ATTITUDE DANCING
Saturday 31 December 2005 @ 12:03 am

ATTITUDE DANCING
STEYNONLINE, December 28th 2005

Many of the most heartwarming tales of the season come out of Austria. One thinks of Oberndorf and the little parish church where the organ broke down on Christmas Eve 1818 and so Father Mohr and his organist Franz Gruber wrote a simple song that could be sung with only the accompaniment of a guitar: “Silent Night”. One thinks of the von Trapp family saying so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu to yieu and yieu and yieu and scramming Nazi Salzburg for a new life in Vermont.

And now we have a third inspirational story from little Austria. One day, a few years after the Trapps skedaddled out of there, a young man was born near Graz. His name was Arnold and he worked out every day and he went to America and became Governor of California and one morning he had to make a decision on whether or not to commute the death sentence of a multiple murderer called Tookie Williams. And he decided instead to let Tookie’s execution go ahead.

And back in his old stomping grounds of Graz the politicians went bananas. In the old days, when some local lad made good and became Fuhrer of another state and started killing people, the hometown crowd couldn’t wait to have a big ol’ Anschluss with him. But times change and contemplating Arnold’s reign of terror his fellow Grazis decided they wanted to disAnschluss themselves from him. Outraged by Tookie’s demise, Social Democratic and Green councilors and MPs immediately took action. Or what passes for “action” in European politics these days.

They demanded that Arnold’s name be removed from the Arnold Schwarzenegger football stadium. They proposed that it should be renamed the Tookie Williams football stadium. They launched moves to strip Arnold of his Austrian citizenship on the grounds that the death penalty is illegal in Europe, which is why a barbaric nation like the United States is ineligible for membership of the EU. (“What a tragedy,” as Americans always say when you point this out to them.)

“People have had enough of him,” Peter Pilz, an MP in the Steiermark regional parliament, told The Guardian. “For us, he has committed a state crime.”

Personally I have no feelings one way or another on the death penalty. But I’m strongly in favour of sovereign jurisdictions having the right to run their own criminal justice systems. Which is why I rejoice at Arnold’s reaction to the “threat” from Graz. Writing to the Mayor of his old town, Schwarzenegger noted that in the course of his gubernatorial term he’d have to make decisions on other death-row inmates, too – the next one comes up in January. So, wrote the Governor, “In order to spare the responsible politicians of the city of Graz further concern, I withdraw from them as of this day the right to use my name in association with the Liebenauer Stadium… I expect the lettering to be removed by the end of 2005” – and, given that most European municipal workers are on vacation till the second week of January, that means the Mayor may have had to sub-contract the job to any obliging Albanian Muslim refugees he could round up.

“The use of my name to advertise or promote the city of Graz in any way is no longer allowed,” continued Arnold. “Graz will not have any problems in the future with my decisions as governor of California, because officially nothing connects us any more.” And just for good measure he returned the “Ring of Honour” he was given in 1999 for the “pride and recognition” he brought Graz.

That would seem to suit everybody. Graz will be free to rename its stadium after Tookie Williams on New Year’s Day and the “state criminal” Schwarzenegger no longer has to live in dread of being formally stripped of his “Ring of Honour” in a humiliating resolution of the Graz council.

But mysteriously the Governor’s severing of ties with his home town seemed to distress them. The Mayor, Siegfried Nagl, begged Arnold to reconsider, only to be told that the ring was already in the mail. It seems that, aside from Kurt Waldheim, there haven’t been a lot of internationally marketable Austrians in recent years, and somehow the campaign to rename it the Tookie Williams football stadium has lost its momentum. The former Crip gang leader would certainly look very fetching on a souvenir dirndl or baggy gangsta-style lederhosen, and no doubt you could have a range of commemorative dishes on the cafeteria menu – say, a 7-Eleven schnitzel, to mark Tookie’s murder of 26-year old store clerk Albert Lewis Owens, followed by a Brookhaven strudel, to honour the motel at which he murdered an elderly Taiwanese family for a hundred bucks, all washed down with a Muthaf–ka apfelsaft, named for the term he used to threaten the jurors who convicted him. Should do wonders for the Austrian tourism industry.

Schwarzenegger is no conservative and has been a disappointing governor. But his letter is magnificent, and the pleasure it affords only heightened by the hilarious Guardian headline to its report on the “controversy”: “Schwarzenegger Faces ‘Tookie’ Backlash In Austria.” No, he doesn’t. With one typewritten sheet, he’s ended the whole damn backlash, and usefully offered a good basic template for US-EU relations that recognizes the basic differences between the two: Americans have responsibilities, Europeans have attitudes. Indeed, the EU has attitudes in inverse proportion to its ability to act on them. It’s able to strut and preen on the world stage secure in the knowledge that nobody expects it to do anything about anything. If entire nations want to embrace self-congratulatory holier-than-thou gesture politics as a way of life, why not give them a hand? The politicians of Graz want Tookie to be a domestic political issue? Now he is, if only for the tourist industry.

So, like the von Trapps, Arnold is singing as he goes:

Green Party poseurs
And posturing mayors
Renaming stadia
For multiple slayers
Dull civic honours of cheap cheesy rings
These are a few of my least fav’rite things…

Arnold to Graz: Don’t ring me, I’ll ring you.
STEYNONLINE, December 28th 2005

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MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE REAL WORLD…
Tuesday 13 December 2005 @ 10:54 am

Steyn Online

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE REAL WORLD…

Suppose a guy yells “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, and the audience hisses back, “Shh! We’re in the middle of a play about how Bush engaged in a massive conspiracy to use a small chimney fire as a pretext for burning down some other theatre three years ago.”

That’s pretty much what happened the other week. The President of Iran announced that Israel “must be wiped off the map” – and the entire capital city of the world’s hyperpower hissed back, “Shh! Patrick Fitzgerald’s about to indict Scooter Libby!” Insofar as I understand the left’s three-year investment in Joseph C Wilson IV, it’s that the selfless patriot exposed the Bush Administration’s rationale for the war – Saddam’s WMD – as a lie cooked up by a cabal of sinister neocon warmongers (Clinton, Gore, Kerry, etc). Just for the record, WMD was never my rationale. As I’ve said on many occasions, when it comes to toppling dictators, there’s no such thing as an “illegitimate” rationale. In his obstruction of UN weapons inspectors, Saddam certainly acted as if he had WMD and, in his “trade” missions to Niger (principal exports: uranium, goats, cowpeas and onions), as if he were eager to acquire more. There’s something to be said for taking a chap at his word.

Anyway, we now have a chance to go through the whole rigmarole with another four-letter Middle Eastern Muslim country beginning with the letters “Ira-”. Same great runaround, new closing vowel. President Ahmadinejad made his wiping-off-the-map remarks as part of a speech called “A World Without Zionism”, so it seems unlikely this was one of those subtle nuances lost in translation. Furthermore, in the final round of last June’s presidential election, both candidates were eager to annihilate the Zionist Entity – Mr Ahmadinejad’s opponent, Hashemi Rafsanjani, having declared that Israel is “the most hideous occurrence in history” which the Muslim world “will vomit out from its midst” with “a single atomic bomb”. So wiping Israel off the map would appear to be one of those rare points of bipartisan consensus, as unexceptional as coming out in favor of motherhood and apple pie.

And indeed President Ahmadinejad, speaking a couple of days later at a “Death to Israel” rally, couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Nor could his rival, Mr Rafsanjani, who pointed out, “Even in Europe, the majority of the population is strongly critical of Israel, but they are afraid to express their views.” Judging from the BBC’s website, only the first half of that sentence is true. Here’s what the Beeb’s viewers and listeners had to say:

“Is this story true? The current American regime is expert at creating faked excuses for military and political action. The WMD scam in Iraq for example.”

“I’m not sure it’s any worse than what Bush said about Iraq, and at least Ahmedinejad is using only words, not bombs.”

“According to BBC, this type of comment is commonly made by Iranian politicians. If so, we need to understand this in context.”

“Iran’s Prime minister said ‘Israel should be wiped off the map’. How do we know that he wasn’t referring to a peaceful arrangement for Israel to give land back to Palestine rather than a violent threat?”

How indeed? Well, maybe one way to find out is to look at the rest of the speech: “We are in the process of a historical war between the World of Arrogance [the west] and the Islamic world… Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism? You had best know that this slogan and this goal is attainable, and surely can be achieved.”

So this isn’t just the usual itsy-bitsy wipe-Israel-off-the-face-of-the-earth boilerplate that Nasser was doing 40 years ago. The Europeans may be indifferent to the incineration of the Zionists but they surely can’t be as relaxed about meeting the same fate themselves. The President’s chief strategist, Hassan Abbassi, has come up with a war plan based on the premise that “Britain is the mother of all evils” – the evils being America, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, the Gulf states and even Canada, all of whom are the malign progeny of the British Empire. “We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization,” says Mr Abbassi. “There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them… Once we have defeated the Anglo-Saxons the rest will run for cover.”

Iran isn’t an impoverished joke-state basket-case like Sierra Leone. It’s a major regional power. What should we do? Take them at their word? Or apply the Democrat-media-CIA test and wait till we’ve got absolute definitive 100% proof that they’ve got WMD – the absolute definitive 100% proof being a smoking crater where Tel Aviv used to be, or maybe London. The contrast between the Iranian President’s speeches and the worthless piffle of a Beltway non-scandal is very telling – or would be if the parochial US media had any interest in covering it.

How can even the dreariest press in the English speaking-world maintain their interest in the third year of Joe Wilson’s 15 minutes? What a pitiful spectacle. If they’ve a sense of humor, the Iranians will time the mushroom cloud for the first day of the Bush-Cheney impeachment trial.

National Review, November 11th 2005

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