Tuesday, March 13, 2007
"WE HAVE A LOT OF WORK TO DO"
Mark Steyn encounters leftoid talkback callers:
When, as they often do, they cite Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, I point out that we’re not always as fortunate to find ourselves up against such relatively benign enemies as British imperial administrators or even American racist rednecks. King and Gandhi’s strategies would not have been effective against fellows who gun down classrooms of Russian schoolchildren, or self-detonate at Muslim weddings in Amman, or behead you live on camera and then release it as a snuff video, or assassinate politicians and as they’re dying fall to the ground and drink their blood off the marble. Come to that, King and Gandhi’s strategies would not have been effective against the prominent British Muslim who in a recent debate at Trinity College, Dublin announced that the Prophet Mohammed’s message to infidels was “I am here to slaughter you all.” Good luck with the binding non-violent conflict resolution there.
And at that point there’s usually a pause and the caller says something like “Well, that’s all the more reason why we need to be even more committed to non-violence.” Or as a lady called Kay put it: “We have a lot of work to do then so that some day a long way down the road they won’t want to slaughter us.”