"Our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable."

I missed this Mark Steyn Opinion Journal editorial when it came out in January, but a friend of mine told me about it over breakfast a couple of days ago. It's certainly not outdated at this point. Here's a taste of it.

Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."

Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.

Posted: Fri - October 27, 2006 at 09:44 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

"Our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable."

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson