MARK STEYN ON THE WORLD AND DIVERSITY AND THE MEDIA
https://www.steynonline.com/section/16/steyn-on-the-world The most important determination the media make is deciding what category a story falls into. For example, NPR recently ran a report asking the following:
Oddly enough, despite the headline, the reporter doesn’t seem that interested in answering the question. What follows is a public-health story:
Oh, my. That’s not good news for, say, all those Brit celebs who retire to the Costa. What could it be?
But migrating birds have been crossing the Mediterranean for millennia without bringing Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever with them. Go back to that sentence up above:
Hmm. 2016. Did anything happen round about then that was different? As opposed to things that are entirely unchanged, like bird migration patterns. Why, yes! Millions of “refugees” arrived in Europe from …go on, take a wild guess: “North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia”. Could that possibly have anything to do with the appearance in Spain of a hitherto unknown disease? Ryan Kennedy thinks so – because he writes for VDare, which is a website that focuses on immigration, so that it seems fairly obvious, if millions of people from the Third World walk unprocessed and unmonitored into First World countries, that pretty soon the First World countries will have Third World diseases. I speak as someone who, as a condition of moving to the United States, was required to be tested for tuberculosis, Aids and whatnot. But the strictures they impose on a Canadian apparently do not extend to Libyans and Gambians and Afghans. So perhaps the migrating birds are blameless, and this public-health story is really one of migrating humans. ~Now consider a second story: A law-abiding unarmed woman makes the mistake of calling 911 and, when the responding officers arrive, they shoot her dead. The American media’s reflex instinct is that this is an out-of-control murderous police-brutality story. To be sure, it’s more helpful if the victim is black or Hispanic, but in this case she is female and an immigrant, albeit from Australia. And certainly Down Under the instinct of the press would also be to play this as an example of a country with a crazy gun culture and the bad things that happen when innocent foreigners make the mistake of going there, even to a peaceable, upscale neighborhood. Or in the shorthand of the Sydney Daily Telegraph front page:
In both Oz and the US, the next stage of the story would be cherchez le cop – lots of reports of a redneck officer with a hair-trigger temper and various personal issues. But there’s a complicating factor. It’s so complicating that The Washington Post finds itself running a 1,200-word story on the death of Justine Damond without a word about the copper who shot her – nothing about his background, record, habits, behavior. Not even his name. Because his name is Mohamed Noor. As Tucker Carlson pointed out on Fox News the other night, the reason you know the officer’s identity is significant is because the Post went to all that trouble not to mention it. Mr Noor was born in Somalia, and these days, aside from being home to the fictional Lake Wobegon, Minnesota is also home to the all too real Little Mogadishu – mainly thanks to generous “family reunification” from a country that keeps no reliable family records. (Last year, I had a Somali minicab driver in London who was planning to move to Minneapolis “because my brother lives there. Well, he’s not really my brother,” he added cryptically.) If you take seriously Sir Robert Peel’s dictum that “the police are the public and the public are the police”, then, if your town turns Somali, you’re going to need some Somali policemen. And, just like Garrison Keillor’s radio tales of old Minnesota, the new Minnesota also requires its heartwarming yarns. In the deft summation of Michele Bachmann (a favorite guest on The Mark Steyn Show) Officer Noor is an “affirmative-action hire by the hijab-wearing mayor of Minneapolis“. Mayor Hodges doesn’t wear a hijab because she’s Muslim (yet) but to show she’s cool with it – and, if you’re not, you’re a bigot. Yes, it’s a bit hot under the hood and it cramps your peripheral vision, but the new Minneapolis is all about embracing discomfort:
So don’t worry, it may look like “complete destruction”, but any moment now we’ll be in full bloom. For her, the recruitment of Mohamed Noor, the ninth Somali officer on the force, is a good-news story, about the glories of “embracing the discomfort of transformation”. For others, including those on the receiving end of his ministrations, Mohamed Noor is a bad-news story. A few days before he shot Justine Damond, a complaint was filed in federal court by another Minneapolis woman, who also called 911 and claims she was assaulted by Noor. Disinclined to embrace her discomfort, she has instead sued. Last year, I spoke to many Muslim police officers in France and Belgium. Not all of them were happy to speak back, but a lot of them did. To reprise Sir Robert, the police are the public and the public are the police. So a semi-Muslim public is entitled to a semi-Muslim constabulary. There are potential difficulties here. As I wrote in March 2016:
But there’s an intervening stage, long before you descend into the madness of Molenbeek. The police are the public and the public are the police: civilized policing depends on an instinctive understanding of the rhythms of your community, of its social norms. “Diversity” – particularly the yawning chasm of Minneapolis-style diversity – is an obstacle to that, because “diversity” eliminates the very concept of “norms”. Being an Australian living in a pleasant low-crime neighborhood, Justine Damond saw in the police cruiser the happily prompt and efficient arrival of the friendly local constables, and so went up to the vehicle in her pajamas. Officer Noor fatally shot her in the abdomen, firing from a sitting position in his cruiser across his partner in the adjoining seat and straight through the open car window. The dashcam and bodycams were switched off. So in this instance the police were not the public and the public were not the police: Justine Damond was not Mohamed Noor and Mohamed Noor was not Justine Damond. Their views of the situation were entirely different, and irreconcilable. Is it a Black Lives Matter/Hands-up-don’t-shoot story? Or is it a story about the “discomfort of transformation” that Mayor Hodges wants us all to embrace? ~Last year I spent a few days in the German town of Reutlingen, in a refugee house with some affable Gambian men not quite as young as they were pretending to be nor as North African as they were claiming, but perfectly upfront and amiable about their gaming of the system. I found them agreeable company, although the amount of pot they smoked gave me a bit of a headache in the confines of their rooms. As for the town, the narrow winding pedestrianized streets of old medieval Reutlingen are not unattractive, if nowhere as pretty as nearby Tübingen, where I went next. Reutlingen had just seen a brutal, fatal machete attack by a “refugee” upon a pregnant Polish lady working at a kebab shop. Tübingen, by contrast, is a university town, once the home of Hegel and Hölderlin, and, enjoying its cafe life after the stresses of those Reutlingen refugee centers, I found myself humming the Serenade from The Student Prince (though that’s actually set in Heidelberg). Alas, a not so friendly Gambian has made his way to Tübingen, and gone on a savage rape spree. Whether or not you want to “embrace the discomfort of transformation”, sometimes the discomforts embrace you. The Mayor writes:
Mayor Palmer is not a right-wing loon, but a leftie from the open-borders Green Party. But he understands, as his counterpart in Minneapolis does not, that the sexual-assaults story is a demographic-transformation story. I found Tübingen pleasant and relaxing after talking to sexual-assault victims in Cologne, and yet the story followed me there, to a small, placid university town. “Embrace the discomfort of transformation”: The mysterious-disease story is a migrant story, the police-shooting story is a migrant story, the sex-crimes-epidemic story is a migrant story. But all transformational discomfort is local, and there are far more western leaders like Mayor Hodges than like Mayor Palmer. In a developed world where the low-skilled service jobs are automating, there is no economic rationale for mass immigration. That leaves only the cultural consequences. Those few politicians with occasional moments of clarity – like Mayor Palmer – should not be given a pass when party HQ prevails upon them to lurch back to “diversity is our strength” bromides. After all, “sharp mood swings” are a well-known symptom of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. [UPDATE: The Minneapolis police chief has now resigned over the death of Justine Damond. The Mayor’s press conference, at 8.15pm Central Time, has degenerated into rather too vibrant a celebration of diversity.] |
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