Culture Briefs

Note from UK

“Surely the faces of the people who were killed [in the July 7 London bombings] told their own story — if this is such an unwelcoming, racist place to live, why do all races continue to flock here, as they do to evil, imperialist America? …

“This sort of Islamofascist hates multiculturalism. Just you try building a church in Saudi Arabia! … And as for any idea of the races being equal … it is the Muslim world that keeps slavery alive, and Muslim governments, as in Sudan, that see nothing whatsoever wrong with ethnic cleansing. Recently a Muslim columnist wrote sorrowfully of how in her culture a Muslim girl marrying a black man was the greatest shame that could fall upon a family. So much for equality under Islam. …

“To my eyes at least, ‘live and let live’ seems to be a concept they have a problem with; until they can grasp it … the jury is still out on whether hardline Muslims can truly live happily in non-Muslim countries. …

“Or will they not be happy until every last country in the world is composed of veiled women, bearded men and dead infidels, of all creeds and colours?”

—Julie Burchill, writing on “Why should we tolerate these Islamofascists who hate us all?” July 16 in the Times of London

PC faith

“It’s not that political correctness has gone away; it’s that it has become such a fixture of university life that one hardly notices it any longer. People have grown acclimated to it. It seems normal to them that certain opinions are not allowed to be expressed, and that if they are, the offender is shunned from respectable society until he has shown adequate contrition. When some poor soul is so unfortunate as to transgress the boundaries of allowable opinion, the ceremony of expiation he inevitably undergoes — consisting of apologies, followed by various forms of ‘outreach’ to the offended groups — is so eerily similar from one person to the next it’s as if they’re all reading from the same liturgical book.

“It’s not a coincidence that religious language — contrition, expiation, liturgical — seems necessary in order to describe this phenomenon. …

“I don’t want to go to a foolish extreme and say that a decent education in at least some disciplines is completely impossible in the present environment, bad though it is. I learned a lot in college and graduate school and had the opportunity to study with some truly extraordinary scholars.

“Still, the fact remains that an educated person in our day has to be in large measure an autodidact.”

—Historian Thomas E. Woods Jr., interviewed by Bernard Chapin, at www.lewrockwell.com

Tough ‘24’

“[The Fox series ‘24’], which just completed its fourth season, is known for its innovative structure, its suspense, and its plot twists. … More striking than its innovations, through, is the show’s political and moral toughness. … As one character puts it, ‘This is a dirty business, and we’re going to have to get our hands dirty if we want to fix it.’

“At least as concerns America’s role in the world, this is not a message the left is comfortable with. But then, the left can’t be terribly enamored of a program in which the Secretary of Defense ends an altercation with his left-wing son by snarling, ‘Spare me your sixth-grade Michael Moore logic!’ …

Story Continues →