Columnist and author Mark Steyn argued that a “large pool of people” who “provide a comfort zone within which this virus incubates” and that Western leaders are going to have to ask themselves “is it really a good idea to admit millions and millions of people to European countries?” on Saturday’s “Fox & Friends” on the Fox News Channel.
Steyn said, “nobody wants to say they were right about this, but I wrote a book almost ten years ago, and people said it was a alarmist. I’ve been listening to you guys all morning, and it’s striking to me, every interview you’ve had, Tucker has said, at one point, well, is it — some variation of is it really a good idea to admit millions and of millions of people to European countries? And people then start to tap dance around that issue, but when you get to it, that’s at the heart of it. That there is a large pool of people who, they don’t want to kill people, they don’t want bomb people, they don’t want to blow people up, but they provide a comfort zone within which this virus incubates. And at some point, if Mr. Hollande, and Mr. Cameron, and all these people talking about our values this morning are serious about that, they will have to do as Tucker did and ask themselves that question, and come up with an answer to it.”
When asked if the president realized “we have different values from the people who did this,” Steyn answered, “No, he doesn’t, and he wants to preserve that myth. If you look at the two big French attacks this year, for example, this attack was on people who just going to concerts, just going to restaurants, just going to soccer games, people find that well, easy to say, well you shouldn’t be blown up if you just go to a restaurant, or you just go to a soccer game. But when you get to the free speech thing, when you get to Charlie Hebdo in January, the majority of Muslims, in France, and in other western European nations, do not accept the concept of free speech. Free speech is not a universal value. It arises from a very narrow, particular tradition on this planet, and when you country becomes ten percent, 15 percent, 20 percent Muslim, there’s less and less of market for a free speech. So, despite what Obama, and Cameron, and Mr. Hollande say, that value of free speech will die, because there will be people who do not share that value.”
Steyn added that the war against terror can’t be fought on an “intelligence basis. I mean, we’ve been talking about whether you can vet people before — as they come in. A lot of these people, for example the Boston Marathon bomber, the guy who did the stabbings in Colorado just last week, they come in, and they’re perfectly normal little kids, and then they get radicalized as they live in Western societies. A quarter million people entered one German state, Bavaria, in September and October, a quarter million people. The German police estimate that it takes 60 people working on just tracking one known person on these watch lists. So, you cannot solve it by intelligence. You have to actually talk about things like a moratorium on Muslim immigration, and waging the battle ideologically. You have to be prepared — you have to, not just talk about our values, as Cameron did. You have to identify what those values are, and be prepared to defend and advance them in the world. Don’t just say that they’re universal. Because the guy in Yemen, and the goat herd, the Pashtun goat herd, and the fellow who thinks that his daughter got raped, so she deserves to die, these people don’t think they’re universal values. And Obama is useless if that’s all that he’s got to say about it.”
He added, “I think it has to be a two prong thing. I mean, this is a domestic battle, as much as an overseas war. In that these are people who nominally are citizens of Western nations, yet feel no allegiance to those nations. I mean, we pretend, we talk about the fellow in Colorado for example. The ABC News headline was a Santa Clara teenager had perpetrated the attacks. So, we present these people as normal residents of Santa Clara, of the United States, of France, Canada, Australia, but they bare, they — in the end, their sense of identity is not French, or Canadian, or Australian, or American. It’s with a pan-national identity, that actually doesn’t think in terms of nation-states. It’s bigger than that. The caliphate isn’t interested in the borders of France, or Belgium, or Germany. it’s actually making the very concept of national identity irrelevant, and replacing it with something bigger.”
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