When I first heard that Justin Trudeau had marched in the Toronto Pride Parade wearing Ramadan socks, my first reaction was that that was a bit under-dressed even for him. My mistake. It turns out the Prime Minister wasn't wearing just his Ramadan socks but also shirt and trousers.
Which, on reflection, is a bit boringly overdressed. Perhaps for next year's parade he could wear a niqab with cutaway buttocks and a crescent tramp stamp. Just trying to be inclusive here.
The official explanation here is that he wished to celebrate both Pride and Eid. Which makes you wonder why nobody thought to hold a combined Preid Parade that would march down Yonge Street and then up the CN Tower where a visiting Gayatollah from the Holy City of Qom would ceremonially hurl everyone off the EdgeWalk. Pride comes before a fall, as some infidel said.
Oh, well. Soon enough. Meanwhile, at the Chicago parade, the lesbians kicked out the Jewish gays because their Jewish LGBTQ flag "made people feel unsafe". There's no J in LGBTQWERTY. The Tablet reported this under the headline "Dykes vs Kikes". Which would make a great rumble in West Side Story. You might recall that a couple of years back Queers For Sharia - whoops, sorry, I mean Queers Against Israeli Apartheid - marched in the Pride Parade chanting:
Butch, femme, bottom, top
Israeli apartheid has to stop.
Which prompted me to offer the group a couple of bonus jingles:
Butch, femme, top, bottom
Gay bars in Riyadh? It's hard to spot 'em.Top, bottom, butch, femme
With complimentary FGM.Top, bott, butch, femme, trans
Quit your chanting and read your Korans.
Alas, there were no takers. Dykes vs Kikes is a pushover compared to Queers vs Emirs.
I'm a King James man, so I prefer the full version:
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
Hard to imagine an haughtier spirit than Justin Trudeau. Almost (gosh) a decade ago, I was staring down the barrel of a de facto lifetime publication ban in Canada because a handful of cozy fluffy Muslim students had complained about my "Islamophobic" writing to three of Canada's "human rights" commissions. In fact, notwithstanding their serial misrepresentation in the press, the five students were not the plaintiffs. That role fell to Mohammed Elmasry, the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress and a guy best known for saying on national TV that killing Jewish civilians was fine by him. So he wasn't exactly the poster boy for Islamic warmth and cuddliness. Which is why, despite his name on the complaints, he never showed up in court or in the media, preferring to operate through his telegenic quintet of students. So, because they were cozy and fluffy, as noted, and he had his hand waggling up them, I called them the Sock Puppets. As I mention in passing here, the Sock Puppet Five dwindled in numbers over the course of our battle, declining from a quintet to the Four Socks, then the Socktown Trio, Socky & Cher and eventually one Lone Sock.
Yet it never occurred to me during that war of attrition that within a decade Canada's head of government would be a literal Islamic socks puppet.
I thought of Justin's socks last night as I watched the American right take a victory lap across the news networks over the nine-zip Supreme Court decision on President Trump's travel ban. It's worth considering what the actual victory is here: the reversal of (most of) a court-ordered stay on an attempt to control immigration from five failed states plus the biggest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet (Iran). It was a hard-fought victory because the judicial left is so brazen and cocksure that you now have district judges presuming to remake US national security by interpreting bureaucratic administrative rules not by the plain meaning of their words but by things the President happened to let fly years earlier when he was one of 17 candidates stumping Iowa and New Hampshire.
Which, when you think about it, is at least as nutty as Justin's socks: In 2017, in order to impose even the most modest, footling and temporary restraints on unrestricted Islamic access to a western nation, you have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. And for every such minimalist victory there are a thousand virtue-signalling prostrations before the Islamic imperialists every day of the week. Over the weekend, The Washington Post claimed that Trump's disinclination to hold a Ramadan-a-ding-dong knees-up at the White House ended a presidential tradition going back to Thomas Jefferson's Iftar banquet in 1805. Oh, really? Did he wear his Iftar socks? Did Martha Washington have her Ramadan corset? Was Betsy Ross busy sewing an Islamic crescent on the flag? Did Stephen Foster show up to sing "Way Down Upon The Sunni River"? Was the first Thanksgiving held at Eid between the starving Pilgrims and the only halal butcher's on Plymouth Rock? Is that Trump play Julius Caesar by Sheikh Spear? Was Little Women written by Louisa May al-Cott as the sequel to Genitally Mutilated Girls? Did Henry Ford of Dearborn, Michigan invent the burqa (you can get it in any color as long as it's black)? Is the Pope Muslim? Does a bear self-detonate in the woods?
And so it goes, around the clock, every day, like Ramadan socks in a tumble dryer, the lop-sided valse macabre of the Iftar ball. [CORRECTION: I originally called it the Ishtar ball, which is a stinker of a movie with Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, and if they hold a commemorative dance every year, my advice is to steer well clear.]
Isn't it culturally appropriative for an infidel to wear post-Ramadan socks? When Burger King in Britain accidentally put a decorative swirl on top of their chocolate ice-cream tubs that looked a bit too much like Allah in Arabic, the usual excitable lads went bananas and Burger King was forced to withdraw them all and re-design the thing. Are those same chaps cool with having their socks appropriated for a parade of prancing gays? If not, Justin's being a way butchier butch than those kike-clobbering dykes.
But I think not. In the sock drawer of multiculturalism, we're all supposed to mix'n'match: gay and straight, butch and femme, bottom and Mohammedan, transitioning and unyielding, questioning and no questions permitted whatsoever. Meanwhile, in London's East End, the gay pubs close and the "sharia patrols" proclaim whole neighborhoods a "gay-free zone". In Amsterdam, the soi-disant "most tolerant city in Europe", there's an epidemic of gay-bashing, and the once famous Rainbow Palace, a landmark "homo-hotel" (relax, that's the Duch term for it), has turned Muslim.
In the Cognitive Dissonance Parade we are all marching toward the precipice in mismatched socks.
~Tomorrow, Wednesday, Mark will be returning to "Tucker Carlson Tonight", the Number One show on America's Number One cable network, live on Fox News at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. We hope you'll join him! And he'll be back on video later this week to answer questions from Mark Steyn Club members.
If you're one of the many members of Mark's club from Canada, feel free to log-in and weigh in in our socktacular comments section below. The Mark Steyn Club numbers among its members representatives from most Canadian communities - gays and Muslims, sock-wearers and persons of open-toed sandals. But, regardless of whence you hail, we do love having you, and you can find more details on the Club here.
