Earth to Mark Steyn: Therefore, what?

Everyone is quoting Mark Steyn’s effective summary of the “moderate” Muslim issue in yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times:

Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers, and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers, but big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists’ strategic goals: For example, according to a recent poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That’s a “moderate” Westernized Muslim: He wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he’s a “moderate” because it’s not such a priority that he’s prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper.

That’s very good. Unfortunately, Steyn, as always, manages to come off as if he’s taking a much tougher position than he actually is taking. Namely, he leaves unaddressed the “Therefore, what?” question. So I posed it to him yet once again in an e-mail:

Since you say that West is not at present serious about fighting the war on terror, and since you are calling on it to be serious, what do you propose doing about the 60 percent of British Muslims (and presumably similar proportions of other Western Muslims) who, as you point out, support the imposition of sharia and thus have the same strategic goals as the terrorists?

Until you address that question, it remains impossible, as in the past, to see you as being serious.

Also, it is dishonest to act as if Bush is waging the war abroad and that the left is undermining the war at home, given the fact that Bush himself through his dhimmi-like attitude to Muslims also undermines the war at home. Bush is obviously doing nothing about the “moderate” Muslims who support the same strategic goals as the terrorists. He even remains close friends with the Saudis who actively promote those strategic goals among U.S. Muslims. He hasn’t even done anything to stop the Saudis from distributing anti-American and anti-Christian jihadist literature in U.S. mosques.

The net effect of your article, as so often, is to give your readers the delusory sense that someone on the so-called right (you, President Bush) is being serious about the war on terror, and that this seriousness is being undermined by the left, when in fact there’s no one either in the government or in the mainstream conservative media who is being serious.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 12, 2005 09:10 AM | Send