Very nice opinion piece in MIT's newspaper

Relevant background: A few weeks ago, the paper reported about a threatening email that an LGBT group received, from someone at MIT from a less tolerant culture. This piece is about the conflict between multiculturalism and the need for some absolute values, like tolerance. It presents the issue well, and asks the poignant question, but leaves the answer up for debate. Your thoughts?

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N22/multiculturalism.html

snip

"However, appropriate limits to multiculturalism are not as obvious to our friends in Europe and Canada. According to the BBC, the Canadian government, flouting free speech rights, brought writer Mark Steyn before a human rights tribunal for writings which were critical of Islam (as if boorishness is on par with, say, genocide). In the UK, Islamic Sharia law courts, where the laws of evidence are more lenient, now operate as an alternative to the legitimate courts of the British government, according to The Telegraph, undoubtedly encouraged by the climate fostered by idealists such as the ruling Labour Party, which had insisted for many years that their country is “multicultural.” In Germany, the judge of a German court cited the Koran in rejecting a Moroccan woman’s petition for an accelerated divorce due to domestic violence and death threats from her husband, according to the International Herald Tribune. While mainstream Muslim leaders, to their credit, swiftly condemned the ruling, the apparent alacrity with which the judge subordinated German legal principles to the Koran illustrates the paralysis of justice which could result from permitting cultural accommodation to become too ingrained. In France, philosopher Jean-Francois Revel has commented that the institutional reluctance to teach French to immigrant children in French schools has stunted the upward mobility of these immigrants, causing resentment which sometimes boils over into the youth riots we have witnessed in recent years. Homosexuals, in particular, comprise one group which has much to fear from the growing Islamization of Europe. In the Netherlands, attacks on gays have increased in recent years, mostly perpetrated by Moroccan youths, according to Radio Netherlands. In Iran, Sharia law calls for the execution of homosexuals. It may be ridiculous now to think that something like that could happen in western Europe, but such changes do not occur suddenly, and we only notice too late when things have gone too far, just as a frog submerged in a pot of cold water does not jump out of the pot if the water is brought gradually to a boil."

snip

in this article this is not it.

and the examples the author pulls from europe are spot on -- and one which europe will have to deal with.

person somewhere. As for myself, I certainly don't have any answers, but I do fear both restrictions on free speech and the erosion of civil rights. I only hope that Western democracy can survive these "culture clashes," and that reason and logic will win out over fear-mongering and unthinking "tolerance" of the intolerable.

The Canadian government didn't bring him to a Human Rights Commission, the Muslims that were maligned, did.

They had asked for equal rebuttal time in Macleans magazine that had published the anti-Muslim article by Steyn, and the magazine refused.

Human rights commissions monitor such things because we have hate laws. It's a criminal offence to denounce a group and call for harm to that group, or to encourage others to attack that group. And it applies to everyone, Jews, Muslims, gays, women etc. Any identifiable group.

Karl Popper had this to say on the subject of tolerance. Makes sense to me.



Certain Muslim and Christian denominations and sects demand exactly what Popper is concerned about: the right to be tolerated while at the same time the right to be intolerant themselves and even to make their intolerance the law of the land.