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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul_philp who wrote (59699)	12/3/2002 3:07:40 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Re: Turkey. What a surprise (not really). Wonder how much they got for their cooperation?

To: paul_philp who wrote (59699)	12/3/2002 3:11:53 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Ian Buruma takes on the British Left's PC reactions to the Miss World riots in Nigeria: Staging the contest in Nigeria might not have been wise, and the journalist may have been courting danger. But some of the reactions in London suggest that the killers may have had a point. There is an odd convergence between fashionable political correctitude and religious bigotry, as though people who have the bad taste to enjoy beauty parades are criminally culpable. Rod Liddle, for example, found it difficult to disagree with the Muslim lynch mob, "from a theoretical point of view", that Miss World represents everything that is horrible about "western culture". Why does the bien-pensant knee always jerk in this predictable way? Why would so many of us be so quick to blame the brutality of non-western bigots on "western culture", or a local journalist who dared to make very mild fun of religious pieties, instead of on the killers themselves? I can think of a few reasons. The contempt for Miss World and those - often, by the way, in the non-western world - who enjoy it, is partly a matter of snobbery. Our condemnation makes us feel morally superior, and shows off our superior taste. Morality and taste are of course connected. What the good bourgeoisie considers to be bad taste is also, on the whole, seen as morally offensive. Hence the deliberate bad taste employed by such iconoclasts as Joe Orton or Lenny Bruce. But the bad taste of Miss World is not deliberate. Perhaps that is what makes it so low rent, so plebeian, so unfit for our dinner tables and thus a convenient target for our disapproval. Besides snobbery, there is a worse reason for being more outraged by western vulgarity than non-western murderousness. It might be called moral obtuseness, or even moral racism. The assumption appears to be that Africans or Asians can't be held to our own elevated standards. They are more like wild animals, whose savagery should not be provoked by our foolishness. When we do provoke them, the consequences are entirely our fault. It would be as misplaced to apply our moral standards to their behaviour, as it would be to expect tigers to talk. The murder of Nigerians or Indian Muslims, or Iraqi Kurds, is par for the course, unless we did it, or Americans, or Israelis. guardian.co.uk I'm glad there is still some sense to be found even in the Guardian. The number of people who have run around looking to place blame anywhere but where it belongs -- on the rioters and those who incited them -- is disgusting, and not small either.