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 The
Altar Of “Sensitivity To Diversity”
Liberal double standard alive and well on college campuses...
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 3/15/06
Hats
off to the UC Riverside College Republicans. They recently
hosted
a program that contrasted the sort of vile anti-Semitic slander
that saturates the
Muslim media, with the cartoons of Mohammed that sparked riots throughout
with Muslim world. Of course
this exercise in Constitutionally protected free speech was noisily protested
by the campus Muslim group, the same people who when they’re not
squealing about “hate speech” are hosting speakers like Amir
Abdel Malik Ali, who recycles the standard catalogue of anti-Semitic lunacy
repackaged as “pro-Palestinianism” and “anti-Zionism.”
You know how
that slight-of-hand works: instead of decrying the sinister Jewish
control of the media, just substitute “Zionist.” Rather
than complain about Jewish control of U.S. foreign policy, mutter
darkly about “neocons.” You don’t have to advocate
the destruction of Jews: just champion a “one-state” final
solution and rationalize Arab murder of Jews as “resistance” to
imperialist stooges. In the end, though, the goal is the same:
the elimination of Israel and the reduction of Israelis to a
beaten-down minority that will eventually disappear and leave
the region what Hitler tried to leave Germany––Judenrein,
free of Jews.
Hate speech indeed.
But don’t expect college administrators
to do anything about it. Their loudly asserted devotion to free
speech and “diversity” ends at the borders of political
correctness, the boundaries set by the left-wing faculty and
students who know how to intimidate bureaucratic functionaries
with guilt and threats of demonstrations. Nothing more terrifies
a university administrator on the make than a mob of protestors “of
color” accusing him of “insensitivity” and
a questionable commitment to “diversity,” all in
front of the evening news cameras summoned in advance. Just look
at what happened to Harvard’s Larry Summers, a presumably
tough veteran of D.C. politics who was run whimpering out of
Cambridge on a rail for unexceptional remarks deemed “sexist” by
the faculty feminist Brown Shirts. Even several groveling apologies
and $50 million in guilt-money couldn’t save Larry.
Given the craven careerism
of the typical college provost, dean, and president, then,
and given the left-wing prejudices or lazy
indifference of most of the faculty, it’s up to students
to make their university live up to its role as protected space
for what Matthew Arnold called “the free play of the mind
on all subjects.” This doesn’t mean that university
officials should censor or limit any speech, but rather that
they should encourage and insure through their control of facilities
and funds that speech is balanced, that as many points of view
as possible are available, and that no point of view is allowed
to be intimidated or in turn to silence others.
This balance is what
the Riverside College Republicans were trying to provide by
offering a larger context for the cartoon
controversy and pointing out the hypocritical double standard
that many Muslims in the West take for granted. For here is an
important lesson in political philosophy: if you are going to
enjoy the right to free expression and expect that right to be
protected, as the Muslim students do, then you must acknowledge
and respect someone else’s right to do the same. You cannot
carve out an exception and call it “hate speech,” a
dishonest term created by the diversity commissars to criminalize
and stigmatize whatever speech they find politically or ideologically
distasteful. And you cannot be allowed to intimidate those others
who are exercising their own free-speech rights.
Many Muslims living
in the West, however, have blatantly asserted their right to
this double standard, and many Westerners have
docilely accepted this challenge to the integrity of a fundamental
political good. After the cartoon scandal, many politicians in
Europe and the United States countenanced a Muslim exception
to free-speech rights, dressing this cowardice up in “sensitivity” or “respect”––a
transparent hypocrisy given the lack of respect for and sensitivity
to Christian or Jewish belief that can be found on most college
campuses, in the mainstream media, and in popular culture.
Yet this hypocrisy
is not the handiwork of Muslims, who have simply mastered the
tools long used by the identity politics
hacks to silence speech they deem unacceptable. We had an example
of this technique not long ago on my campus of the California
State University. A firebrand evangelical preacher, who used
the “free-speech area” (itself an illegal restriction
of free speech, by the way) to hector students about the immorality
of homosexuality, was run off campus by a flashy protest organized
by the women’s studies department. No one seemed bothered
by the irony of one group using its right to free speech to make
sure someone else stopped using his.
This double standard
has become standard operating procedure on college campuses,
where unpopular speakers, if they manage
to get invited in the first place, will be shouted down and protested
while university officials sit on their hands and praise the “dialogue.” Having
raised “sensitivity to diversity” and “tolerance
of the other” into a fetish, the university is incapable
of acting in defense of its own beliefs.
The willingness of
our colleges to sacrifice their defining ideals of free speech
on the altar of “sensitivity to diversity,” however,
has ramifications beyond the campus culture wars. To our jihadist
enemies, these desperate assertions of “tolerance” and “respect” and “sensitivity” in
the face of jihadist aggressive intolerance are seen as nothing
more than the cowering fear of the dhimmi, the conquered infidel
whose behavior must daily acknowledge his inferiority. So even
as we preach the value of freedom, in our own countries we shrink
from actions that prove our commitment. We refuse to insist that
Muslim immigrants who choose to live in the West, who accept
social welfare payments, and who enjoy the benefits and freedom
of our way of life embrace and respect the values that make all
those goods possible in the first place.
To a true believer
willing to kill innocents for his belief, this fear is testimony
to the fatal weakness of our beliefs and
the divinely sanctioned superiority of his own. We may be richer,
more technologically advanced, and militarily more powerful,
but these material advantages mean nothing in the long run when
a people no longer will fight for the values that have created
these goods. It’s only a matter of time. -one-
copyright
2006 Bruce S. Thornton
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