Steyn reveals several misapprehensions regarding Islam. He attributes the faithful's carrying out Jihad against the Infidel to the Infidel's defending himself against Jihad; he refers to Islam's "intellectual rubble," "global ideology," and "Islamism" rather than call it what it is--the fulfillment of Allah's commands to fight to make the world Islam; and he implies that a diversification of industry will in some way change the source and sustenance of Islam's war against humanity: the command of Allah and the example of his false prophet.
Read Port decision won't put U.S. in a safe harbor and weep:
"So saying 'Get lost, Dubai' isn't a new steeliness so much as a retreat into an unsustainable bunker mentality more sentimental than Bush's liberty promotion. My National Review comrade John Derbyshire has been promoting the slogan 'Rubble Doesn't Cause Trouble.' Cute, and I wish him well with the T-shirt sales. But, in arguing for a 'realist' foreign policy of long-range bombing, he overlooks the very obvious point that rubble causes quite a lot of trouble: The rubble of Bosnia is directly responsible for radicalizing a generation of European Muslims, including Daniel Pearl's executioner; the rubble of Afghanistan became an international terrorist training camp, whose alumni include the shoebomber Richard Reid, the millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam, and the 9/11 plotters; the rubble of Grozny turned Chechen nationalists into pan-Islamist jihadi.
Those correspondents of mine who send me e-mails headed 'Nuke Mecca!' might like to consider the broader strategic impact on a billion Muslims from Indonesia to Yorkshire, for whom any fallout will be psychological rather than carcinogenic. Rubble is an insufficient solution, unless you're also going to attend to the Muslim world's real problem: its intellectual rubble.
Arab Muslims fought in Afghanistan, British Muslims took up arms in Bosnia, Pakistani Muslims have been killed in Chechnya. When you're up against a globalized ideology, you need to globalize your own, not hunker down in Fortress America. Right now the Arab world's principal exports are oil and Islamism. Ports management is a rare diversification and long overdue."