Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn is the senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group, North American editor for The Spectator and an internationally syndicated columnist, also writing for the Jerusalem Post (also owned by Hollinger), the National Review in the United States, and the Irish Times in Ireland.
He also formerly wrote for National Post in Canada, but his position became uncertain after the purchase of the newspaper by Canwest Global. It was not confirmed until May 2003 that he no longer writes for the Post, from which he quit. He is currently writing for the Western Standard in Canada.
Steyn and politics
He is a strong conservative who mostly writes on foreign policy issues. He is a close ally of Conrad Black, and has written for many of Black's newspapers. Like Conrad Black, he is a Canadian, although he has long railed against the policies of the Liberal Party, which has dominated federal politics in Canada since the 1960s. These policies include multiculturalism, public healthcare, high taxation, gun control, concessions to Quebec separatists and anti-Americanism, which he desribes as 'Trudeaupian', in a reference to former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
He was a leading proponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has continued to support that action, scornful of the United Nations, from which he advocates US withdrawal, and of countries like France, which opposed the war.
He wrote a column in May 2004 complaining about media bias and low journalistic standards in newspapers, attributing this to a political agenda, and double standards in relation to the conflict in Iraq:
- In the last few days, The Mirror, a raucous Fleet Street tabloid, has published pictures of British troops urinating on Iraqi prisoners and the Boston Globe, a somnolent New England broadsheet, has published pictures of American troops sexually abusing Iraqi women. In both cases, the pictures turned out to be fake. From a cursory glance at details in the London snaps and the provenance of the Boston ones, it should have been obvious to editors at both papers they were almost certainly false. Yet they published them. Because they wanted them to be true. Because it would bring them a little closer to the head they really want to roll - George W. Bush's. If you want to see what the Islamists did to Nick Berg or Daniel Pearl or to those guys in Fallujah or even to the victims of September 11, you'll have to ferret it out on the Internet. The media aren't interested in showing you images that might rouse the American people to righteous anger, only images that will shame and demoralize them. [1]
His interventions in British and European political matters in his Daily Telegraph column have led to hostile reaction, for example from the senior journalist Peter Preston writing in The Observer in June 2004. Preston took him to task as a 'neo-con ranter', citing Steyn's labelling of Neil Kinnock and Chris Patten as on the 'lunatic fringe' in matters relating to the EU.
Steyn now lives in New Hampshire in the United States, in part because of its favourable tax regime and the absence of curbs on gun ownership.
Barbs on Steyn
- "The arrogance of Mark Steyn knows no bounds", Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Ambassador to the United Kingdom"
- "Our treatment plants will always be ready to receive the literary outpourings emanating from his most humane soil", Ghazi Algosaibi, Minister of Water and Sewage, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Barbs by Steyn
Steyn is known for lacing his pieces with wry, vivid and often disparaging humor.
- Quebec: "The dumbest secession movement in the world... the world's most pointless secession movement: They want to leave Canada in order to set up a country that looks exactly the same - confiscatory taxation, moribund health service, no mail service on weekends"
- Canadian health care: "Unlike Britain but like North Korea, in Her Majesty's northern Dominion the public health system is such an article of faith that no private hospitals are permitted: Canada’s private health care system is called 'America'"
- On Denmark's flag planted on Arctic land claimed by Canada: "There's something Danish in the state of rotten"
- On Christmas: "The Jews - the Ellis Island/Lower East Side generation - were merely the latest contributors to the American Christmas. For their first two centuries on this continent, the Anglo-Celtic settlers attached no significance to Christmas: it was another working day, unless it fell on a Sunday, in which case one went to church. It was later waves of immigrants - the Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians - who introduced most of the standard features we know today - trees, cards, Santa. Nothing embodies the American idea - e pluribus unum - better than the American Christmas. This is genuine multiculturalism: If the worry is separation of church and state, the North American Christmas is surely the most successful separation you could devise - Jesus, Mary and Joseph are for home and church; the great secular trinity of Santa, Rudolph and Frosty are for school and mall"
- On the Israeli-Arab Conflict: "In fact, there is a Palestinian state: it's called Jordan, whose population has always been majority Palestinian. It's not as big a state as it used to be, but that's because King Hussein, in the worst miscalculation of his long bravura highwire act, made the mistake of joining Nasser's 1967 war to destroy Israel. Hence, the 'occupied territories': they're occupied because the Arabs attacked Israel and lost."
- On the EU: The European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has decided to shelve its report on the rise of anti-Semitism on the Continent. The problem, as reported in The Telegraph, is that the survey had found that "many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups", and so a "political decision" was taken not to publish it because of "fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims".
Let's go back over that slowly and try not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the uselessness of these thought-police bodies: they're fine for chastising insufficiently guilt-ridden whites in an ongoing reverse-minstrel show of cultural self-abasement, but they don't have the stomach for confronting real racism. A tolerant society is so reluctant to appear intolerant, it would rather tolerate intolerance.
Bibliography
- Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now (2000)
- The Face of the Tiger (2002)
- Mark Steyn From Head To Toe: An Anatomical Anthology (2004)
- America Alone: Our Country's Future as a Lone Warrior (2004)