Swat This

So the Taliban have been given Swat to run? Shocking, isn’t it?

Well, yes, of course it is. But no more so than the Wahhabi statelets established with our full blessing, to say the very least, in Bosnia and in Kosovo, the latter, in particular, setting the unanswerable precedent for what will soon be the predominantly Muslim areas of Britain, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

At least the Pashtun, from whose generality the Taliban are indistinguishable, are the long-standing local population of Swat, unlike the Muslims of Britain, France, the Netherlands, or indeed Kosovo.

And who is to stop the UDIs in British, French or Dutch cities? Who is to say no? The BNP does not represent the Britain that won the Second World War and thereafter built a flourishing social democracy at the heart of the Commonwealth, the Britain that most Britons want, but for which they now have no option of voting. The FN does not represent the France of de Gaulle, whether internationally or domestically; whether internationally or domestically, that is the France that most Frenchmen want, but for which they now have no option of voting.

And Geert Wilders represents, as Pim Fortuyn did, the Netherlands of drugs, vice, and legal sex with 12-year-olds, not the Netherlands of the staunchly Protestant north or the devoutly Catholic south, the real reasons why there is so little teenage pregnancy there and why Dutch teenagers have their first sexual experiences so much later. That latter is the Netherlands that most Dutchmen want, but for which they now have no option of voting.

Nor should the United States lay to her soul any flattering unction of exceptionalism, whether on this or on any other point. The Latinos along her southern extremity will be the first to follow the Kosovo precedent that she herself has set. But they will not be the last. And the muezzin’s call now echoes around Harvard Square.