Columnist's Book Excerpt Didn't Include 'White Cities' Phrase

By: E&P Staff Syndicated columnist Mark Steyn did not use some words attributed to him in a Washington Times article about a complaint filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC).

The CIC, in filing the complaint against Maclean's magazine, asked for the right to rebut excerpts the newsweekly published from Steyn's "America Alone" book. The excerpts said, among other things, that high Muslim birthrates could be a contributing factor to a security threat against the Western world.

One paragraph in the Dec. 31 Times story read, in part: "Mr. Steyn, in the excerpts used by Maclean's, compared Muslims to Indians in the Old West infiltrating 'the white cities'...." E&P quoted from that paragraph in a Dec. 31 story summarizing the Times article.

But Steyn wrote E&P to say: "The use of quotation marks around the phrase 'the white cities' implies that they are my words from my article. In fact, if you go to the Maclean's piece you will find no such phrase."

Steyn included a link to the 2006 Maclean's article, and "the white cities" are not Steyn's words from that piece. His actual words were: "(I)n the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland's radical imams settle the metropolis."