MARK STEYN: “NEVER AGAIN” WHAT EXACTLY? INTERVIEW BY LAURA ROSEN COHEN
http://www.endofyourarm.com/2015/02/your-weekend-treat-my-exclusive_6.html
Well, friends, have I got a treat for you.
Following his live appearance at Chapters Indigo in downtown Toronto, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the great Mark Steyn for an in-depth conversation on his new, best-selling book, antisemitism, the collapse of Western civilization, hate speech, Official Jews, and the possibility of being sent to the Middle East to sing groovy James Bond songs to soothe the savage ISIS beasts.There is so much hot stuff in this interview, I’d be shocked if your computer was not smoking, as you read.
Please enjoy the transcript of our chat, painstakingly transcribed by yours truly with adoration intermittent hot flashes great affection and admiration.
I hope you enjoy it.
Q: I definitely want to start with the new book, and then talk about something that are specific to Canada. The [Un]documented Mark Steyn-Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned. I was wondering if that feel like the story of your life at this point. Is that going to be inscribed on your tombstone? “I told you so, don’t say you weren’t warned-it’s all in my book”. How does it feel to try to explain in real time what’s going on in the world today?
“It does feel like that and that’s not a good feeling. Apart from the fact that ‘I told you so’ is generally not an attractive quality in a person but also because I find whatever happens in the news, you know you wake up on a Wednesday morning or Thursday morning and something’s happened in paris or brussels or wherever and a radio or tv station asks you to come in and comment about it you sigh wearily because you said exactly the same thing 8 or 9 years ago. At a certain point it becomes very tedious and actually faintly obnoxious to say ‘if you had listened to me in 2005 2002 you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“And that’s one reason why I assembled this particular book, is because there are different specifics but a lot of the big points that I am more and more convinced of, I wrote about 10-15 years ago, you do it initially in the hope people will change course but if they don’t change course you might as well put a book together saying hey this is what I said in 2007 while you fellows were listening to people who were wrong about everything, people is, “hopelessly optimistic” and “pollyannish”, people who have lived in this sort of post 1950 bubble and can’t actually imagine a scenario in which all the certainties of your world are upended. That is what is objectionable about most commentary, it takes the assumptions of that post-1950 bubble and assumes they are eternal and can’t be overturned. That’s the reason I put that book together basically.
Q: And that people think it can’t be overturned when these forces are telling you exactly what they want to do, and exactly how they are going to implement it, it must sometimes be very frustrating, because they’re being very honest about it, and we in the West are not.
“No, that’s true. And there’s a broader point in that. You can say to people who were around in the 1930s, why didn’t you see what was happening, why didn’t you do something, and I think it’s true that when they say ‘we had no idea that the most advanced and civilized state in Europe would construct a vast bureaucratic apparatus simply for the purpose of killing millions of people, that was beyond our imagination, I think it’s valid. But that generation actually, I think had an advantage over us, in that they did understand that life can be going on and then suddenly the adjoining country’s troops come over the border and life is suddenly chaos, you lose all your possessions, your home is destroyed and you have to pick up, and start all over again, sometimes in a town on the other side of your country and sometimes on the other side of the world and you don’t even have to be in the game, really.”
“My grandparents were Belgian and figured that their country wasn’t particularly important and was of no consequence, but for the Germans, it was the express check-in to France. They got invaded and occupied and their lives were ruined just because they happened to be in the way.”
“And that generation, on all sides of Europe, doesn’t matter if you’re talking about Poland, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the Balkans, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Austria people had a sense then, that civilization is the exception to the rule, and that it’s fragile-and the forces of barbarism, everything can look very normal and you can be eating beautiful patisserie and sipping your coffee and watching the world go by but just over the horizon there are always dark forces menacing you.”
“I think we’ve lost that sense of it, so even to go back to the point I was making about the Holocaust in the 1930s, and it being unimaginable because there had always been anti semitism always been low-simmering Jew hatred, and that it would always be like that.
“We don’t even have that excuse, we have seen what it’s like when millions of people are killed and we have the explicit threats to do that again, we have actual murders, not on a large scale but we have a significant small scale of ongoing violence against Jews and we don’t have the excuse that our grandparents’ generation had that it’s unimaginable”. Because we don’t have to imagine it.”
“Every year as we’ve just seen and on significant anniversaries as we’ve just seen, all the big shots line up and congratulate themselves and say ‘Never Again’, again and again and again” and then we go on to letting the Iranians build nuclear bombs, Jewish shops and schools get firebombed, people killed in the Jewish museum in Brussels and kosher grocery store in Paris and “this is now the new normal”.
“Our generation will be treated far more brutally by history because these guys are all standing up there at the big ‘Never Again’ ceremony slapping each other on the back and saying what marvellous fellows they are, that’s on page 1, and on page 37 there’s the story of this weeks’ Kosher grocery bombing. It’s disgusting”.
Q: Was “Never Again” just a type of utopian security blanket, because as you say, we’ve hit the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and there isn’t a country in Europe where you can see that spirit-of barbaric anti-semitism being animated. And it’s also Argentina, where the prosecutor against the terrorism against Jews there faced ‘suicide by a bullet to the back of the head’. And the Italian Jews-the leader of the Rome Jewish community and his grandson were locked in Auschwitz at a ceremony, escaped climbing the walls and were interrogated by the Polish police. So, “Never Again”?
“I think they drew the wrong conclusion from “Never Again”. The Jews were sort of peripheral to the meaning of that. I think what ‘Never Again’’ means to a continental European is never again, as they saw it, nationalism led to war. So their response to 1939-1945 was to undermine their own nationalism. At the time of the European Constitution, so-called, a decade ago, you had these apparatchiks from the European Commission standing up and warning the Dutch and the French that if they didn’t sign on to this Euro Superstate that they would be on the path to Belsen and Auschwitz.”
“In other words, it’s one or the other. You’ve the European union or you’ve got ovens. That was the lesson they drew, that nationalism was bad that nation states were bad, that national identity was bad. And, as part of that, they imported the next generation of anti semites to Europe.”
Q: And that’s worked out really well for Europe?
“I think I said this to Ezra the other day on his telly show, it’s one of the blackest jokes of history, that the Holocaust enabled the Islamization of Europe and the Islamization of Europe has enabled the destruction of what remains, post-Holocaust, of Jewish life in Europe.”
Q: And this makes you wonder if the animus towards the Jews can be characterized as anything but a completely pathological, self-destructive phenomenon?
“Somebody said, I forget where it was, I think it was the Daily Mail the other day the story about all these Jews saying there’s no future for the Jews and they’re preparing to leave and Maureen Littman, who we mentioned earlier, I think Maureen is among them, actually she’s now saying she’s trying to figure out where you go next, which is extraordinary to me because I think about her as British as anybody and the idea that she feels driven out of her country by the malevolence and hatred.”
“And somebody responded to that, commented in that piece, said ‘oh Britain without Jews wouldn’t be Britain’, a nobody, just some nobody just in the comment section, comment 807, says ‘yeah they always say that don’t they’. That’s what they say in Poland, that’s what they say in Germany, but in the end they somehow manage either killing them or driving them out.”
“What I find odd, but not close friends but people I’ve had an acquaintance with over the years, there was this fellow the other day, he’s the big political editor of Sky News, Adam Bolton, he’s not Peter Mansbridge, but he’s kind of just below that level and he’s asking someone, on the anniversary of Auschwitz, don’t you feel this anti semitism, is you know-all the fault of Israel.”
Q: Oh yes, he asked that of the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom!
“Or I listen to what Elvis Costello says about the reason he won’t appear in Israel any more, and what is shocking, is that they don’t hear what they’re saying and these are people who speak in public all the time. And when you speak in public you have an instinctive sort of self-protection thing. Some infelicitous thought rises in your gullet, but you’re sufficiently self-aware because you speak in public all the time that you just dial it back, dial it back and so in a way when Adam Bolton says it on television or Elvis Costello says it in a press release, that’s actually worse than some bloke just saying it in a pub, these are people who weigh their words and live by their words, and they have no idea what they’re saying and of the implications of what they are saying.”
“And I would imagine that if I were in Maureen Lipman’s shoes, you’re a fairly doctrinaire, left of centre person of the left who agrees with these people on everything else, then you’re reading The Guardian in the morning and you realize that on something that is absolutely central to who you are, that these guys have gone nuts.”
Q: Or they’ve just revealed themselves?
“Let’s put it this way, because I think this is the thing, Charles Krauthammer has a column on this, I think it’s this morning in the Washington Post and he’s talking about the new anti semitism in Europe, but he doesn’t mention who it is who’s doing it because obviously, it’s not Elvis Costello and Adam Bolton who are firebombing Kosher groceries. And Charles Krauthammer doesn’t mention the actual people who are doing this, we all know they are guys called Mohammed and Ahmed and it’s always that way.”
“The Toulouse shootings, they thought it was some right-wing neo-Nazi and of course, it turned out to be the usual ones, and that’s true they’re the guys who are killing, and putting Molotov cocktails through the letter boxes of synagogues and all the rest of it but the culture that is-it’s the European establishment that is rationalizing it because they can’t confront the disaster of their own immigration policies and the implication for where they’re going, so they have to rationalize it and I would be as their Muslim populations grow and as the violence grows, the intellectual hostility not just to Israel but to Jews in general, will absolutely metastasize and that at the absolutely most respectable college dining tables at Oxford and the Sorbonne, and all the rest of it there will be absolutely minimal difference between the hatred of Jews expressed there and the hatred of Jews expressed in the streets of Les Banlieues in Paris. Because it’s the rationalization. It’s easier to say ‘oh it’s all to do with Gaza’ than to actually confront the disaster that is going to consume their countries, too.”
Q: So basically, the Sky News interview was just a portent of where the intelligentsia is going, which is pretty awful.
“I think about Adam Bolton, and if I’d been in the Chief Rabbi’s position, I’d have socked him in the jaw.”
Q: Pulled a William Buckley?
“I think so because it was like the BBC person who was talking to one of the guys outside the Paris grocery store, never mind hostility there’s not even the sort of residual good manners in these situations.”
Q: It’s redefining “chutzpah” with an anti semitic flavour?
“What people don’t understand, I think, is when countries transform, is that you not only lose you future, you lose your past too.” I was trying to explain this to a Jewish friend of mine in London who works in the theatre and I was saying, well you know do you think ticket sales will be when London is 30% Muslim? How many of these theatres are going to be open and more to the point how what works will no longer be played?”
Q: What will be ‘haram’ for the London theater?
“Yes, so it’s not just that you won’t have an Irving Berlin, say, because we all know what the show biz scene is if like if you happen to be stuck in Riyadh on a wet weekend with nothing to do. It’s not a world that produces anything like that, and there isn’t going to be anything like that.”
“And the other side of the Adam Bolton thing is, I was in London a few days ago and I switched on the TV 10 minutes before I went out and the BBC was drooling over the Gaza version of X-Factor or something, and the subtext is obviously ‘see they’re just like us’ they’ve got their crappy pop talent show, and maybe they will be for a while like that so you will be able to watch the Gaza version, ‘Gaza Idol’ or whatever where there’s six people bellowing crappy version of Anglo-American pop songs. But actually, after a while they won’t even need that anymore and it will be a land essentially without music and without culture.”
“When you’re 30% Muslim in London, do you think it’s going to be economically viable to put a Noel Coward play in the west end, that’s what I mean, it costs you not only your future but your past as well.”
“Because the British and European intellectual class cannot confront the reality of what they have done to themselves, they have to find something else to blame it on, even if it’s just some little terrorist-squat, halfway down the world, halfway down the Mediterranean, a little nothing place, that has to be responsible for the entirety of why Western European is now seething with Jew-hatred. It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
Q: Ultimately, then, is it really about the Jews? It may seem so, that is to say, the terrorism against the Jews is about those individual Jewish families and anti semitism, but isn’t this a microcosm of the future for these places in Europe, but they just don’t realize it?
“The French, who have a sort of admirably cynical low cunning in certain matters that sometimes serves them very well, and I think in this case, it hasn’t because I think they consciously reached the conclusion during that kind of low-level French Intifadah just after 9/11 2001-2002 that as long as what was going on could be held to the Jews it was of no broader significance. And I think cynics like M. Chiraq thought of that consciously. And you can understand why, for M. Hollande 94% of Muslims voted for him, in other words that’s his base, as much as the black population is for Obama in a sense, and in a democratic polity, you go where the votes are. And that is why in a lot of marginal constituencies all across Europe that’s where the votes are. So you can’t come out with any kind of ringing defense of Jews because you don’t want that 94% of the Muslim vote to fall down to 53% of the Muslim vote. So, these guys cynically I think said, well, if we can hold it to the Jews, it’ll bad and once in awhile it’ll be embarrassing and yes, there probably isn’t much of a future for them but we can tamp it all down and keep a lid on it.”
“And what they don’t realize, which it’s like posterity’s all time greatest joke, is that in the Europe they have created-they are the Jews. Chiraq and Hollande are the new Jews and they’re headed where the Jews were.”
“I don’t think the English edition is out, or coming out until the fall or whatever, but the new Michel Houellebecq novel, that terrific line that he says to his Jewish girlfriend as she’s getting out of the country [to Israel], “There’s no Israel for me.” And that’s the genius of Houellebecq. Hes actually put the continental European situation in one line. “There is no Israel for me.”
Q: And by extension, the majority of the populace in places like France don’t realize that these leaders are like the kapos, sacrificing their own people, selling each other out. The average French citizen doesn’t realize that they’re being put on the altar right now.
“And I think when they do, some of them will get angry, and people predict that, but I think we’re getting past the stage demographically where meaningful anger will be possible. Even people that are supposed to be notorious haters like Marine Le Pen, they’re running those numbers, too. Because you have to be mighty confident that you can make up the votes elsewhere, doesn’t matter who you are in European politics, you have to be mighty confident you can make up the votes elsewhere to be able to be able write off the entire Muslim population.
Q: So what are the lessons for Canada and particularly for Canadian Jewry, and would you have a warning or words of advice, especially given that the Canadian Jewish community and the organized Jewish community was part and parcel of everything you went through with the Human Rights Commission and the hate speech issues?
“I find it depressing that the so-called ‘Official Jews’ in Ezra’s great phrase, continue to get this issue wrong. Just the other day the answer to this is more hate speech laws which I absolutely reject because I think the more hate speech laws you have the less likely it is that these issues can be addressed honestly.”
“I mean I prefer fellows like the guy I mentioned the other night, like Anjum Choudary, who goes on TV and says yeah, I want sharia worldwide and I want the flag of Islam over Buckingham Palace and the White House and actually St. Peter’s in Rome eventually, and so when Canadian Jewish groups think the answer is to have more powers for the human rights commissions or even the proposed terrorist legislation, I don’t think the problem can be managed like that.”
“When you look for example, the way how you would have to expand the RCMP’s budget to monitor everybody who says something ‘beastly’-that’s simply not doable, by some accounts, I think the Germans devote 60 officers to every fellow they’re tracking, and I think that is what was shown by both the fellow who killed Corporal Cirillo in Ottawa and the fellow who killed Patrice Vincent in St. Jean Sur Richelieu. They were both known to authorities, the authorities had taken the step of preventing them from leaving the country so they could only kill people in Canada.”
Q: So, just let them go and just shut the doors?
“Yes, I think you let them go, it’s a one-way ticket, they’re presumed to be guilty and not admitted back into the country. “
“And you have to have a serious conversation about immigration, which is what Jews-even sensible Jews never want to talk about. Jews are the most sentimental about immigration, and I would include great friends of mine in the American Jewish community who are as right wing as you can get, and yet they have a blind spot about sort of sentimentalist myths about immigration. And the fact is that in Canada, where Islam is essentially the greatest provider of new Canadian citizens, and we are reluctant, with the exception of Quebec, to even have any kind of conversation on the contradictions between ‘hyper’ Islam, let’s just keep it there for the moment, and what it means to be Canadian.”
“I had lunch with the two ladies in my vast entourage at the Big Smoke bar on King Street, and a fully covered woman, that is to say Saudi-style with just the slit eyes for the visor, came in and ordered a burger. And I think when you see something like that, the liberal multicultural Canadian says ‘oh yes, she’s wearing a niqab, but she ordered a burger-what could be more Canadian than that’?’
Q: Well she could have gone to Tim Horton’s! Come on!
“Well that’s right and the media-savvy ones are always very good about that when they go on TV to be asked about this, they always have their Tim Horton’s coffee with them to show they’re just regular.”
Q: Fully assimilated!
“Right. So the liberal person looks at the woman at the woman in the niqab buying a burger and says she’s buying a burger, she’s as Canadian as the next, and the more skeptical person says is it possible to be a functioning member of society when you are so self-segregating that you will not even show yourself to your supposed fellow Canadians and burger-chompers and Tim Horton’s sippers.”
“And there is a difference, people always say oh, these Mennonites they can be stand offish, and Orthodox Jews, but Islam is a religion with universalist claims, it doesn’t want to settle down in an encampment-like what’s that town, in Intercourse, PA, where the Mennonites are.
Q: It had to be named “Intercourse”, right? It couldn’t be named ‘Abstinence”?
“Right. So Islam doesn’t just want to decamp to a couple of fields. It wants everybody on the planet to submit to Islam.”
“So Canada I think, actually is faced with a serious challenge there, and the idea that somehow we cannot distinguish between whether admitting the fellows from Afghanistan who dump their women folk in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, we’re not allowed to distinguish between them and a couple of Catholics from the west coast of Ireland or a Catholic from Slovenia or whatever, that somehow if you have immigration, you can’t distinguish between sources of immigration… ultimately, that has to go.”
“We’re a generation behind where Europeans are, but the Muslim community has spent a lot of the 21st century in Canada catching up and the Jewish community, in the hands of its spokesmen like Bernie Farber, is still wedded to the old solutions, to hate crimes prosecutions for elderly Nazis and to the idea that the state can regulate all the bad stuff away, and the state cannot.”
“And the pathetic response of the Official Jewish groups to the outright calls for the deaths of Jews that are made on the streets of Calgary, Montreal and all kinds of other places and the Bernie Farbers of the world are entirely useless on that.”
“We need more free speech and we need a more honest dialogue and frankly, whatever its own history, the Jewish community has to have a slightly more hard-headed approach, rather than sort of sentimentalist “Ellis Island” view of mass immigration.”
Q: So the basic idea would be to divert Jewish energy away from leftist, Tikkun Olam, hate speech activism, to simply having a conversation on immigration-that would be a good start?
“It’s a basic sense of self-preservation. I think it is possible at a certain level in life for everything to seem as if it’s tickedy-boo.”
“There is a video on the internet in which Bernie Farber runs into Khurrum Awan, my head Sock Puppet, and he’s back-slapping and saying ‘hey great to see you’ and they are whooping it up a storm and you can see that at a certain level of the Canadian state that that works. Bernie Farber recognizes Khurrum Awan as a player in same the pool in which he swims, it doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, Muslim, or Ukrainian or gay or transgendered, or whatever, you’re one of those people whose wafted up into being one of the super players in identity politics where power is mediated in the Canadian state.”
“And at a certain point in your careers you swung along to Ottawa and you get given the Order of Canada and the Queen’s Jubilee Medal and all the other stuff and you all award each other Man of the Year certificates back and forth all decade long. And if one were to excuse the appalling failure of Bernie Farber and the other Official Jews, it would be that if you exist in that bubble where you meet these bespoke honchos from the identity groups much like yourselves-it would be easy to think in that bubble because there actually is no real difference between you you’re all just super schmoozers, oiling and greasing your way through the upper mechanisms of the Canadian state . That would be about as charitable of you of how Bernie Farber a got it wrong as I could imagine, but for people on the ground level who don’t have the Jubilee Medal that Bernie Farber got there are tougher questions about survival, about if an uncovered woman can still walk through a heavily Muslim neighbourhood.”
“Then, there is this absurd story of the Jewish toupee some guy invented because that’s a less visible mark of your faith, going around with a Sean Connery toupee on your head.”
Q: Now you’re breaking my heart-he has a toupee?
“Oh, only since about 1968.”
“So where that’s the only acceptable, least life-threatening mark of your faith that you can get away with. Where you’re riding on the Paris Metro without a book that betrays your identity.”
“And beyond the Jews one of the reasons UKIP is doing well-even when they say it’s a heavily Muslim area, there are still 3 or 4 little old ladies who have been living in that house since 1928 and haven’t moved out and their neighbourhood has been utterly transformed and they have to live with the reality of the hate and hostility every day of their lives and Bernie Farber doesn’t.”
“And the betrayal, by the leaders, by the elites of their bases, is why Europe’s in the state it’s in and it if it got to that stage in Canada it would be a tragedy, because these things are going to end violently. The only thing we don’t know is the particulars of the violence-who’s going to do what to who but they will end violently and the more you tell people you can’t speak about it you can’t say anything honest about it, you can’t express your concerns you can’t express your feelings, the more people like Bernie Farber say we need Section 13 back, we need to crack down on people..”
“Bernie Farber ought to understand that better understand better than anyone. The Third Reich had an official ideology and you weren’t allowed to question it, Bernie Farber’s official ideology is Trudeaupian Multiculturalism, and he and too many other people are far too comfortable with a world in which you’re not allowed to question that. And if we’re going to get through this thing and it’s not entirely clear to me that we will, if we do get through it it’s because we return to an age of honest discourse as opposed to parroting glassy eyed, the official lies.”
“When I was saying there’s not going to be a lot of West End theater in London, that’s true for Canada, when you go past the hockey hall of fame or whatever it is at the end of Yonge Street, there’s not going to be a lot of hockey if Canada has the same transformative immigration that France has, it changes everything. And people need to understand that.”
Q: John Kerry sent James Taylor to France and sing You’ve Got a Friend, has Prime Minister Harper approached to sing in the Middle East? They say music soothes the savage beast, surely you singing James Bond songs to the Baghdadi caliphs, and singing to ISIS would bring world peace?
“You won’t be surprised to hear I don’t get as overwhelmed with potential promotional booking for my Goldfinger CD as you might think, and the way the schedule looks, if some promoter would say hey, we booked you a big gig in Mosul I wouldn’t be sure I’d agree to it.”
“It’s the detail of Islam I find interesting, the way the big imam who clarified the Taliban’s position on music, he said it isn’t true that it’s illegal or forbidden to listen to music in Islam, it’s just forbidden to enjoy it. And on that logic, my Goldfinger album ought to be #1 in Afghanistan.”
“And it’s like the Ayatollah Khomeini’s great line there are no jokes in Islam. We’re inverted things. John Kerry thinks that that James Taylor is important, and that that stupid song is important, you know ‘winter, spring summer or fall, all you’ve got to do is call,’ and I’ll send a low-level diplomat to come and see you in a couple of weeks, the idea that there is a sort of significance in this pathetic, weedy fey, hippie anthem, that’s what John Kerry is saying and the Taliban actually take those guys at their word, and it is significant to them. And they ban music and all the rest of it.”
“The whole idea, the whole Quincy Jones, healing power of music, the idea that music transcends borders and boundaries, no it’s just as political as anything else. And in fact in the world we’re headed to James Taylor will wind up getting his head chopped off along with the rest of them. It’s not going to make any difference.”
Q: Because It’s very hard to sing without your head attached to your neck?
[laughs] “It is true. And the interesting thing about that is, even like the smallest pleasures will be denied to us-like Kathy Shaidle likes punk and all that. ‘’
“I drove from Amman to just shy of Baghdad then I turned and went north up to Tikrit, Saddam’s home town and in Amman, when you are within range of the Hyatt, you can still get a couple of still vaguely semi-western sounding pop stations, and as you drive further and further out through the hard core towns, there’s nothing, nothing and you tune in the radio but there’s just nothing the call to prayer and all the rest of it. “
“There is “literally no music” in that. I used to make jokes about when I drove through that desert, that you could do like in Nevada, you could put up a Vegas there and could have Wayne Newton do two shows a night or whatever but in fact it’s just like a wasteland, you tune the radio but it’s nothing but imams sounding off, and the call to prayer, and dial again and there’s another imam sounding off, and it is literally a land beyond music, and that’s where the James Taylor is completely pathetic, because it shows how stupid and parochial we are in a way that these guys well understand, we’re a bubble and they’re in a world outside the bubble and we don’t get it.”
Q: You had a great line about taking small actions every day, because if not, we’ll end up on a similar drive into the desert that you experienced, no joy, no music and no simple pleasures?
“That comes back to what Israel is, and that has been true since the British Mandate when the British officials how the Jews just got on with irrigating the desert, while the Arabs didn’t. Literally to be able to grow something and to tend it, to nurture it.
Q: Instead of killing it and sucking out the joy?
“Yeah. I think that’s the tragedy that you already sense in the way that the desert creeps south in North Africa each year you sense that psychologically the desert is creeping on us in the West, and that’s a tragedy.”
Q: Orianna Fallaci had a great metaphor about water. She said that unlike Islam, Judeo-Christian civilization is like water and creates and sustains life. It’s a life force and wherever it finds itself it will support life. I like to think that there are enough people who are like water, will fight and sustain life and to grow the flowers in the desert-because there’s too much at stake. Do you think?
“Sometimes you can have a little pruning foist upon you, that you didn’t anticipate but you will grow again, but it’s never about the numbers, Jews know that better than anyone, there are fewer Jews than there are with anything [population-wise] and they are disproportionately represented in all the great areas of scientific and artistic and cultural fields and so it’s never about the numbers, and the numbers do not determine your future. ”
“The essence of every story that’s ever been told, it’s the guy who beats the odds and for western civilization, the odds aren’t good for civilization right now but that is the essence of every story that’s ever been told that eventually the good guy rouses himself and beat the odds, and that’s all we have to do is rouse ourselves and we can beat the odds.”
Q: Well, you’re one of the good guys. Thank you very much for this.
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