The Mohammedan Candidate

We’re going to party like it’s 1999, or at least 1997 and ’98. First up, Mark Steyn demolishes the conspiracy theory du jour that the queen had Princess Di whacked because she was sleeping with Dodi Al-Fayed, the Mohammedan Candidate:

National Review’s David Pryce-Jones made the point that, in persisting with his lurid accusations, Mohammed Fayed revealed how little he understands Britain: He’s lived there for years, it’s been good to him, he owns Harrod’s and the Paris Ritz and various other baubles. No big deal. He’s one of many, many beneficiaries of Western openness to “the other.” And yet he’s convinced himself that Buckingham Palace is so consumed by “Islamophobia” that the queen’s husband dialed M, and M called in Moneypenny, and Moneypenny faxed 007, and a week later the princess and her Islamostud are dead.

Reality is more humdrum: In multiculti Britain, everyone was indifferent to Di’s Muslim lover. Could have been a Hindu, could have been a Buddhist. Who cares? But, instead, Fayed has retreated into the paranoia and victim mentality that stunts so much of the Muslim world. A while back, I was in Jordan, and a wealthy Saudi told me that the Iraq war was part of a continuous Western assault on Islam that includes the British Royal Family’s assassination of Dodi Fayed. And so, in a London courtroom, a freak one-off celebrity death becomes just another snapshot of the big geopolitical picture.

More flashbacks from the late 1990s: As Ann Coulter notes in her radio interview with Kevin McCullough, next year will be the tenth anniversary of Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings. So Hillary will have that in the background–and quite possibly the foreground–as she campaigns next year.