"You can't assimilate with a nullity"

Another great contribution from Mark Steyn, courtesy of Scott at Crusader:

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A friend of mine did a satirical play in England a couple of years ago, he's an old leftie, very anti-Iraq war, so in his show he had Bush and Blair come out and sing 'we're sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus' ... ha-ha, very funny. Well how about if you have a couple of Imams dancing around singing 'we're sending you a schoolgirl bomb from Allah'.
Well oddly enough, my pal was far more reluctant to do that, on the reasonable grounds that unlike insulting Christianity, if you insult certain other faiths, a far more motivated crowd is likely to be waiting for you at the stage door.
Multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke, in which the American tells the Soviet that 'in my country, everyone is free to criticise the President' and the Soviet guy replies 'same here! In my country everyone is free to criticise your President'. Under the rules, as understood by the New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance.

If one had to choose, on balance, Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elite's loathing of their own.

Now I have a great sympathy for Muslims that face demands that they assimilate; it's on the front pages of all the newspapers in London this weekend. Even if you wanted to, even if you wanted to, how would you assimilate with say, Canadian national identity? You can't assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It's much easier to dismantle a society than put anything new and lasting in it place. And across much of the developed world, that's what's going on right now.

The advantage for the US and for Australia, and to a lesser extent other parts of the English-speaking world, is that Europe, in its civilisational exhaustion, is ahead in the line, and its fate might wake up even the most blinkered on this side of the continent.
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Read the rest, it's worth it.

Mark Steyn is a terrific columnist, but I think he's an even more effective speaker. There's an insistence in his voice that makes the points he underlines all the more powerful. I've been listening to him as a weekly guest on the Hugh Hewitt radio show for .... gosh, can it be two years now?... and he's usually a highlight of the broadcast week.
Here are some recent appearances of Steyn's on Hewitt's show:

Thursday August 3rd

Thursday July 27th

Apparently he filled in for Rush Limbaugh's radio show one day last week? Did anyone hear how he did? I usually only tune in to Rush when I know that Walter Williams is filling in, because that means a talk with Thomas Sowell, one of my favorite writers; what a thrill it must have been to get a 3-hour dose of Steyn..!