SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
 Public ReplyPrvt ReplyMark as Last ReadFilePrevious 10Next 10PreviousNext  
To: LindyBill who wrote (54086)10/23/2002 2:32:17 AM
From: Nadine Carroll  Read Replies (1) of 281500
 
Nice quote from John O'Sullivan:

To the Western mind, it is a matter of polite indifference if somebody else holds a heretical religious belief. Indeed, a willingness to tolerate different and competing religions within the same polity is the very foundation of the West's liberal tradition. To the medieval minds of the Osama Gang, however, heresy is itself a serious affront — and open heresy in an Islamic country is regarded by them as an intolerable affront, one punishable in Bali and elsewhere by death. If this sounds a harsh verdict even on radical Islamism, remember that a death penalty was imposed on Salman Rushdie for writing a heretical novel by a radical Islamist Ayatollah and that a sizeable minority of Moslems accepted the reasonableness of this.

Western left-wingers find it difficult, indeed impossible, to grasp the fundamental nature of this hostility to the West's cultural and religious tolerance even when radical Islamism obligingly expresses it the clearest terms. Their own unacknowledged hostility to the West — their post-colonial guilt and multicultural masochism — simply gets in the way. They instinctively side with the Third World in any dispute between it and the West even when the West is plainly taking the more progressive position. For all their multiculturalism, they cannot really believe that people shaped by a different culture really hold different attitudes on everything from God to women's rights. They persist against all the evidence in seeing them as Western progressives in fancy dress. And they accordingly seek an explanation for Bali in the conduct of Western policy rather than in the beliefs of the bombers.

nationalreview.com
Report TOU ViolationShare This Post
 Public ReplyPrvt ReplyMark as Last ReadFilePrevious 10Next 10PreviousNext  

HomeMailHotSubjectMarksPeopleMarksKeepersSettings
Terms Of UseContact UsCopyright/IP PolicyPrivacy PolicyAbout UsFAQAdvertise on SI
© 2025 Knight Sac Media.  Data provided by Twelve Data, Alpha Vantage, and CityFALCON News