Mark Steyn - Lutey Tunes

Mark Steyn flays Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post until there's no more flesh on the bones of his pretensions.

At any rate, Capehart is eager to dispel the notion that symphonies are the work of tub-thumping white nationalists like Mozart and Mahler. Get a clue, losers:

Those symphonies Trump says "We write" (ahem) would be real lame without the influence of the Middle East and Muslims. According to Salim al-Hassani, chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization and editor of "1001 Inventions," which chronicles "the enduring legacy of Muslim civilization," told CNN years ago that the lute, musical scales and the ancestor of the violin are all part of that legacy.

So Beethoven's Eroica, Brahms' Fourth, Tchaikovsky's Sixth would be "real lame" without "the influence of the Middle East and Muslims".

So says a senior writer in the establishment newspaper of America's capital. On the basis of what? A lone reference to the umpteenth lavishly-funded straw-clutching special-pleading Islamofest created to explain why the casual observer is entirely wrong to conclude that the Muslim world is culturally moribund and entirely irrelevant to the planet's artistic, scientific and economic progress (with the single solitary exception of oil that they require foreigners to get out of the ground for them). The casual observers who've come away with that unfortunate and ignorant misapprehension include, inter alia, a fellow I quoted in America Alone:

In the words of Dr. Mahathir Mohammed, the former prime minister of Malaysia, one of the least worst Muslim nations in the world, "We produce practically nothing on our own, we can do almost nothing for ourselves, we cannot even manage our wealth."

But pay no attention to Dr Mahathir. What does he know about Islam's achievements compared to a senior columnist at The Washington Post? Sure, they may not have done anything much for a millennium or so, but we all know that everything in your world would be "real lame" without Islam. How stupid is Trump? He doesn't even know that, without Islam, we'd be in a lute-free world!

Who knew? When CAIR was named by the Feds as an unindicted co-conspirator in that terrorism-funding case, it was no doubt because the FBI wiretappers eavesdropped on the planning meeting for the CAIR Symphony Orchestra and misunderstood when the imam said, "Where have you stashed the lute?"

The evidence for this is - to put it politely - wafer-thin. Insofar as the lute has anything to do with Islam at all, it derives from the pre-Islamic east - like the one I saw in the British Museum a couple of years back from Mesopotamia, circa 3,000 BC. Then Mohammed showed up and that was the day the music died: Drove my camel to the wadi, but the wadi was dry.

You would think that after this verbal drubbing  that Capehart would find another job under an assumed name after hiding his true identity, but you would be wrong.