Steyn is shocked, shocked, that mass non-Western immigration has been going on in this establishment
Winston Smith writes:
Re your entry yesterday about Steyn’s concern about immigration, this seems to be recent theme with him. He recently wrote a column for Macleans on the Tamil protests in Toronto:
Tamil questions that can’t be asked
That’s because professional ethnic grievance mongers cry ‘Racist!’ at the drop of a turban
… “Like the revelation during the 2006 war with Israel that half the population of Lebanon hold Canadian passports, the Tamil protests were one of those rare moments when the veil lifts and Canadians glimpse the sheer scale of societal transformation. The obvious question prompted by the size of demonstrations in Ottawa and Toronto is: how did Canada acquire that many Tamils? News reports suggesting that Toronto is home to “200,000 Tamils” prompted a lot of pooh-poohing about inflated figures and unreliable statistics. And surely they are. I doubt there are verifiable numbers on the Tamil population of Ontario. But, even if they’re half that 200,000, it would seem to be more Tamils than anyone might reasonably need—or indeed, even if you did need them, more than you could reasonably expect to acquire. …
The largest Tamil city in Sri Lanka is Jaffna, population 85,000. Is Toronto now the largest Tamil city in the world? And, if so, why? …
The word “immigration,” itself all but verboten in polite society, hardly begins to cover this phenomenon.” …
LA replies:
We see here the phoniness and emptiness of Steyn. He, perhaps the most widely published “conservative” columnist in the world, has NEVER discussed immigration AT ALL, even in the mild passing way that is done by all manner of conservative columnists. But now suddenly wanting to talk about the issue after having been totally silent about it all these years, he complains that no one can talk about it because of the racism charge! What right has he to make this complaint, given that he had ample opportunity to discuss the issue and avoided it like the plague? For example, he wrote innumerable articles about the Muslim threat in the West without once mentioning the fact that it was by Muslim immigration that Muslims had entered the West and were still entering it. You would think from reading Steyn that Muslim had sprung out of the ground.
He writes:
“The obvious question prompted by the size of demonstrations in Ottawa and Toronto is: how did Canada acquire that many Tamils?”
But why should anyone know that? Did Steyn himself ever write a single column informing his readers about Canadian immigration policy? Did Steyn ever come to the side of immigration restrictionists in the U.S. and Canada? He’s deliberately ignored immigration through his entire writing career, and now he’s shocked, shocked, that Canada has lots of Tamils.
Further, are we now to understand that Steyn OBJECTS to the immigration of Tamils? On what basis does he object? On what basis would he have stopped the immigration of Tamils, had he known that so many were immigrating? I sure can’t think of any basis, since he’s never dealt with the immigration issue at all, never discussed the pros and cons of it, never discussed on what basis some immigration may be ok and other immigration harmful, and never asserted a country’s right to determine whom it admits. To the contrary, by his resolute and unnatural silence about Muslim immigration even as he was saying that Islam was going to destroy the West, he sent out the strongest message that immigration—let alone the restriction of immigration—is a verboten topic. So who the hell is he to complain about the inability of people to talk about immigration? He himself led his legions of conservative followers into total silence on the issue.
So, again, on what basis does he now expect the Canadians to start being concerned about Tamil immigration?
I don’t think he expects them to. I think he’s playing with the issue.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s changing. But I won’t believe it until he stops playing the kinds of games he’s playing in this column and gets real.
- end of initial entry -
M. Johansson writes from Sweden:
Steyn reminds me of Anders Isaksson in my own country. He was a very intelligent journalist who saw through the politicly correct propaganda because he was once a standard bearer of the PC crowd himself but defected some 20 years ago. He had a platform, DN, the biggest newspaper in Sweden, and still, he wrote his only article criticizing Sweden’s immigration policy only when he was already terminally ill from cancer.
I would estimate the percentage of Swedes opposed to immigration to be well above 50 percent. But every time you read an article in a major newspaper criticizing the current madness, it’s written by a crank (or a journalist dying from cancer). Still I know, I mean I really know, that 20 years from now everyone will be anti-immigration and those who aren’t will be called extremists of some sort, left, right, green or whatever. And good arguments for increased immigration, if there are any, will be regarded as tantamount to denying the Holocaust. And every editor of every major newspaper will still have their jobs with their new ideological outfit and telling all the rest of us how to think as they always have.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 03, 2009 02:58 PM | Send