Programming note: Please join us this weekend for a special edition of The Mark Steyn Show.
~Since his health woes a year or so back, Mark has not given many interviews. But he made an exception for The European Conservative's Frank Haviland. The European Conservative is one of his favourite publications, and its quarterly print edition is not only a big meaty read but also by contemporary standards strikingly handsome and elegant in design. They are publishing Mr Haviland's interview with Steyn in two parts. Here's how Part One begins:
HAVILAND: I'd like to start with the issue of Islam, specifically in relation to Britain. It's been a major thorn in the side of the Conservative Party. We've had former home secretaries stating that basically 'Islamism'—which is their preferred term because it allows you to pretend it's totally separate from Islam—is running Britain. And we had Lee Anderson chucked out of the Tory Party for saying the same about London. But whatever the official Downing Street line, the fact is that our elected representatives, the police, the judiciary, and faith leaders, by their actions, all seem to suggest that either appeasement or downright homage is the only viable response to Islam. To what extent do you think Islamic extremism is running Britain at the moment?
STEYN: Well, let me just say, I was surprised to see that 'Islamism' is still the preferred term. I'm not sure I had actually heard that in a decade and a half, or maybe longer. Because it's a term I associate with the immediate post-9-11 period when George W. Bush was anxious to distinguish between what he called a 'religion-of-peace Islam' and this teeny, tiny, incy wincy, barely detectable sliver of Islam that is into blowing things up. And so I recall using the word Islamism circa 2001–2002, but I really haven't had much use for it in the past twenty years because I quickly concluded it was an evasion. So it's disturbing to me that the evasion is somehow still the preferred currency in the UK.
I wrote a book; you mentioned America Alone; that's a book about demography, and it was published in 2006, when it still would have been possible to do something about it. I still get emails from people when some girl gets stabbed in a French park or whatever, and they say, well, why don't the police do this and why don't the police do that? And you know, it is because we're now at the stage where a lot of the official bodies that you would expect to be engaged on the front lines have actually been hollowed out by Islam and apologists for Islamic supremacism. We've seen this most grotesquely on a topic I used to cover on GB News a lot, with the so-called 'grooming gangs,' which is another euphemism, another evasion, up and down the spine of England. You know, Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Banbury, Telford—insert your town here—and where essentially all the institutions you might have expected to protect little 12-year-old girls—the politicians, the police, the social workers—had all concluded that it was too sensitive, too problematic.
We hope you'll want to read the whole thing.
By the way, Mark refers in the above interview to little girls getting stabbed in French parks. On Wednesday afternoon in the German town of Wangen a four-year-old girl, in a supermarket with her mother, was randomly stabbed by a "Dutch citizen" - ie, a Syrian migrant. She is alive, but in a serious condition.
~We thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly couple of months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And we look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court in less two months' time.
