Steyn decries “ethnic squeamishness” while displaying it himself

In an article in 2004 in the Chicago Sun-Times (no link), Mark Steyn discussed actor James Woods’s report to authorities about his observations of the 9/11 hijackers on a practice fight in August 2001:

The details Woods is permitted to discuss are in themselves very revealing: the four men boarded with no hand luggage. Not a thing. That’s what he noticed first. Everyone going on a long flight across a continent takes something: a briefcase, a laptop, a shopping bag with a couple of airport novels, a Wall Street Journal or a Boston Globe.

But these boys had zip. They didn’t use their personal headsets, they declined all food and drink, they did nothing but stare ahead to the cockpit and engage in low murmurs in Arabic. They behaved like conspirators. And Woods was struck by the way they treated the stewardess: ‘They literally ignored her like she didn’t exist, which is sort of a kind of Taleban, you know, idea of womanhood, as you know, not even a human being.’

So they weren’t masters of disguise, adept at blending into any situation. They weren’t like the Nazi spies in war movies, urbane and charming in their unaccented English. It apparently never occurred to them to act natural, read Newsweek, watch the movie, eat a salad, listen to Lite Rock Favourites of the Seventies, treat the infidel-whore stewardess the way a Westerner would. Everything they did stuck out. But it didn’t matter. Because the more they stuck out, the more everyone who mattered was trained not to notice them. The sort of fellows willing to fly aeroplanes into buildings turn out, not surprisingly, to be fairly stupid. But they benefited from an even more profound institutional stupidity. In August 2001, no one at the FBI or FAA or anywhere else wanted to be seen to be noticing funny behaviour by Arabs. In mid-September, I wrote that what happened was a total systemic failure. But, as the memos leak out, one reason for that failure looms ever larger. Thousands of Americans died because of ethnic squeamishness by federal agencies.

In 2004 Steyn derided whites’ “ethnic squeamishness” in the face of obviously threatening Muslims, which, he pointed out, left us helpless to defend ourselves from them. Since then he’s written article after article saying that Europe is doomed to Islamization by Europe’s low birth rates, while never deigning to mention the most obvious cause of Islamization, Muslim immigration, nor the most immediate and necessary measure that Europe can and must take to save itself from Islamization, the cessation and reversal of Muslim immigration. It’s easy to condemn whites and consign them to oblivion because of their low birth rates. Who’s going to be offended? It’s not so easy to warn whites about the mass immigration of a non-white group. So it looks as though Steyn himself has a rather large component of ethnic squeamishness, doesn’t it? He’s all hat, no cattle.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 06, 2006 01:00 PM | Send