamas terrorists, experienced unfathomable horrors.
Our hearts are broken 💔.
May her memory... pic.twitter.com/svSArX3XSx
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) October 30, 2023
The barbarians are at the gates - and then paraglide over them. Miss Louk suffered merely the customary fate of infidel women: The brave heroes of Hamas gang-raped her and then broke her legs. That's why her limbs are splayed in the scene below:
WARNING GRAPHIC: Palestinians strip the corpse of an Israeli woman, put it on display and desecrate it while shouting 'Allah Akbar'.
— Paul Golding (@GoldingBF) October 7, 2023
Hamas and Israel are now at war. https://t.co/qa1di87ac7
Miss Louk was already dead by the time of her arrival in Gaza. She was gang-raped so vigorously that back at the festival site she left a piece of her skull, from which the authorities identified her.
Who supports such acts? Well, if you're British or American or European, a huge proportion of your neighbours do. Here is Hasan Piker, formerly of the Young Turks podcast in America and now host of a Twitch channel with millions of followers. Mr Piker argues that all those beheaded and tortured Israeli babies are legitimate targets:
Piker, born in New Jersey to Turkish parents and raised in Istanbul, told Klein he thought the October 7 terror attack was justified.
'This is going to sound very radical and possibly very violent, but this is a matter of law and maybe if you agree with this, a matter of morality: Palestinians have the legal ground to violently seize back their own homes from these settlers,' he said.
'This is a reality, and that is precisely the reason why they have to exist under endless occupation in the West Bank.'
Klein told Piker: 'If they were settlers, that would be a lot more understandable.'
Piker replied: 'There are baby settlers as well, there are baby settlers as well. There are babies in the settlements...'
He then moved on to declare he was 'a one-stater', and defend YouTuber JT Chapman, who tweeted his own defense of Hamas' attacks.
Mr Piker is the nephew of Cenk Uygur, the founder and impresario of the Young Turks podcast. Whenever he has had cause to mention me, Mr Uygur has always portrayed me as a fringe racist wackjob. Yet he is the one whose family argue coolly and rationally in favour of targeting babies. So presumably that's fine and dandy and mainstream.
You have to be awfully optimistic if you think such blood lust will be sated by merely Jewish moppets. Identity politics is, by its very nature, dehumanising: It teaches millions of people, and virtually the entirety of our youth, to view Fred Smith not as Fred Smith but as an anonymous foot-soldier of a despised and targetable group - even if Fred is only two months old.
~As I say, this is way beyond Jews. So I find all the scholarly references to the Six-Day War, the UN plans for Jerusalem, the British Mandate, etc, etc, frankly a bit peripheral. My own advice is simple: In any contest of Barbarians vs [Whatever], it is unlikely to work out well if you choose the side of the Barbarians. Look at that scene from Gaza. The big butch men of Hamas found a defenceless woman. So they gang-raped her, then tortured her, then killed her, then threw her in the back of the truck like a New Hampshire hunter taking his buck down to the general store to be weighed. And, when they get to the Gazan equivalent of the general store, they are welcomed as heroes, and the people dance in the streets around the poor lady's corpse, and one brave kid leaps toward the flatbed to spit on her. As I said a couple of weeks back, a generation hence that poisoned moppet will be a resident of Clichy-sous-Bois or Luton or Dearborn...
I do not wish to live among the relatively small number of savages who raped and murdered her. I do not wish to live among the far larger number of savages who dance in the street and proclaim the greatness of Allah at the sight of her defilement. I do not wish to live among children who spit on her poor broken body. I do not wish to live among sophisticated educated Turks (once Israel's best friends in the region) who rationalise such scenes. I do not wish to live among mobs who chant "Gas the Jews!" outside an opera house...
And yet my government, like yours, has invited the barbarians within the gates, and tens of millions of westerners raised to revile their own inheritance have made common cause with them. This will not end well.
~You have to be able to talk honestly about such things, and increasingly in the west you can't. So I've been enormously touched by how many readers, listeners and viewers want to support my free-speech lawsuit against the ever more overbearing censors of Ofcom. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;b) buying a chum a SteynOnline gift certificate;
c) ordering a copy of my latest book The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it); or
d) treating yourself to the aforementioned SteynOnline Liberty Stick.
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in the latter two, everything save the shipping. And you or your loved one gets something, too.
~Finally, let me thank all the newcomers to our ranks in recent days, from Merseyside to Minnesota, Johannesburg to Joncherey. We hope to welcome many more of you in the years ahead. For more information on The Mark Steyn Club, see here.
