January 1, 2007

Should Old Admonitions Be Forgot

Justin Katz

I wish I were confident that we will soon reach a time when sentiments the likes of this, from Mark Steyn, can safely be ignored as repetitive:

Many of us think about the long-term shifts necessary to win this struggle: euthanizing the United Nations and overhauling other malign and anachronistic institutions. Fat chance. Mustaf Jama's express check-out [with the wanted murderer escaping England via a major airport by dressing as a Muslim woman] is the perfect parodic reductio of "security": The state is willing to inflict pointless bureaucratic discomfort and inconvenience on everyone else, but the demographic group with the most links to terrorism gets to go through the fast-track VIP channel.

I'm afraid that it's much more likely that fretting over this well-aged topic will soon seem to be remarkably prescient. In the meantime, at least we can enjoy the dry humor with which our Cassandra serves up his frank truthfulness:

The "international community" has reacted in the usual ways [to Ethopia's military invasion of Somalia]: calls for immediate cease-fires so that an ineffectual U.N. force of peacekeepers can go in and enjoy their customary child sex with the locals while propping up the Islamists.