Just to round out our coverage of this month's Munk Debate on the great migrations sweeping across Europe, here's my closing statement: UKIP leader Nigel Farage went first, very effectively; then Columbia historian Simon Schama, who chose to read out the famous "Meditation XVII" from John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions; I was up next; and finally former UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, who insisted that there's no difference between the once supposedly unassimilable Irish Catholics and East European Jews and the new Pushtun goatherds and Mogadishu hoodlums. It's one of the curious aspects of self-proclaimed "multiculturalists" that they are, essentially, uniculturalists: they think everybody's the same.
But sometimes history doesn't repeat itself - and Emma Lazarus' lousy poem is an even lousier guide to social policy. Click below for my closing remarks:
Bottom line:
We cannot fix failed states by inviting millions of their people to move in with us. All that ensures is more failed states, more failure, and eventually, one by one, the nations of the west will join them. And then you'll really be yearning to breathe free and there will be nowhere to do it.
For a quick recap of the Munk action:
You can find the pre-interviews with me, Nigel, Mme Arbour and Professor Schama here.
You can watch the full debate here.
You can see what The National Post's Barbara Kay and The Spectator's Douglas Murray considered the critical exchange here.
And you can check the final score here.
~As to the broader reaction to the Munk Debate, Robert Stacy McCain comments:
Farage and Steyn both made extensive reference to wave of violence that Muslim immigrants have unleashed in Europe, including the New Year's Eve nightmare in Cologne, Germany, where hundreds of women were sexually assaulted. (See, "Muslim Rape Gangs Attack Women, and Feminists Won't Say a Word About It.") Because of liberal bias in the media, however, very few Americans — or Canadians, for that matter — are aware of the extent of what can fairly be called sexual terrorism that is being perpetrated in Europe. Facts that do not fit the liberal narrative have a remarkable tendency to elude the attention of editors at the New York Times and producers at CNN, so that unless you are in the habit of seeking out samizdat published by politically incorrect sources, you have never heard of The Rotherham Horror, nor are you aware of why Sweden now challenges South Africa for the title of Rape Capital of the World.
That's true - although the absolute insistence of certain Canadian pundits that there's nothing to see here takes it to a whole other level. With that in mind, I'm glad to see the Prussian return to the fray. SteynOnline readers will recall him as one of the sharpest commentators on hockey-stick fraudster Michael E Mann. It turns out he's just as good on The Globe & Mail's migrant-rape denier Doug Saunders:
I'm German. I read the German newspapers. And I assure you, those are not "urban myths" to Germany's media, to its people, to its police, even if two of those are under pressure to hush things up.
Do read the whole thing, not least for his exhaustive pushback on Saunders' previous "myth" - that of "the Muslim tide". You can get the gist of his take from the Prussian's headline:
Doug Saunders Is Telling Porkies
Indeed.
~Related - and how - from The Sunday Times in London:
Half of [UK] Muslims Say Gays Should Be Outlawed
If you've wandered down the Old Kent Road recently, you'll know that in parts of the British capital they already are.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of what rape denier Doug Saunders calls "urban myths", here's Heather Mac Donald:
Actually, there was no precedent in Germany or the rest of Europe for mass peacetime sexual assaults, much less ones where the police merely look on. "I have never experienced such a thing in any German city," a victim told the New York Times. But people who did name the attacks for what they were—a manifestation of Muslim misogyny and an alarm bell regarding mass immigration—were vilified as racists. An old-school German feminist, Alice Schwarzer, denounced the New Year's assaults as a "gang bang" designed to terrorize women; she found herself condemned by other feminists and "antiracists..."
The New York Times provided a stunning example of the inevitable "defining sexism down" that will be necessary to accommodate such immigration. The problem on New Year's Eve, it reported, was that migrants from war-torn countries were "unfamiliar with German culture." Translation: the norm that you don't jam your fingers up women's vaginas in public is just a quaint German custom, akin to wearing lederhosen.
But hey, as I said in my opening statement in that Munk Debate, it's nothing that a bigger pictogram can't solve.
~As previously mentioned, my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn is now out in audio format, read by yours truly. It's currently bubbling under the Top Ten humor bestsellers. At one point over the weekend, I was sandwiched between Ellen DeGeneres and Lena Dunham, which is not a boast I ever expected to be able to make.
~On Wednesday I'll be back on the radio with Toronto's Number One morning man John Oakley, live at 8.30am Eastern on AM640. Hope you can join me.
