Hoping the crocodile eats *them* last?

Glenn quotes Mark Steyn:

In 2010, the bestselling atheist Richard Dawkins, in the ‘‘On Faith’’section of the Washington Post, called the pope ‘‘a leering old villain in a frock’’ perfectly suited to ‘‘the evil corrupt organization’’ and ‘‘child-raping institution’’ that is the Catholic Church.  Nobody seemed to mind very much.

Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that ‘‘all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.  They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.’’  This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks.  Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the ‘‘controversy.’’  The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, ‘‘How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism.  You are now beyond an embarrassment.’’  The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, ‘‘It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again.  Something’s gone weird.’’  The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, ‘‘Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.’’
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None of the above is Muslim.  Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins.  Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far.  It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10...  Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that ‘‘we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.’’...

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What Dawkins is getting at is more fundamental than bombs or burqas.  Whatever its virtues, Islam is not a culture of inquiry, of innovation.  You can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a pre-Muslim past — as, indeed, much of the Dar al-Islam did in those Middle Ages Dawkins so admires — but it’s not unreasonable to posit that the more Muslim a society becomes the smaller a role Nobel prizes and translated books will play in its future.

then remarks

Islam may not have to be that way, but at the moment it pretty clearly wants to be that way.

Left unanswered:  Given Islam’s present direction, why the western liberal intelligentsia - many of whom would be first against the wall in any Islamized society - should be rushing to defend it.  Quoth Steyn again:

It’s creepy and unnerving how swiftly the West’s chattering classes have accepted that the peculiar sensitivities of Islam require a deference extended to no other identity group.

‘‘Whistling past the crocodile,’’ perhaps?’’

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:59:16 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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