Mark Steyn interview
Posted by Richard on November 11, 2005
Go read Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Mark Stein at Radioblogger. Stein, as usual, is articulate, intelligent, and thought-provoking. Stein on Jordan:
… Jordan is basically, you know, when people talk about a Palestinian state, Jordan is the Palestinian state, and we wouldn’t have a lot of the problems we have with so-called Palestinian nationalism if when they divided the old League of Nations mandate in 1922, that instead of calling the western bit Palestine, basically, what’s now Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, they’d call the eastern bit Palestine. Instead, they called it trans-Jordan, and the British basically had a spare Hashemite prince they didn’t have a job for, and they put him…they installed him as head of state of this country. But he’s basically a Hashemite king, presiding largely over a Palestinian state. And King Abdullah is certainly one of the more moderate leaders in that part of the world. But even so, even in sixty years since independence, they haven’t developed functioning political parties. …
Stein on Tony Blair’s defeat in Parliament on detentions (ellipses in brackets added):
I have mixed views about this, because in many ways, Tony Blair has been contemptuous of Parliament in his time as prime minister. And so I’m generally speaking in favor of parliamentary independence. And I like it when MP’s assert themselves. […] But having said that, I do think that what’s pathetic about all Western countries, including the United States, including France, including Canada, and a lot of other countries, is that they make these sort of high school sophist arguments about terrorism, as if it’s some sort of theoretical debate. It’s not. We’re dealing with a very difficult situation here. And if you accord to terrorists all the rights of somebody who gets arrested for holding up a liquor store in Des Moines, you are going to lose to the terrorists, because when you accord them the full rights of somebody who is a criminal, you make it impossible to prosecute this as a war, which is what it is.
As they say, read the whole thing.
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