by Mark Steyn
July 18, 2015
A memorial at the military recruiting center where the shootings began on Thursday in Chattanooga, Tenn. Kevin Liles for The New York Times
A fifth victim of the Chattanooga jihad boy has died: Petty Officer Randall Smith, US Navy.
I'm afraid the makeshift memorials of flags and other patriotic memorabilia that have sprung up on the edge of the police tape depress the hell out of me. A no doubt sincere veneration for the military apparently can only express itself with a feeble passivity that is a large part of the problem. This isn't a time for the bumper-sticker bromides of "We salute our heroes/Thank you for your service/We support our troops". Among the dead are men who waged a bloody and hard-fought battle to retake Fallujah ...only to come home and die unarmed in a crappy shopping mall at the hands of a halfwit fanatic whose family had been under the leisurely money-no-object scrutiny of the bloated security apparatus for years.
A Chinese-made teddy bear from Wal-Mart is not an appropriate reaction. Righteous anger is. And there's not a lot of evidence of that. At that parking-lot memorial, the public seems to discern that such anger is no longer an approved sensibility - whereas a teary generalized sadness gets plenty of media coverage. This is the same media, by the way, that, after a couple of perfunctory questions about Chattanooga, asked Josh Earnest for more details about the "father-daughter weekend" President Obama is currently enjoying in New York. Golly, you'd almost get the impression they're really not that sad at all.
Screw the cakes and balloons. We who did not know them cannot mourn them: That is for their friends and family. The nation's duty is to avenge them - so that they did not die in vain.
~When I first saw this spelling - in yesterday's column - of the name of this week's murderous Mohammedan, I did a double-take and assumed I must have mistranscribed it and corrected it to one of the usual iterations. But no, apparently we have a new variant of everybody's favorite boy's name:
PERRY, OH (WOIO) - The man FBI officials say opened fire on a military recruiting center and reserve center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, killing four U.S. Marines once worked and lived in northeast Ohio.
Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez was killed after Wednesday's attack.
Mohammod? Great. Just what we need: another spelling of Mohammed/Muhammad/Mohamad/Mahmoud to bugger up the intelligence databases.
~Defense Secretary Ash Carter has released an official Pentagon statement on the mass murder of US servicemen:
My thoughts and prayers - along with those of the men and women of the Department of Defense - are with the families of those killed in this senseless act of violence.
On the other hand, Her Excellency El Presidenta-in-waiting Hillary Clinton insists it was not a "senseless act of violence" but "an act of senseless violence":
Hillary Clinton called Thursday's shooting of four Marines in Chattanooga, Tennessee, "an act of senseless violence".
Where do the Republicans come down? Tennessee Congressman Scott DesJarlais:
My thoughts and prayers are with our Tennessee community and all those affected by this senseless act of violence.
And, alas, even one of my favorite representatives, the great Marsha Blackburn:
I am deeply saddened by this senseless act of violence.
Tragic and senseless... Senseless act of violence... Senseless act of violence... Senseless act of violence...
Is there an app for this rote incantation? Oh, wait, here's Florida senators Bill Nelson (Dem) and Marco Rubio (Rep):
We all mourn the senseless loss of life in Chattanooga... My thoughts and prayers today are with the victims of this senseless attack...
Which one's the Dem? Which one's the Rep? And does it matter?
What happened on Thursday isn't "senseless" at all. It shows great strategic purpose - as I've said so often before, including the last time unarmed soldiers were gunned down by "lone wolves":
If you seriously think this is a senseless act of senselessly senseless violence, then you're the one who's senseless. This isn't a harmless banality one can forgive in the stress of the moment. It's part of the reason we're losing.
~In this week's Aussie Spectator, James Allan reviews my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn. It's already had a rave from the peerless Julie Burchill in the London Speccie, but this is the view from Down Under:
In the Introduction to this book Steyn repeats some of his 'Monica's dress' gags (they've not withered with time) before explaining how 9/11 changed all that for him. As Steyn puts it about himself, his writing went all 'jihad, demographic decline, the death of Europe, all the fun stuff'.
But that said the mood is not all doom and gloom... The reader is taken on a ride whose overarching theme cannot be described as 'optimistic', but which never, ever fails to be beautifully written and funny. Have I mentioned that this is the funniest political columnist alive today?
James Allan is too kind. In these awful times, an honest joke is a small act of defiance. But we will need much larger ones.
~Speaking of defiant jests, the new editor of Charlie Hebdo has announced there will be no more Mohammed cartoons. So another non-senseless act has paid off bigtime for the Islamic enforcers. I regret the decision, although I understand it.
For what it's worth, I'll be speaking in Copenhagen on the tenth anniversary of the original Danish Motoons. If you're in the general area - Scandinavia, Europe, the Northern Hemisphere - you can get tickets and more information by emailing here.
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