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Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight of the West
Roaming from America to Europe to Australia, Lights Out is a trenchant examination of the tensions between a resurgent Islam and a fainthearted west - and of the implications for liberty in the years ahead.
In 2007, the Canadian Islamic Congress brought three suits against Maclean s, Canada s biggest-selling newsweekly, for running an excerpt from Steyn s bestselling book America Alone, plus other flagrantly Islamophobic columns by the author. A year later the CIC had lost all its cases and Steyn had become a poster boy for a worldwide phenomenon - the collision between Islam, on the one hand, and, on the other, western notions of free speech, liberty and pluralism.
In this book, Steyn republishes all the essays the western world's new thought police attempted to criminalize, along with new material responding to his accusers. Covering other crises from the Danish cartoons to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, he also takes a stand against the erosion of free speech, and the advance of a creeping totalitarian "multiculturalism"; and he considers the broader relationship between Islam and the west in a time of unprecedented demographic transformation.
In 2007, the Canadian Islamic Congress brought three suits against Maclean s, Canada s biggest-selling newsweekly, for running an excerpt from Steyn s bestselling book America Alone, plus other flagrantly Islamophobic columns by the author. A year later the CIC had lost all its cases and Steyn had become a poster boy for a worldwide phenomenon - the collision between Islam, on the one hand, and, on the other, western notions of free speech, liberty and pluralism.
In this book, Steyn republishes all the essays the western world's new thought police attempted to criminalize, along with new material responding to his accusers. Covering other crises from the Danish cartoons to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, he also takes a stand against the erosion of free speech, and the advance of a creeping totalitarian "multiculturalism"; and he considers the broader relationship between Islam and the west in a time of unprecedented demographic transformation.
322 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2009
35 people are currently reading
374 people want to read
About the author
Mark Steyn
166 books220 followersMark Steyn is a Canadian author and cultural commentator. He has written numerous books, including the New York Times bestsellers America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Steyn has been published by magazines and newspapers around the world, and is a regular guest host of the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show. He also guest hosts Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, on which he regularly appears as a guest.
Steyn lives and works mainly in Woodsville, New Hampshire. He is married, and has three children.
Steyn lives and works mainly in Woodsville, New Hampshire. He is married, and has three children.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
June 2, 2014
Fascinating, entertaining and important
For those of you who are not aware, Mark Steyn was brought before three courts of Canada's Human Rights Commission for violating the human rights of some Muslim students and the Canadian Islamic Congress. You see, in Canada, your right not to be offended is more important than your right to speak your mind (except in the hypocritical cases Steyn has fun with throughout the book).
What was Steyn's crime? Maclean's magazine printed excerpts from his book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It . This was a bestseller in America and Canada but if he was found guilty the books would be pulled from all Canadian bookstores and Maclean's would have to be minded by politically correct nanny censors. Steyn is continually amazed that "large numbers of Canadians apparently think there's nothing wrong in subjecting the contents of political magazines to the approval of agents of the state." (p. 4)
Steyn details the fight against these three cases. Along the way he generates lots of memorable quotes such as, "I don't want to get off the hook. I want to take the hook and stick it up the collective butt of these thought police." (p. 5)
So, Steyn includes offending comments from the excerpts that brought him to court. He also includes...
Read more at: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2010/...
For those of you who are not aware, Mark Steyn was brought before three courts of Canada's Human Rights Commission for violating the human rights of some Muslim students and the Canadian Islamic Congress. You see, in Canada, your right not to be offended is more important than your right to speak your mind (except in the hypocritical cases Steyn has fun with throughout the book).
What was Steyn's crime? Maclean's magazine printed excerpts from his book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It . This was a bestseller in America and Canada but if he was found guilty the books would be pulled from all Canadian bookstores and Maclean's would have to be minded by politically correct nanny censors. Steyn is continually amazed that "large numbers of Canadians apparently think there's nothing wrong in subjecting the contents of political magazines to the approval of agents of the state." (p. 4)
Steyn details the fight against these three cases. Along the way he generates lots of memorable quotes such as, "I don't want to get off the hook. I want to take the hook and stick it up the collective butt of these thought police." (p. 5)
So, Steyn includes offending comments from the excerpts that brought him to court. He also includes...
Read more at: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2010/...
June 3, 2010
Stein is funny. Hal edited the swear words for me. I liked this. Read America Alone first.
"In the case of an enfeebled west at twilight, the fault is wholly in us. After Sep 11th 2001, many agonized progressives looked at America and its allies’ relations with the Muslim world and argued that we need to ask ourselves: Why do they hate us? As Brian Dunn, a Michigan blogger, put it, a more relevant question is: Why do we hate us? After all, if all our institutions, from grade school to public broadcasting to Hollywood movies to Canadian “human rights” commissars, operate from the basic assumption that western civilization is the font of racism, imperialism, oppression, exploitation and all the other ills of the world, why be surprised that the rest of humanity takes us at our word?"
"In the case of an enfeebled west at twilight, the fault is wholly in us. After Sep 11th 2001, many agonized progressives looked at America and its allies’ relations with the Muslim world and argued that we need to ask ourselves: Why do they hate us? As Brian Dunn, a Michigan blogger, put it, a more relevant question is: Why do we hate us? After all, if all our institutions, from grade school to public broadcasting to Hollywood movies to Canadian “human rights” commissars, operate from the basic assumption that western civilization is the font of racism, imperialism, oppression, exploitation and all the other ills of the world, why be surprised that the rest of humanity takes us at our word?"
June 7, 2013
Steyn is brilliant and funny when discussing a) the barbarity of Islam as a religion and worldview as reflected by the vast majority of its adherents, not just a radical few, and b) the moral cowardice of Europe, North America, and the rest of the civilized world in defending the virtues that made the West far superior to the rest, namely respect for individual rights, free speech, limited government, and separation of church and state power.
Steyn himself was harassed by the Canadian government for his truth-telling to an alarming degree. Very scary.
Steyn himself was harassed by the Canadian government for his truth-telling to an alarming degree. Very scary.
February 9, 2012
Because "Lights Out" is (mainly) a collection of previously published and posted columns, some ideas are repeated enough times to notice. But on the whole, a smart, fun book.
January 4, 2015
Read this book while you still can. It will be one of the first that the soon-to-come US PC Police will pull from the shelves and toss on the pyre. In a world where one can be brought to court for the opinions and thoughts of the invented characters in a work of fiction (seriously, it happened in Canada and the author LOST) this is an important read.
We who still read take freedom of expression for granted. We like to think that western society is a marketplace of ideas where discourse is open and ideas are examined on their merits. But censorship already has a grasp on the throat of freedom. Proof? There are books NOT being published, movies NOT being made, news stories NOT being written, and positions NOT being examined simply because it is not Politically Correct to do so.
Steyn's definition of a nanosecond is telling: a nanosecond is the time interval between an Islamic terror attack and a politician's denouncement that the attack was "not really Islam". In this era of Orwellian Newspeak, a Muslim attacking a Kosher butcher with an ax is "the act of a lunatic, not a Muslim", the flying of planes into skyscrapers is referred to as "anti-Islam activity", and ISIS (the Islamic State in Syria is neither Islamic nor a State, says our President.
The truth is, it is probably too late to stem the tide of PC. The surest way to win an argument is to prevent the opposition from taking part in it.
We who still read take freedom of expression for granted. We like to think that western society is a marketplace of ideas where discourse is open and ideas are examined on their merits. But censorship already has a grasp on the throat of freedom. Proof? There are books NOT being published, movies NOT being made, news stories NOT being written, and positions NOT being examined simply because it is not Politically Correct to do so.
Steyn's definition of a nanosecond is telling: a nanosecond is the time interval between an Islamic terror attack and a politician's denouncement that the attack was "not really Islam". In this era of Orwellian Newspeak, a Muslim attacking a Kosher butcher with an ax is "the act of a lunatic, not a Muslim", the flying of planes into skyscrapers is referred to as "anti-Islam activity", and ISIS (the Islamic State in Syria is neither Islamic nor a State, says our President.
The truth is, it is probably too late to stem the tide of PC. The surest way to win an argument is to prevent the opposition from taking part in it.
January 27, 2015
This is a collection of columns written by Steyn while in his battle with provincial Human Rights Commissions in Canada over Mclean's publication of an excerpt of his book "America Alone." I always enjoy reading or listening to Steyn because of his sense of humor and clever turns of phrases, but this book is a serious cautionary tale on the dangers of government suppression of expression. The powers given to the Human Rights Commissions in the provinces hail back to the Star Chamber and Stationers' Company control of the English press in the 1600s. His accounts from the the midst of the fray provided some provocative current examples for discussion in the introductory unit of my Media Law class. Understanding what happened to the likes of William Prynne and John Lilburne before the Star Chamber seems remarkably relevant when reading about the prosecutions of Steyn and Mclean's in Canada.
March 1, 2014
A collection of essays, mostly originally from the Canadian news magazine "Macleans" and many of which I had seen before, detailing Steyn's well-known struggles with a twisted mutant arm of the Canadian justice systems. Distilled down, it would make a good chapter for Nick Cohen's You Can't Read This Book. I bought it to help Steyn out with his legal costs in his current stoush with Trofim Whats-his-name of Pennsylvania State University.
Best is the essay in defence of the late Oriana Fallaci, which is incandescent with righteous rage and at the same time a surgically-precise evisceration of the idiotic attack made against her.
Best is the essay in defence of the late Oriana Fallaci, which is incandescent with righteous rage and at the same time a surgically-precise evisceration of the idiotic attack made against her.
January 6, 2016
Great book about how Muslims have been given rights that the rest of us don't have. Because of political correctness we are allowing our freedoms to be taken from us. Mark Steyn again sounds the alarm.
October 23, 2024
Targeted by government censors for writing essays in Macleans, Steyn took the offending essays and collected them into a book. That is a noble effort.
The book is also filled with wonderful anecdotes about, not the hearings, which were only in the process of happening, but of normal people during the hearings.
A good bit of what Steyn hammers time and time again is that the censors were not attacking him for misinformation; the truth of the essays was irrelevant to the real crime which was… mostly unstated, but appeared to be saying things the tribunals didn’t want said.
Steyn’s targets aren’t just the Canadian censors, but also defenders-in-name-only; he takes on, for example, “Dinesh D’Souza new book… The Enemy At Home”.
Another thing he targets is the complete lack of either any knowledge of cultural history, or of shame for not knowing it. Why would anyone think it an insult to be compared to the journalist Oriana Fallaci? Or have the brazen ignorance to claim that Fallaci, who literally interviewed central figures such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, doesn’t deal with primary sources?
This section of the book also explains the superficially very strange decision to show photos of Khomeini’s books on the dust jacket. It looks for all the world like an advertisement for other books you’d like to buy. But the guy who’d “insulted” Steyn by comparing him to Fallaci also claimed that Khomeini never had a Blue Book. And because any photos inside the text would necessarily be black and white, they reproduced them on the dust jacket to prove the very blueness of the editions in question.
The censored essays are themselves worth reading, but the essays about the censorship are priceless. It’s also a bit saddening realizing how much worse the censorship has become since 2009.
The book is also filled with wonderful anecdotes about, not the hearings, which were only in the process of happening, but of normal people during the hearings.
On my first day at the hotel, I got into the elevator with two ladies, one of whom looked me over and exclaimed: “You’re that dastardly troublemaker Mark Steyn!” They told me to stick it to the kangaroos and got off a couple of floors ahead of me. Whereupon the Eastern European bellman, intrigued by the conversation, said, “So what brings you to Vancouver, sir?”
I replied, “I’m on trial at the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal for crimes against humanity.”
“Oh,” he said, with a nervous laugh. “You must lead a very interesting life.”
Not lately.
A good bit of what Steyn hammers time and time again is that the censors were not attacking him for misinformation; the truth of the essays was irrelevant to the real crime which was… mostly unstated, but appeared to be saying things the tribunals didn’t want said.
…as the head of CBC News sees it, we’re both just as “extreme”—on the one hand, people who threaten to (and actually do) kill you; and, on the other, people who point out there are fellows who want to kill you. A pox on both their extremist houses.
Steyn’s targets aren’t just the Canadian censors, but also defenders-in-name-only; he takes on, for example, “Dinesh D’Souza new book… The Enemy At Home”.
Why do they hate us? Hey, that’s easy. D’Souza has rounded up a ton of denunciations of the Great Satan’s appetite for “fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest” (to cite Osama bin Laden himself).
…
D’Souza makes a shrewd observation about pornography: Every society has it, but you used to have to pull your hat down and turn your collar up and skulk off to the seedy part of town. Now it’s provided as a service in your hotel room by every major chain. That’s a small sign of a big shift.
Where I part company is in his belief that this will make any difference to the war on terror. In what feels like a slightly dishonest passage, the author devotes considerable space to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual progenitor of what passes for modern Islamist “thought”. “Qutb became fiercely anti-American after living in the United States,” writes D’Souza without once mentioning where or when this occurred: New York in the disco era? San Francisco in the sumer of love? No. It was 1949—the year when America’s lascivious debauched popular culture produced Doris Day, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and South Pacific. And the throbbing pulsating nerve center of this sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, where Sayyid Qutb went to a dance…
In 1949, Greeley, Colorado, was dry. The dance was a church social.
Another thing he targets is the complete lack of either any knowledge of cultural history, or of shame for not knowing it. Why would anyone think it an insult to be compared to the journalist Oriana Fallaci? Or have the brazen ignorance to claim that Fallaci, who literally interviewed central figures such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, doesn’t deal with primary sources?
She [Oriana Fallaci] was by that stage ‘the greatest political interviewer of modern times’ (Rolling Stone), and yet unlike so many of the bland bigshots jetting from foreign ministry to presidential palace she gravitated to power mainly for the opportunities it afforded to knee it in the crotch.
This section of the book also explains the superficially very strange decision to show photos of Khomeini’s books on the dust jacket. It looks for all the world like an advertisement for other books you’d like to buy. But the guy who’d “insulted” Steyn by comparing him to Fallaci also claimed that Khomeini never had a Blue Book. And because any photos inside the text would necessarily be black and white, they reproduced them on the dust jacket to prove the very blueness of the editions in question.
The censored essays are themselves worth reading, but the essays about the censorship are priceless. It’s also a bit saddening realizing how much worse the censorship has become since 2009.
…they’re like lemmings striking over the right to a higher cliff.
December 17, 2022
Hard hitting and true
Mark Steyn's book gives us many examples of his biting wit and in-your-face humour. It really comes into its own during the final chapters which describe his interactions and struggles with the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal.
Steyn pithily dissects what this fake court with unjust powers does, whilst describing the labyrinthine events which led to a show trial worthy of the USSR or East German despots, all in what we considered a civilized Western country. All this because he dared to try to expose the true nature of Islam by examining the actual writings of Ayatollah Khomeini. We know now that these truths are not allowed to be spoken.
These events in Canada in 2008 foretold what would happen in 2022 when Canadian truckers dared to displeased its (now tyrannical) government and ended up being financially ruined, persecuted, threatened with losing their children, having their pets culled and at times finding themselves imprisoned without charge. All this in the name of human rights and supposed protection of health!
Steyn's book poses many interesting questions which are still very relevant and it's written in an enjoyable and easily accessible style.
Mark Steyn's book gives us many examples of his biting wit and in-your-face humour. It really comes into its own during the final chapters which describe his interactions and struggles with the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal.
Steyn pithily dissects what this fake court with unjust powers does, whilst describing the labyrinthine events which led to a show trial worthy of the USSR or East German despots, all in what we considered a civilized Western country. All this because he dared to try to expose the true nature of Islam by examining the actual writings of Ayatollah Khomeini. We know now that these truths are not allowed to be spoken.
These events in Canada in 2008 foretold what would happen in 2022 when Canadian truckers dared to displeased its (now tyrannical) government and ended up being financially ruined, persecuted, threatened with losing their children, having their pets culled and at times finding themselves imprisoned without charge. All this in the name of human rights and supposed protection of health!
Steyn's book poses many interesting questions which are still very relevant and it's written in an enjoyable and easily accessible style.
September 27, 2024
Astounded by his depth and breadth
I bought this book in order to stand in solitary with the prophetic Mark Steyn whose travails continue to the present day exacting enormous costs physically and financially. It's amazing how adroit he is in diving deep into Western self loathing only to surface again with phenomenal wit. As often the case with Steyn, read his words while keeping a dictionary and encyclopedia handy.
I bought this book in order to stand in solitary with the prophetic Mark Steyn whose travails continue to the present day exacting enormous costs physically and financially. It's amazing how adroit he is in diving deep into Western self loathing only to surface again with phenomenal wit. As often the case with Steyn, read his words while keeping a dictionary and encyclopedia handy.
April 23, 2015
Enlightenment in the Endarkenment:
"'Multiculturalism' is a unicultural phenomenon. It exists only as a western fetish, and we don't believe in it, not really. ... Even hardcore multiculturalists want to live in a western society. For one thing, that's the only place you can make a living as a multiculturalist."
Steyn is at his best as an uproarious polemicist mercilessly mocking and relentlessly ridiculing his critics. This volume has all of his virtues (and few,if any, of his liabilities) on what is perhaps the most important subject he writes about.
"'Multiculturalism' is a unicultural phenomenon. It exists only as a western fetish, and we don't believe in it, not really. ... Even hardcore multiculturalists want to live in a western society. For one thing, that's the only place you can make a living as a multiculturalist."
Steyn is at his best as an uproarious polemicist mercilessly mocking and relentlessly ridiculing his critics. This volume has all of his virtues (and few,if any, of his liabilities) on what is perhaps the most important subject he writes about.
December 1, 2015
This book covers the author’s travails with the P. C. police. His description of his attempt to defend his writing against Canada’s “human rights” commission is pretty chilling. He relates facts about the muslim world view and their reactions to events around the world such as the 2006 Danish cartoon incident. Educational, humorous and frightening.
January 12, 2017
I enjoyed the book but I don't like to buy a book and subsequently find out it is a collection of op-eds the author has written over the years. It seems like a lazy way to write a book. The reader should know what he's getting before he buys a book
April 22, 2012
Sign of things to come! Mark Steyn is a genius.
February 17, 2015
Interesting and important subject.
(Not much to say that hasn't been said in other reviews).
(Not much to say that hasn't been said in other reviews).
June 20, 2015
Vintage Mark Steyn, erudition, opinion and humour, always a treat!
February 15, 2016
Slightly repetitive, but a humorous , thought-provoking defense of freedom-of-speech. Was amazed to know of the First Amendment of the US constitution.
January 11, 2022
Vintage Mark Steyn, erudition, opinion and humour, always a treat!
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews