One Rant Leads to Another

Mark Steyn sees red. And green and yellow, too.

Remember the USA Today weather-map system of colour-coded security alerts that Tom Ridge introduced south of the border a couple months ago? If you were to apply Ridge’s code — from blue to red via green, yellow and orange — to the health of global democracy, you’d wind up with something along these lines: the United States, code green; Britain, Canada and the non-insane parts of the Commonwealth, code yellow; Europe, code orange; the Middle East, code red. The Arab world has no democracy, and little prospect of any, and so its much-vaunted “Arab street” is, in fact, a symbol of weakness. Folks jump up and down in the street when they’ve nowhere else to go. The Arabs are world leaders at yelling excitedly and shouting “Death to the Great Satan!” and world losers at everything else.

I’ve said it before: The only two things of any importance to come out of the Arab world in the last three centuries are crude oil and crude hate. Incapable of governing themselves decently for at least 500 years, they bristle at the mere suggestion of adapting some Western ways.

There’s nothing wrong with Islam that wasn’t wrong with Christianity at the same age — I’m certain they’ll mellow with age.

But we can’t wait that long for the Araby to grow up. They have too much money, too many resources, too many weapons, and too many idiots willing to use them against us.