Abu Wabu

Austin Bay, Glenn Reynolds and Mark Steyn discuss the Pope's strategy for drawing civility out of Islam.

Dialogue is crucial to facing the Islamofascist threat; not with the ghouls who demand I choose between submission and death (to whom my answer is, as Eric Cartman would say, fuck you guys), but amongst non-Muslims, some of whose denial of this threat evolves from their world view, which places value on personal self-esteem whilst deriding the self-esteem of the society they live in. Their world view prevents them from recognizing the value of their own society; they've already decided it has none. This makes it easier to ignore that said society is under threat.

Which means things can stay the same.

For now.

Right?

Steyn:

I don’t get too excited about the really crazy, left-wing kooks, who are explicitly and obviously full of vile loathing for Bush and America and all the rest of it. They’re not the problem. The problem, I think, is this far more slippery and sly{?} belief that you can have a kind of entirely enervated, culturally relativist world, in which you never ever have to stand up for what you believe. And it starts very early on. It starts in kindergarten, really, these days. But the whole way, … our whole way of forming the world view of tomorrow citizens is by raising them in this rather, kind of fluffy, nonjudgmental cocoon. You know, I find it to be very interesting in American schools over pre young children in grade school, they go on and on about self-esteem. You know, every individual has to have to self-esteem. Self-esteem is very important. I went to an English boys’ school where the object was on the first day of term to have every last ounce of self-esteem hammered out of you by the end of the first week, so it’s an entirely different system for me.

For my kids, they’re told all the time, self-esteem, self-esteem is critically important. But what about societal self-esteem? You know, what about saying that the society you live in, the inheritance of that society is actually important and worth valuing, too. And I think we don’t do a very good job of that, and I think it poses a great question mark in the end of the long term future of that.

Read it.