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Dalrymple Decries Our Decadence

You would not have to be an acute psychologist, for example, to descry the insincerity and fear in the expressions of sympathy for Muslim outrage emanating from both British and American governments. It is abject nonsense to say that we understand and even share to some degree the primitive Muslim outrage expressed — belatedly, and […]

You would not have to be an acute psychologist, for example, to descry the insincerity and fear in the expressions of sympathy for Muslim outrage emanating from both British and American governments. It is abject nonsense to say that we understand and even share to some degree the primitive Muslim outrage expressed — belatedly, and often with state encouragement — at the Danish cartoons, in the unctuous Clintonian sense of feeling their pain. Perhaps we understand the outrage in the anthropological sense, as a symptom of injured pride and the thuggishness that injured pride generates. But that is not what Jack Straw, the Neville Chamberlain de nos jours, meant, or rather intended us to think he meant.

We do not, most of us, respect Islam any more than we respect people who speak in tongues. What we respect is the right of Muslims to practise their religion in perfect peace, in so far as it does not conflict with our laws. We also hope that we can find common ground with them in many other aspects of human existence: in business, in the professions, in literature and so forth. Tolerance is not a matter of respecting what is tolerated — if it were, tolerance would hardly be necessary. Tolerance is the willing, conscious suppression of distaste or disdain for other people’s ideas, habits and tastes for the sake of a wider social peace.

As it happens, the Danish cartoons were making a morally serious point, if not very well; which is why, of course, they provoked such outrage. It is a sign of our moral frivolity that we have failed to defend and protect the Danes with the utmost vigour, without equivocation, on a point of the most profound principle.~Theodore Dalrymple, The Spectator (registration required)

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