MARK STEYN: TODAY’S MOSLEM CHILDREN ARE LESS WESTERNIZED THAN THEIR PARENTS
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/309398/islamist-generation-mark-steyn
Media types like to talk about “the narrative”: News is just another form of storytelling, and certain plot lines grab you more than others.
The easiest narrative of all is anything involving young people. “I believe that children are our future,” as the late Whitney Houston once asserted. And, even if Whiney hadn’t believed it, it would still as a point of fact be true. Any media narrative involving young people presupposes that they are the forces of progress, wresting the world from the grasping clutches of mean, vengeful old men and making it a better place.
In the West, young people actually believe this. Thus, in 2008, Barack Obama, being the preferred choice of America’s youth, was by definition the candidate of progress and the future. In humdrum reality, his idea of the future doesn’t seem to be any more futuristic than the pre-Thatcher statist wasteland of Britain in the Seventies, but that didn’t stop the massed ranks of fresh-faced youth chanting “We are the Hopeychange!” in adoring if glassy-eyed unison behind him at every campaign rally. Four years later, half of recent graduates can’t find full-time employment; Americans’ college debt is now larger than credit-card debt; the number of young people with summer jobs is at a record low; and men in their late 20s and early 30s trudge upstairs every night to the same bedroom in which they slept as a kindergartner.
And that’s before they’re permanently buried by interest payments on the multitrillion-dollar debt and unfunded liabilities from Medicare. Yet in 2012 the rubes will still vote for Obama and be congratulated by the media for doing so. Because to be young is to vote for hope and change.
Likewise, halfway across the world, the Arab Spring was also hailed as the voice of youth, tweeting its universal message of hope and change. A year on, it’s proved to be rather heavier on change, and ever lighter on hope. Egypt’s first freely elected head of state is a Muslim Brotherhood man. In the parliament of the most populous Arab nation, the Muslim Brotherhood’s party and its principal rival, the Even More Muslim Brotherhood, between them won nearly three-quarters of the seats. In traditionally relaxed and secular Tunisia and Morocco, elections have been won by forces we are assured by the experts are “moderate Islamists” — which means that, unlike the lavishly bankrolled American protectorate of Afghanistan, they won’t be executing adulterous women in the street, or at any rate not just yet.
So what are they doing? In Libya, British Commonwealth war graves have been desecrated, something that never happened under Colonel Qaddafi even at the very lowest of low points in relations between him and the West. But hey, one can forgive Libya’s suddenly liberated young men a spasm of very belated anti-imperialism, right?
Meanwhile, in northern Mali, the dominant Ansar Dine group is currently engaged in destroying the ancient shrines of Timbuktu, including the famous door of the 15th-century Sidi Yahya mosque that was supposed to be left closed “until the end of the world.” Bring it on, baby!
No Britons or Europeans were involved in the creation of these shrines.
Rather, it’s a dispute between the region’s traditionally moderate Sufi Islam and the ever more assertive Wahhabist model exported worldwide by Saudi Arabia with Western petrodollars. The shrines are official UNESCO World Heritage sites, but then so were the Buddhas of Bamyan blown up by the Taliban in Afghanistan a decade ago. What’s next on the condemned list? Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sheikhs” (he’s like a supersized sheikh) has invited Egypt’s President Morsi to “destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what the Sahabi Amr bin al-As could not” — a reference to the Muslim conqueror of Egypt back in the seventh century.
Less controversially, Egypt’s Salafi party does not see the need to destroy the Pyramids but does favor covering them in wax. The Pyramids are the last of the Seven Wonders of the World still around in the 21st century, but that’s no reason not to destroy them, as part of the new pan-Islamic identity’s contempt for any alternative claims of allegiance — cultural, national, or historic.
Comments are closed.
