More Than 20 Years Ago...

Mark Steyn in The Irish Times, 25 July 2005:

...[O]ne notices a subtle evolution in multicultural pieties since the Islamists came along. It was most explicitly addressed by the eminent British lawyer Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, QC, who thought 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."

And 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 appears to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room.

       (Link to full article is here)

Our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance...

Seems to be a lot of that mind virus going around these days. But maybe what the Normals need is more intolerance.