Thanks for posting the Canadian article, Andreas.
I think Bush is a jerk for trying to appease the
outraged Muslims, who clearly don't understand
pluralism.
Here's more from Ibn Warraq's article, which I
cited earlier:
This raises another more general problem: the
inability of the West to defend itself
intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not
apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the
sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize,
for example, for the British Empire, when, in
fact, the British presence in India led to the
Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief,
railways, roads and irrigation schemes,
eradication of cholera, the civil service, the
establishment of a universal educational system
where none existed before, the institution of
elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of
law? What of the British architecture of Bombay
and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the
Indians their own past: it was European
scholarship, archaeology and research that
uncovered the greatness that was India; it was
British government that did its best to save and
conserve the monuments that were a witness to that
past glory. British Imperialism preserved where
earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of
Hindu temples.
On the world stage, should we really apologize for
Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe? Mozart, Beethoven
and Bach? Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Breughel,
Ter Borch? Galileo, Huygens, Copernicus, Newton
and Darwin? Penicillin and computers? The Olympic
Games and Football? Human rights and parliamentary
democracy? The west is the source of the
liberating ideas of individual liberty, political
democracy, the rule of law, human rights and
cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised
the status of women, fought against slavery,
defended freedom of enquiry, expression and
conscience. No, the west needs no lectures on the
superior virtue of societies who keep their women
in subjection, cut off their clitorises, stone
them to death for alleged adultery, throw acid on
their faces, or deny the human rights of those
considered to belong to lower castes.
How can we expect immigrants to integrate into
western society when they are at the same time
being taught that the west is decadent, a den of
iniquity, the source of all evil, racist,
imperialist and to be despised? Why should they,
in the words of the African-American writer James
Baldwin, want to integrate into a sinking ship?
Why do they all want to immigrate to the west and
not Saudi Arabia? They should be taught about the
centuries of struggle that resulted in the
freedoms that they and everyone else for that
matter, cherish, enjoy, and avail themselves of;
of the individuals and groups who fought for these
freedoms and who are despised and forgotten today;
the freedoms that the much of the rest of world
envies, admires and tries to emulate." When the
Chinese students cried and died for democracy in
Tiananmen Square (in 1989) , they brought with
them not representations of Confucius or Buddha
but a model of the Statue of Liberty."
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398853,00.html
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