Cultural Relativism and Double Standards

Imagine that large numbers of white Christian men were deliberately seeking out Muslim teenage girls for gang rape. Imagine that the numbers of girls victimized by these degenerates approached fifty. What do you suppose the reaction might be?

Surely Muslims around the world would use these crimes as an excuse to murder any Christian they could find. Here at home liberals would be shedding their opposition to capital punishment as fast as if it were a jacket set afire and demanding that the perpetrators be hung from the nearest tree. The media would be pointing to these crimes as just another confirmation of the inherent racism and sexism of the evil white male and of the moral poverty of Christianity.

But imagine that the roles in the story were reversed. What would be the reaction? Well, in England it was about what you might expect. Nicholas Farrell at Taki's Magazine fills us in:

We are endlessly told that white people are racist and that white men are sexist. But in my experience people of a different color are much more racist and men of a different color much more sexist. It is just that we do not hear about this racism because no one is allowed to speak about it for fear of being branded...a racist.

Now from Britain comes the latest horrific example of nonwhite racism and sexism. And try as they might, the British media were unable this time to avoid telling us at least part of the truth.

Here it is: Nine British Muslims, eight of Pakistani and one of Afghani origin, gang-raped dozens of underage white girls in the northern England town of Rochdale between 2008 and 2010. One of the nine just happens to be a father of five and a religious-studies teacher in his local mosque.

There were 47 known victims, mostly aged 12-16 and living in local government children’s homes. But there were probably many more victims and many more rapists. Last Tuesday in Liverpool those nine men were convicted and sentenced to a total of 77 years in prison. In separate recent trials, 56 men (50 of them Muslims) were convicted of similar crimes in other northern England towns.

In the coverage of this latest child-rape-industry trial, the British media avoided the fact that racism motivated the nine and that they are all Muslims. The police and social workers failed to investigate for the same reason. The nine are usually referred to as “Asian” or “Pakistani” and not “Muslim.” But at the root of their racism is their religion. Asian or Pakistani Christians or Hindus, for example, treat women of whatever age and color differently.

Farrell goes on to say that the liberal British media insist that every cultural group has its sociopaths and that we shouldn't make too much of the ethnicity and religion of the perpetrators, but Farrell's not buying it. These men would not have dreamed of assaulting Muslim girls like this, which suggests that the victims were selected on the basis of a religious bias, nor would white Christians be given a similar pass were they found to have behaved in such an abominable fashion.

It's a simple fact that no racial or religious group is held to the same standard as liberals hold whites, particularly white Christians. Why this should be the case is an interesting question. Is it that liberals deep down simply don't believe that other groups can realistically be expected to measure up to the high behavioral standard set by Western Christians? If so, isn't that more than a little chauvinistic, even bigoted, of our liberal friends? It certainly seems so.

The Stupidity of Political Correctness

A week ago I commented on the case of Naomi Schaeffer Riley who was fired from her position as blog writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education because she offended a number of readers in the academy by stating the obvious, i.e. that much of black studies scholarship isn't scholarship at all.

Riley has leveled similar criticisms at other academic fields as well, but that didn't matter. You can say what you want about other disciplines, but if you say anything critical about black studies it's a thought crime - ipso facto proof of racism. Any criticism of the quality of any scholarship associated with any approved minority, whether racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation, is heresy and must be expunged lest thoughtful people be impressed by the truth of it.

So I thought it amusing the other night watching a talk show on which Riley appeared as a guest describing her encounter with liberals who no doubt perceive themselves as deeply committed to tolerance and the diversity of speech and ideas. It was amusing because the host of the show, recounting the allegations of racism made against her by her detractors, invited her husband, a Wall Street Journal editor who was sitting in the audience, to join them on the stage to defend her against the indictment. The audience laughed as her husband made his way to the stage. The racist Ms Riley was married to a black man and has two biracial children.

Liberal political correctness isn't just insufferable. It's stupid. It's a form of holier-than-thou self-righteousness embraced by people who substitute formulas for thought because thinking is too taxing, who latch on to the slightest deviation from orthodox speech and behavior as proof that someone is a heretic. They're people so filled with their own prejudices that they just assume everyone else is also, and proof is just a matter of catching the other guy saying something that could be twisted by the witless to indicate a deviation from orthodoxy. They're the modern descendants of those who burned witches at the stake in the fourteenth century because the hapless women made some innocuous but careless remark. They're kin to those self-righteous prigs in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter who, though filled with their own sins, nevertheless sternly punished anyone who gave them the merest warrant for doing so. They're cut from the same cloth as the communist totalitarians who use mind-numbing reeducation camps and "snitches" to eradicate "deviationism" among the people.

They are stereotypical ideological puritans and if given enough power they'll eventually deaden all thought and discourse, which is doubtless their goal.