Our Culture

Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple

QN: I often wonder how 'feminists' can be so vocal on many issues and so quiet on treatment of women in the Middle East. Oppose the war in Iraq, yet dismiss the treatment of individuals in a cruel dictatorship. Issues are complex and cannot be effectively distilled into a 60 second explaination. That's why I think that television has a negative effect on intellegence.

Dalrymple provides some insight in his book Our Culture or What's Left of it. An excerpt from an interview in Frontpage (2005) is below with a link to the article.




Frontpage: You discuss the horrifying suffering that women endure under the vicious and sadistic structures of Islam's gender apartheid. You touch on the eerie silence of Western leftist feminists on this issue, noting "Where two pieties -- feminism and multi-culturalism -- come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence."


To be sure, the Left has long posed as a great champion of women's rights, gay rights, minorti rights, democratic rights etc. Yet today, it has reached out in solidarity with the most fascistic women-hating, gay-hating, minority-hating and democracy hating force on the face of the earth -- Islamism.


What gives? It's really nothing new though is it? (i.e. the Left's political pilgrimages to communist gulags etc.)


Dalrymple I think the problem here is one of a desired self-image. Tolerance is the greatest moral virtue and broadmindedness the greatest intellectual one. Moreover, no decent person can be other than a feminist. People therefore want to be both multiculturalist and feminist. But multiculturalism and feminism obviously clash; therefore, you avoid the necessity to give up one or the other merely by disregarding the phenomena. How you feel about yourself is more important to you than the state of the world.


Read the rest of the interview here:

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=D2C70DCE-BF86-4761-9788-03AB7FAB2608