"When Mark Steyn Struck Back"

Steyn Online  "We've received a lot of letters about Barbara Kay's column in The National Post, so I figured we ought at least to link to it. Huffington Poster Nicholas Nazar has a different take, but onealso worth your time.

"At any rate, Mrs Kay was in attendance at last Friday's Munk Debate on the great migrations, and writes up her view of the evening under the terrifying headline "When Mark Steyn Struck Back":" . . .
. . . 

To some audience members (not to me, but for example to my furiously tweeting companion, a young colleague whohappens to bear the same last name as me), Steyn dwelt excessively on the sexual crimes we've all read about in Cologne, Hamburg, Malmö and elsewhere. So it apparently seemed to Arbour and Schama, because they mocked Steyn for it in their rebuttals. Arbour sneered at both Steyn and Farage as "newborn feminists" (she got a laugh), while Schama disgraced himself with "I'm just struck by how obsessed with sex these two guys are, actually. It's a bit sad, really." (That got a very big laugh.) I took one look at Steyn's glowering face after that remark — Schama will regret having said it to his dying day, I know it — and I kind of felt sorry for those two liberals, because I knew what was coming.

Steyn slowly rose...

I think that was the moment those of the audience who did change their minds got it... A civilized culture, which takes centuries of painstaking collaborative work to create, can be easily destroyed, and quickly. This is a reality conservatives understand, but liberals, consumed by guilt for past collective sins, and morally disarmed before the Other, choose to ignore. The Munk debate illuminated this important distinction, and for a change, realism won.

. . . "Yes, yes, it's poor form to review one's own debate performance, so all I'll say is that I think Barbara Kay is not quite right, but Tamara is: It wasn't the moment when the crowd swung to our side, but it was the point at which the cartoon labels fell off and the crowd started listening to us as human beings, and evaluating our arguments on the merits, rather than simply dismissing them because we're "cartoons". Some changed their minds, some didn't. But labeling sneers about pseudo-feminist sex-starved paedo-fantasists no longer cut it." . . .