House of Eratosthenes

Excerpts from a lecture delivered by Mark Steyn at Hillsdale College, five months ago. The subject under discussion is the awful, guileful danger involved when, in the name of tolerance, intolerance itself is tolerated:

After the London Tube bombings and the French riots a few years back, commentators lined up behind the idea that Western Muslims are insufficiently assimilated. But in their mastery of legalisms and the language of victimology, they’re superbly assimilated. Since these are the principal means of discourse in multicultural societies, they’ve mastered all they need to know. Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’m facing in Canada. Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading “Behead the Enemies of Islam” and promising another 9/11 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen.

Thus we see that today’s multicultural societies tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, while refusing to tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. It’s been that way for 20 years now, ever since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. A reader in Bradford wrote to me recalling asking a West Yorkshire policeman on the street that day why the various “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to “play it cool.” The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to “Push off” (he expressed the sentiment rather more Anglo-Saxonly, but let that pass) “or I’ll arrest you.” Mr. Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely: “There is only one person around here who is in any danger of dying.”

Sharpened steel, coming into contact with glass, will scratch the glass while the glass will not make any imprint whatsoever upon the steel. Diamond, impressed on the steel, will scratch the steel while the steel will not alter the diamond. It does nothing to slander or derogate in anyway, the glass, the steel, or the diamond to point any of this out. It is a direct consequence of the relative hardness of things.

And the radical Islamic culture is much harder than the pansy phony-tolerance multi-culti politically-correct culture.

The question that remains to be pondered, is whether the western civilizations would have been allowed to keep some of their liberty if some doctrine of equal-enforcement were observed and upheld, with sincerity. This would mean the constables would have received no such instructions to “play it cool,” and the Muslims marching for the head of Salman Rushdie would have been brought before a tribunal to explain themselves. That, or Mark Steyn and his publishers would be just as free as you & me.

I don’t know if equality of enforcement by itself would do the trick — anything goes when intolerance is tolerated. But since our Canadian and European friends are not placing much value on equality of enforcement and the situation is even worse still, it isn’t too tough to predict what happens next. For the tempered steel has been sharpened, as on the business edge of a surgeon’s scalpel, and is now being pressed into…something like room temperature butter.

How concerned should we be?

As your clip notes, it’s not Muslim culture, it’s Leftist culture. The Leftists will use any weapon to get us to “Year Zero”. And if they can smear Religion at the same time, that’s a two-fer.
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 08/25/2008 @ 11:24

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Lights Out on LibertyMonday, August 25th, 2008

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Monday, August 25th, 2008