A failed state, on a world-wide scale (I)

America, be prepared! Here comes a woman that doesn't even know how to spell compromise ... and cares even less. Not if it means selling out to blood-thirsty Islamists, their immature appeasers or multi-culti advocates. While Ayaan Hirsi Ali's latest book, an auto-biography titled "Infidel" hits the shelves and the mainstream media start sharpening their pencils, on the other side of the pond, polemics in Europe's salons of 'high culture', are still raging. The previous two posts dealt with just one of the contributors to that debate, Professor Paul Cliteur who defends Hirsi Ali's position and counters by attacking the 'preposterous consequences' that the post-modernist solution to avoid a major clash, would have.

Another proponent of Ayaan's tenets is the French writer Pascal Bruckner. In an article dated 24th January he is defending her against the attacks and condemnations of the multicultural apostles, Ian Buruma who is "embarrassed" by her attacks on the Koran and denies her the right to quote Voltaire, and Timothy Garten Ash who doesn't stop at old-fashioned machismo and talks the little woman down, accusing her of being "irresponsible" as well as being "counterproductive".

Indeed, the latter prefers appeasement and poshly advocates a state of semi-autonomy for the natives. Bruckner accuses them both of "chaining people to their roots"; in fact committing a latter day version of racism, Apartheid even and of promoting a contemporary version of colonialism: a very insightful perspective indeed.

To put it succinctly, Bruckner writes, and I have to agree with him wholeheartedly on this one: "There's no denying that the enemies of freedom come from free societies, from a slice of the enlightened elite who deny the benefits of democratic rights to the rest of humanity ...".
I don't propose to take you very far into the polemics. Anyone interested can read the articles for themselves. I do want to draw attention to a few new perspectives on the discourse, as well as comment on those points that have become so fashionable over the last few years that we hardly notice their eccentricity anymore, a sign of just how pervasive and dangerous these social experiments are. In the meantime they have reached the status in the European Union, of all but the officially prescribed policy for all member states.

Unlike above critics Ayaan indeed "never transgresses the domain of reason". This is in which she differs, and what infuriates the loyal defenders of Islam so much! No matter how many insults and threats are being thrown at her, she always remains outwardly calm and refuses to be pushed off course, pairing arguments and trains of logic with good, solid rationality. She does so with unusual modesty, ever allowing her opponents their say - not that that is always done in the best of tastes.

Just how "vulnerable" Islam is, I will not comment on. As we have seen at Dr Pat's, as long as people can "pretend that the objects of their hate are the real cause of any problem, they don't have to deal with the external reality (of the Islamo-Nazist terror), or face the truth about their own unacknowledged and pathological internal reality." But sometimes you have to admire the capacity of turning the tables.

The values of the Enlightenment - or, for that matter any other idea or faith that prides itself on representing objective truth - are irrelevant to the knights of multi-culturalism: which is why they see no problem in telling anyone to shut up (as today, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard)! And since at the core of their sophistry lurks an oxymoron, logic and rationality are seen as irrelevant: that is why they can deride religion and denounce the "evils of the Enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism" without offering a viable alternative, except what basically amounts to a world in which anarchy and tribal warfare with the neighbours will be the norm: welcome to the multi-culti world of Hobbes of Balkan and Somali infamy: a failed state on a world-wide scale.

In passing Bruckner provides us with an informative piece of background into the origins of multi-culturalism [1]. But regretfully he follows in the post-modern tradition of master deconstructionist Derrida in explaining the world through linguistics, clarifying the distance taken from 'the natives' by etymologically breaking down the word respect. This method is deserving to be confined to eternity once and for all, as it bears all the hallmarks of reading tea leaves: it defies logic!

To be continued.