Just off the top of my head, after less than one coffee — and handicapped by my foolish lapse in not having attending Upper Canada College, like he did:
About those anarchists:
The point of McKinley’s assassin was that he was an anarchist, not a “Catholic” one.
(Dorothy Day was a “Catholic anarchist.” She was profoundly annoying, but no murderer.)
Anarchists were responsible for a number of assassinations, bombings and so on, and eager to take credit for same.
Joseph Conrad captures the era well in The Secret Agent.
That’s why, to this day (I believe) there is a law on the US books against letting “known anarchists” cross the border — UPDATE: ah, here — which I assume is not longer enforced, since The Sex Pistols freely toured that country in 1978.
Certainly, to my knowledge, it never prevented any of my friends from crossing the border, or Toronto from hosting the Unconvention.
And you’ll notice that while there are and always will be a small number of anarchists, their numbers are relatively small today. Why?
Because the government cracked down on them at the time, without apology.
Oddly enough!!
Meanwhile, the Irish:
First off, unlike many Muslim immigrants, they spoke English (of a sort) and may or may not have been “white” depending on how drunk one of them is when they’re raving about that particular topic.
Both made assimilation easier.
However, they WERE troublemakers. That’s why a couple of priests finally took them in hand, told them to stop acting like jerks and created the Irish Catholic culture that got them a President (a dubious achievement in retrospect) and which is only now dying out, having had a fairly strong, long, influential run.
I don’t see a Muslim version of Dagger John on the horizon.
The percentage of Muslims (or whoever) in the population doesn’t matter.
Jews and homosexuals represent a tiny minority, and their influence on society is profound.
(And of course, we’re all instructed to be obsessed instead with “neo-Nazis,” whose percentage of the population is even tinier.)
Next: while Selley asserts repeatedly that the writings of Mark Steyn influenced Lee Harvey Norway, he fails to note the much stronger evidence that the Koran has influenced exponentially more murderers, for much longer.
Finally, I’m obliged to assume that Chris Selley has little personal stake in whether or not women are permitted to have clitorises — or marry freely, or walk about unveiled, since he doesn’t mention these and other outrages, which as we speak are plaguing once liberal, Western democracies.
Oh well, let him dream his dreamy dreams…
How funny is it that the “deep thoughts” of Chris Selley, arguably the least insightful of all the NatPo opiners, are adorned with a photo showing the crush of tens of thousands around the Magic Black Box in Mecca during the annual hajj?
