Monday, August 25, 2014

Mark Steyn: The Face of the Tiger

You must read every bit of Mark Steyn's post "The Face of the Tiger". 

Marshal McLuhan once famously remarked that "the medium is the message".

Jihadists keep making the same point over and over again, but the exquisitely petrified apologist dhimmi West wants little to do with hearing the message.

"Somehow we keep missing the point: the story did get out; the severed head is the message."

I urge you to read the whole thing, because it's also a very good take-down of the Narcissist Golfer In Chief, a man, who Steyn so aptly refers to as one "who seems to think the 18th hole is the moral high ground".

Mr. Obama is not a real man.

These are real men.

Steyn understands the problem.

As do others, like, his fellow smart Canadian Rex Murphy, G-d bless him, who was finally allowed to write a column asking if, after the latest beheading, can we finally use the "I" word? 

Murphy asks:

"When will the world take the jihadists at their word? Is there any doubt whatsoever that ISIS — which is currently slaughtering Christians, beheading its opponents, purging “non-believers” and storming about Iraq and Syria with the cry “Convert or Die” — is not fanatically, ruthlessly and irredeemably rooted in religious extremism? What, in any god’s name, does the first “I” is ISIS stand for?"

"The President of the United States offered his, by now too familiar, affectless mush on the killing. He declared that “no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.” But that’s not how ISIS reads the Koran."

"Who is Obama not to take ISIS at its word? Like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, it is their declared goal of restoring the “Caliphate” that stirs their demented souls. If they name their religion, let us name it, too."

"Pure evil — there’s a terminology adequate to the deed. In this contest with radical Islam, the answer to Juliet’s question — What’s in a name? — is … everything."

My own opinion is that there is no such thing as "Islamism" and I think that this semantic playground is precisely what distinguishes those who are serious about the problem and those who are not. 

It's just like when you have a conversation with someone and they talk about Israel and "Palestine", you know right away where they are coming from ideologically. 

Let's now go back to Steyn and the tiger:

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.


"The smile on the face of the tiger is the video recording of the death of Daniel Pearl. What an accomplished production it sounds. According to Pakistani authorities, somewhere between five and eight persons were present to choreograph and record the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter.

"They wanted to get it right, and, from their point of view, they did."

Yet "American journalists" will continue to try and ride the tiger. 

I'm just a plain old American journalist they cry-but what the jihadist sees is: JEW. 

I believe this article has been scrubbed somewhat, but it did originally indicate that he is the grandson of Holocaust survivors.  A friend gives some insight into what could possibly motivate the grandson of Holocaust survivors to abandon America the beautiful-the Garden of Eden that let them in when they survived blood soaked Nazi Europe, and run toward arguably one of the most dangerous places for a Jew to go-the jihadist Middle East-home of the real "neo" Nazis.

A million people could have told him what he was doing was foolish, it seemed like it to us outsiders looking in, but to him it was what he loved to do and you weren’t going to stop him,” he told Central Florida Future."

Steve said it was scary over there. It was dangerous. It wasn’t safe to be over there. He knew it. He kept going back.”

Theo Van Gogh asked "can't we talk about this" not realizing until that moment that it is impossible to discuss anything when your throat is being slit and your head falls to the earth.

Another friend of Mr. Sotloff gets it wrong completely because she, too, is looking through a Western lens. 

"Anne Marlowe, a writer, said on her Twitter account Mr. Sotloff had lived in Yemen for years, “spoke good Arabic, deeply loved Islamic world. … for this he is threatened with beheading.”

No, it's because he thought that speaking good Arabic, and deeply loving the Islamic world is some kind of infidel immunity. 

"Can't we talk about this", even in Arabic, they wonder?

No-we cannot.

Nor should we ever entertain the thought.

To think we can talk about this is the beginning of the end-for the individual and for civilization.