Author Mark Steyn (Hillsdale.edu)
I’m giving Mark Steyn’s new book Lights Out: Islam, free speech and the twilight of the West a rave review, and not just because he mentions me in the Author’s Note. And on page 214. And somewhere else, I think. (Come on: did you really expect me NOT to mention that...?)
No, its because Steyn is incapable of writing a tedious line. As reviewers noted about his last book, the demographic doomsday tome America Alone, reading Mark Steyn can be the most fun you’ll have getting depressed.
In Lights Out, Steyn chronicles his year from hell. Canada’s oldest magazine, Maclean’s, printed an excerpt from America Alone that speculated on the effect increased Muslim immigrant birthrates were having on European society, and, by extension, America.
Steyn quoted some actual radical Muslims who said some, well, radical things. He presented his case with his usual pyrotechnic prose and withering sarcasm.
The Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like Steyn’s article, so they talked a trio of Muslim Canadian law students to take Steyn and Maclean’s to court, charging them with “Islamophobia.”
Except, of course, that there’s no such crime as “Islamophobia.” As Steyn explains:
Islamophobia is one of those illnesses of which the only symptom is to be accused of having it. There is nothing “irrational” about wanting to examine the fastest growing religion and population demographic in the world...
But that doesn’t matter whether on not “Islamophobia” is a real crime, because those Canadian Muslim belligerents didn’t take Steyn and Maclean’s to a real court. They took them to something called a Human Rights Commission.
In Canada’s extra-judicial Human Rights Commissions, all the traditional legal niceties are dispatched with or turned upside down. Truth is no defense. Evidence can be seized without a warrant. The complainants have all their legal expenses paid for by taxpayers, while the defendant has to pay all his own bills.
I’ve written about Steyn’s case before, in my own book The Tyranny of Nice, and in articles elsewhere on the web. By the time Lights Out landed in my mailbox, I’d been blogging about his case, and Ezra Levant’s related one, literally every day for 18 months. Lights out? I was HRC’d out.
But... I wanted to flip through Lights Out to look for my name. And I got caught up in the whole story again.
I’m not giving the game away when I say: Steyn won. Because “won” isn’t quite the right word. Mark Steyn and his supporters around the world made such a stink about his case that the HRCs basically dropped it, eventually.
However, as Steyn points out, this isn’t just about him. Free speech is under threat all over the world, and even in the United States, the home of the First Amendment. Between the return of the Fairness Doctrine under the guise of “localism” and the new “cyberbullying” law that could punish commenters on weblogs, state censorship is on the rise.
For every “win”, like Steyn’s, the day’s news brings reports of someone less famous, less articulate and not as well connected being dragged before some kind of Big Brother tribunal, or being informally silenced by accusations of “racism” or “political incorrectness.”
Luckily, a book like Mark Steyn’s Lights Out is both a warning and a handbook on how to fight back. Winning against intimidating radical Muslims and their liberal friends in bureaucracy isn’t easy but it is possible. And if you’re like Steyn, and you can keep your sense of humor and your convictions intact, you can do more than make it safely to the other side. You can crush your tormentors and teach them – and your complacent fellow citizens – a priceless lesson.
Lights Out is both depressing and entertaining, amusing and infuriating. If you’re looking for a searing indictment of political correctness, multiculturalism and censorship, Lights Out by Mark Steyn is a must-read.
And not just because I’m in it. Honest.
PS: Lights Out is available from Mark Steyn's online bookstore. He'll even sign it for you.
Comments
I think he's about 30-40 years late.
Though I know your review of this book is NOT about a world class Author mentioning your name three times in his new book Kathy, and you mentioning your name getting mentioned three time in your review of this new book mentioning your name three times, it is worth buying just to find out what another writer, has said about you.
You are so controversial, you inspire either emotional love or rabid hate. No Anne of Green Gables for sure. More like Anne Coulter of True North.
Good one, Jim. I think of myself as the short, ugly Ann Coulter of Canada
Geeze Kathy, don't be hard on yourself. You are not ugly, at least not physically :}.
The fact Steyn, Levant, you and Kate (the Gang of Four) have made such a difference in a short period of time for freedom of speech in Canada, at great financial risk to yourselves personally from law suits and the wrath of the speech monitors, is a beautiful thing.
Orwell would be proud you of you all.
Glad to see a book that Americans will read seriously. Anti-free speech is coming upon them like a meteor storm. The Obama will see to that. Still not in stores in Edmonton as of two days ago. I'm getting antsy to read it.
Just finished reading my personally autographed copy. Steyn has exceeded my expectations with this one. A copy of it should be in every school
and public library in the country.
Cool!
This is the very first time I get to put a comment down on a Kathy Shaidle blog/article!
Woo hoo!
Ever since her days as a + + relapsed catholic + + blogger, I've been chomping at the bit to comment.
Now hopefully she'll implement this little feature on her 5FEETofFURY blog.
Tito Edwards (CVSTOS FIDEI & The American Catholic website)
Sorry, my blog FiveFeetOfFury will remain comment free -- managing these takes enough of my time :-)
Thanks for visiting, everyone.
kathy - I agree with Dirty Harry -except I am hopeful it's never too late if enough people can get motivated. How would you compare it to Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism
In my view, Mark is the best writer in the world. Everything he writes is worth reading regardless of his subject matter. Are his peers in letters ever simply in awe of this man? It would be pretty cool to be as smart as Mark Steyn. Thanks.
Bravo Kathy,
You, Steyn and the other gang are personal heros in the relentless battle against the censors and HR industry.
Living at an undisclosed location in the EU, I cxan only say Mark is absolutely dead on with his comments in "Amerika Alone".
I noted with amusement Kate's post about "Natsies" and your very funny line related to Tony Blair's Britain "Please return Luftwaffe - all is forgiven" keeps coming to mind.
Keep up the great blog(s).
Dear sporty: Yep, I gotta get lights out...before the lights go out. Same in Australia, kid. No really. Colonel Robert Neville blogspot com
Here's how Marxist nihilists and Muslim psychopaths celebrate multicultism in Melbourne Australia with a rather infamous photo taken by a friend:
colonelrobertneville.blogspot.com/2009/01/jihad-in-melbourne-cbd-muslim-and.html
And here is how our laughable and terrifyingly suicidal phony security services spin it:
colonelrobertneville.blogspot.co
PS. And here is how our laughable and terrifyingly suicidal phony security services spin it: colonelrobertneville.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-had-spare-afternoon-so-i-called-up_19.html
The only quibble I have with your review is that you say, "the day’s news brings reports of someone less famous..."
I think the point is that it that those other cases are not heard of in the news at all. WE only know of them because of blogs like yours, Levant, Steyn and smalldeadanimals. The HRCs have had some serious coverage in the mainstream since the high profile cases, but the main source for information on the meat and potatoes injustices comes from the blogs, and now from three books.
In a January 2007 column in the Chicago Sun-Times, Steyn wrote that Barack Obama was “black, and white, and Hawaiian, and Kansan, and charismatic, and Congregationalist, and Muslim. [...] He was raised in an Indonesian madrassah by radical imams, which is more than John Edwards can say.” He added, “The madrassah stuff was supposedly leaked to Insight Magazine… by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s team.”[14] Two days later, Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times responded to Steyn regarding what she called the smear
Send that piece of excerment back to Canada and keep him there.
Robert Moon is spamming The Activity Pit again: twi.cc/lAlq
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